Work

Feminism has contributed the social sciences' most important insight about work: that is, work often performed by males, wage work or work outside the household, has been assumed to be the only kind of work, while work often performed by women, such as childcare or gardening, is left invisible or dismissed as mere chores and hobbies (this can be extended to activities of many men, such as tinkering with cars). To think of women's labor as work means to think not only of producing objects but also reproducing (renewing) the conditions of daily life. It means widening our ideas about what work is, for example in Arlie Hochschild's studies of emotional and nurturing care as work. And it challenges everyday language, such as "going out to work" and identifying a person by their paid occupation.

We thus need to keep open minds about what sorts of activities constitute work. The world of work is more diverse than stereotypical images of factories or heavy physical labor. Bureaucrats, for example, engage in "thought-work," the partly rationalized mass production of mental and verbal operations required to classify and regulate other people. Work thus involves tremendously varied experiences and ideas about those experiences, even within wage labor. Different workplaces and occupations have their own subcultural norms and symbols; the so-called "informal" workplace organization of friendship, collaboration, and factionalism often differs from the official organizational chart of power and authority. Participant-observation in workplaces has shown that informal organization surrounding minutely differentiated tasks and pay rates interdigitates with inequalities brought from the wider world, including gender, race, and ethnic background. Workplace friction, then, both reflects and exacerbates wider societal conflicts. The concept of "segmentation" aims to summarize such patterns of inequality of work and employment conditions. It highlights, in particular, the differences between jobs with specific entry requirements (e.g., educational credentials), relative stability, ascending careers, generous fringe benefits, and so on, and jobs that come and go, with few entry requirements, little future, low pay, and poor or no benefits. Working people holding the latter jobs are much more vulnerable to recurrent unemployment, giving rise to patterns of persistent rural and inner-city poverty that we perceive as "social problems."

Social scientists have also debated whether and how work has changed in recent history. Three key phases emerge from this literature. In Taylorism, named after management consultant Frederick Taylor (most active in the 1890s), management controls virtually every motion of workers through a combination of minute subdivision of tasks, detailed instructions, and monetary incentives for rapid and efficient performance. In Fordism, named after automobile manufacturer Henry Ford (most active in the 1910s and 1920s), relatively high rates of pay joined high-speed, high-pressure jobs; its broader social effect was a high-production, high-consumption, joint corporate/labor union economy characteristic of privileged segments of the Western economy from the 1940s to the 1970s. Post-Fordism, also termed flexible production, or Japanese-style management, has emerged since the 1980s. This is a contradictory concept. On the one hand, hierarchies of control are supposedly flattened and cooperative groups promoted. On the other hand, unions are dismissed as old-fashioned, even attacked and broken, workers are treated as "flexible," that is, easy to hire and fire, and corporate culture and human relations are deftly manipulated by management.

A debate has emerged in the literature about post-Fordism over whether, with computers and other advanced technologies, the tedious, Taylorist and Fordist jobs of the past will disappear. The social theorist André Gorz argues that the immense productive capacity of the modern economy makes possible vastly reduced effort, a life of leisure, self-cultivation, or voluntary and avocational work. In abstract terms, Gorz's argument makes sense and is an appealing ideal. Yet in post-Fordist conditions, the demands of work (both in terms of sheer time spent at work and people's tendency to take work "home" via computer, cell phone, etc.) have actually increased (Schor). This debate poses the question of whether the modernist image of labor as factory work and analyses, such as Marx's, that apply to it, are relevant to contemporary (flexible or postmodern) capitalism. Contemporary capitalism involves corporate and governmental entities of enormous size, complexly distributed working processes, rapidity of movement and information transfer, and finely tuned systems of psychological control. Some authors feel that this constitutes a networked capitalism characterized by loose, relaxed relationships, flexibility, and constant change. Others portray systems of power in which external surveillance becomes included as part of the individual's own watchful self. There is a strange mixture of giddy futurism and hopeless surrender in postmodern perspectives. Though often presented as arguments against Marx, these visions extend his notion of alienated labor to the point where the commoditization of the person as worker and consumer has completely colonized the self. The main difference is that they abandon his hope of a revolutionary break with alienation. Yet we should question whether such corporate forms really have eliminated all competing notions of human creativity and self-directed discipline. Likewise, the predicted end of the factory is incorrect and Western-centric; the mind-numbing mass production of everyday goods has shifted to newly developing countries such as China, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil, and others. Though not simply replicas of the past, such places do in their own way re-create the "dark Satanic mills" of William Blake's early industrial Britain.