Power In Workplace Research Articles

WORKPLACE POWER AND JOB PERFORMANCE: IMPLICATIONS FROM AGRICULTURAL UNIVERSITIES IN NIGERIA

This study determined effects of workplace power on job performance with its implications for Agricultural Universities in Nigeria. Two hundred and twenty seven (227) employees were randomly drawn from the selected universities through multistage sampling procedure. The mean age of the employees was 38 years, while most of the employees were mostly male (60.8%). Results indicated that the overall job performance was significantly influenced by expert (b = 0.287, p<0.01) and legitimate power (b = -0.279, p<0.05) in studied educational organizations. It was clearly concluded from the study that superior officers have considerable professional experience to manage workplace power through which subordinates were made to do their work better. This professional expertise of the line officers positively enhanced employees’ job performance. This study recommended that, policy that will ensure transparency in all administrative procedures be put in place to enhance thriving of legitimate power within organizations.

From echo chamber to orchestra: Orchestrating job empowerment for deaf employees in Jeddah

Deaf individuals in the Saudi labour market face significant hurdles, adversely impacting their professional integration. This study investigates the reality of job empowerment for Deaf employees from their perspective in Jeddah, aiming to illuminate the nuances of their experiences. A qualitative approach employed interviews with twelve Deaf employees, purposively sampled from the community. The findings paint a complex picture. While overall relations appear positive, a stark gender disparity emerges in workplace power dynamics and opportunities. Deaf males enjoy greater autonomy, wield influence and navigate responsibilities relatively easily. Deaf women, however, encounter discriminatory practices, are often excluded from crucial decision-making processes and professional engagements. This study underscores the urgent need for concrete measures to combat workplace gender bias and empower Deaf females. Business institutions must prioritize equal opportunities for employment, training, and development by fostering inclusive work environments and providing targeted support for Deaf females. Such findings provide an in-depth understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced by Deaf employees, particularly navigating the complexities of gender dynamics within the professional sphere. Further research is warranted to explore effective strategies for fostering equitable and empowering workplaces for Deaf individuals of all genders, ultimately promoting their successful integration into the Saudi labour market.

Sexual Harassment as an Unequal Power in Workplace: (Phenomenological Approach Women middle managers in companies under the Ministry of Industry, Mines and Trade in the whole country)

Sexual Harassment as an Unequal Power in Workplace: (Phenomenological Approach Women middle managers in companies under the Ministry of Industry, Mines and Trade in the whole country)

Shifting Workplace Power: How a Pandemic, Evolving Demographics, a Tight Labor Market, and Changing Workplace Relationships Shifted Employees’ Demands and Preferences

Employees have spread their wings. This manuscript will analyze various factors that have had a unique impact on the American workforce that have led to a workplace power shift. Factors considered include the impact of the pandemic, current employee developments, and an historically tight Labor Market. Furthermore, generations and the evolution at the workplace of changing workplace relationships are analyzed. Technology’s role in these shifts will be considered. Furthermore, Chris Argyris’ maturity theory adds new insights to understanding changing workers’ demands and desires. Throughout this document, HR’s challenges and opportunities are presented.

Millennial Messiahs, Female Fixers, and Corporate Boards

This article explores how television dramas function as a cultural forum on the workplace power dynamics of US tech startups. Focusing on the limited series, Super Pumped and WeCrashed, which are about Uber and WeWork, the authors analyze how relations of race, class, and gender/sexuality emerge in these narrativized techworlds via several “figures,” including white male founders/CEOs or “millennial messiahs,” “female fixers” that range from executives to silent service providers, and the “corporate board.” These figures are important because they circulate across fictional and non-fictional contexts and become a means by which publics make sense of the power relations of tech startups. Even as these shows center on the trials and tribulations of egomaniacal, power-hungry CEOs, they raise crucial questions about corporate corruption, gender/racial discrimination, and labor exploitation in the tech workplace and challenge viewers to reckon with the unchecked power of the big US technology companies.

The age of insecuritisation: Insecure young workers in insecure jobs facing an insecure future

AbstractRapid political‐economic changes in recent decades have led to increasingly insecure youth labour markets and the weakening of state protections, resulting in growing precarisation for young people. This article examines how student‐workers from post‐1992 UK universities on zero‐hour contracts in hospitality experience insecuritisation and societal turbulence as a result of continual neoliberal flexibilization of labour markets. It shows how existing personal insecurity—reinforced by limited state protection, inexperience and socio‐economic background—is intensified by the addition of job insecurity, underpinned by transactional employment relations and workplace power asymmetries. It argues that these experiences can further precarisation of already insecure individuals and shape perceptions of future labour market insecurity. Drawing on 35 semi‐structured interviews, the article posits that insecurity is structurally entrenched in the lives of many student‐workers and zero‐hour contract work can further exacerbate it by sustaining existing inequalities, dialling down aspirations and hindering prospects of social mobility.

A peek behind the curtain: An integrative review of sexual harassment of nursing students on clinical placement.

This integrative review aimed at systematically searching, analysing and synthesising multiple sources of evidence, to build a temporal understanding of nursing students' experiences of sexual harassment whilst on clinical placement, and to discuss the social context which enables this. Sexual harassment is highly prevalent in workplaces globally. Contemporary social understandings contextualise sexual harassment as a significant form of interpersonal violence. This is the first literature review to go beyond prevalence to synthesise the experience, implications and responses to sexual harassment encountered by student nurses on clinical placement. Whittemore and Knafl's (2005) integrative review methodology is used to structure a rigorous analysis and synthesis of evidence. The PRISMA checklist supported sound reporting of the search strategy. Three databases (CINAHL, Scopus and Medline) were searched using a Boolean strategy. Papers with a significant focus on sexual harassment of nursing students in the clinical setting were included with no limitation on publication date. Papers were excluded if they were not published in English or were only published as abstracts. A synthesis of 26 papers demonstrated that sexual harassment has significant impacts on student nurses and the nursing profession. The intimacy of close body care, dominant social perceptions of nursing as women's work and the sexualisation of nurses increase student vulnerability to sexual harassment. Workplace power imbalances further exacerbate sexual harassment and shape responses to incidents. Sexual harassment of nursing students is widespread and impacts student well-being and learning. Education is a strong protective factor and should target students, clinicians, clinical facilitators and academics. Attention to workplace culture, and processes that support disclosure and reporting, is also required to meaningfully address the sexual harassment of nursing students.

(Re)shaping Amazon labour struggles on both sides of the Atlantic: the power dynamics in Germany and the US amidst the pandemic.

With the initial context of COVID-19 fuelling Amazon's exponential growth, this article investigates how the pandemic (re)defined labour struggles, i.e., cultivating labour's structural, associational and institutional powers in two case study countries, Germany and the US. By analysing these power resources in its two largest markets, I argue that Amazon's structural conditions by which it organises its warehouse labour, which predate the pandemic, have continued to act as obstacles to collective labour action. While in Germany, ver.di continues to mobilise its workplace power but has been unable to get Amazon to sign a collective agreement, the pandemic triggered unprecedented workplace mobilisations and the pursuit of associational power in the US, albeit with varying outcomes. Despite their different industrial relations systems and labour struggles, these two cases highlight the key role of shop-floor organising to put pressure on Amazon, while Amazon's continued rejection of unions as negotiating partners further underlines the importance of regulating Amazon's union-busting tactics.

Preface to Special Issue: Not So Free to Contract: How Unequal Workplace Power Undercuts the “Freedom of Contract” Framework

Preface to Special Issue: Not So Free to Contract: How Unequal Workplace Power Undercuts the “Freedom of Contract” Framework

Labour realities at Amazon and COVID-19: obstacles and collective possibilities for its warehouse workers and MTurk workers

The COVID-19 pandemic has only further magnified the already growing political-economic and societal power of platforms. This article delves into the different realities of platform workers by juxtaposing two cases: location-based Amazon warehouse workers and web-based Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers. Informed by a historical materialist approach that accounts both for the contextual conditions and the agency of workers, this article asks: how does the organisation of workers (location-based vs. web-based) relate differently to their labour organisation and mobilisation in light of the COVID-19 pandemic? By investigating agency through analysing the structural power of workers (that is, marketplace and workplace), this article argues that both Amazon warehouse workers and MTurk workers experienced a further dwindling of their already weak marketplace power as a result of larger co-evolving political-economic conditions. The former workforce did experience, however, an increase in their workplace power given the growth of Amazon during the pandemic. The fact that they are location-based plays a crucial role in framing their struggle vis-à-vis the direct health risks and their ability to mobilise to disrupt the circulation line. MTurk workers, on the other hand, experienced a further weakening of their workplace power. Given the challenges in disrupting web-based gig labour, workers continue to express their agency through more alternative forms by instrumentalising digital spaces to foster solidarity and support each other for better working conditions. These contrasting case studies shed light therefore on the wider repercussions of the nature of the platform and its relation to the political-economic conditions for labour’s agency.

Labour power, materiality and protests in Ghana’s petroleum and gold mines

We examine the role of resource materiality in extractive labour protests in Ghana. Focusing on petroleum and gold mining, we centre contestations as part of the resources’ socio-natural constituents. Research data was obtained from social conflict databases, newspapers and field interviews. The analysis focused on themes and discourses on protest emergence, mobilisation, negotiation and impacts. Findings show how petroleum labour protesters use passivity and chokepoints to impede gas supply to households. Ghana petroleum workers attempt to garner structural power through workplace power, albeit unsuccessfully. Conversely, gold mineworkers protest by actively reappropriating machinery and extraction spaces. They centre protests in mining towns to emphasise their work as lifeblood. The ‘landedness’ of gold and the introduction of surface mining reshaped such protest tactics. Thus, materiality can help excavate the relational and comparative logic, tactics and potentialities of labour power in resource extracting countries. We suggest extractive labour to forge stronger cross-class coalitions to align workplace exploitation with broader issues of accumulation by dispossession. Published open access under a CC BY licence. https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/

Minders of the Clock and Starvers of the People: Everyday Fascism and the Grassroots Logic of Revolutionary Defascistization in Monfalcone, Italy, 1922–1946

Although much is known about the political and legal contours of post-dictatorial transitions in twentieth-century Southern Europe, less is known about the process of resolving contradictory purge aspirations at the national and local levels, let alone how new social imaginaries emerged at the grassroots level informed by the everyday experiences of dictatorship. This article provides a bottom-up account of defascistization in the Italian town of Monfalcone, where a distinctly social-revolutionary logic of defascistization emerged independent of Marxism and tied to the town's everyday experiences of dictatorship. Twenty years of everyday antagonism between non-Fascist residents and local Fascists who headed workplace and marketplace power structures led to a conflation of Fascism with workplace and marketplace power structures in their entirety. Residents understood defascistization as a project to dismantle both political Fascism and local power structures that instantiated ‘everyday Fascism’. This clashed with the logic of defascistization brought to Monfalcone by Italy's post-war Allied Military Government, and incompatibilities between local and external logics concretely undermined defascistization efforts with profound political effects. As defascistization faltered, the Communist Party articulated Marxism-Leninism within the language of popular purge aspirations, fuelling a campaign for Tito's Yugoslavia to annex much of northeastern Italy, Monfalcone included. Residents participated in this battle to realize their expansive vision of defascistization and to weed out authoritarian structures characteristic of ‘Fascist’ life. The study suggests a great potential for everyday-historical approaches to uncover still-buried dynamics of post-dictatorial transitions in and beyond Southern Europe.

When the boss steps up: Workplace power, task responsibility, and engagement with unpleasant tasks

All jobs, managerial or entry-level, inevitably require unpleasant tasks. Traditional research on power’s corrupting tendencies might suggest that powerholders, given their reduced constraints and greater self-focus, would put minimal effort into undesirable work. Yet drawing on theorizing and evidence regarding power as wielded in organizations, we posit that structural power will instead yield feelings of task responsibility, fostering increased engagement with unpleasant tasks. In two correlational field studies, employees’ structural power predicted responsibility for and, in turn, engagement with, a real-life work task. This indirect effect was stronger for unpleasant than pleasant tasks. In two experiments using a vivid virtual team context, a team-leader role increased participants’ felt responsibility for and, in turn, their engagement with, an unpleasant task. These findings illuminate the tendency of workplace power to promote the pursuit of shared goals and therefore engagement in tasks that are important for organizations, yet undesirable to complete.

“It’s hard for them to even understand what we are saying”(.) Language and power in the multinational workplace

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of language ideologies in negotiating organisational relationships in a Korean multinational company (MNC). By adopting an interactional sociolinguistics (IS) approach, this paper illustrates how language becomes part of a mechanism of negotiating group membership and of perpetuating or challenging power asymmetries through social and ideological processes.Design/methodology/approachThis paper draws on interview data from an ethnographic case study of a Korean MNC to understand language ideologies in one working team. The interview data are analysed through an IS framework to connect the situated interaction to the broader social context.FindingsThis paper shows that participants’ discourse of linguistic differentiation becomes an interactional resource in challenging the organisational status quo. Linguistic superiority/inferiority is constructed through particular sequencing and the systematic production of a dichotomy between two groups – expatriate managers and local employees – at various levels of their company structure. Group membership is enacted temporarily in positioning the self and the others.Originality/valueThis paper offers a methodological contribution to international business language-sensitive research on language and power by conducting interactional analysis of interview talk. Through the lens of IS, it provides insights into how discourse becomes a primary site of negotiating power and status and a multi-level approach to the study of organisational power dynamics and the complex linguistic landscape of any workplace.

Professional Identity Development of Iranian EFL Teachers: Workplace Conflicts and Identity Fluctuations

ABSTRACT This study aimed at uncovering complexities surrounding in-service English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ identity development. Literature still lacks knowledge about such process in the face of workplace conflicts and as to whether such conflicts vacillate EFL teachers’ imagined and practiced identities, especially in the context of Iran. To address this lacuna, three Iranian EFL teachers’ identity construction in the course of 4 years was explored through narrative inquiry. Data were collected through journals, narrative semi-structured interviews, and lesson plans. Drawing upon Activity Theory (AT), the findings underscored the fluid, collaborative, and negotiated nature of identity development. This study demonstrated how workplace climate, teaching milieus and power relations within, teachers’ personal ideologies and interpretations, and institutional demands may be used to garner insight into EFL teachers’ journey of professional identity development. This study has implications for educational authorities and teacher educators.

Proposal of Priority Schemes for Controlling Electric Vehicle Charging and Discharging in a Workplace Power System with High Penetration of Photovoltaic Systems

Using Electric Vehicles (EV) as Flexible Resources (FR) to increase surplus Photovoltaic (PV) power utilisation is a well-researched topic. Our previous study showed that EVs are viable as supplementary FRs in large capacity PV power systems, where EVs are likely to gather (i.e., workplaces). However, that study assumed all EVs to have identical arrival and departure times (availability), and battery capacities. As these characteristics may vary between EVs and affect their performance as FRs, this study expands the modelling of EVs to consider a variety of availabilities and battery capacities. To effectively utilise a variety of EVs as FRs, an Optimisation Electric-load Dispatching model is used to formulate priority schemes for charging and discharging the EVs based on their potential to contribute to the power system. The priority schemes are evaluated by simulating the annual operation of the power system both with and without the priority schemes, and comparing results. The power system is simulated using a Unit-Scheduling and Time-series Electric-load Dispatching model. The priority schemes reduced annual CO2 emissions by nearly 1%, compared to the case without the priority schemes. The performances of different EVs as FRs when the priority schemes are used and not used are also analysed.

Workforce localization, women workers and gendered power relations in Saudi Arabian private sector workplaces

PurposeThe paper investigates the implications for gendered power relations at work of Nitaqat, a workforce localization policy operating in Saudi Arabia which, by regulating the employment of Saudi nationals in private sector firms, has stimulated greater feminization of employment.Design/methodology/approachBased on an interpretivist, phenomenological research approach, rich qualitative data were collected in two case study organizations – a retail company and an architectural firm. The mixed-method design involved in-depth interviews with managers and women workers and extensive non-participant observation.FindingsIn exploring gendered power relations in Saudi private sector workplaces under the Nitaqat regime, the paper highlights the importance of patriarchal power. However, increased feminization of employment provides women workers with access to power resources of their own, producing complexity and variation in gendered workplace power relations.Originality/valueDrawing on Bradley's (1999) relational conception of gendered power, the paper illuminates how a Nitaqat-inspired feminization of employment, by increasing firms' dependency on women workers, has influenced the dynamics of gendered power relations in Saudi workplaces.

There and Back Again: A Commentary on Social Welfare Policy in the Wake of 2020

There and Back Again: A Commentary on Social Welfare Policy in the Wake of 2020

Social power and epistemic authority in workplace: Professional assessments

Social power and epistemic authority in workplace: Professional assessments

The State Giveth and Taketh Away: Public Sector Labour Law, the Legitimacy of the Legislative Override Power and Constitutional Freedom of Association in Canada

This article investigates the role of courts and legislatures in the design and enforcement of labour laws in the context of public sector employment. It does so by focusing on government employers’ legislative ability to temporarily override public sector labour rights, or to displace outcomes achieved under their processes. This issue is analysed through a case study of Canada, a country which offers constitutional protections for freedom of association, but which is also constructing a highly deferential approach to the constitutional review of override statutes. As a result of this deference, governments have been afforded significant leeway in the use and design of override legislation, which serves to undermine the legitimacy of the underlying public sector labour law regime. The result is to shake the confidence of public sector employees in the promise of workplace power redistribution and workplace voice and to undermine the legitimacy of public sector labour law. Because override legislation can so fundamentally undermine public sector labour rights, the courts should avoid excessive deference and instead undertake an active constitutional review of their use, where constitutional protections are available. Judicial Deference; Public Sector Labour Law; Legislative Override; Freedom of Association; section 2(D); The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; The Expenditure Restraint Act, Pre-Legislative Consultation; Legitimacy; Special Interests