Work and Worklessness

6 Key excerpts on "Work and Worklessness"

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  Social Problems in the UK

  An Introduction

  • Stuart Isaacs(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  For most of us, work is also bound up with our social identity. This is why, for example, when people are asked about ‘what they do’ they take it to mean what they do for a living. Our work, therefore, can tell others a lot about who we are. This association between work and identity is nothing new. Historically, people have associated their occupation with who they are, for example naming themselves after their work. Consider the surnames Mason, Butcher and Baker, which all began as descriptions of occupations people once did. Work has been, and still is, of crucial importance to the way we live our lives. And so it is not surprising to find that work raises some fundamental social problems and is related to a range of social issues.

  This chapter discusses a number of these questions. One of the main problems addressed in this chapter is the way in which work is socially constructed in our society. We shall discuss the underlying discourses which illuminate our understandings of work and the ‘work ethic’ and offer alternative ways of viewing ‘work’. Following on from this discussion, we shall look at unemployment as a social problem, this time highlighting the way in which unemployment is socially constructed. We shall consider different ‘constructs’ of unemployment from a range of perspectives, but first it will be useful to discuss the issue of work in more detail, not least because our understandings of what work is can determine the meaning of work and non-work, and the varying definitions of unemployment.

  5.2  Defining work

  If we intend to investigate work activities, then we must first decide what we mean by work. One way of understanding work is to define it in terms of task-based activities for which people are paid by an employer, client or customer. However, this definition fails to recognise work which is unpaid but still contributes significantly to the functioning of society. For example, voluntary work contributes to the functioning of the UK in a variety of ways. Unpaid charity fundraisers, community workers and those who altruistically give up their time to help others are rendered invisible when a narrow definition of work is used. So too are youth work-experience ‘employees’ who may not be paid, even though they are carrying out the same work as formal members of staff. This definition of work as ‘paid employment’ is made even more problematic if we consider that many of the activities people do within employment are also carried out by people who are technically not employed. Care workers employed by the healthcare service and private care homes are paid and recognised as ‘real’ workers because they have a contract of employment, but those people in the UK who work as carers for their elderly or impaired parents or partners do not get the same recognition. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that there were approximately 5.8 million people providing unpaid care in England and Wales in 2011. These people are often not seen as workers, despite the fact that the activities in which they are engaged are the same as those provided by full-time paid employees.

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  Key Variables in Social Investigation

  • Robert Burgess(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In particular, Marx, Weber, Freud, Hob-house and Durkheim explored the relationship between the organization of employment and production, social stability, disorder and conflict, and the centrality of work in the development of individual identity and social integration. The study of employment patterns and orientations to work and work organizations continues to be a major concern of sociologists in their analyses of the structure and process of societies as well as in specific projects within industrial, organizational and occupational sociology, because there is a very real sense in which a society is its division of labour, reproduced daily and inter-generationally in the structures and processes of its economic and social interdependencies. Work Work and employment are often taken to be virtually synonymous but it seems particularly important to distinguish between them in contemporary labour markets in the light of theoretical concern to re-evaluate the relationship between public and private worlds (Stacey and Price, 1981) and between the formal and informal economy (Pahl, 1980). Employment inherently posits a contractual relationship between employee and employer and provides the mechanism whereby production and consumption are related. ‘Work’ does not necessarily involve this exchange, implying merely productive activity, whether it be the expenditure of physical energy or mental endeavour. In the context of contemporary capitalist society, the word ‘work’ has a number of other connotations, which derive from identification with employment. Employment involves the sale and purchase of labour power as a commodity in a market, resulting in the direction of activity during ‘working hours’ by persons who have acquired the right to do so by virtue of the labour contract. Researchers using occupation as a key variable in social investigation need to be aware of the ideological context in which people experience and define their activities

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  Introducing a New Economics

  Pluralist, Sustainable and Progressive

  • Jack Reardon, Maria Alejandra Caporale Madi, Molly Scott Cato(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  6

  Livelihoods and Work

  Our objective in this chapter is to introduce a conceptualisation of work. How is work used to affect the basic economic goal of provisioning? How does work provide meaning and self-worth in an individual’s life? Since the nature of work is changing globally, it is crucial to understand the contemporary dynamics of capitalism. Indeed, current working conditions are increasing insecurity and unease. In this context, we will ask: Is work a means to an end rather than an end in itself? What about work in the informal sector? What is unpaid work? Is caring in the family fulfilling? How can work become both fulfilling and sustainable? Could a basic income be an effective and sustainable solution?

  6.1 WHAT IS WORK?

  It is not our general purpose to criticise one particular school within economics, for in the spirit of pluralism we feel that each school has something to offer. However, pertaining to work and its many attendant issues, we feel an initial criticism of neoclassical economics is justified. As discussed in Chapter 1 , neoclassical economics is deductive (based on axiomatic assumptions) rather than empirically based. In other words, rather than investigating how the economy operates, and the labour market in particular, neoclassical economics gratuitously (and rather dogmatically, we might add) assumes that it operates in a particular way. Specifically, individual workers are assumed to trade off between work and leisure: leisure is a positive good to be enjoyed, something that everyone wants more of; whereas work is not desirable in itself, but only instrumental – we work to earn money in order to buy goods and services. Thus, workers are mere cogs, and

  ‘labour’ or work [is] little more than a necessary evil. From the point of view of the employer, it is . . . simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman [sic], it is a ‘disutility’; to work is to make a sacrifice of one’s leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice.

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  Sociology and the Future of Work

  Contemporary Discourses and Debates

  • Paul Ransome(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  For Durkheim, the sense of identity which derives from work goes beyond the particularities of income, status and lifestyle, and becomes an essential part of our sense of ourselves as participants in the wider social body. From the Durkheimian perspective that ‘society’ exists over and above the individuals of which it is made, work anchors people’s sense that they are securely located as social beings. A sense of social-beingness is a necessary precursor for people’s sense of themselves as individuals: without the common identity of being a member of society, individuals would not be able to register their sense of individuality and difference (Durkheim 1933, 1964).

  The importance of work, both in terms of particular activities and skills, and in terms of work-as-social-activity, is clearly demonstrated by empirical evidence of the negative consequences of unemployment. Loss of work signifies the removal of the individual from the milieux of working life, and thus seriously undermines the whole range of identity-markers we have just described. As Fineman, and Kalvin and Jarrett put it, there is ‘a very powerful image presented of the job satisfying these fundamental needs in a way which no other existing social institution could’ (Fineman 1983, p. 153):

  [There is] consistent evidence that human beings need a sense of purpose and structure to their lives; that the vast majority derive this purpose and structure very largely from their work; and that to be unemployed is therefore for most people deeply disturbing, distressing, and debilitating. (Kalvin and Jarrett 1985, p.6)

  Time and again research has uncovered the direct link between unemployment and economic and ontological distress:

  Redundancy signifies a crucial change in social identity for those who experience it, and one which exposes them to powerful pressures... it involves not simply a change from a secure position of regular employment, with relatively confident expectations about the future, to one of insecurity and uncertainty; but also an exit from an organization, where the daily routine is of collective shared experience with those working alongside, to a highly individualised place in the labour market where the general rule is competition with other unemployed individuals for scarce employment. (Westergaard et al

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  The Deconstruction of Employment as a Political Question

  'Employment' as a Floating Signifier

  • Amparo Serrano-Pascual, Maria Jepsen, Amparo Serrano-Pascual, Maria Jepsen(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  of risk visible. This context fosters the emergence of protected wage-earning status as the epicentre of our social consciousness. This benchmark model was underpinned by a social language characterised by the terminological proliferation of notions relating to security (social assistance, social protection, social security), bringing into play a collective representation of wage employment through three regulatory approaches: insurance, law and collective action and representation. Through these regulatory systems, we have been able to conceptualise work in terms of interdependence (the key to social relations).

  Resemantisation and Recontextualisation of the Notion of Work

  There have been numerous studies (Gorz 1988 ; Méda 1998 ; etc.) reconstructing the semantic journey of the notion of work through various enunciation frameworks reformulating its connotative force: in Romance languages from being an instrument of torture (tripalium), to divine punishment, from this to an object of piety, and finally to an expression of humanity. The history of the meaning of work reveals an archaeology of past struggles between different social groups to legitimise criteria for classification among different social groups.

  2

  This history and this resemantisation of the notion and the traces of its genealogical route are still present in the wide polysemy characterising the notion with intrinsically contradictory connotations: work in Spanish (trabajo ) is simultaneously synonymous with sacrifice, progress, effort, punishment, dehumanisation, moral expression, dignification, etc.

  3

  From a rapid but revealing genealogical appraisal, in the light of existing studies, we could analytically identify four phases in its semantic journey.

  In an initial phase (as also in other cultures) of evolution of the notion, employment and work could not be named and were therefore unimaginable. Productive activities were not placed within a specific category, as they were subsumed in broader or more specific categories. It was therefore not relevant to differentiate productive work from other human activities (Méda 1998 ; Prieto 2007 ; Sanchis 2004 ). The motivations of working individuals were not economic, but derived from social and community obligations (Polanyi 1944 /1989

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  Work and Society

  Sociological Approaches, Themes and Methods

  • Tim Strangleman, Tracey Warren(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  et al .’s study became particularly well known for examining what people gain from work, aside from income. The researchers identified that work gives a time structure, provides social relationsbeyond the family and neighbours, gives a sense of purpose and achievement as well as social status, clarifies personal identity and gives regular activity. For Jahoda, ‘work is … the very essence of being alive’ (1982:8).

  A range of classic British studies in the 1970s and 1980s such as Workless by Dennis Marsden (1982), Adrian Sinfield’s What Unemployment Means (1981), as well as John Westergaard et al .’s After Redundancy (1989), provided valuable qualitative material on the lives of the unemployed. The focus in these accounts was largely on unemployed men, and the studies covered a broad range of topics including the men’s memories of the work that they had lost, how they had looked for or were now looking for work; and the impact of job loss on their identity. A varied selection of topics was also covered in the edited collections by Stephen Fineman (1987) and Sheila Allen et al . (1986) which include a focus on the experiences of men and women as well as the family unit and community (see below. Also see Seabrook 1982). From these studies, we review briefly finances, time and health.

  Financial

  The financial costs of unemployment: growing poverty, loss of savings and mounting debt emerged from these fascinating and often desperately sad sociological accounts. Reductions in income also impact negatively on the other aspects of unemployed people’s lives including their time use, mental and physical health, and social lives. Basically, the studies revealed how having less income makes lives harder in many and interlinking ways.

  Time

  Marie Jahoda suggested that key functions of paid work included providing a temporal structure to the day, week and year, as well as regular activities. Without work setting the correct times to do things, many of the unemployed in Marienthal felt disorientated (see Chapter 9

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