Documents Thompson, Paul 13 results

"This article examines institutional experimentation by linking the dynamics of capital accumulation, the adoption of new digital technologies within the labour process, and institutional settings. Our inductive qualitative case study within the service (logistics) sector in Europe sheds light on the processes through which local stakeholders engage in workplace change through institutional experimentation. It also illustrates how and under which conditions unions can act as political agents of transformation to influence work and employment."

"There is an ongoing sociological debate regarding which work activities can be considered ‘skilled'. In recent years, this debate has become increasingly controversial due to the growing prominence of so-called ‘soft skills', especially when used in interactive service work. This article seeks to strengthen the conceptualization of soft skills, through case study investigation, to determine whether or not they are worthy of the ‘skilled' label. An expanded notion of skill is supported, recognizing that in service contexts displaying employer-facilitated worker discretion and requirements for contextual knowledge in the use of soft skills, the term can indeed have real meaning. "

"The last twenty-five years of the twentieth century was a period of extraordinary change in organizations and the economies of the developed world. This continues today. Such has been the scale and momentum of events that, for some analysts, the only comparable periods are the early part of the twentieth century in which the shift to mass production and large-scale organization was accomplished, or the industrial revolution itself a hundred years earlier. Researchers in Europe and the USA in particular have been studying change in work and organizations, but there has been little attempt to systematize and draw together the results of their work. So far, the emphasis amongst writers on organizations considering the problem of contemporary change has been on ways of conceptualizing events, rather than also considering evidence. But what has actually happened? How much of the flux of events is real change, and how much mere change in emphasis in which apparent change is overlaying organizational continuity? How far are changes in particular events and sectors connected, and is an overall understanding of complex processes possible? TheOxford Handbook of Work and Organizationaims to bring together, present and discuss what is currently known about work and organizations and their connection to broader economic change in Europe and America. Issues of conceptualization are not neglected but, in contrast to other comparable volumes, the emphasis is firmly on what is known what and has been observed by researchers. The volume contains a range of theoretically informed essays, written by leading authorities in their respective fields, giving comprehensive coverage of changes in work, occupations, and organizations. It constitutes an invaluable overview of the accumulated understanding of research into work, occupations and organizations in recent decades. It shows that in almost every aspect of economic institutions, change has been considerable. The subject area of work, occupations and organizations is considered in five major sections of the volume: I, Work, Technology, and the Division of Labour; II, Managerial Regimes and Employee Responses; III, Organizing and Organizations; IV, Occupations and Organizations and V. Organizations, Institutions, and Boundaries. In this way the contemporary situation in work and organizations is considered extensively in its different dimensions and interconnections. The contributors have been selected for their expertise and include many leading authors in organizational analysis and substantive research. The handbook is thus an authoritative statement, and offers a valuable account of organizations at this time."

"Call centres are evidently an inhospitable environment for teams given a work design based on individualized, largely routine work regulated heavily by technology and managerial scripts. The article explores a number of potential explanations for this paradox in the context of comparable case studies from the UK and Australia. The case studies con.rm that teamworking did not exist in any substantive or traditional sense within any of the plants. But it is argued that teams can exist in the absence of teamwork based largely on their normative bene.ts to management and to a much lesser extent team members. Even allowing for this differentiation, only one of the companies had sustained normative objectives and these were only partially successful. The existing sociotechnical design of call centres is not conducive to teams, but this may not be true of other types of service work."

"The formal negotiations process remains perhaps the least-studied moment of collective bargaining. Drawing on ideal types of 'distributive' and 'integrative' bargaining and the ‘formal/informal' distinction, this article reports non-participant observation and ethnographic research into the negotiations process that enabled a change agreement in a British multinational, hereafter anonymised as FMCG. Informal bargaining relations provided the backdrop to - and emerged within - the formal negotiations process. Formal bargaining established new employment contracts based on a simplified internal labour market and generated the joint governance processes to enable and regulate the change process. Neither management nor union strategy was wholly derived from rational, interest-based positions. The negotiations process was essential to strategy formation and to the emergence of sufficient 'integrative' bargaining for all parties to devise and approve new processual institutions and norms to deliver a more flexible labour process and to restore the long-run viability for 'distributive' bargaining."