Sociology and the Future of Work

Contemporary Discourses and Debates

Paul Ransome

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429795046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

First published in 1999, this book adopts an explicitly forward-looking and dynamic approach in trying to understand not only where the sociology of work has come from but of where it is likely to go next. For the first time in a single volume, it reviews the continuing usefulness of the 'classical' accounts of Karl Marx, Max Webster and Emile Durkheim, the post-industrial accounts of the 1960s and 1970s and the post-Fordist accounts of the 1980s and 1990s. It provides specific treatment of key topics such as technological change and 'flexibility', the impact of gender on work, the changing nature of the relationship between work and personal identity and the possible emergence of economic globalization, all of which are currently receiving much academic and popular attention. The treatments of gender, identity and globalization are challenging and innovative in that they go beyond simply describing current debates, and question the validity of some of the premises on which they are based. For example, that it is not possible to provide a 'unifying' explanation of gender inequality at work because its causes are multiple rather than singular; that it is wrong to imply that work will cease to be an important basis of personal identity; and that evidence of economic globalization is far too patchy to justify the claim that we are living in a 'global economy.' The text combines theoretical analysis with clear descriptions of the key arguments and tests these against current empirical data.

1 The Narrative of Industrialism

A Typical Narrative of Work

The first three perspectives we shall be looking at involve a largely narrative account of the future of work. Typically within this type of account the future is framed or constructed out of an understanding of what has happened in the past. Notwithstanding the problematical nature of ‘knowledge’ just discussed, this kind of approach is attractive because we all like a good story. It is also comforting because it reassures us that despite our present difficulties we are all going to live ‘happily ever after’. This optimism amounts to a continual refurbishment of the idea of progress. Not only are things going to turn out right in the end, they are going to be bigger and better than they were before. The idea of progress has occupied an important position within both the popular imagination and sociological theory ever since its inception during the nineteenth century. Picking up on one of the leading ideas of the European Enlightenment (see for example Hampson 1990, ch.2, Swingewood 1984, chs. 1 and 2 and Morrison 1995, ch.l), humankind reinvented its own image of itself as ‘master’ of its own destiny.

Our capacity for creative action motivates us to improve ourselves as time goes by, an improvement which is not random, is not an unfolding of blind chance or fate, but is deliberate and directed towards fairly definite goals which we have set for ourselves. Instead of being fixed in the present, or obsessed with the past, human endeavour became focused on the future. Although the final outcome cannot be known, this merely adds to the excitement of finding out what can be achieved. Since society is essentially a product of human effort, human progress means social development. If social scientists could discover the underlying processes of social development, this opened the possibility of using this knowledge to intervene in the next stage of progress. Social-scientific knowledge itself becomes a key ingredient of social development. As Francis puts it:

At the heart of sociology lies the idea that human behaviour is conditioned by social environment.... Armed with [a scientific understanding of man and history] mankind would no longer be at the mercy of blind historical processes. It would be possible to control the course of history by reconstructing society in accordance with the laws of human behaviour. By perfecting man’s social environment one could perfect man himself. (Francis 1987, p.3)

In one of the earliest attempts to define the ‘positive’ potential of the new science of sociology, Auguste Comte is quite explicit that knowledge of the past has an important bearing on understanding what lessons the past holds for the future:

The aim of every science is forethought. For the laws established by observation of phenomena are generally employed to foresee their succession. All men, however little advanced, make true predictions, which are always based on the same principle, the knowledge of the future from the past.... Manifestly, then, it is quite in accordance with the nature of the human mind that observation of the past should unveil the future in politics, as it does in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and physiology. The determination of the future must even be regarded as the direct aim of political science, as in the case of the other positive sciences. Indeed, it is clear that knowledge of what social system the elite of mankind is called to by the progress of civilization -knowledge forming the true practical object of positive science - involves a general determination of the next social future as it results from the past. (Comte 1822, ‘Plan for scientific work necessary for reorganising society’, quoted in Kumar 1983, pp.23-4)

In addition to all of this, the arrival of the idea that human society develops through time, provided a conceptual framework for understanding the past. Previous periods in history, previous manifestations of society, could be understood as the earlier stages, the stepping stones, of social evolution. Having taken humankind out of history, having separated humankind from nature and fate, it could now be put back into history, and the social and the biological aspects of development could be reconciled. Kumar goes so far as to suggest that the idea of biological evolution actually developed out of the idea of social evolution:

Indeed it isn’t far-fetched to suppose that the attention to change brought by the idea of progress stimulated inquiries in an evolutionary direction in the natural sciences. At any rate, to complement the theory of social evolution ... there was now a highly satisfactory theory of natural - geological and biological - evolution. The natural and social world could now be seen as continuous; human social evolution was a special case of biological evolution in general; the principles of order and change in the one applied equally to the other. (Kumar 1983, pp.18-19)¹

One justification for Kumar’s suggestion, is that Darwin’s theory of ‘natural selection’ was published after the social theorist and ‘gentleman scholar’ Herbert Spencer had popularised his idea that the principal mechanism of biological and social development was through ‘the survival of the fittest’ (described in Social Statics, 1851).

In brief, Spencer identifies three types or levels of evolution and the categories of scientific knowledge and modes of investigation which go with them: the natural sciences (geology, physics and astronomy) are concerned with identifying the mechanisms of evolution of inorganic matter; the biological sciences are concerned with organic matter, and sociology is concerned with the mechanism of evolution of society itself. Sociology then, is the study of the ‘super-organic’ - a level of knowledge which seeks to unite theories of inorganic and organic evolution into one complete system of knowledge. As Spencer puts it:

The study of Sociology [is] the study of Evolution in its most complex form.... Throughout [the work of sociologists] there runs the assumption that the facts, simultaneous and successive, which societies present, have a genesis no less natural than the genesis of other classes [of phenomena].... Using the analogy supplied by human life, we saw that just as bodily development and structure and function, furnish subject matter for biological science... so social growth and the rise of structures and functions accompanying it, furnish matter for a Science of Society... we saw, on comparing rudimentary societies with one another and with societies in different stages of progress, that they do present certain common traits of structure and of function, as well as certain common traits of development. (Spencer in Thompson and Tunstall (1971), pp. 33-43)

Although Spencer’s highly naturalistic view of social evolution has been largely rejected by contemporary theorists (Goldthorpe in Raison (ed.) (1979), it is difficult to cast off completely the idea that we and the society in which we live are evolving towards some ‘higher’ state.

Applied to the world of work a typical narrative might run something like this. Humankind emerged from a primitive state of hunting and gathering during the early stone age (from around 600,000 to 100,000 years BC) into a more settled state of agrarian communities during the middle and late stone age (up to around 10,000 BC). These communities began to coalesce into larger rural and semi-urban settlements during the bronze (3,500-800 BC) and iron ages (from 800 BC), characterized by a more elaborate division and specialization of tasks. Metalworking and thus tool making enabled significant increases in production to take place, which in turn led to the beginnings of non-local trade. The emergence of new hierarchies and distinctions in economic life (for example between slaves, labourers, craftsmen, proprietors and lords), together with the need for governmental structures and administrative systems, was accompanied by the emergence and consolidation of social and cultural hierarchies. Despite the rather faltering rate of ‘technological’ progress during the medieval period (typically from the end of the Roman Empire in 476 to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453) these relationships reached a level of maturity based on the authority of private ownership of land.

The period from the Renaissance in Europe around 1450, up to the emergence of the first industrial revolution in Northern Europe around 1750 was a period of transition, in which many of the constraints of feudal society were gradually displaced and subsequently replaced by industrial society. As far as economic life was concerned, and apart from continuing innovations in agriculture, the most important developments were a considerable expansion of entrepreneurial activity both within Europe and between Europe and the recently discovered ‘new worlds’, and the expansion of non-agricultural industries in, amongst other things, the mining of coal and other necessary minerals and ores, and in the manufacturing of other desirables such as glass, paper and gunpowder. The earth-bound nature of many of these new activities meant regional concentration of industry. In the same way that it is not practicable to graze sheep in places where there is no grass, it is not possible to mine coal where there is none.

Between 1750 and 1900 industrial society really shifted into top gear. Beginning in the textile industries, the application of new technologies and ways of organizing industrial work in factories massively increased the economic output of the key European players.² By 1781 Arkwright’s Cromford factory employed nearly 1,000 workers, while by the turn of the century there were in excess of 150 water-powered factories in northern England and the midlands. By the nineteenth century, the size of the workforce in the average mill was around 500, and steam-power had almost completely replaced water-power. As a measure of production in cotton textiles, imports of raw cotton increased from around 2 million lbs in the 1730s to over 33 million lbs in the 1790s.

Similar dramatic developments took place in iron and steel production (which in England increased from 68 thousand tons in 1788 to 6.5 million tons in 1873 and upwards of 9 million tons in 1914), and in coal production which rose from 8 to 50 millions tons between 1750 and 1850 to over 130 million tons by 1875.³ The massive canal- and road-building projects of the 1790s, together with the development of the steam railway (by 1860 over 12,000 miles of track had been laid in Britain) represented both the symbolic and the practical completion of the transition to a fully industrialized economic infrastructure.

With the coming of industrial society the land-based authority of the old feudal aristocracy was more or less completely displaced by the capital-based authority of the industrial entrepreneur. Increasing output in manufactured goods generated large amounts of capital which was eagerly re-invested in new ventures. At the lower end of the social hierarchy, the mass of the working population was settling down to an urban rather than a rural way of life. The natural rhythm of the seasons and cycles of cultivation were almost entirely replaced by clock-based time (Thompson, E.P., 1967). Working had become a distinct realm of activity, a calibrated portion of the day spent at the place of work.

This transition was accompanied by a qualitative change in the nature and experience of work, because now that the worker was paid in relation to the time spent at work, rather than in terms of the product itself, the relationship between the doing of the work and the work done was much more abstract. The most extreme case was in the highly mechanized factory, where mass production was, by definition, concerned with producing large numbers of identical components or products. It therefore mattered very little which individual had produced which particular item. The division of labour in industry therefore required workers who were prepared to forfeit any real or direct conception of how their effort and skill manifested itself in the final product.

This shift into mechanized and factory-based working also brought about an explicit separation of the place of work from the home of the worker. Work had become a public rather than private activity. The new pattern of work also involved a change in the division of labour between men and women as the earlier self-sufficiency of the household based on a sharing of activities between men, women and children, was replaced by a dependent household characterized by a much more explicit division of work between family members (Thompson, E.P., 1963, Anderson 1974, Pahl 1984).

At the turn of the twentieth century, the pattern of development which had begun in Britain replicated itself across Northern Europe and the United States. The industrial revolution had established an economic system based on the production and sale of manufactured goods. The merging of the large industrial firms into a small number of joint stock companies, corporations and industrial conglomerates, together with the development of ever more sophisticated and reliable international networks of transportation and communication, meant that industrialism had become a truly ‘global’ affair. A rise in standards of living, first amongst the expanding middle classes, and later amongst the working classes, provided an essential market for the increasing variety of manufactured goods.

The spiral of supply and demand of manufactured goods for domestic consumption meant that industrial society was also ‘consumer society’. This was a new kind of commercial ethos in which passive response to traditional tastes was superseded by actively developing new products and stimulating new consumer demands. The division of labour was extended to include a new range of functions performed by a new strata of non-manual employees as firms now had to devote an increasing proportion of their resources to planning, advertising and sales. As both the quantity and quality of information about the firm and its various interlocking functions increased, managers required more and more support from white-collar clerical staff. The intellectual information-handling paper-based occupations of the office, had become at least as important as the manual materials-handling machine-based occupations of the workshop and factory floor.

Outside private industry, demand for people to work in the public sector also increased as the state became the major provider of education and other forms of health and social welfare thus establishing career structures in government and public administration, education and health, and later in social and welfare services. With good career prospects, relatively high levels of pay, and rising social status, these new ‘service sector’ occupations, consolidated the shift away from heavy manual industrial occupations.

Technological advance in sources of power, communications, and in new manufacturing processes and products continued to stimulate economic development. Within industry, and following the lead taken in motor manufacture and chemicals, automated production lines and continuous processing techniques became the new model. Within the manufacturing sector, and to an increasing extent outside it, the demarcations between blue and white-collar occupations which had begun to emerge a few decades earlier, become firmly established, with a growing proportion of the workforce engaged in technical, design, managerial, administrative and clerical tasks. Outside manufacturing, the service sector continued to grow in importance, both in response to industry’s need for business and other financial services, and in response to the new demands of the welfare state in Europe and the United States.

With near full employment during the 1950s and 1960s came rising prosperity, prosperity meant affluence, and affluence meant even more consumption. Whereas work had once been seen as an unremitting struggle for survival, people now came to expect that there would be sufficient income left over to achieve the better things in life. With the help of the mass media, the horizon of pleasure and images of the good life moved onwards and upwards. Even if work did involved some sacrifice of personal autonomy, this was the necessary price one had to pay for membership of consumer society.

While the 1960s and early 1970s represented the high point of industrialism in the established economies of the West, the 1980s and 1990s have been characterized by a considerable levelling-off and subsequent decline in their economic fortunes. Internally, the dominant theme is one of industrial and economic transition, characterized by a widespread feeling of uncertainty and perplexity. The very considerable, and in some cases total contraction of traditional heavy industries (mining, steel manufacture, ship building), combined with the widespread automation and restructuring of manufacturing enterprises (car manufacture, eng...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Narrative of Industrialism
• 2 The Narrative of Post-Industrialism, Post-Fordism and Flexibility
• 3 The New Technological Paradigm
• 4 Feminist Perspectives and the Future of Work
• 5 Work, Identity and the Production/Consumption Debate
• 6 Economic Globalization and the Future of Work
• 7 Work Futures
• Chapter Notes
• Bibliography