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Explore our diverse range of digital textbooks designed for course adoption and recommended reading at universities and colleges. We publish over 140 textbooks across the social sciences, and an annual subscription to digital textbooks is possible via BUP Digital.

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This chapter is the first of two that examine the agency and voice of workers. The chapter puts forward two dimensions to facilitate a mapping of worker agency and voice. These dimensions are: the form of agency – ranging from (informal) meanings, norms or beliefs via informal practice to formal practices; and the ends to which the agency is applied – whether it is agency that is mainly resistive to the employer or agency that is supportive of employer aims. This chapter focuses on worker agency in the creation of meaning before examining workers’ informal practices. In so doing, the chapter analyses meaningful work, organizational citizenship, discretionary effort, organizational commitment, flow, communities of coping and informal resistance, in terms of limiting effort and defending autonomy.

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This chapter is the second of two that examine the agency and voice of workers. The chapter’s mapping follows two dimensions: the form of agency – ranging from (informal) meanings, norms or beliefs via informal practice to formal practices; and the ends to which the agency is applied – whether that agency is mainly resistive to the employer or is supportive of employer aims. This chapter focuses on formal voice structures and mechanisms. It begins with an analysis of employer-initiated voice mechanisms. It then focuses on the following worker-initiated voice structures and mechanisms: social media campaigns, worker collectivities, civil society organizations, labour unions, statutory workplace democracy, worker cooperatives and labour voice in global supply chains.

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This chapter introduces the book as an analytical celebration of the sociology of contemporary work. The chapter defines what is meant by ‘the sociology of contemporary work’. It then goes on to outline the key threads in the book: the focus on service work, knowledge work and platform (gig) work; the sociological imagination at work; the importance of debate; and the importance of clear communication.

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This chapter focuses on inequalities of opportunity: systematic differences in the likelihood that different groups of people (for instance people born to working-class or upper-class parents) are able to occupy employment positions that give beneficial outcomes, such as high income. The chapter examines, in turn, four types of inequality of opportunity: overall social (im)mobility, barriers related to gender, barriers related to ethnicity, and global inequality between countries as a context for international migration. The chapter weaves in examples from service work, knowledge work and platform work.

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This chapter begins by laying out the building blocks needed to understand the key patterns of rising inequality of income. Then it outlines those patterns of rising income inequality, both in broad historical terms and in more detail regarding changes in recent decades. The chapter goes on to consider the causes of the rise in income inequality. The last section of the chapter examines why rising income inequality matters – both in terms of health and social consequences and in terms of the issues that it raises for our understanding of class in contemporary society.

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At the heart of the sociology of work is the analysis of how work is organized. This is the core focus of this chapter. Key dimensions of work organization are outlined: division of labour, labour process, co-worker relations, control and individual job mobility (career). This allows the chapter to build up to consider different overall types of work organization. Here, a key contrast is shown between work organization along craft principles and Taylorized work organization. Debates are examined regarding how best to characterize work organization in contemporary service work, knowledge work and platform work.

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The chapter outlines key aspects of the following social theories and their relevance to the analysis of work: Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Polanyi, feminism, postmodernism and Foucault. The chapter indicates important points of comparison and contrast between the theoretical approaches, and notes important dimensions or aspects that underpin many of the approaches. The chapter considers how far we need to decolonize social theory at work. Finally, the chapter examines how these social theories have been applied to the analysis of the three types of work upon which this book concentrates: service work, knowledge work and platform work.

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What It Is, and Why We Need It

This book injects a burst of energy into the sociology of work, offering a perspective that is both innovative and deeply informed.

Leading sociology of work scholar, Marek Korczynski, praises the discipline’s comprehensive approach to theory, its focus on uncovering power dynamics and its ability to reveal how social injustices often stem from workplace inequalities. Offering an accessible overview of the field, the book:

  • analyses both the social structures around work and the voice and agency of workers;

  • examines the role and impact of artificial intelligence at work; · provides a consistent thread on gig work, service work and knowledge work;

  • has an end-section in each chapter where students are asked to put their sociological imagination to work on relevant topics.

This is an enlightening exploration of sociology of work, and of the evolving world of work itself.

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This final chapter’s first section considers AI as a key emerging development within the sphere of work. The chapter gives wider context to the analysis of AI by considering scholarship informed by technological determinism, and that shaped by an understanding of the social shaping of technology. AI is considered in terms of its potential to substitute, complement and augment human labour. The second part of the chapter reflects on the considerable strengths of the sociology of work. It argues that these strengths can be usefully highlighted against important gaps and weaknesses in the scholarship in the neighbouring fields of work psychology, human resource management, organization studies and economics. A key contrast is drawn between the strengths of the sociological concept of the social contract of work and the corresponding weaknesses in the concept of the psychological contract.

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This chapter focuses on key social structures in which contemporary work is embedded. The chapter looks at the most important macro-level structures: capitalist Fordism, post-Fordism and precarity, varieties of capitalismfinancialized capitalism, globalization and the international division of labour. It then examines how these structures, in turn, informs the nature of control at the workplace level.

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