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Labour Process (labour + process)
Selected AbstractsOnce More With Feeling: Ethnographic Reflections on the Mediation of Tension in a Small Team of Call Centre WorkersGENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 5 2005Matthew J. BrannanArticle first published online: 12 AUG 200 This article explores the labour process of a team of call-centre workers based in a multi-client call centre in the West Midlands. Founded on the basis of a 13-month ethnographic study into workplace resistance in call-centre environments, this article provides insights into control in call centres, focusing on sexuality, internal team dynamics and discipline. It is argued that control is exerted through management and information technology but it is crucially exerted laterally in the team and sexuality is an important medium of such control. This article focuses specifically on how worker sexuality is deployed to regulate the tension between contradictory imperatives faced by workers. The article then considers the emotional content of the call-centre labour process, arguing that the apparent resolution of potentially contradictory logic, in fact, depends upon the development by call-centre workers, encouraged by more senior employees, of informal, pseudo-sexualized client relations at the point of production. Crucially however the fieldwork reveals that the demands placed upon customer service representatives are subtly gendered. [source] ,The Worst Thing is the Screwing' (2): Context and Career in Sex WorkGENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 3 2000Joanna Brewis This article, and an earlier linked one, focus on the labour process of the modern Western female prostitute. Drawing on available qualitative research from the United Kingdom and Australia, and research undertaken by one of the authors in New South Wales, we argue here that the ways in which individual prostitutes understand themselves, the work that they do and their relationships with clients are at least partly informed by the discursive context of their labour. We seek to highlight the variety of discourses which currently give shape to prostitution in the modern West, and in so doing discuss the ways in which individual workers may engage with these discourses to make sense of their life-world , for example, whether they understand themselves as victims of patriarchy or as feminist activists. In this second article, then, our focus moves from the encounter between the client and the prostitute to the prostitute's career, and we provide a discussion of the various ways of understanding how and why prostitutes enter the profession, how and why they stay in it, how and why they exit this occupational field and how and why they understand themselves in particular ways following such an exit. [source] Collective bargaining and new work regimes: ,too important to be left to bosses'INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS JOURNAL, Issue 3 2009Patricia Findlay ABSTRACT The formal negotiations process remains perhaps the least-studied moment of collective bargaining. Drawing on ideal types of ,distributive' and ,integrative' bargaining and the ,formal/informal' distinction, this article reports non-participant observation and ethnographic research into the negotiations process that enabled a change agreement in a British multinational, hereafter anonymised as FMCG. Informal bargaining relations provided the backdrop to,and emerged within,the formal negotiations process. Formal bargaining established new employment contracts based on a simplified internal labour market and generated the joint governance processes to enable and regulate the change process. Neither management nor union strategy was wholly derived from rational, interest-based positions. The negotiations process was essential to strategy formation and to the emergence of sufficient ,integrative' bargaining for all parties to devise and approve new processual institutions and norms to deliver a more flexible labour process and to restore the long-run viability for ,distributive' bargaining. [source] Identifying trajectories of birth-related fatigue of expectant fathersJOURNAL OF CLINICAL NURSING, Issue 12 2009Ya-Ling Tzeng Aims and objectives., The objectives of this prospective study were to identify birth-related fatigue trajectories in expectant fathers with the progress of labour and the physiological, psychological and situational factors related to specific trajectory patterns. Background., An increasing number of fathers participate in their partner's labour; however, their fatigue experience remains unclear. Previous studies have focused on overall groups without considering the possibility of between-subject heterogeneity. With an advanced data-analytic strategy, it is feasible to identify subgroup variation within the population over time. Design., A prospective, repeated measures design was used. Method., A convenience sample of 108 Taiwanese expectant fathers was followed throughout the labour process. Data were collected by visual analogue scales and self-administered questionnaires. The repeated measures of fatigue were analysed by using semi-parametric, group-based modelling. Results., Two distinct groups of individual trajectories among the expectant fathers were identified; the persistent low-fatigue group (49·2%) and the persistent high-fatigue group (50·8%). After birth, a moderate level of fatigue persisted in the high-fatigue group. The fastest period of increasing level in the persistent high-fatigue group was in the latent phase. The persistent high-fatigue group also experienced significantly more sleep difficulties prior to labour and more anxiety than the persistent low-fatigue group. Conclusions., Identifying and characterising meaningful clusters of trajectories could provide a better understanding of the birth-related fatigue experience of fathers and contributes to recognising the target client and timing for early intervention. Relevance to clinical practice., There are points in time at which professional caregiver actions may have an effect on the birth-related fatigue of fathers. Caregivers should prevent high levels of fatigue, which could accumulate as fathers accompany the women entering the labour phase. Fathers who present with high fatigue at onset of labour should receive early intervention, especially in the rapid-increasing fatigue period. [source] Electronic surveillance and cohesive teams: room for resistance in an Australian call centre?NEW TECHNOLOGY, WORK AND EMPLOYMENT, Issue 1 2005Keith Townsend A number of employees individually and cooperatively resist the controls of the electronic surveillance systems in the PowerGrid call centre. However, this is not the case in all teams. One team is faced with a labour process that directs their resistance to be focused directly at management, rather than at management via the machine. [source] The Experience of Gender Change in Public Sector OrganizationsGENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 5 2006Raewyn Connell The state has a twofold relationship to gender change in society, through its overall steering capacity and through the gendered character of its constituent agencies. It is therefore important to understand the experience of gender change in state organizations. The findings from a study of gender relations in ten public-sector worksites in New South Wales, Australia are presented. There is a widespread consciousness of gender change linked with new labour processes, restructuring and new patterns of management. These changes are uneven and limits to change are visible. Gender is recognized as an organizational problem in specific circumstances, most visibly where men's resistance to change appears. A number of mechanisms limit the consciousness of gender as a problem. Several trends, including the current strength of neo-liberalism, converge to make the gender-neutral workplace the principal goal of gender reform in the public-sector workplace. This, however, limits the state's steering capacity in regard to societal gender relations. [source] LABOUR AND LANDSCAPES: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LANDESQUE CAPITAL IN NINETEENTH CENTURY TANGANYIKAGEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 3 2007N. Thomas Håkansson ABSTRACT. In a long-term and global perspective irrigated and terraced landscapes, landesque capital, have often been assumed to be closely associated with hierarchical political systems. However, research is accumulating that shows how kinship-based societies (including small chiefdoms) have also been responsible for constructing landesque capital without population pressure. We examine the political economy of landesque capital through the intersections of decentralized politics and regional economies. A crucial question guiding our research is why some kinship-based societies chose to invest their labour in landesque capital while others did not. Our analysis is based on a detailed examination of four relatively densely populated communities in late pre-colonial and early colonial Tanzania. By analysing labour processes as contingent and separate from political types of generalized economic systems over time we can identify the causal factors that direct labour and thus landscape formation as a process. The general conclusion of our investigation is that landesque investments occurred in cases where agriculture was the main source of long-term wealth flow irrespective of whether or not hierarchical political systems were present. However, while this factor may be a necessary condition it is not a sufficient cause. In the cases we examined, the configurations of world-systems connections and local social and economic circumstances combined to either produce investments in landesque capital or to pursue short-term strategies of extraction. [source] | |||||||||||||