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Recent Publications:
Author: Richard Sennett. Publisher: Yale University Press. Date: 2006. Summary: This is an elegant, engagingly written, summary of 4 decades of research into the lives of British and American workers. It engages with the current topics of skill, unemployment and politics. In "cutting edge" firms many workers needed to retrain every 8 to 12 years. Computer repair workers and doctors in America retrained 3 times in a working lifetime. Past service alone does not guarantee future employment. Workers do not own their jobs. This last point is both legally correct, and well understood by Karl Marx. Training intends to produce new skills. The most prized "skill" in the BBC was the ability to do something new, as opposed to drawing on what one already knew. This skill was really the ability to move on to new projects, rather than improve existing projects. This skill was abstract, in that it related to personal potential in the future. Managers become like management consultants; always on the move, and removed from future blame. It was more damning to be found lacking in potential, than to be damned for past achievements. Flexibility meant the potential to work in short lived teams, not getting to know team members well; and then to move on to the next team. This all produced low institutional loyalty, low informal trust between workers, and weakened institutional knowledge. Trade Unions should now address these problems by setting up "parallel" institutions to provide pensions, crèches, social activities, health care, and finding employment! Education, not mentioned by Sennett, could be another parallel institution; and is currently being pursued by the TUC in Britain.
Authors: Luc Boltanski & Ève Chiapello. Publisher: Èditions Gallimard (1999): Verso. ISBN: 1-85984-554-1. Date 2005. Summary: This extensive, and expensive, study contrasts 1960's capitalism with to-day's. It argues that justifications for capitalism have changed over this period; from serving the common good, to managing by objectives, to seeing customer satisfaction as the supreme value. There is a focus on the search for autonomy in the 1960's as justifying the removal of hierarchy, which dominated those below it. In it's place was self control by managers, and even workers. This removed the need for, and the cost of petty tyrants. They become redundant! Some workers were hostile these new ideas; it was no part of their jobs to organise work practices. Some were enthusiastic, as it might secure their jobs. One problem is how far this self control will work as a justification, especially amongst to-day's managers who are university graduates.
Author: Madeleine Bunting. Publisher: Harper Collins (2004). Summary: This is a well written and engaging book by a well known journalist. It details many individual human examples of overwork. Its strength is the covering of changes in work over the last 10 years. The loss of clear lines of responsibility is a major irritant for many.
Author: Professor Stephen Wood. Publisher: Department of Trade and Industry, Employment Relations Research series. Number 45. ISBN: 085 605 3759. Crown Copyright. Date 2005. Also available from Sheffield University. Summary: This is a detailed review of published research on the effect of legislation on 4 key areas: wages, union representation, parental leave and working hours. There is an extensive bibliography. The effect of the National Minimum Wage is seen as the only clear success for the current Labour Government.
Publisher Oxford University Press. ISBN. 019 926954 8. Date: 2004. Authors: Philip Brown & Anthony Hesketh. Summary: This is a study of 60 UK graduates over a period of 18 months. It estimates that only 30% of UK graduates were in a job that required a degree. What was required by employers was graduates that were "oven ready", and did not require to be "home made". This implied that employers wanted universities to do their job training for them; and so save on "home" training within the firm. Put differently, graduates had to "hit the ground running"! There is a detailed study of employers' interviewing techniques.
Author: Ralph Fevre. Publisher: Sage. ISBN: 07619 66625. Date 2003. Summary: This is a well argued, and unfashionable, attempt to bring back morality into discussions which are seen as too economistic. It can be seen as a return, albeit critically, to Human Relations. It is based on a 1991 very detailed study of the Hawthorne Experiments by R. Gillespie, entitled "Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments". Cambridge University Press.
Author: Peter Ackers & Adrian Wilkinson. Publisher: Oxford University Press. ISBN. 019 925903 8. Date: 2003. Summary: This collection of 18 chapters by different experts aims to be interdisciplinary. Part One has 9 disciplines focussing on industrial relations. Part Two compares 3 continents Europe, America and Australia. Part Three looks to the future. Although Chapter 14 by Edmund Heery is a very good summary of the last few years.
Author: Philip Brown et al.. Publisher: Oxford University Press. ISBN. 019 924420 0. Date: 2001. Summary: This is an original discussion of skills; the construction of skills in education and in the workplace, and a comparative analysis of skill acquisition and use in different countries. The belief that high skills not only provides the individual with a high income, but also the employer with a better product/service, is analysed in terms of debates about the meaning of globalisation, and it's consequences for all.
Author: Randy Hodson. Publisher: Cambridge University Press. ISBN. 0521 77812 3. Date: 2001. Summary: This is an American text which attempts to discuss studies of workers involvement and resistance to a loss of dignity at work. The research is also discussed in terms of both classical social theory, and more contemporary theory. The use of much ethnographic evidence makes the practices of losing, and gaining, dignity very clear. |