Book review of The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment (original) (raw)
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This popular text explains and justifies the use of sociological imagination to understand the nature of institutions of work, occupations, organisations, management and employment and how they are changing in the twenty-first century.
Contribuition to Sociology of Modern Work_2013
This article presents several results of the author's ten-year research into the world of work at the end of the twentieth century and at the dawn of the 21st, and is also a contribution to the sociology of modern work. The article focuses on current divisions and boundaries in the sociology of work, reflects on the post-Taylor paradigms in modern work, work in the digital age and work in networks, and depicts the logic and organization of modern work in services. The article ends with a reflection on the current issues involved in a specific phenomenon: the 'servicelization' of modern work.
Organization, 2018
The Work of Communication is an ambitious and expansive treatment of the ways social and material conditions interact in the contexts of organizations and the processes of organizing. It revolves around the central question of how to capture the range of ways that symbolic and material dimensions of human relations are interrelated and what that range of understandings means for research and practice. In a manner parallel to innovative treatments of the agency-structure tension in sociology, this volume explores multiple avenues for recasting the role of communication, with the material world in full view and with an array of interrelationships confronted. Along the way, the authors interweave diverse theoretical threads to represent well the dynamism and performativity of many situations and senses of work. As a work of communication theory and practice, this book is profoundly conscious of vocabulary, interaction, and narrative (including the authors' own theoretical story). The authors explain in chapter 1, Encountering Working and Organizing, how they aim to interrogate standing stories of meaning of work in capitalist contexts, as well as to question familiar ways of portraying symbolic-material relationships. To do this, they highlight practice and emphasize a concept of "relationality" as something of a perspective on perspectives. With this term, the authors direct our gaze toward what happens in situations as a whole and away from positing what is prior to or shapes something else-as in either material conditions giving rise to certain symbolic lenses or characterizations, or those symbolic constructions influencing anticipated future material conditions. Relationality then becomes a term for crystallizing the dynamic interplay of symbolism and materiality. Relationality becomes a means of conceptually and spatially repositioning key ontological and epistemological questions such as the "location" of objects and actions. Chapter 2 is structured around five integrative theoretical premises and four broad areas of application and does its work entirely under the rubric of "relationality." This chapter covers a great deal of territory in the social sciences and humanities; at the same time, the chapter celebrates novelty in terms of upending some familiar interpretations, rotating others, and combining or recombining still others. The underlying assumptions include not only the idea that there's much more to communication "at work" than was previously thought, but also that scholars and practitioners remain unduly tied down to what might be called fixity of identities, structures, and meanings. "Substance" is repositioned; reality is made plural; the social and material are not exactly fused but are placed in a never-ending dance with one another. Agency, by this account, is dispersed and hybrid; causality becomes more of a point of multiple references, to allow for its often 800453O SS0010.1177/0170840618800453Organization StudiesBook Review book-review2018
A s organizational communication scholars, we routinely orient ourselves to organizations as places of work while often ignoring the diverse forms of communicative work and communication about our working lives that underpin such locales. In this essay, we consider how the study of meaningful work problematizes the boundaries of organizational communication. Specifically, we reflect on how definitions of meaningful work are very much caught up in our contemporary milieu. Organizational communication scholars, then, must be willing and able to work within and across traditional boundaries, perhaps redefining them in the process. We illustrate these claims in three parts. In the first part, we consider the rise of communication work and how it calls into question common notions of meaningful work. In our second section, we argue that what counts as meaningful work often stems from the raced, classed, and gendered assumptions guiding our practice. Finally, in part three, and with these elements of our milieu in mind, we describe ways in which scholars can begin to investigate meaningful work by examining tensions between description and prescription
Management Communication Quarterly, 2008
I n their landmark The New Spirit of Capitalism, show how, over time, capitalism has generated differing ideologies, or "spirits," to justify the system's existence. To defend capitalism against criticisms of its harms for individuals, its present version frames work as a key source of personal meaningfulness and identity creation. Tracing the contours of this capitalist spirit, Boltanski and Chiapello show that finding meaning in work increasingly requires that people blur distinctions between private and professional lives, become free agents who identify with their career over any given organization, and display continual flexibility, self-control, and creativity. Discourses that apply most clearly to economic concerns are embedded in determinations of meaning and significance well beyond corporate settings, as concerns for accountability, sustainability, and efficiency are now common across social domains. Although there is no shortage of proclamations of such dramatic changes, Boltanski research focuses on women's and men's communicative management of their relationships to the organizations that employ them, including the ways in which these relationships are mediated by new information and communication technologies. Jane Jorgenson (PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 1986) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on recent workplace changes, including trends in work flexibility and the implications for family life. Patrice M. Buzzanell (PhD, Purdue University, 1987) is professor and the W. Charles and Ann Redding Fellow in the Department of Communication at Purdue University and is a former editor of Management Communication Quarterly. Her current research projects include a coedited book with Donal Carbaugh, Distinctive Qualities in Communication Research, and continued work on the gendered constructions of career, leadership, and work-life. Brenda L. Berkelaar (MA, Seton Hall University) is a doctoral student and Andrews Fellow in the Department of Communication at Purdue University. Her current research projects include an international study on how children talk about engineering, a study on perceptions of computing majors, and studies on the influence of information technology on organizations. Lorraine G. Kisselburgh (MS, Purdue University) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Purdue University. Her research interests lie at the intersections of organizations, technology, and difference, and she is currently conducting research on gendered constructions of science, technology, and engineering work and careers. Sharon Kleinman (PhD, Cornell University, 1998) is professor of communications at Quinnipiac University. Her research focuses on the history and social implications of communication technologies and on issues concerning online and place-based communities. Disraelly Cruz (MA, Florida State University) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Missouri. Her current research interests lie in understanding issues of work-life enrichment, role identity, and role management in nonprofit and voluntary organizations. Kuhn et al. / Discourses of Meaning / ful Work 171
Special Issue on Re-thinking Sociologies of Work: Past, Present and Future
2009
This paper traces relations between the study of work and the evolution of British sociology as an academic discipline. This reveals broad trajectories of marginalization, as the study of work becomes less central to Sociology as a discipline; increasing fragmentation of divergent approaches to the study of work; and -as a consequence of both -a narrowing of the sociological vision for the study of work. Our paper calls for constructive dialogue across different approaches to the study of work and a re-invigoration of sociological debate about work and -on this basis -for in-depth interdisciplinary engagement enabling us to build new approaches that will allow us to study work in all its diversity and complexity.
Communication as constitutive of work practices
Communication & Language at Work, 2018
governed by the two editors and a growing, international editorial board. The journal, further, is embedded in several research networks and centers, that connect, thematically, to CLaW's aims and scopes. First, there is the Communicating Organizations Research Group, located, located at the Department of Culture and Global Studies, AAU, secondly, there is the SDU-based Center for Narratological Studies, with its international network for narrative research, connecting researchers from Denmark internationally. These networks are important intellectual bases for CLaW. The board has been renewed, completely, except for the founding editor. Associate editors agree to collaborate for a three-year term, renewable by agreement. All associate editors will be invited to an annual board meeting. Finally, we want to assert what this Journal is about, and, equally important, what it is not about. Communication & Language at Work, obviously, contains three keywords: communication, language and work. To us, these three keywords, in this exact combination, make sense and provide the basis for numerous (critical) perspectives on what constitutes (communication) tangible interaction (language) in daily human encounters (work). Starting with communication, we are interested in communication as displayed by theories of action, that is, social, and discursive practices of communication as conducted by agents, embedded in and relating to social structures (e.g. Giddens, 1984). That is, we take no interest in positivistic approaches to, e.g., the functional vein of corporate communication with the mere purpose of corporate application or practice reaffirmation. Instead, we view subfields of communicationfrom strategic organizational communication to intercultural communicationas constructed by interacting agents and the social settings they are associated with (e.g. Schöneborn & Blaschke, 2014). Critical approaches as to, e.g., power or knowledge asymmetries (e.g. Mumby, 2013, and Alvesson, 1996), and how these impacts on communicative practices are especially welcomed.