Suchergebnisse

"People need dignity and autonomy at work. Ifthey are denied this, there will be a strong tendency to resist working conditions and misbehave at work.This book presents and analyses stories about people's resistance in working life that make us reflect upon how employees are treated at work and consequences thereof"--

Can waged work under capitalism be meaningful? How does this meaningfulness express itself in the politics of working life? More fundamentally, how should work be socially and economically valued, rewarded, organised and regulated to become more meaningful? Knut Laaser and Jan Ch. Karlsson address these questions and provide a novel theory of meaningful work that is deeply ingrained in Critical Social Science approaches. The authors conceptualise meaningful work as a continuum between meaningful-meaningless work that rests on objective and subjective dimensions of autonomy, dignity and recognition, all pushed and pulled by the multi-layered control and power dynamics of waged work. They challenge the tendency to promote unpolitical concepts in the scholarship of meaningful work. The explanatory power of the meaningful work framework is illustrated by the analysis of empirical case studies on Norwegian industry operators, British bank employees, Indian security guards, German university academics and Swedish cabin crew members.

The Norwegian sociologist Sverre Lysgaard's theory of the worker collectivity is virtually unknown outside Scandinavia. This article presents the basic principles of the theory and compares it to three British theories in the same research area of resistance at work: Stewart et al. on the collective worker and collectivism; Fox on the employee collectivity; and Ackroyd and Thompson on self-organization. The main aim in this article is to examine whether Lysgaard's theory may have anything to contribute to the international body of theories on collectivity. It is concluded that it stands out as a more thorough analytical examination of the constitutional mechanisms supporting collective action when compared to the other theories discussed.

The term 'restriction of output' is a basic category in research on resistance and organizational misbehaviour and it has many synonyms, but seems to lack antonyms. The term means, of course, that employees do less work than they are expected to by management. The opposite behaviour is in the management literature regarded as organization citizenship behaviour, a term with several synonyms as well as antonyms. This article argues that 'expansion of output' can be a form of organizational misbehaviour and an antonym to restriction of output. The study bases its argument on empirical findings from the public sector: workers doing more than they are expected to do in order to resist management control. A typology of different kinds of expansion of output is suggested.