Documents Laaser, Knut 4 results

"Over the last three decades work and employment in the private and public sector are increasingly subject to marketization processes. A defining feature of marketized employment is the rise of performance management systems (PMS). This article utilizes a novel framework of Sayer's moral economy approach and labour process theory to explore the changing nature of bank work and social relationships between branch managers and branch workers before and after the implementation of PMS in UK banks. This article illustrates how the social and moral texture of the social relationships between branch workers and their managers deteriorated after the implementation of PMS, resulting in the rise of hostile forms of engagement."

"Following a decade of radical economic and workplace restructuring, it is important to understand how state employment policies support or deny human flourishing. This article utilizes a realist document analysis approach and reviews European employment policy through a moral economy lens. It fuses different moral economy approaches, drawing together the work of Karl Polanyi and Andrew Sayer a multi‐layered conceptual lens is offered that explores the tensions between a commodification of labour and human needs. A dominant market ideology is revealed, highlighting how quality work has been subsumed by the flexicurity agenda in the EU."

"Utilising an analytical framework informed by a moral economy approach, this article examines the social relationships between bank workers and customers in the context of changing performance management. Informed by 46 in‐depth interviews with branch workers and branch managers from UK banks, this article focusses on the interplay of the pressures arising from an intensified and all‐encompassing performance management system and bank workers lay morality. The article seeks to analyse why one group of bank workers engages with customers in a primarily instrumental manner, while another group tends to mediate and engage in oppositional practices which aim to avoid such an instrumentalisation. The article argues that moral economy gives voice to the agency of workers and the critical concerns of the social, economic and moral consequences of market‐driven and purely profit‐oriented workplace regimes."

" Based on a longitudinal study of a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU) in England for children excluded from mainstream schools and utilising a moral economy lens, this article explores how solidarity is created and maintained in a very particular community of teachers and learning support assistants (LSAs). A moral economy approach highlights the centrality of people's moral norms and values for understanding the multi-layered dimensions of solidarity in organisations and how it changes in the context of transformations in the labour process. The article illustrates how teachers and LSAs rely on mutuality, underpinned by moral norms of justice, and values of care, dignity and recognition, to cope with physically and emotionally demanding work that is under-resourced and undervalued. The analysis reveals that solidarity is not only against unjust workplace regimes, but also for connectivity and a humanised labour process."