Work, Employment & Society current issue

Medicalization of unemployment: individualizing social issues as personal problems in the Swedish welfare state

Holmqvist, M. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

This article reports qualitative data on how the Swedish Public Employment Service classifies unemployed individuals as ‘occupationally disabled’ in order to transfer them to various labour market programmes.The article draws on a framework of medicalization, arguing that the individualization of the social issue of unemployment into a personal trouble of disability is a neglected yet important phenomenon that has interesting implications for theory and policy. By classifying some people as disabled in order to explain their unemployment, medicalization can be seen as an important yet so far neglected mechanism in understanding how this individualizing enterprise comes about. It is concluded that by medicalizing unemployment, the target for society’s intervention to fight the spectre of unemployment is primarily individuals’ personal troubles rather than any social issues.

The consequences of caring: skills, regulation and reward among early years workers

Findlay, P., Findlay, J., Stewart, R. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

The persistence of gendered pay inequality raises questions as to what sustains it. Recent contributions highlight the role of low skills visibility and valuation in pay inequality in predominantly female occupations. This artical examines the skills and rewards of early years workers, the organizational processes through which their skills are measured and rewarded and the institutional and organizational influences on grading and pay systems.The article does so at an important juncture when the importance and regulation of the ‘early years’ sector has increased significantly and following pay equality initiatives. It concludes that while the application of more systematic forms of skill and job measurement has improved the relative rewards of nursery nurses, gendered constructions of their caring skills contaminate evaluation of their educational role such that undervaluation of their work persists. This finding raises implications for other work that incorporates caring skills.

Public sector trade unionism in the UK: strategic challenges in the face of colonization

Edwards, G. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

This article explores the potential contribution of Habermas’s social theory to debates on union decline and renewal in the UK public sector. It employs data relating to 2004—5 research on the National Union of Teachers (NUT) to suggest that two of Habermas’s concepts are particularly valuable when considering strategies to increase membership activity. The concept of ‘communicative action’ is useful for highlighting the importance of spaces for collective discussion among members, while the concept of ‘colonization’ allows an appreciation of the ways in which these ‘communicative spaces’ are being increasingly eroded in the course of public sector restructuring. In this context, NUT strategies for renewing membership activity involve opening up alternative communicative spaces for members in schools, the union, and online.

Networks of aestheticization: the architecture, artefacts and embodiment of hairdressing salons

Chugh, S., Hancock, P. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

The aesthetic dimension of interactive service work is increasingly significant. This is reflected in the attention paid to it within both industrial sociology and organization studies. Such research has however tended to focus either on the aesthetic aspects of the labour process of service workers or, alternatively, on the material environments within which such labour takes place. This article draws on data derived from a case study investigation of two hairdressing salons in the UK. It extends our understanding of the aesthetics of such service encounters through an analysis of the inter-relationships between the human and non-human elements present in such workspaces. Incorporating elements of actor-network theory, it examines the aestheticization processes that emerge from, among other things those networks of architecture and design, non-human artefacts, and embodiment and aesthetic labour, that constitute the servicescapes of the salons in question.

'Switch on': sensory work in the infantry

Hockey, J. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

There has been little sociological research on work at the sensory level and the result is a largely missing foundational link in the chain of analysis connecting the phenomenological practices of doing work with theories about work. As a first step towards remedying this lacuna the article portrays the sensory work of movement, seeing, hearing, smelling and touching manifested by the occupation of infantryman.

'Technical, but not very....': constructing gendered identities in IT-related employment

Guerrier, Y., Evans, C., Glover, J., Wilson, C. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

Changes in the nature of skilled roles in the IT sector were predicted to create new opportunities for women, yet the proportion of women in this sector is falling.This article presents findings from interviews with senior managers in organizations that are attempting to change this situation.There was little evidence from these respondents of a radical reappraisal of the cultural assumptions about jobs and considerable evidence that gendered identities at work were being constructed in traditional ways drawing on women’s perceived ‘soft skills’.‘Hybrid’ roles combining technical and traditionally female skills were seen as the way forward. These were presented as a new way for women to work in a male dominated environment without compromising their gendered identity. The article confirms and develops, in an IT context, the challenges inherent in changing gendered occupational roles and we conclude that traditional expectations and contexts persist.

Leaders of men: women 'managing' in construction

Watts, J. H. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

Although women’s experience of working in management has been studied extensively, the particular challenges they face in this role within male-dominated professions merits further attention.This article draws on research into the career experiences of women civil engineers in the UK to critically discuss the possibilities for women to pursue a management pathway within construction. A feminist theoretical framework has been used to analyse data from 31 in-depth interviews with women working in both the consulting and contracting parts of the industry. The study highlights cultural issues of visibility and the presenteeism ethos of the sector as well as the material constraints of construction sites. Women are taking up senior management posts but only in very few numbers.Their success depends on assuming ‘male’ norms and in these roles they straddle a marginal territory that is bordered by exclusion and resistance.

In critical defence of 'emotional labour': refuting Bolton's critique of Hochschild's concept

Brook, P. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

Sharon Bolton’s comprehensive critique of Hochschild’s concept of ‘emotional labour’ is flawed by her misinterpretation of its primary form as an aspect of labour power. Consequently, she erroneously argues that emotional labour is commodified only when transformed into commercial service work. However, emotion workers experience commodification of their labour power as wage-labour, irrespective of the nature of their product. Bolton also argues that Hochschild’s notion of workers undergoing a ‘transmutation of feelings’ renders them ‘crippled actors’ in the grip of management control. Hochschild, however, theorizes transmutation as a contradictory and unstable condition albeit in an under-developed form. While Bolton correctly argues for a theory of emotion work that captures the complexity and contradictory nature of the emotional workplace, it is not necessary to reject the emotional labour concept. Rather, it needs to be more fully theorized and integrated within Labour Process Analysis.

Getting to the heart of the emotional labour process: a reply to Brook

Bolton, S. C. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

In an article published in this volume of WES Paul Brook suggests the need to strongly defend Hochschild’s emotional labour concept, as it is claimed that I threaten it with extinction with the development of a new typology of emotion management in the workplace.This article seeks to reply to Brook’s core concerns and deal with issues of substance about the phenomena Brook and I are both interested in. Mainly this paper considers how we conceptualize emotional labour and work, and how might that fit into labour process analysis? In response to the misgivings of Brook, the discussion will reveal why and how there is a need to develop analytically the idea of emotional labour, that the typology introduced in Emotion Management in the Workplace (Bolton, 2005a) offers a nuanced explanatory framework; and that labour process analysis is its theoretical home.

WERS the validity? a critique of the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey of employees

Timming, A. R. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

The Workplace Employment Relations Survey series is a tremendously useful source of data for industrial relations researchers. But, like all large-scale secondary datasets, it has a number of structural design problems. These have not been articulated previously in much depth. Looking at the 2004 instalment of the series, this article aims to offer a critical appraisal of the survey of employees. The structure of the questionnaire and the validity of the items are critiqued. Recommendations are offered for the next edition of the Workplace Employment Relations Survey.

Joint Review: Alison Pullen, Nic Beech, and David Sims Exploring Identity: concepts and Methods Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, {pound}26.99 pbk, (ISBN: 9781403989833) 368 pp. Lin Lerpold, Davide Ravasi, Johan van Rekom and Guillaume Soenen (eds) Organizational Identity in Practice Oxford: Routledge, 2007, {pound}85.00 hbk, {pound}27.99 pbk, (ISBN: 978041539840) 4264 pp

Murray, W. C. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

Book Review: Carol Wolkowitz Bodies at Work London: SAGE Publications, 2006, {pound}70.00 hbk, {pound}21.99 pbk, (ISBN: 9780761960645), ix + 224 pp

Purcell, K. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

Book Review: Naila Kabeer Mainstreaming gender in social protection for the informal economy London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 2008, (ISBN: 978--0-85092--840--2), xviii + 411 pp

Castello, L. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

Book Review: Dennis Briscoe, Randall Schuler and Lisbeth Claus International Human Resource Management: policies and Practices for Multinational Enterprises, 3rd Edition London: Routledge, 2008, {pound}29.99 pbk (ISBN: 9780415773515), xix + 397 pp

Gotcheva, N. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

Book Reviews: Joseph S. Lee (ed.) The Labour Market and Economic Development of Taiwan Cheltenham: Elgar, 2007, {pound}69.95 hbk, (ISBN: 9781847203427) xxiii + 329 pp

Wei Huang, — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

Book Review: Gerry Mooney and Alex Law (eds) New Labour/hard labour? Restructuring and resistance inside the welfare industry The Policy Press, Bristol, 2007, {pound}22.99 pbk, 312 pp. ISBN: 978-1861348333

Stewart, P. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

Book Review: Gary Daniels and John McIlroy (eds) Trade Unions in a Neoliberal World: British Trade Unions under New Labour Oxford: Routledge, 2009, {pound}75.00 hbk (ISBN: 9780415426633), xix + 380 pp

Darlington, R. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

Book Review: Craig Phelan (ed.) Trade Union Revitalization: Trends and Prospects in 34 Countries Bern: Peter Lang, 2007, {pound}50.00 pbk (ISBN: 9783039110094), 582 pp

Prowse, P. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

Book Review: Carl Rhodes and Robert Westwood Critical Representations of Work and Organization in Popular Culture Oxford: Routledge, 2008, {pound}70 hbk (ISBN: 9780415359894), viii + 236 pp

Tai, H.-H. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT

Books Received

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:11:47 PDT