Labour power and labour process : contesting the marginality of the sociology of work

This article opens by suggesting that the decline in the sociology of work in the UK has been overstated; research continues, but in locations such as business schools. The continued vitality of the field corresponds with material changes in an increasingly globalized capitalism, with more workers in the world, higher employment participation rates of women, transnational shifts in manufacturing, global expansion of services and temporal and spatial stretching of work with advanced information communication technologies. The article demonstrates that Labour Process Theory (LPT) has been a crucial resource in the sociology of work, especially in the UK; core propositions of LPT provide it with resources for resilience (to counter claims of rival perspectives) and innovation (to expand the scope and explanatory power of the sociology of work). The article argues that the concept of the labour power has been critical to underpinning the sustained influence of labour process analysis

Survivor syndrome : effects on middle managers in South Africa

The impact of organisational downsizing on employees who remain has been the subject of intense research, particularly in the USA. The issue of so-called survivor syndrome is critically important in relation to productivity growth and the success of restructuring. However, current conceptualisation has been based largely on American research. There has been little data on downsizing in the South African context. The purpose of this article is to discuss the extent of survivor syndrome in organisations that have restructured and downsized in South Africa. We ask the questions: does downsizing inevitably result in high levels of survivor syndrome; which factors intensify and modify survivor syndrome; and is there a restructuring cycle? The database constitutes 421 South African organisations

Layoff agency: A theoretical framework

The current downsizing literature has neglected the cognitions and behaviors of layoff agents. In this article, layoff agents are defined as employees who assist in the implementation of layoffs in their employing organizations. The article develops a theoretical framework that focuses on the cognitions and perceptions of those individuals. This framework suggests that layoff agents have the potential to experience cognitive dissonance as a result of their layoff agency activities, and under some conditions they will seek to reduce that dissonance by altering their perceptions of organizational downsizing. The framework specifies variables that moderate the relationship between layoff agency and cognitive dissonance and also variables that moderate the relationship between layoff agency—induced cognitive dissonance and agent perceptions of organizational downsizing. The moderating effects of these variables are captured in a set of propositions suitable for testing in future empirical research on the psychology of layoff agents

Downsizing and deknowledging the firm

Organizations in many OECD economies have undergone a decade of downsizing, restructuring and transition. For example, workforce reductions were a dominant feature of firm behaviour in Australia throughout the 1990s. These wide-ranging organizational transitions are expected to continue. What do the new organizational forms and new job structures mean in relation to skill trends? This article examines the changing paradigms for understanding long-term skill change and assesses their relevance by empirically examining the relationship between downsizing, deskilling/upskilling and contingent labour use in larger firms. The analysis is based on a comprehensive, longitudinal data set of 4153 companies. A key finding is that downsizing was used as a vehicle for a different form of `deskilling' across the 1990s. Alongside the `knowledge organization', there are processes of deknowledging the firm

The Means of Management Control

In the understanding of managerial control over work, the labour process literature has been very influential. Recent critical contributions from the sociological tradition have, however, served to so fragment the underlying perspective that its coherence is now threatened. This paper seeks to demonstrate how a dialectical analysis can lay the basis for a viable amended approach. The need for a dialectical framework has often been urged - illustrations of such a perspective in operation, however, are rare. Using a series of examples, this paper argues that the dialectic of work control can be revealed by focussing on two phenomena: the 'levels' and 'circuits' of control

Adoption of managerial ideologies in Finnish academic management education 1960-2007

The article analyses when and how different management paradigms have been adopted for teaching, in the subject of organization and management, by examining the curricula and study guides of the eight main business schools in Finland.The data was analysed in three ways: (1) the analysis of all the reading lists in curricula and study guides, (2) the analyses of subject descriptions in the study guides and (3) the analysis of individual course descriptions in the study guides.Theoretically, the study draws on the literature on German-style and American-style business schools, and on the literature on management paradigms and their dissemination.Our findings indicate that there are differences in the adoption of different management paradigms in management education in German-style and American-style business schools in Finland. For example, between 1980 and 1995, the most commonly used paradigm in teaching in German-style schools was the human relations paradigm, while in American-style schools the most popular paradigm was structural analysis.The results suggest that different traditions in arranging higher management education may have an impact on the content of teaching.This provides an interesting point of departure for investigating the contents of management education in other countries, too