Roland Paulsen, Empty Labor. Idleness and Workplace Resistance

Book Revie

The Determination of Employee Representatives

Plant species differ in their ability to transform available resources to biomass and to respond in a plastic way to environmental circumstances; we hypothesized that such differences among four weed taxa of Papaver would explain differences in their competitive response. We first compared two populations each of Papaver rhoeasL., P.dubiumL. ssp. dubium, P.dubiumL. ssp. lecoqii (Lamotte) Syme and P.argemoneL., grown in a greenhouse for 6 weeks in a nutrient gradient combined with two light treatments to elucidate possible differences in responses. As there were clear differences, a second experiment evaluated whether these differences also meant differences in competitive response, during early growth, when tested against two crops (wheat, rape). The assumption that competitive response was linked to the ability to transform nutrient and light to biomass was not supported: even though differences in extent of plasticity existed, the effect of competition was similar for the taxa. Thus, higher plasticity and ability to transform available recourses to biomass did not lead to stronger competitiveness for Papaver during early growth

Agricultural and Rural Household Income Statistics

Farm Management,

Circular 90

The growth regulators chlormequat (Cycocel), paclobutrazol (Bonzi), daminozide (B-Nine) and Bayleton 25WP (triadimefon) were studied for their ability to control plant height in seed propagated tuberous begonia (‘Nonstop’ begonias). Bayleton is a fungicide used for powdery mildew control that also has growth regulator effects. Two ml growth regulator solution was evenly sprayed on each plant two weeks after transplanting. Cycocel (500 parts per million [ppm], 1 mg active ingredient [a.i.] per plant) resulted in 23% shorter plants than the control plants 15 weeks after transplant. Bonzi (5 ppm, 0.01 mg a.i. per plant) treated begonias were 65% and Bayleton (150 mg•liter-1, 0.3 mg per plant) treated plants 43% shorter than the control plants. The number of flowers and shoots was severely reduced on plants treated with Bonzi or Bayleton. BNine was ineffective at the rate of 3000 ppm (6 mg a.i. per plant) for controlling plant height of seed propagated tuberous begonia

Stephen Ackroyd and Paul Thompson (2022). Organisational Misbehaviour

It started with an article with the ingenious title ‘All quiet on the workplace front?’. Here, Paul Thompson and Stephen Ackroyd (1995) criticized the dominant types of analyses of work organizations in British working life studies of that time. In these studies, they pointed out that workers had disappeared as agents of workplace life, which was the quiet to which they alluded. According to much of the sociology of work, management had succeeded not only in subjecting workers to total control, but also in turning them into self-controlling dopes of company cultures. Already in Thompson and Ackroyd’s critique, we find concepts such as misbehavior, recalcitrance, and appropriation of time and products – concepts that are further theorized in the first edition of their book Organisational Misbehaviour (OMB, Ackroyd & Thompson 1999). Throughout, the authors emphasized the importance in workplace life of employees’ collective agency through informal self-organization. Undoubtedly, this is the most important book in the field in the beginning of the 2000s and it had a huge influence on working life studies. The success of the book meant that many have been waiting for a long time for a second edition – and now it is here

Tommy Isidorsson & Julia Kubisa (eds.): Job Quality in an Era of Flexibility. Experiences in a European Context, Routledge, 2019

The idea behind this book is thrilling: If we presuppose that we since a couple of decades live in an era of flexibility in working life – in which way has the quality of jobs been changed? Now, since a long time, we know that the concept of ‘flexibility’ is of various meanings and often deceptive (Furåker et al. 2007; Skorstad & Ramsdal 2016). It is strongly value laden in that everything that is flexible stands out as something good and every word combined with flexibility becomes a good word – wage flexibility, organizational flexibility, time flexibility, flexible labor market, flexible working life. Who can be against flexibility? Who can call for three cheers for rigidity? (...

Work, Passion, Exploitation

This article revolves around the concepts work, passion, and exploitation. I suggest answers to three questions: What is work? What is passion? What is exploitation? Finally, I discuss some possible relations between them