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. This allows us to build up to consider different overall types of work organization. Debates are examined regarding how best to characterize work organization in service work, knowledge work and platform work.

Work organization – key dimensions

What do people talk about when they are comparing one job with another? What do people look at when comparing, for instance, the job of a platform worker delivering pizza and the job of a call-centre operator in an insurance firm? One of the first things would probably be pay. But what if the salaries of the jobs are similar – what else is important in thinking about whether you prefer one job over the other? Perhaps the security of employment might feature as important, and perhaps the degree of independence there is in the role. Beyond these features, many people might struggle to get to grips with this issue. Given that jobs are a fundamentally important aspect of most people’s lives, this is not a trivial issue. Gladly, sociologists of work have given the question of comparing jobs – particularly regarding how work is organized – systematic thought. This chapter draws upon this scholarship.

The organization of work, in principle, can be broken down into very many sub-dimensions. For some purposes, it might make sense to do that. But for our central purpose – to lay out the main rooms in the architecture of work organization – it is enough to concentrate on the most important abstract dimensions. Note that different social theories often emphasize the importance of different dimensions of work organization. For instance, scholars following a Marxist approach tend to focus on the labour process, while scholars oriented by Durkheimian thought will focus more on the nature of peer relations.

The following sections lay out four key dimensions: the basis of division of labour, the labour process (skill and work intensity), peer relations and individual job mobility. Note that control is also a key dimension of work organization. Control and authority relations were discussed in detail in the previous chapter. It made sense to discuss control as part of the focus in Chapter 3 on structures of power at work, but it also deserves its place in this chapter. Control explicitly reappears in this chapter when we turn to consider overall patterns in work organization.

Division of labour

A fundamental question that sociologists ask is: ‘What is the basis by which a “job” comes to exist?’ Take some contemporary examples of typical jobs – a call-centre operator in an insurance firm, a software programme developer in a management consultancy, an operative in a food-processing factory. How is it that such ‘jobs’ have come to be? How is it that those groups of tasks come to be bundled together into these things we call jobs? Jobs come about socially, through human framings, actions and interactions. And the key question arising from this simple observation becomes: what is the basis for the decision-making that leads to a certain group of tasks to be bundled together into a job rather than a different group of tasks? Or, to put it more sociologically, what is the basis for the division of labour?

Across time periods and across work settings, there have been several different bases for the division of labour. Perhaps the most important change in these bases was caused by the advent of industrial capitalism in the industrial revolution (which first occurred in the UK across the 18th and 19th centuries). In the pre-industrialized period, jobs tended to centre on occupations, often linked to a clear product, with jobs entailing a holistic grouping of tasks necessary for production. A carpenter, for instance, would be able to produce a range of wooden materials, from tables to chairs to shelves and doors, and the job of the carpenter would entail all the tasks from the sourcing of the wood to the design of the table to the execution of the tasks to create the table. Tradition also implicitly had a role within this division of labour: a carpenter’s job was like that because it had always been like that. ‘Custom’ was an important word informing the fabric of pre-industrial work and society (Thompson, 1991).

Moving on from the customary social division of labour involving wide, traditional occupations, the industrial revolution led to the primary basis for the division of labour becoming the aim of maximizing task efficiency. This led to the detailed division of labour (involving narrow, specialized jobs) that Adam Smith described as operating in a pin factory (quoted in Chapter 1), and which occupied Emile Durkheim in The Division of Labour in Society (discussed in Chapter 2).

Another key point in the development of specialization and a detailed division of labour was the birth of ‘scientific management’ associated with Frederick Taylor in the early decades of the 20th century in the US. Important here was the principle that there should be a separation of the conception (planning, design) of a task from its execution. Taylor proposed that tasks involving conception should be constituents of managerial jobs, and the role of executing tasks should become the default job description of the production operative. This scientific management principle, or Taylorist principle, was a vital element in the organization of work associated with Fordist capitalism (discussed in Chapter 3). One of the reactions against the principles of maximizing task efficiency and separating conception from execution was the movement towards more human-centred, alternative forms of job design (Kelly, 1982), often linked to an approach known as a socio-technical system approach. The aim – rarely realized in practice – was to put forward the principle of meaningful work as the basis for the division of labour, and for the design of technology (Berggren, 1993).

There are other important bases for the division of labour. In service work, where the key part of the job involves interacting with a service recipient, the principle of the creation and maintenance of a relationship with the service recipient (patient/guest/diner/customer) can play an important role in the division of labour (Korczynski, 2002). For instance, in nursing in the UK NHS, this is manifest in the principle of care, which is ‘patient-centred rather than task-centred, and is characterized by each patient having a single, identified, qualified nurse who is responsible for their care during the entire period of their hospital stay’ (Wicks, 1998: 186). In professional work, the basis of the division of labour often revolves around the professional association that identifies professional jobs with a discreet, systematic body of knowledge and expertise (Abbott, 1988). There is also an important stream of sociology scholarship that shows how the division of labour can be, and often is, gendered. The core argument here is that the bundling of tasks into distinct jobs, and the allocation of types (gender) of people to those distinct jobs, do not occur separately but are interrelated. There is a bundling of ‘masculine’-linked tasks into jobs to be occupied mainly by men, and there is a bundling of ‘feminine’-linked tasks into jobs to be occupied mainly by women (Abbott et al, 2005).

Labour process – skill and work intensity

Skill

The core of work organization is the enactment of workers’ labouring, something that many sociologists refer to as the labour process. The term ‘labour process’ has origins in Marx’s ideas about the core of the capitalist economy involving the transformation of the potential to labour (labour power) into actual labouring. Skill is a key element of the labour process. There is a large literature in the sociology of work regarding what is meant by ‘skill’ (Spenner, 1990; Green, 2013). Here, we follow Spenner (1990) in focusing on two central elements within the concept of skill: the complexity of the task and discretion. The complexity of a task refers to whether the nature of the task is simple and easily accomplished, with little learning required (associated with jobs labelled as ‘low skilled’), or whether it is intricate and complicated and would usually require a long period of learning for it to be accomplished well (associated with jobs labelled ‘high skilled’). The second element in Spenner’s concept of skill, discretion, refers to the degree and scope of decision-making given to the job-holder. Jobs with higher discretion are seen as higher skilled than those with lower discretion (everything else being equal). So, making a burger in McDonald’s is seen as a low-skill job in large part because the job has been designed such that there is almost no discretion for the worker regarding how to accomplish it – the worker just follows a set structure of processes linked to specifically designed technology used to make the burger (Leidner, 1993). By contrast, a chef making a burger in a mid-range restaurant is likely to have very high levels of discretion, around both the recipe and the processes of mixing and cooking the burger, and such a job tends to be seen as high skilled.

It is important to note that sociologists have studied how and when certain jobs are labelled skilled or unskilled and have concluded that this process should be understood as a political one. It has often been a deeply gendered political process: when men undertake a given task, the task is more likely to be labelled as skilled than when women undertake similar tasks (noted in Chapter 2).

Note that jobs involving high discretion often involve the worker having both execution and design tasks to undertake – compare this with the job design approach of Taylorism. Indeed, the jobs that sprang from the application of the principles of Taylor’s scientific management were narrow, low-skill jobs. When such principles were allied to the technology of the assembly line, the nature of work appeared as a seemingly endless and intense cycle of executing monotonous tasks.

Work intensity

The second element of the labour process focused on here refers to the amount of labour to be enacted in a work period. Green (2001: 56) formally defines work intensity as ‘the rate of physical and/or mental input to work tasks performed during the working day’. Work intensity comprises several aspects, including the rate of task performance; the intensity of those tasks in terms of physical, mental and emotional demands; and the gaps between tasks (Green et al, 2022: 460). A key element in sociological research in recent decades has concerned whether there has been an increase in work intensity. Recalling the discussion in Chapter 3 of the important distinction between labour power (the potential to labour) and actual labour enacted, a concentration on work intensity focuses exactly on a core struggle at the heart of the employment relationship. Ethnographic studies of workplaces (where the researcher becomes part of the workforce for an extended period) often highlight that a significant point of conflict between management and workers concerns the degree of work intensity. I undertook an ethnographic study of work in a factory manufacturing window blinds. The following workers’ quotes from that study demonstrate conflict about the intensity of work (Korczynski, 2014: 142–143):

Pauline [a worker in the factory] says, ‘They [management] want us to work 150 per cent. For that wage, there’s no way we’re going to do that.’ … Molly said, ‘We don’t work any faster if there are absences, but they want us to. I’m not going to cover two machines. If I do it once, they’ll expect it all the time.’

In January 2023, the BBC reported that the first strike by Amazon workers was occurring in the UK, at the Coventry warehouse (Jordan and Conway, 2023). Striking workers who were interviewed pointed out that the work intensity was so high that toilet breaks were tightly policed by supervisors, and that supervisors focused heavily on minimizing ‘idle time’ (when workers were not digitally logged as undertaking measured productive tasks).

Green et al (2022) present a comprehensive study of work intensification in Britain in the first decades of this century based on data from the Skills and Employment Survey, a consistent series of nationally representative sample surveys of employed people in Britain. They write that ‘the story from 2001 on [until 2017] is one of renewed work intensification’ (p 468). The authors saw a consistent rise in the proportion of workers reporting that their job requires them to work very hard, includes high-speed work and involves working to tight deadlines. They also note (p 478) that this intensification is ‘far from an isolated episode, [as] the rise follows an earlier period of work intensification in the 1980s’. In addition, they point out that the work intensification in the 21st century has not been one associated with an ongoing de-skilling and simplification of work. They argue that the key factor underlying this work intensification has been the increasing power of employers over workers. Chapter 3 pointed to a number of significant developments in the strengthening of employer power over workers. Green et al (2022: 480) go on to say that ‘because of the declining power of both organized and unorganized labour to resist pressures from employers in Britain’s liberal market economy, technical and organizational changes have been harnessed in combination to intensify work’. Not all jobs feature high work intensity – Green et al position around 60 per cent of workers in 2017 as occupying jobs with high work intensity. (The second half of this chapter analyses specific forms of work organization with regard to openness to or barriers to work intensification.) Finally, note that, although Marx argued that there was an inevitable logic within capitalism for work to become more intensified, Green et al (2022: 481) argue that ‘getting people to work harder is inherently self-limiting as a growth strategy’ because there are physical limits regarding how hard people can work. They point out that there are other, less limiting strategies to achieve profits and growth, such as ‘investing in their human capabilities or new capital’.

Co-worker relations

Another important dimension of work organization is that of lateral, or horizontal, relations: the relations between workers at a similar level in the hierarchy. This dimension is perhaps the most overlooked of the ones covered here. Hodson (2001: 202) notes that there has been a ‘relative inattention to work groups, and co-worker relations’.

Marx points to two fundamental logics in co-worker relations – logics that push in different directions. There is the logic of competition between wage-labourers in the labour market. Such competition pushes workers apart from each other. Hodson’s (2001) overview of workplace ethnographies notes that co-worker conflict such as (racialized and gendered) back-biting, bullying and malicious gossip often grows in the context of organizational chaos, where work is not so much organized as disorganized. However, Marx also pointed to a stronger logic of association through mutual cooperation within the labour process and workers’ shared position in the employment relationship. Marx (1848: 27) saw great potential for the emergence of class solidarity from the latter: ‘Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association.’ Ethnographic studies show that workers frequently enact a range of cooperative practices in and around the labour process, and that such practices are often underpinned by norms of solidarity and reciprocation. For instance, consider this excerpt from Santino’s (1991: 70) ethnography of the work of railway porters in the US: ‘[Porters] aided each other – for example, covering a fellow porter’s car while the man stole a few hours’ sleep, warning each other if somebody learned that a spotter was on board, and teaching new porters the tricks of the trade.’

Informal group solidarity is often played out through gestures of kindness. Cavendish (1982: 67) describes a shop-floor-wide culture of mutual care and sharing. She was struck by the generosity of the poorly paid women with whom she was working:

[After returning from a two-week unpaid sick leave] I was talking to Anna when she stuffed a £10 note in my trouser pocket so quickly I wasn’t even really sure what it was. She was giving it to me because I would be short, having lost two weeks’ wages … I was quite overwhelmed by her generosity; the gift was completely genuine, and she really didn’t want the money back.

We should not assume that such cultures are a thing of the past, overtaken by rising individualism in recent decades. My more recent ethnography (Korczynski, 2014: 42) outlines the everyday enacted community among workers in a blinds factory:

On my second day at McTells, Rachel came over to the work table to pick up a batch of roller blinds. … She picked up an armful and turned to carry them back to her stitching table, but in so doing, she caught one of the blinds on a trolley, and all the blinds spilled on the floor. Almost before she could say ‘oh, bugger’, there were already four people crouching down, helping her to pick the blinds up. ‘Don’t worry, they’ll be fine’, said Sheila, handing back three of the blinds to Rachel.

The study goes on to report that these workers undertook much of the same informal collective practices as the railway porters noted by Santino. Korczynski and Wittel (2020) argue that we can usefully think about such co-worker cooperation as a form of ‘workplace commoning’: a set of cooperative practices and values that are shared among workers, often underlain with an ethic of solidarity and mutual care. The idea of commoning (De Angelis, 2017) derives from political economic scholarship on the commons – basically an analysis of how best to look after and reproduce things that are held in common, without specific ownership (such as the air, seas, the environment). One strong tendency within capitalism is for capital to enclose the commons, to take the commons into private ownership or control (Hardin, 1968). Notably, in Britain between the 17th and 19th centuries, land that had been held in common, known as the commons, was systematically enclosed and taken into private ownership and control. This is relevant because Korczynski and Wittel (2020) argue that management’s widespread drive for teamwork within the organization of work can be analysed as an attempt to enclose informal workplace cooperation and commoning – to take it into management’s control and to mould it to management’s will.

The move to formal teamwork stands as one of the most important management developments with regard to work organization over the last century – since the Hawthorne studies highlighted to management the importance of informal work groups and their norms (noted in the discussion of Durkheim in Chapter 2). Such management-initiated teamwork structures tend to be underpinned by a hierarchical threat against non-participation by workers. Further, such management-initiated teamwork seeks to ensure that all of the cooperation that occurs contributes to the core management aim of profit creation. So, for instance, management-initiated teamwork structures among porters would involve learning the most efficient way to do the job (rather than the ‘tricks of the trade’), and would not involve such practices as covering each other’s cars to allow sleep or helping each other with the knowledge of management spotters. Existing research on teamwork has highlighted extreme cases of management-framed ‘concertive control’ (Barker, 1993) where teams become forums in which workers discipline each other, but, in the UK context, a more common finding is the incompleteness of management’s attempts to enclose informal workplace cultures of co-worker commoning and cooperation within formal teamwork structures (for example Findlay et al, 2000).

Mobility of individuals

So far, the dimensions we have focused upon relate to the social structure of how work is organized, and they predominantly link to a static, cross-sectional snapshot of an organization. The dimension of the mobility of individuals within and between organizations, by contrast, focuses upon the importance of understanding the dynamic element across time of the patterns that people make in their journeys across job roles. Often this is discussed in terms of patterns of careers, but, because the concept of career is rarely applied to significant sections of the people in low-skilled and low-paying jobs, here, the term ‘mobility of individuals’ is used. A good sociology should feature not just a static analysis of the social structures that face people, and which people enact, but also a dynamic analysis of how people create journeys through such structures.

There is a greater focus on the agency of individual workers in this dimension, but it is also crucial to see that there are important social structures that pattern the mobility of individuals across job roles. A key first distinction that scholars make in thinking about these social structures is between the internal labour market and the external labour market. The internal labour market refers to a firm’s internal job structures, wages, training and promotions policies that are developed as largely shielded from the wider external labour market (Doeringer and Piore, 1970). The external labour market covers jobs and wages set in the wider, open market. The relative importance of the internal or external labour market is a crucial element in the social structures that pattern individual job mobility. Table 4.1 lays out the main patterns of mobility of individuals across jobs. The first row pertains to situations where the internal labour market plays the central role.

Table 4.1:

Mobility of individuals across jobs
Main mode of mobility of individuals Main mobility pattern Key structuring agent
Internal labour market Within organization, vertical Organization
External labour market – occupation Within occupation (between organizations), horizontal and vertical Professional association
External labour market – employability Between organizations and sectors, mainly horizontal Individual workers positioned as responsible; employers and state bodies as enablers
External labour market – the hustle High short-term mobility across forms of employment, horizontal Employer assumes no responsibility for employability training, leaving worker in short-term search for job gigs

When there is an emphasis on the internal labour market, the individual is more likely to be linked to a single organization. The organization plays the key structuring role. Jacoby (1998) writes that many of the large corporations of advanced industrialization put considerable emphasis on the internal labour market and the ‘career job system’. Corporations organize their jobs into ladders or hierarchies and set out clear criteria by which individual workers could move internally up these ladders. Edwards (1979: 21) puts it thus: ‘Work becomes highly stratified; each job is given its distinct title and descriptions; and impersonal rules govern promotion. “Stick with the corporation” the worker is told, “and you can ascend up the ladder”.’ The company promises the worker a career.

Baruch (2004) characterizes the organizational career ‘deal’ of advanced industrialization in the middle decades of the 20th century as involving a long-term commitment from organization and workers to each other, in which a job mobility pattern of gradual advancement is linked to length of job tenure. Although aggregate job tenure data has not indicated a strong shift away from the importance of internal labour markets, qualitative studies tend to paint a picture of increasing precarity and the increasing salience of the external labour market over the internal labour market as the key structures for job mobility (St-Denis and Hollister, 2023, discussed in Chapter 3).

The subsequent three rows in Table 4.1 concern situations where the external labour market is dominant. There can be important differences in how the external labour market plays a role. The second row relates to situations where the external labour market is structured for mobility within occupations, and between organizations. Here the main structuring agent tends to be a professional association. Consider how Devine et al’s definition of a profession (2000: 522) involves a key role of the professional association in the structuring of jobs. The professions are:

a range of exclusive occupational groups with special skills and knowledge – have long been known to occupy positions of power and privilege in the labour market. Their power derives from authorised knowledge and, consequently, professions have been careful to protect their expertise via the activities of associations who control the recruitment and training of new entrants and the conduct and standards of work by individual professionals.

Doctors, lawyers and accountants are examples of such professions, in which professional associations play key roles in structuring the external labour market in which individuals can be mobile. The percentage of jobs that are professional, in the sense of Devine et al’s definition, has grown in recent decades. According to the UK government’s occupational classification, the proportion of the labour force in professional occupations rose from 19.5 per cent in 2012 to 25.7 per cent in 2021 (GOV.UK, 2022).

The penultimate row in Table 4.1 concerns job mobility through the external labour market where employability is becoming the dominant structure. The importance of employability is signalled by the widespread renaming of career advice services offered at schools, colleges and universities as ‘career and employability’ advice. Employability structures are designed to promote training and learning among people in and entering the labour market that equips them to find employment – to be strong candidates for jobs in the external labour market. In broad government policy terms, there has been a significant shift away from seeking to generate full, and relatively stable, employment (see the discussion of Keynesian policies as part of Fordism in Chapter 3) towards promoting the capacity of people to keep finding jobs in an increasingly unstable economy. As Forrier and Sels (2003: 641) put it, ‘“lifetime employability” is often put forward as an alternative to lifetime employment with the same employer’. The structures that support and promote employability often feature a mix of individual employers, employer associations, colleges and other state bodies (Dill and Morgan, 2017). Within these structures, there has been a key shift towards pushing on to the individual worker the responsibility for their continued employability, with employers and state bodies positioned as ‘enablers’ for individuals to sustain their own employability (Chertkovskaya et al, 2013). Research on varieties of capitalism (see Chapter 3) show that this shift has been much more pronounced in liberal market economies, such as the UK, Ireland and the US (Jackson and Deeg, 2006). Training and learning for employability often feature broad, general skills that are considered transferable between occupations and sectors.

A positive take on employability emphasizes the opening up of individual choice, the freeing up of career horizons for the individual worker, sometimes characterized as the creation of ‘boundaryless’ careers. Sweet and Meiskins (2008: 138) note that the ‘optimistic view envisions a mobile workforce charting boundaryless careers, engaging in transient relationships between different employers and thereby expanding a variety of portable skills’. An emblematic positive example of this is the software programmer in Silicon Valley who rotates through companies, expanding innovation, knowledge and their own financial rewards (Saxenian, 1996). However, there are also critical voices regarding the rise of employability as a key structure for the mobility of individuals between jobs. One point of criticism is that transferable skills for employability can become so generic that they become almost empty of substantive meaning (Chertkovskaya et al, 2013), such that, for low-paid workers, learning linked to employability can offer few positive outcomes (Dill and Morgan, 2017).

A more profound sociological critique flows from an analysis of the social relations and power relations within the structures of employability. Chertkovskaya et al (2013) argue that employability promotes a social relationship in the labour market in which the individual worker is positioned as a form of entrepreneur increasingly freed from constraints linked to the old economy and its limited forms of job mobility. For these authors, such a positioning is damaging because the individual worker with limited substantive skills is, in reality, a weak rather than empowered figure in the job market. Moreover, the idea within the structures of employability that individuals are responsible for their own careers inevitably leads to a structure where individuals come to internalize a lack of career success as a sign of their own moral failure, despite the fact that much larger social structures, such as the international division of labour (see Chapter 3), may place major constraints on the possibility of upward job mobility (Shildrick et al, 2012). Furthermore, the more the individual worker is positioned as the empowered entrepreneur, the more hidden become the deep power imbalances in the nature of the employment relationship and within the structures of the job market. This is the social structure that leads to unpaid internships becoming, apparently, more acceptable (Discenna, 2016). Chertkovskaya et al (2013) also take issue with the unrelenting positivity with which the idea of employability is promoted, even by universities, which should be institutions that hold power to account and should not become cheerleaders for social structures that have significant negative implications.

The waxing of employability against the waning of organizational careers constitutes a significant shift in the social contract around work. Employers move from an implied obligation to promote career paths within their organization to an implied obligation to promote jobs and learning opportunities that support workers’ wider employability. All this assumes that employers follow the path of implied obligation, but we must also consider the nature of individual job mobility when employers do not even meet the more limited obligation of supporting employability. Employers who rely on platform-mediated labour are exhibit number one here as they deny that they are employers and thereby seek to step away from obligations as an employer (Ravenelle, 2019).

In this context, where the term boundaryless career is an ‘oxymoron’ (Kost et al, 2020), job mobility centres on ‘the hustle’ (as in the final row of Table 4.1). The hustle involves individual workers who have limited training, who face conditions of high employment insecurity and no support for wider training and who respond to that context with practices that support their short-term access to a range of forms of employment. The hustle often involves a blurring of the formal and informal, and perhaps a blurring of the licit and the illicit (Thieme, 2018). The hustle may, for instance, involve a worker undertaking a number of part-time jobs simultaneously, while trying to become an influencer on social media (Cottom, 2020), while also developing a network of contacts that can give a lead into the next short-term employment opportunity. Rooted in immediate necessity, these practices promote a short-term job-mobility-entrepreneurialism. As Thieme (2018: 530) puts it, the hustle ‘both normalises and affirms conditions of uncertainty’. It can be seen as part of a focus on the immediate present forced by conditions of uncertainty and precarity – what Desmond (2023) calls a ‘feverish present-mindedness’. Ens’ (2021: 1) study of influencers, or Seller Stylists, on the social media marketplace Poshmark, argues that ‘hustling, in the way Seller Stylists celebrate it, re-routes precarity into fulfilment, [while] individualizing systemic problems such as student debt, and lack of maternal benefits’. Cottom (2020: 19) concurs, noting that the hustle is a response to situations where ‘risk has shifted from states and employers to workers’.

Work organization – the contrast between craft work and Taylorism

Here, we move from looking at the individual dimensions of work organization to consider how these individual dimensions cohere into overall patterns in work organization. A key contrast drawn in overall work organization is that between work organization according to craft principles and work organization according to Frederick Taylor’s principles of ‘scientific management’ (that is, Taylorism). Table 4.2 plots these two contrasting forms of work organization against the dimensions covered earlier (along with the dimension of control discussed in Chapter 3).

Table 4.2:

Craft and Taylorist work organization
Dimension of work organization Work organization – craft principle Work organization – Taylorism
Basis of division of labour Unity of conception and execution Task efficiency through separation of conception and execution, and task fragmentation
Labour process High skill, limited intensity Low skill, potential for high intensity
Control Adherence to occupational norms Hierarchical measurement of output, and observation of labour process
Peer relations Strong principle of peer respect, some hierarchies regarding expertise Weak principle, highly individualized jobs created
Individual mobility Within occupation Potential for limited progression through job hierarchies

Work organization – craft principles

Although craft work is largely associated with historical forms of skilled manual labour, if looked at abstractly, craft can be and has been applied to a wide range of contemporary jobs, from software engineers and laboratory technicians to academic work (Kroezen et al, 2021). Therefore, rather than rely on either historical forms of craft work or on examples of what is painted as a contemporary resurgence of craft work (Bell et al, 2018), it is more useful – in terms of drawing a contrast to Taylorism – to look at the core abstract principles informing craft work. Or, to use the sociological jargon, it is more useful to consider an ideal type of craft work organization. A core to craft work is a unity of conception/design and execution. This is the principle for the division of labour. For Braverman (who laid out a foundational contrast between craft work and Taylorism), the unity of hand and brain work was fundamental to (manual) craft work (1974: 76), as ‘the [craft] worker combined, in mind and body, the concepts and physical dexterities of the specialty’. The craft worker sees the whole, understands how to make the whole (or at least a contribution to it) and is able to enact that making. Kroezen et al (2021) label this the ‘all-roundedness’ of craft work. Within the labour process, craft work is high skill, as it involves both great complexity of task (understanding the design and the relationship between design and execution, and the complexity within the execution itself), and high discretion in the completion of the task. Regarding discretion, Mills (1956: 222) writes of a model of craft in which the craft worker ‘is free to begin his [sic] own plan, and during the activity by which it is shaped, he is free to modify its form and the manner of its creation’. There is an implied limited intensity of the labour process within Mills’ and Braverman’s pictures of craft work. The primary form of control is that of occupationally created norms around what constitutes ‘good work’. Sennett (2008: 1) gets at the importance of this in his definition: to do craft work is ‘to do something well for its own sake’. These norms of good work are collectively created, shared and discussed by the craft workers themselves. Thus, peer relations – among the craft workers – play a key role in work organization according to craft principles. An important historical institutional example of this was the guild, which was composed of the craft workers in a locale and which set clear guidelines for the appropriate enactment of the craft. Kroezen et al (2021) discuss these peer relations in terms of the operating principle of ‘communality’ within a craft. Informal and sometimes formal hierarchies pertain in these peer relations, largely related to different levels of expertise and experience within the craft, from apprentice to master. Within an environment of workers being socialized into a strong internalized commitment to the craft itself, and where workers hold deep, substantively specific skills (how to blow glass, how to programme a particular form of software), individual mobility is within the craft occupation. This mobility is, therefore, limited. Griffin (2013) shows that, historically, such a lack of individual mobility (even horizontal mobility in becoming an apprentice to another master) sometimes could be experienced as deeply constraining.

Taylorist work organization

Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, which he developed in the US in the early decades of the 20th century, was fundamentally about increasing efficiency through undermining the strong form of worker power within craft work organization. Taylor’s (1948: 128) picture of such worker power within the steel industry showed that, ‘as was usual then, and in fact is still usual in most shops [workrooms] in this country, the shop was really run by the workmen and not the bosses’. Fundamental to the reversal of these power relations was that the division of labour should be informed by a focus on increasing task efficiency to be achieved by separating design/conception away from execution. Crucially, the design/conception was to be held by management, and execution (and only execution) was the domain of workers. Further, task efficiency could be improved by designing jobs so that workers had to undertake only a simple array of narrow tasks. Skill within the labour process is low as task complexity is low, and, further, workers’ discretion is minimal as they are positioned in a structure in which they are to follow management instructions. The potential for heightened labour intensity is clear. The logic of Taylorist work organization is one in which control can become pervasive, involving both output measurement and close observation of tightly prescribed activities. And the logic of Taylorism did lead to a tight prescription of the worker’s body in enacting the labour process. At the most extreme, techniques were developed that involved attaching light bulbs to a worker’s body to allow the clear tracing of its movements. Lundemo (2011: 3) paints the following picture:

Taylor’s time efficiency studies were invested with a chronophotographic complement when the American engineer Frank Bunker Gilbreth developed his ‘micro-motion method’ to make work processes more efficient … Gilbreth patented the Chronocyclograph in 1913, a camera coupled to a large number of small light bulbs. These lights could be distributed on a body performing a movement, most often a work process, in order to chart the successive positions of a movement. … Through the study of these instants of a gesture, the irrational movements wasting time and energy (and in capitalist production, money) could be identified and eliminated.

In addition, the development of Taylor’s scientific management had potentially important implications for relations of authority. Scientific management means that technical knowledge relating to production is held exclusively by management. Managers become the experts and can gain authority from this expertise.

Moving to consider the dimension of peer relations, the key aspect to note is the strong logic in the Taylorist approach towards the individualization of job roles because workers are positioned as undertaking narrow, repeated and measurable tasks beside each other, with management overseeing control of the overall flow of production. This picture suggests little productive need for cooperative teamwork within Taylorism. Indeed, Adler (1997) wrote an article with the revealing title ‘Work organization: From Taylorism to teamwork’ (emphasis added). As such, peer relations have a very limited role within an ideal type of Taylorist work organization, although, in practice, teamwork structures have been applied to Taylorist settings (Baldry et al, 1998). It is fair to say that Taylor had little thought for the implications of individual job mobility for the workers occupying the roles set up along his ‘scientific management’ principles. Littler (1978: 185) argues that the logic of Taylorist work organization is devoid of any consideration of job mobility structures: ‘Taylorism represents an organizational form without any notion of a career-structure … Taylorism does not involve, nor imply, a career system.’ Edwards (1979) argued that, in practice, large firms in the mid-20th century accommodated Taylorism through a seniority career structure, in which workers could move up a ladder of many rungs with small gaps between them within an organization, where the rungs constituted Taylorist jobs (in which there may be a slight change in task complexity).

A sporting analogy may help in understanding the contrast between craft work organization and Taylorist work organization. We can say that the relationship between a craft worker and a production worker in a Taylorized job is akin to the relationship between a soccer (association football) player and an American football (gridiron) player. The job of soccer player (and the craft worker) has both conception and execution. At any given moment in the game, the players (working broadly within the remit set by their coach) must be able to execute a task and must also be able to design, or conceive of, the task: for example, should they play a square pass to the unmarked right back, or float a long diagonal pass to the left winger who is making a quick run? There are exceptions at the set plays of free kicks and corners, when the expectation is primarily to execute a role already designed by the manager, but, overall, a considerable proportion of the role involves both conception and execution. The job of the American football player (and the Taylorized job), by contrast, centres primarily on execution. With the breakdown of plays every few seconds, the primary task of the player comes to be executing a role in the plays that are pre-designed by the coach. Furthermore, American football mirrors Taylorism in having a very narrow specialization of roles, which is possible because there are unlimited substitutions permitted during the game. So, in current professional American football, there are distinct sets of 11 players for an offence situation, for a defence situation and for different ‘special teams’ where the team is kicking or lining up against a kick. Some players in special teams may come on and perform their role for only a few seconds each game. In American football, the coach is the Taylorist supervisor or manager, and the players are the workers in the Taylorized jobs. Hoch (1972: 9) brings out this analogy between American football and Taylorism:

Every pattern of movement on the field is increasingly being brought under the control of a group of non-playing managerial technocrats who sit in the stands (literally above the players) with their headphones and dictate offences, defences, special plays, substitutions and so forth to their players below. It’s no longer a game. It’s a business and there is too much at stake to leave this business to the players.

Perhaps it is no accident that such an implicitly Taylorized sport as American football became popular in the US just as the organization of the jobs in its economy were increasingly designed along Taylorist principles.

The discussion in Chapter 3 of the rise of outsourcing and the new international division of labour linked to global value chains would suggest that the Taylorized manual jobs in manufacturing are predominantly located now in lower-wage economies such as China, India and Bangladesh. Silver (2003), for instance, outlines how the sites of car production (a highly Taylorized industry) have moved from high-wage economies to lower-wage economies across the globe. It is difficult to conduct independent, critical sociology of work studies in factories in China. Yu’s (2008) study of a factory in southern China manufacturing for Reebok, the sportswear MNC, is, therefore, important. It shows ‘Tayloristic production process, coercive labor disciplines and rampant labor rights violations’ (p 517). Sandoval’s (2013: 337) overview of manufacturing in the electronics sector, based on international watchdog reports, indicates that work is, indeed, highly Taylorized:

Low skilled assembly line labour and uniform work procedures … dominate work in electronics factories. … Workflows are fragmented and repetitive. One worker told China Labour Watch: ‘We finish one step in every 7 seconds, which requires us to concentrate and keep working and working. We work faster even than the machines’ (worker quoted by China Labour Watch, 2010).

Further, this is often Taylorism imposed with the same iron discipline that existed on the Taylorized assembly lines at Ford in the US in the 1920s and 1930s. Sandoval (2013: 337) reports that at Foxcom (a manufacture-contractor for Apple), workers ‘had to collectively reply “Fine! Very fine! Very, very fine!” whenever they were asked [by a supervisor] how they felt’.

The contrast between work organized along craft principles and work organized according to Taylorist principles stands as one of the analytical touchstones within the sociology of work. It was central to Braverman’s (1974) highly influential and widely debated argument that the logic of capitalism leads to the replacement of craft work by work organized according to Taylorist principles. Noon and Blyton (2013) give a skilful overview of the debate on Braverman’s argument (a narrower version of the argument is referred to as Braverman’s de-skilling thesis). A key element of Noon and Blyton’s approach is that Braverman’s argument is too blunt. For the analytical touchstone of the craft-Taylorism contrast to be useful, it is important that we break down the issue into smaller parts – it is important we disaggregate the question. In that spirit, the rest of this section involves looking at debates on the nature of the organization not of all work as one block, but of specific types of work. Continuing the thread of the book, the focus is upon service work, knowledge work and platform work.

Overall work organization in service, knowledge and platform work

The organization of service work

When service work is examined, it is important to be aware of three specific aspects of that work overlooked within the broad craft–Taylorist contrast. The first relates to the meaning, status and role of the customer. Note that the customer is absent from the management–worker dyad that informs the craft–Taylorism contrast outlined in the previous section. In Korczynski (2013), I argue (p 1) that ‘customers play a key part in the working experience of a significant proportion of the working class in contemporary service work’. That article points to different ways in which sociologists approach the analytical status of the customer – from downplaying any meaningful role for the customer, via seeing the customer affecting a small part of work organization, to seeing the customer’s role as potentially important throughout work organization. Emotional labour and aesthetic labour are the other two important specific aspects of service work overlooked within the craft–Taylorism contrast. They both relate to what is distinct in the enactment of labour by service workers. The analysis of emotional labour began with Hochschild’s groundbreaking book, The Managed Heart (1983). There are small differences in emphasis regarding how sociologists define emotional labour, but most see emotional labour as occurring when service workers manage feelings and behavioural displays associated with feelings in interactions with service recipients (for example customers or patients). In Korczynski (2002), it is put sharply (p 139): ‘Car workers are not expected to smile at cars, computer programmers are not expected to behave empathetically towards software, but for many front-line workers expectations related to emotions are central to their job.’ Think of the nurse’s care, the flight attendant’s smile and the barrista’s light-hearted chat. Aesthetic labour (Warhurst and Nickson, 2020) relates to how service workers appear – through their body, clothes and movements – and sound to customers. While Hochschild concentrates on the internal management regarding emotional labour, the concept of aesthetic labour highlights the importance of the outward – visual and aural – display of service workers. Nickson et al (2001: 2) define aesthetic labour as:

a supply of embodied capacities and attributes possessed by workers at the point of entry into employment. Employers then mobilise, develop and commodify these capacities and attributes through processes … transforming them into competencies and skills which are then aesthetically geared toward producing a style of service encounter intended to appeal to the sense of customers.

With an understanding established of distinct elements of work organization within service work, the analysis can move on to consider debates regarding how service work is organized. The discussion in Chapter 2 on how to apply Weberian theory to understand service work has already introduced the key debate here. Ritzer’s (1998, 2011) arguments that service work is made up of de-skilled McJobs in McDonaldized structures have strong (and sometimes explicit) overlaps with the wider argument that (all) work is becoming Taylorized. Indeed, mapping Ritzer’s arguments regarding service work on to the dimensions of work organization outlined in this chapter involves simply reproducing the Taylorist model of work organization with an add-on sub-dimension of the labour process regarding emotional labour (see the middle column of Table 4.3). Regarding emotional labour, Ritzer follows Hochschild’s foundational argument, which itself can be interpreted, in part, as an application of Braverman’s ideas to the emotional labour process. Hochschild (1983) makes the chilling case that employers are increasingly commodifying, taking control of, measuring and shaping service workers’ emotions. Hochschild contrasts people’s discretion in managing emotions in the private sphere, outside employment, with the control that employers impose on service workers’ emotions within the structure of the employment relationship, saying that (p 198) ‘when the product – the thing to be engineered, mass-produced, and subjected to speed-up and slowdown – is a smile, a mood, a feeling, or a relationship, it comes to belong more to the organization, and less to the self’. Hochschild further argues, mainly on the basis of her study of flight attendants, that management wants to manage service workers’ hearts; that it wants them to internalize the feelings that management want presented to customers (hence the title of her book, The Managed Heart). Overall, she argues that management’s control over emotional labour can have deeply harmful effects for service workers. In following Hochschild’s analysis regarding emotional labour, Ritzer also follows the Braverman line of argument regarding the almost inevitable imposition of Taylorism in previous areas of craft discretion. He argues that this leads to service workers delivering a fake, ‘have a good day’ form of emotional labour.

The main broad counter made in Korczynski (2002, 2009b) to the McDonaldization thesis, however, is far from being simply a statement that craft principles continue to pertain in service work organization. Rather, the argument rests on the case that service firms do not compete simply by low cost and efficiency; they also compete on the basis of customer orientation: enchanting the customer through individualization and attempts to make them feel special and appreciated. Korczynski and Ott (2004) argue that the presence of customer orientation for the labour of service workers means a presentation of the enchanting myth of customer sovereignty. Competing on both efficiency/price basis and customer-orientation basis is the material underpinning, in Weberian terms, that the customer, as well as rational-legal authority, is a key basis of authority within organizations. Therefore, service work organization can be understood as a customer-oriented bureaucracy – see the third column of Table 4.3. Here, the logic of Taylorist/McDonaldized bureaucracy is joined by the logic of customer orientation.

Table 4.3:

Service work organization – McDonaldized vs customer-oriented bureaucracy
Dimension of work organization McDonaldization Customer-oriented bureaucracy
Basis of division of labour Task efficiency through separation of conception and execution, and task fragmentation Task efficiency and customer relationship and enchantment
Labour process Low skill, fake emotional labour, potential for high intensity Low to medium skill (discretion in navigating competing logics); potential for intensification
Control Hierarchical measurement of output, and observation of labour process (Limited) hierarchical measurement and customer-related norms
Peer relations Weak principle, highly individualized jobs created Move from individualization towards cooperation among service workers
Individual mobility Potential for limited progression through job hierarchies Limited – structured through employability

In terms of the dimensions of work organization, for the basis of the division of labour, the emphasis on task efficiency is joined by the requirement to create relationships with customers and enchant them. We noted earlier in this chapter that, in nursing, the importance of creating relationships with patients (service recipients) has become an important principle in the allocation of roles, expressed in the term ‘primary care’. In restaurants, although it may lead to greater task efficiency for waiters to bring out meals to any available table, as diners, we hear instead, ‘My name is Marek, and I will be your server this evening’, as the firm tries to create a relationship with customers. Much of service work can be characterized as medium to low skill. In the labour process, service workers are constantly faced with dual logics of trying to act efficiently and to make customers feel that they are important and are being individually attended to. This gives service workers some important discretion (a key part of skill) in how they navigate these often-competing logics. In Korczynski (2002) the argument is made that the dual imperatives within a customer-oriented bureaucracy create spaces that are absent within a McDonaldized work organization. Hampson and Junor (2005) analyse these spaces in terms of ‘articulation work’ undertaken by service workers, ‘the often unacknowledged management of awkward intersections among the social worlds of people, technology and organisations’. These same spaces provide a barrier to work intensification, but this barrier is becoming increasingly porous because of two linked developments. First, customer information management systems are providing increasingly accurate predictions of the peaks and troughs of customer activity (whether in shops, cafés, restaurants or call centres). Second, particularly in liberal market economies like the UK, Ireland and the US, employers are making increasing use of contractual arrangements in which they have the power to send away workers (during a trough of customer activity) or, alternatively, call on workers (during a peak) at extremely short notice. Here, service workers’ hours are ‘subject to change without notice’ (Halpin, 2015). The combination of real-time customer information systems predictions with employer power to alter workers’ working time at short notice suggests a strong potential for the intensification of a large segment of service work (Vargas, 2021).

Regarding control, Chapter 3 highlighted that, in much service work, it is difficult for management to gather comprehensive, meaningful measures of output and behaviour. Notably, service quality is a key output of the service encounter, and to access such data, management seeks to generate customer feedback on interactions, and to use mystery shoppers, who are employed by service firms to pose as customers in order to assess the standards of service and behaviour of the staff (Fuller and Smith, 1991). Despite these efforts, measurement data often have significant gaps, so management seeks to use customer-oriented norms as a normative supplement for hierarchical control. Thus, service workers tend to be recruited on whether they hold customer-oriented norms, and employers seek to develop such norms in training sessions (Korczynski, 2009b). Regarding peer relations, the analytical ideal type of the customer-oriented bureaucracy suggests a movement away from the highly individualized jobs of Taylorism and McDonaldization because the creation of a sense of relationship and enchantment among customers suggests the importance of information flows and cooperation among service workers. Although, Mathews (1994) suggested that teamwork based on building relationships with customers would sweep through service work organization, there is little evidence that this has occurred. Finally, on individual mobility, although it is suggested (Korczynski, 2002) that service work structured as a customer-oriented bureaucracy would tend to create a trap for service workers, it is also the case that there can be some limited mobility linked to employability, in which transferable skills often involve being customer-focused.

The debate between whether service work tends to be organized in a Taylorized, McDonaldized manner, or as a customer-oriented bureaucracy is an important one for understanding the nature of around a third of contemporary work. One of the most startling and powerful phrases regarding service work from sociology of work scholarship characterized call-centre work (an important part of service work) as involving ‘an assembly line in the head’ (Taylor and Bain, 1999). This imagery points to the dominance of Taylorism. Even in call centres, much research shows the presence of some elements of Taylorism, but not that work organization is effectively Taylorized. For instance, Sallaz (2015) shows that, in many ways, the work in the call centre he studied was not as Taylorized as images such as Taylor and Bain’s suggest. More widely, Herzenberg et al (1998) and Vidal (2013) undertook overviews of patterns of work organization in the US economy. Both studies position very few service jobs in the Taylorism-like category of ‘tightly constrained’ work organization. Indeed, Vidal places only 6–7 per cent of the whole labour force in that category. Rather, the studies position most front-line service jobs within the ‘semi-autonomous’ and ‘unrationalized labour intensive’ categories. These are categories that have significant overlaps with a customer-oriented bureaucracy form of work organization.

The organization of knowledge work

As noted in Chapter 1, traditionally, sociologists focused their analyses on professional work. An important stream of research on professional work emphasized the power obtained by professions through the creation of a closed monopoly over credentialed knowledge (MacDonald, 2006). This research also pointed to the important gendered and racialized exclusions in professional work (Witz, 1992). However, this assumption of privilege, power and autonomy was challenged by the Bravermanesque argument that many professions were subject to de-skilling by the increasing dominance of bureaucratic structures over professional work, the effect of the introduction of IT and the growth of paraprofessional roles leading to de-professionalization (Friedson, 2001; MacDonald, 2006). The argument that there is systematic de-skilling and de-professionalizing of professional work has not gained widespread support (MacDonald, 2006).

The wider focus on knowledge work allows us to see professional work as a specific subtype of knowledge work – one where there is a closed monopoly of credentialed knowledge by a profession. A key starting point to analyse the nature of the organization of knowledge work is to note that recent discussions of craft work often reference knowledge work jobs as examples of craft work, from laboratory technicians to academics to software developers (Kroezen et al, 2021). This suggests that there are many shared elements in the organization of craft work and the organization of knowledge work. Both share a unity of conception and execution as the core basis of the division of labour. Whereas, for craft work, this has been traditionally understood in terms of a unity of mind (conception) and manual skill (execution), for knowledge work, both conception and execution occur with reference to forms of knowledge. Knowledge work, like craft work, is high-skill work. Abbott’s (1988) astute analysis of the high task complexity within professional work can be usefully applied to the wider category of knowledge work (Frenkel et al, 1999). Abbott’s argument is that central to the labour process of knowledge work is classifying a problem (to diagnose), reasoning about it (to infer) and taking action on it (to treat). These abstract processes are central to the knowledge-work labour process, whether it is enacted by a doctor, statistician, computer programmer or any other knowledge-work occupation. Knowledge workers also tend to have high levels of discretion and autonomy when undertaking these processes (Herzenberg et al, 1998; Vidal, 2013). The knowledge base and autonomy of knowledge work tend to create a barrier against labour intensification. However, with the advent of hyper-connectivity through digital technology, Mazmanian et al (2013) argue that an ‘autonomy paradox’ can occur, in which there is a self-authored tendency towards an intensified labour process. Mazmanian and colleagues studied a range of ‘knowledge professionals’ (such as lawyers and investment bankers), who had a high usage of connective technologies (mobile email devices) in their work. The authors argue that the knowledge workers were (p 1291):

enacting a norm of continual connectivity and accessibility that produced a number of contradictory outcomes. Although individual use of mobile email devices offered these professionals flexibility, peace of mind, and control over interactions in the short term, it also intensified collective expectations of their availability, escalating their engagement and thus reducing their ability to disconnect from work. Choosing to use their mobile email devices to work anywhere/anytime – actions they framed as evidence of their personal autonomy – the professionals were ending up using it everywhere/all the time.

Hierarchical/vertical relations tend to be less important than horizontal/peer relations in knowledge work. Because of the depth of specialized knowledge in knowledge work, it is difficult for management to unambiguously measure outputs or meaningfully observe behaviour. Therefore, following the logic of Ouchi (1979) (see Chapter 3), control tends to operate through peer norms and peer review of work undertaken. The central importance of collegial, cooperative relations among peers for knowledge work is primarily explored through the concept of communities of practice. A community of practice is an informal ‘group of people who have a particular activity in common, and as a consequence have some common knowledge, a sense of community, identity and some element of a shared language and overlapping values’ (Hislop et al, 2013: 196, following Lave and Wenger, 1991). Such communities of practice tend to play out in informal networks of relations rather than in the hierarchical structure of the formal organizations. Indeed, Brown and Duguid’s (1991) analysis positions communities of practice as improvising new knowledge in a group that forms outside formal structures, partly in resistance to management (Cox, 2005). Individual mobility tends to be through professional and knowledge (rather than organizational) hierarchies, as well as being structured by communities of practice.

Table 4.4 summarizes the overview of an implicitly craft-based understanding of the organization of knowledge work. There is currently no credible argument that Taylorism is being applied in a wholesale way to de-skill knowledge work (although the implications of AI may change things – see the discussion in Chapter 9). Indeed, Vidal’s (2013) overview of forms of work organization in the US economy points to a rise in the size of high-skill autonomous work from around 30 per cent of the labour force in 1960 to around 38 per cent in 2005. However, Adler (2015) presents a nuanced Marxist understanding of how a simple analogy of knowledge work to an intellectual form of craft work fails to consider systematic pressures that run counter to this craft analogy. Adler’s focus is primarily upon innovative, creative knowledge work. He argues that, while there is a craft-like collaborative logic in creative knowledge work, there is also a capitalist logic of control and creation of profit through exploiting labour. The logic of control and profit exists in constant pressure against the collaborative logic. As Adler puts it (2015: 450), ‘the stability and cohesion of this collective [knowledge] worker community is constantly challenged by the divisive and demotivating effects of the valorization process – the profit imperative’. Adler applies this theoretical argument to a detailed study of software development – an archetypal knowledge-work occupation. He shows that, although management knows the importance of collaboration and communities of practice for innovation and quality, it finds itself undermining processes to support such communities because it is under pressure to show short-term profits to shareholders.

Table 4.4:

The organization of knowledge work (as intellectual craft work)
Dimension of work organization Organization of knowledge work
Basis of division of labour Bodies of knowledge informing unity of conception and execution
Labour process High skill; barriers to intensification, but possible autonomy paradox
Control Occupational norms, peer review
Peer relations Core principle, importance of communities of practice
Individual mobility Upward progression through profession and movement within communities of practice

The organization of platform work

As outlined in Chapter 1, there are several different types of platform work. Again, we concentrate on the taxi, delivery and courier forms of platform work here. Vallas and Schor’s (2020) insightful overview of the emerging scholarship on platform work notes that a range of interpretations has been put forward regarding the key nature of such platform-mediated work. The authors label the interpretation that highlights positive aspects as picturing platform work as ‘incubators of entrepreneurialism’. This is a neoliberal view of the pure market as freedom, and the rise of platforms as a move to that pure market. Vallas and Schor (2020: 277) characterize this view thus:

Many of the rigidities of the corporate economy are destined to recede in favor of a more egalitarian form of crowd-based capitalism in which corporate hierarchies no longer represent the dominant structure of economic activity. Crucially, the employment relation itself loses its predominance in the wake of ‘an emerging networked society of microentrepreneurs’.

By contrast, there is the view of platform work as a ‘digital cage’. This is a 21st-century updating of Weber’s famous pessimism regarding work organization as a form of iron cage of rationality in which platform firms are the architects. Here, there is an emphasis of platform firms being at the leading edge of the ‘surveillance society’ (Zuboff, 2019), using the capacity of digital technology to micro-observe and measure the activities of workers, and platform firms harnessing power through their access to much greater information than is granted to (individualized) workers – often labelled as information asymmetry.

A useful way to navigate through this debate on the nature of platform work is to consider work organization dimension by dimension. Fundamental to the capacity of platforms to operate is the ability to identify bundles of tasks with a clear, measurable output. This is the core basis of the division of labour in platform work. Platform firms enlist labour through identifying a measurable output from a set of tasks and then setting up a digital architecture in which clients call upon the achievement of this measurable output (for instance, delivery of pizza, a taxi ride from A to B) from worker-contractors. As noted in Table 4.5, within the labour process, skill levels can be regarded as medium (recall the earlier definition of skill as involving task complexity and discretion). While task complexity may not be high, discretion over many elements of the labour process in platform work is high. Vallas and Schor (2020: 282) note that ‘the platform firm retains authority over important functions – the allocation of tasks, collection of data, pricing of services, and of course collection of revenues – but it cedes control over others, such as the specification of work methods, control over work schedules, and the labor of performance evaluation’.

Table 4.5:

The organization of platform work
Dimension of work organization Organization of platform work
Basis of division of labour Bundling of tasks with clear measurable output
Labour process Medium skill (high discretion, but lower complexity), high potential for intensification through gamification, and structure of workers’ weak labour market position
Control Direct exposure to the market, payment linked to output measurement, customer evaluation
Peer relations Individualized roles, structure of competition between ‘contractors’
Individual mobility The hustle

High discretion over many aspects of the labour process is a key aspect that many platform workers value about their jobs. Purcell and Brook (2022) highlight that the notion of ‘at least, I’m my own boss’ is central to the generation of worker consent in platform work, and, indeed, this notion is mobilized in recruitment marketing by platform firms. However, sociologists of work also point out that this construction of an idea of being your own boss is often situated in a gamified structure of the platform – where worker discretion is led in clear patterns by such features as price-boosting in certain locations and at certain times, so as to match customer demand. Gamification, involving the platform manipulating incentives to pattern worker behaviour, tied to the often very weak labour market position of many platform workers points to a high potential for a high intensity of work. Many platform workers are migrant people (see Chapter 8), whose skills and credentials from their home country often go unrecognized, and who are often denied forms of labour market protection, such as unemployment benefit (Van Doorn and Vijay, 2021). Of course, the weak labour market position of many platform workers is considerably exacerbated by the platform model of treating the taxi drivers, couriers and delivery people not as workers in an employment relationship but as independent contractors. As such, these workers do not have any right to employment protection and benefits, such as sick pay. The structurally weak position of many workers may, therefore, push them to keep working through periods of sickness.

With regard to control, Chapter 3 noted that platform work is directly exposed to the operation of the external market, and this, rather than a hierarchical supervisor – absent in platform work – is the key disciplining device. Some platforms also bring in hierarchy here by setting standards regarding elements such as percentage of gigs accepted and number of hours worked (also thereby eroding areas of worker discretion), such that, if workers do not meet these standards, they are ‘deactivated’ from the platform, which is the equivalent to being fired by an employer. Central to the discipline of direct exposure to the market is the clear measurable output linked to the completion of tasks. Failure to achieve that output means payment is withheld. Further, customers are enlisted in the operation of control through eliciting and monitoring of customer evaluation of the delivery of the output (Rahman, 2018). Within the organization of platform work, one interpretation could be that peer relations are formally absent in the sense that each gig is a discrete task to be undertaken by one worker-contractor, without any need to communicate or cooperate with another worker-contractor. A more accurate characterization is that not only are individualized jobs created, but, in addition, the platform puts the people who undertake gigs in a competitive social relationship with each other, in the sense that they directly compete to click ‘accept’ quicker than other worker-contractors and so secure the gig. Finally, the social structure set by platforms for individual job mobility is the hustle, as discussed earlier in the chapter. Platform firms step back from any responsibility as an employer and thus they avoid even the reduced responsibility of supporting job mobility through employability. Workers, often in weak labour market positions, are left with little option but to hustle.

From this overview of the organization of platform work, it is clear that Vallas and Schor (2020) are correct to say that neither the argument for celebrating platforms for creating micro-entrepreneurs nor the argument painting gig work as a digital cage are useful characterizations. It is also notable that the overview of gig work organization departs considerably from the expectations set by the craft vs Taylorism axis that has dominated sociology of work scholarship for a century. This is neither craft nor Taylorized work. Indeed, Kornberger et al (2017: 79) argue that work organization here exhibits a new geometry in which ‘control is radically distributed, while power remains centralized’. Following this lead, Vallas and Schor (2020: 273) characterize platforms as ‘permissive potentates that externalize responsibility and control over economic transactions while still exercising concentrated power’. Another way to think about the organization of platform work is to identify what kind of ‘bargain’ or social contract of work is implicit within it. The rise of Fordism – in which Taylorism triumphed over craft work – involved the central bargain of increased wages and consumption in exchange for de-skilled, alienating work (Gabriel and Lang, 2015). The rise of gig work involves the bargain of gaining (structured) self-determination for the loss of the rights and obligations tied to the employment relationship. The terms ‘(structured) self-determination’ and ‘subordinated agency’ (Wood and Lehdonvirta, 2021) refer to the coexistence of increased scope for discretion and agency with a clearly defined and controlled structure of power in which that discretion and agency operates. While the Fordist social contract proved to have some stability and longevity, the dynamic and skewed political economy informing the gig-work bargain suggests that there may not be such stability in this bargain.

Sociological imagination – your turn

What do people talk about when they are comparing one job with another? In addition to salary, which of the dimensions of work organization considered in this chapter is the most important for you? The chapter has considered the main broad dimensions of work organizations, but are there other dimensions of work organization, not covered in this chapter, that you consider important? Overall, has this chapter been helpful for you in thinking about the characteristics of a job you want to do?