Sociology, Labour Process and Management

Exercise of power in order to secure sufficient tesources and mobilise and orchestrate individualand collective action towards (more or less) given ends

Simple control - direct, authoritarian and personal control
Technological - emerges from physical technology
Bureaucratic - hierarchical relationship based on rules

Managers prescribe work tasks in detail and monitor execution and output

Employees are given some discretion and responsibilityin their work

Deskilled and fragmented jobs, narrowly skilled workforce, doing vs thinking, little choice over pace and task sequence, hierarchy for monitoring

Rich jobs, multi-skilled workforce, doing & thinking, choice over pace and task sequence, workers' discretion

Work designed following direct control principles, low investment in training, dead-end jobs, ad hoc employment, flexibility for predictability, instrumental relationship

Work designed following responsible autonomy principles, high investment in training, opportunities for personal and career development, long term employment, flexibility for adaptability, emotional involvment

Group-based work activity in which a (variable) degree of discretion is left to group members, acting in a cooperative manner, about how they perform the tasks allocated to them

Control by peers rather than by management, value-based system which requires strong indentification with the group

Creation of shared values of what good work is through discussions, personal responsibility and guilty feelings if shipment gets missed, working overtime becomes a pattern

Shared norms become formalised rules: they can be easily understood and adopted by recently hired workers, enforcement through naming and shaming within the group and peer pressure

Codified rules, team members as constant eyes of the norm to ensure discipline, stress

Senior partners decide over promotion, appraisals and distribution of tasks, monitoring and evaluation by project managers, output measurement and performance-based management, standardised qualifications

Meritocratic ideology, instrumentalism, elite identity

Increased opportunities for managerial direct control: supervision, monitoring of individual and collective performance, routinisation and standardisation of work (Braverman, 1974), customers' feedback

Opportunities for greater employees' responsible autonomy: home-working, continuous learning, ups killing, more discretion over working time

Unequal powerrelations between mangers and workers, managers have interests in maximising labour effort, while workers may have different interests

Capitalist imperative to control workers leads to uniform tendancy to deskill the workforce

Automation - increasing use of technology to replace labour
Taylorism as the key strategy for labour control

Systematically gather knowledge of production process, break down process into its simplest parts and concentrate knowledge in hands of managers, workers responsible for very simple, standardised tasks

Separation of conception for execution, workers check brain inat the door

Task allocation, time study, standardised operations

Managers do not have unilateral, undisputed control, large amount of work resistance tio th strict control methods of Taylorism, provide autonomy to workers

For workers to believ that the ideas of mangemnt are thier own (Friedman 1990)

Widely adopted throughout the US and other idustrialised economies, time and motion studies central to industrial engineering, often leads to work intensification

Alternatives to Taylorism started to occur in the 1950s and sought to replace standardisation with empowerment, autonomous decison making was encouraged and there was a move away from the deskilling effect of standardisation, absence of hierarchy

Focus on minimising waste (muda) and continuous improvement (Kaizen), flatter hierarchies and dynamic teamwork that de-taylorised work organisation through job rotation and empowerment

Takes place within teams and contributes towards continuous improvement (Vidal, 2007a), employees are involved in their work and capable of self-management (Lawler III, 1994), lead to increased instrinsic motivation

Suggest that the use of employee involvement and worker empowerment has lead to improved instrinsic motivation throiugh increased satisfaction and increased decision making respectively

The managerial rhetoric of increased employee autonomy was met with a reality for employees of intensified managerial control and greater work effort

Revealed a growth in the formal solicitation of worker input, after occupational change, from 15% to 39%. At the sdame time, workers experienced increased workloadsw, increased stress and little evideny of increased autonomy

Neo-Taylorist is a more sophisticated form of worker subordination

Managers tend to satisfice which is deciding on an action that will satisfy the minimum requirements necesssary to achieve a particular goal

Within manufacturing, more often than not, managers in liberal market economies choose not to train workers, not to devolve responsinility and instead, due to market pressure, focus on getting the product out of the door

Early computer programming was accidental and evolved out of electrical engineering. A group of engineera, employed by the US Navy, built the first computer during World War II. Programming became recognised as intellectually demanding and even artistic (Kradt, 1979)

The principles of Taylorism were applied to programming through task fragmentation and resultant deskilling. Structured programming sought to standardise the work of the programmer

Legacy of structured programming involving a linear process throught the different stages and work roles of development (Barrett 2005) and is "standardised, controllable and predictable" (Moe , Dingsoyr & Dyba: 2010: 480)

Used to refine the software development process from chaotic to standardised

Found that for routine tasks, process standardisation was welcomed. However, non-routine tasks were elft unstructured which allowed for creativity to exist. Illustrates the creative element of programming with developers often being referred to as knowledge workers (Andrews et al. 2005; Barrett 2004; 2005)

Software workers resemble professionals who work with their mind both they also display elemnts of industrial work as they produce a commodity rather than a servcie.

Agile software development emerged as a reaction to the plan based watrerfall method (Dyba and Dingsoyr, 2008). A group of 17 experienced practitioners are credited with drawing up the agile manifesto in 2001 which focused on an agreed set of principle focusing on quick reaction time to cusotmer and user needs, avoiding incremental process and multi-functional and self-managed teams (Beck et al., 2001)