Autonomy in Unlikely Places: Preconditions in Low-Skilled Jobs

Abstract

Can low-skilled jobs be designed advantageously with high levels of autonomy? Since the beginning of industrialism, Taylorist principles of separating planning and execution of work have dominated the design of work organisation in the private sector. This has resulted in reduced control by workers in and over their work, as well as increasing fragmentation of work into short-cycle tasks based on the standardisation of labour. In the late 20th century, public sector organisations adopted similar principles; scholars such as Mintzberg (1980) and Chandler (1990) focused on the role of the division of labour in the evolution and social shaping of organisational structures. Research into organisations has gradually acknowledged that there are limits to the Taylorist paradigm and to managerial strategies based solely on short-cycle work and the control of workers. With their seminal work, Kern and Schumann (1984) initiated a broad wave of empirical research and ongoing theoretical debates into new production concepts and new forms of work organisation; this implied a shift of the debates to management strategies based on ‘responsible autonomy’ for workers rather than direct control (Friedman, 1977). Authors writing on job design (Hackman and Oldham, 1980) and sociotechnical systems design (Trist, 1978) and more recently insights into determinants of job quality and well-being at work (Holman, 2013) are critical of a far-reaching technical division of work, and promote the idea that increased worker control — even for low-skilled jobs — is associated with increased motivation and well-being at work and productivity.