Steven Peter Vallas: Work. Polity, 2012

Abstract

Steven Peter Vallas: Work. Polity, 2012In Polity's series of books on key concepts in social science, time has come to work- after for example issues as time, consumption, risk, gender, welfare, power, and culture. It is written by Steven Peter Vallas, Professor at Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Northwestern University, USA, who is a renowned working life researcher with many important contributions to field. He declares that he intends book as a user's guide or manual for performing labor of sociology of work. To this end he lays down three rules of thumb, basic principles or axioms for our endeavors which he thinks permeates this research field. The first point is that work is of great importance in human life, both on an individual and a collective level. Through our work we change not only world around us but also ourselves. Many studies have shown importance of occupations and jobs in forming identities of working people.The second is that work is a social, not only economic, phenomenon. In spite of claims in neoliberalism and New Public Management ideologies-Vallas calls them myths-that market is most efficient and natural way of organizing, leading to idea that work is limited to economic parameters, work is much richer. Innumerable studies, of which Vallas reminds us of classics such as Polanyi on embeddedness of economic institutions in social ones and Hawthorne studies on limitations of economic incentives for worker productivity, have made us aware of importance of social, cultural, and political influences on way work is organized. The third is what he calls the hidden underside of meaning that workers can find ways to escape even hardest employer forms of control, although means of doing so varies with many institutional and cultural factors. Working life researchers should never assume that work is performed according to formal rules and managers' directives-and neither should managers: This very assumption has short-circuited many aspiring managers (19). Perhaps one can say that through these points he tries to formulate essence of results of sociological research on work-always a difficult and risky thing to do, but I tend to agree with his analysis.After introduction, book is organized according to macrostructural factors in work. There are two chapters on class, one on capital's of labor process, another on development of work organization. Then one on gender, another on race, and finally one on globalization. In chapter Capitalism, Taylorism, and problem of labor control Vallas discusses what he calls labor process school, in which many Marxist-inspired ethnographic studies of workplaces have been performed. The central concept here is managerial over labor process, work, and workers. Vallas starts out with Taylor and deskilling debate following Braverman's now classic book on degradation of work in 20th century. In analysis continuous process of deskilling of work in capitalism rests on employers successively taking over of planning of work from workers. Braverman argued importance of application of Taylorist principles for this process and later scholars of school have analyzed lean as a neo-Taylorist management offensive. But, Vallas claims, there are also other ways through which employers seek over workers, and an important one is workplace culture. (For those who want names of most important scholars he mentions, these are Richard Edwards, Michael Burawoy, and John Van Maanen.) Gradually, employers have realized strength of normative constructs for moving workers' sympathies from fellow workers to firm. Ethnographic workplace studies of labor processes were extremely important as empirical bases for theoretical understanding of role of culture in production of consent to work among workers and normative over workplace life. …