The Global Diffusion of Regulatory Capitalism

Braverman’s analysis of the changing division of labor is crucial for understanding the impact of the neoliberal assault on higher education on academic labor. Much like Taylorism a century ago, adjunctification of the faculty, online education, and data driven planning are rationalizing academic labor. Teaching is being “unbundled” and its components parts automated, outsourced, and transferred to a growing middle level administration. As a result, faculty are becoming “just-in-time,” deskilled, disempowered, contingent labor. This newly emerging new division of labor is fundamentally transforming higher education. No longer merely subject to commercialization, academic labor is being reorganized to resemble the interchangeable contingent work that is ubiquitous throughout the labor market. To resist these developments it is necessary for faculty to study the new division of academic labor in order to devise new organizing tactics and strategies, such as the systemwide local and Metro organizing models.

The reorganization of higher education has been made possible by a new division of labor that is rationalizing and deskilling college teaching. These new relations of academic labor are disempowering the professorate by transferring control over teaching to a growing middle management and automating it as online distance learning. In order to respond to this threat to higher education, it is necessary to shift the focus from the commercialization of higher education to the adjunctification of the professorate. This requires a critical rethinking of organizational tactics, strategies, and objectives of academic labor organizing.

The way in which the new international division of labor (NIDL) in the globalized economy affects gender inequalities has not been sufficiently explored yet. The body of literature on commodity chains that has attempted to assess the welfare effects of the NIDL, especially in less developed countries, has paid sparse attention to gender issues. Globalization has entailed the deverticalization of commodity supply chains and the emergence of highly concentrated financial groups and transnational companies linked to a network of firms operating as affiliates and suppliers, namely the global commodity chains. The NIDL could worsen gender inequality, due to the particular organizational strategies in global commodity chains that privilege power, instead of trust and market exchange, as the major form of governance and means for resource allocation. Because women represent the poorest swathe of the world’s population, they suffer the most from the growing wealth inequality and the concentration of power produced by the NIDL. Moreover, because of the traditional sexual division of labor and because of their low status in society, women are the most harshly exploited subjects in the system. The general conclusion of the paper is that in the NIDL the main means of resource allocation are not competitive markets, as often suggested by the GCV literature and mainstream economics, but are instead power relations that ultimately stem from the patriarchal culture of violence and domination.

The case in this study is the introduction of a new more prominent position for teachers. The aim is to contribute to the literature on stratification and organizing of professions. This is done by addressing the question how division of labor is affected by enhanced organization of a profession? The paper illustrates how stratification took place and a new division of labor emerged. Not much conflict was observed regarding the new division of labor and it is proposed that this is because the new division of labor did not challenge the dominance over the core domain of teachers or of principals. The increase in organization did not lead to an increase in control of the profession but an increase in control by the profession. In addition, stratification in fact led to a de-hybridization of the roles of teachers and principals.

Evidence-based guidelines on hypertension have been developed in many western countries. Yet, there is little evidence of their impact on the clinical practices of primary care nurses. We assessed the style of implementation and adoption of the national Hypertension Guideline (HT Guideline) in 32 Finnish health centres classified in a previous study as 'disseminators' (n = 13) or 'implementers' (n = 19). A postal questionnaire was sent to all nurses (n = 409) working in the outpatient services in these health centres. Additionally, senior nursing officers were telephoned to enquire if the implementation of the HT Guideline had led to a new division of labour between nurses and doctors. Questionnaires were returned from 327 nurses (80.0%), while all senior nursing officers (n = 32) were contacted. The majority of nurses were of the opinion that the HT Guideline has been adopted into clinical practice. The recommendations in the HT Guideline were adopted in clinical practice with varying success, and slightly more often in implementer health centres than in disseminator health centres. Nurses in implementer health centres more often agreed that multiple channels had been used in the implementation (P < 0.001). According to senior nursing officers the implementation of the HT Guideline had led to a new division of labour between nurses and doctors in about a half of the health centres, clearly more often in implementer health centres (P < 0.001). The HT Guideline was well adopted into clinical practice in Finland. The implementation of the HT Guideline had an impact on clinical practices, and on creating a new division of labour between nurses and doctors.

Levy, Frankand Richard J. Murnane. The New Division of Labor. How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market. Russell Sage Foundation, New York; Princeton University Press, Princeton [etc.] 2004. ix, 174 pp. Ill. $24.95; £15.95 - Volume 50 Issue 2

This issue of the International Journal of Sociology (IJS) focuses on lean production in the global economy. Given the muted reception of lean production in sociology, in this introduction I describe structural changes that led to lean production, how different versions of the division of labor have emerged, and how lean production has been implemented in different industries around the world. The four articles in this issue examine as-yet unanswered questions about this new division of labor. They investigate a combination of three important processes: (1) the spread of lean production beyond the United States and Japan into France, Canada, Mexico, and China; (2) the use of lean production in the services industries; and (3) an assessment of whether lean production is good for workers, society, and management.

This article describes how school leadership, as a response to omnipresent hopes and expectations, seems to be shrouded by mystery and new forms of secular religion. This results in new divisions of labour – between a profane, everyday praxis, a kind of magic management, and divine leadership. The article is theoretically informed by the social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, and it is based on empirical data from a project on qualification of school leadership in the Danish Folkeskole (primary and lower secondary school).

As the current recession ends, many workers will not be returning to the jobs they once held--those jobs are gone. In The New Division of Labor , Frank Levy and Richard Murnane show how computers are changing the employment landscape and how the right kinds of education can ease the transition to the new job market. The book tells stories of people at work--a high-end financial advisor, a customer service representative, a pair of successful chefs, a cardiologist, an automotive mechanic, the author Victor Hugo, floor traders in a London financial exchange. The authors merge these stories with insights from cognitive science, computer science, and economics to show how computers are enhancing productivity in many jobs even as they eliminate other jobs--both directly and by sending work offshore. At greatest risk are jobs that can be expressed in programmable rules--blue collar, clerical, and similar work that requires moderate skills and used to pay middle-class wages. The loss of these jobs leaves a growing division between those who can and cannot earn a good living in the computerized economy. Left unchecked, the division threatens the nation's democratic institutions. The nation's challenge is to recognize this division and to prepare the population for the high-wage/high-skilled jobs that are rapidly growing in number--jobs involving extensive problem solving and interpersonal communication. Using detailed examples--a second grade classroom, an IBM managerial training program, Cisco Networking Academies--the authors describe how these skills can be taught and how our adjustment to the computerized workplace can begin in earnest.

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This forum article outlines a research agenda focused on linkages between the UNFCCC and other governance arrangements that also address climate change. We take as our point of departure the recognition that the UNFCCC is no longer the sole site of global climate change governance, and thus the types of linkage across what we call the global climate governance landscape including as a central node the UNFCCC are important for thinking through how improved global responses to climate change may be pursued. The forum identifies two specific types of linkage: division-of-labor linkages and catalytic linkages. We illustrate these with some examples and raise questions we believe would be useful to pursue in future research.

Safe and successful surgery depends on effective teamwork between professional groups, each playing their part in a complex division of labour. This article reports the first empirical examination of how introduction of robot-assisted surgery changes the division of labour within surgical teams and impacts teamwork and patient safety. Data collection and analysis was informed by realist principles. Interviews were conducted with surgical teams across nine UK hospitals and, in a multi-site case study across four hospitals, data were collected using a range of methods, including ethnographic observation, video recording and semi-structured interviews. Our findings reveal that as the robot enables the surgeon to do more, the surgical assistant's role becomes less clearly defined. Robot-assisted surgery also introduces new tasks for the surgical assistant and scrub practitioner, in terms of communicating information to the surgeon. However, the use of robot-assisted surgery does not redistribute work in a uniform way; contextual factors of individual experience and team relationships shape changes to the division of labour. For instance, in some situations, scrub practitioners take on the role of supporting inexperienced surgical assistants. These changes in the division of labour do not persist when team members return to operations that are not robot-assisted. This study contributes to wider literature on divisions of labour in healthcare and how this is impacted by the introduction of new technologies. In particular, we emphasise the need to pay attention to often neglected micro-level contextual factors. This can highlight behaviours that can be promoted to benefit patient care.

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 691 Divisions of Labour: Skilled Workers and Technological Change in Nineteenth Century Britain. Edited by Royden Harrison and Jonathan Zeitlin. Brighton, Sussex, and Champaign: Harvester Press and University of Illinois Press, 1985. Pp. ix + 254; tables, notes, index. $29.95. The contributors to this volume of essays are, in the main, former students of the Centre for the Study of Social History at Warwick. They are members of a wider distinguished group, a “staff/student literary co-operative” that has produced Albion’s Fatal Tree (1975), The Independent Collier (1978), and Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain (1981). These books testify to the value of freestanding but interrelated research projects in the humanities and social sciences. The essays are concerned with responses to changes in job owner­ ship and skill levels consequent on technological change in a variety of 19th-century trades, some marginal, some mainstream: cabinetmak­ ing, baking, sailmaking, pottery, shipbuilding, and engineering/ compositing. Response took various forms and occurred on several levels. The book, as coeditor Royden Harrison points out in his excellent introduction, is about “skill” and “the skilled.” It links the labor-aristocracy debate to the debate concerned with the division of labor, which sees the workplace as a battleground on which the existing division of labor is to be preserved or redefined. Workers’ attempted control of the supply of skilled labor through standard wage rates, closed shops, insistence on apprenticeship, and the reduction of the standard working week and overtime are instanced in these essays. So too are examples of workers’ attempts to maintain or stimulate demand for their labor through new manning levels and, in collusion with employers, through trying to eliminate competition. But a particular skill can become irrelevant, as Hirsch shows in his article on sailmakers. For them, as for handloom weavers or blacksmiths earlier in the 19th century, “genuine skill” became an irrelevance as technological innovation combined with market forces made the craft marginal. Most of these men failed to become part of the new division of labor defined by the introduction of new materials and machines. In cases where technological innovation was less dramatic, as in baking and compositing, the bargaining power of the skilled, as McKay and coeditor Jonathan Zeitlin demonstrate, was not necessar­ ily diminished. The potters, on the other hand, the subject of Whipp’s essay, were divided and subdivided in a labyrinth of specialization according to the section of the trade to which they belonged as well as to the size of the firm in which they were employed. Forms of subcontract involving men, women, and children further bedeviled labor organization. The master craftsman in the potting shop, sliphouse, and oven who could claim membership in the aristocracy of labor had little in 692 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE common with the batter and bailer of clay whose wages were barely at subsistence level. Such divisions within a trade were reflected, too, in the ability to retain privilege within a changed environment. McClel­ land and Reid show how the shipyard boilermakers adopted a policy of inclusion in relation to the hoíders-on and rivet boys and one of exclusion for platers’ helpers. There is a wealth of detail in this book; too much, perhaps. The essays, suffering from a surfeit of minutiae, lack the felicity of expression that one has come to expect from the hand of Royden Harrison. Argument is too easily lost in a welter of itemization and description. Nonetheless, the book deserves attention for the new case-study material that is brought to light and, in particular, for Harrison’s introduction and Zeitlin’s carefully argued comparison of engineers and compositors, in which he manages to retain shape and argument despite the detail. Jennifer Tann Dr. Tann is director of the Centre for Continuing Education at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making 1801—1885. By Judith A. McGaw. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. Pp. xv + 439; illustrations, tables, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $40.00. The papermaking industry was only a small component of Britain’s industrialization. In 1770 it contributed 0.4 percent...

Since the 2000s, the economic division of labor between Korea and Japan has shifted from the vertical division of labor into a horizontal division of labor. The background of this transformation was the expansion of the global value chain and the modularization of the industrial architecture. In response to these new environmental changes, Korea has a comparative advantage in finished goods and Japan in parts and materials.<BR>This relationship is similar in appearance to the vertical division of labor between Japan and Korea that went on until the 1990s. However, this is a new division of labor in that Korea’s finished goods companies have more bargaining power than Japanese materials and parts companies. This division of labor is a new equilibrium that creates benefits for both companies.<BR>But this equilibrium presupposes the free movement of capital and raw materials. If there is a problem with the supply chain, there is a risk of serious damage. The current Japanese export restrictions on Korea can be said to be the actual risk. However, this export restriction is expected to be difficult to sustain for a long time because it is an anachronistic policy that counters global trends and is an inefficient policy that will ultimately cause more damage to Japan.

This mixed methods case study discusses how the introduction of new technology changed the work of departmental administrators at a Swedish university, drawing on Cockburn's theories on gender and technology, viewing organisations as fields of contestation. This paper argues that jobs seem more fragmented with less discretion, as a result of computerisation. However, time saved by a new division of labour enabled by digitalisation has increased the possibilities for specialisation and job crafting. This new division of labour also led to increased tensions between academics, administrators and management. As the risks and possibilities connected to computerisation are matters of social relations, as much as being governed by technology, this paper adds to the debates on work and technology by exploring the complexity of social relations at work place level experienced by this overlooked group at the periphery of the managerial and academic power centres in academia.