Suchergebnisse

This article explores the growing interest in selves and subjects at work. In particular, it examines the analytical importance of insecurity for understanding the subjective power relations and survival strategies of organization. Insecurity in organizations can take many different, sometimes overlapping forms. Highlighting how these insecurities can intersect in the reproduction of workplace selves and organizational power relations, the article argues that attempts to overcome these insecurities can have contradictory outcomes. It also illustrates how `conformist', `dramaturgical' and `resistant' selves may be reproduced, particularly in surveillance-based organizations. The article concludes that a greater appreciation of subjectivity and its insecurities can enhance our understanding of the ways that organizational power relations are reproduced, rationalized, resisted and sometimes even transformed within the contemporary workplace.

This article examines the politics of accident reporting on North Sea oil installations. In the context of an all-pervasive safety culture and performance assessment system, offshore workers restricted the reporting of accidents. Other studies suggest that workers often respond to increased monitoring by engaging in defensive practices that manipulate performance information. Accordingly, a central contention of this article is that performance assessment frequently creates employee performances. In turn, the paper highlights the value of linking the work of Goffman to that of Foucault for the critical analysis of culture, performance assessment and safety in contemporary organizations.

Peu d'études ont été faites sur les rapports entre travail et vie privée dans l'industrie pétrolière en mer du Nord. L'auteur étudie les rapports de force asymétriques et les inégalités de fait qui caractérisent l'industrie du forage en mer. Prenant le cas des travailleurs à contrat des deux sexes, l'auteur examine les pres‐sions économiques et les contraintes d'espace et de temps aux‐quelles ces employés sont soumis, sur le lieu de travail et dans leur vie privée. Il insiste sur le fait que ces employés n'ont aucune sécu‐rité d'emploi et doivent composer avec un travail qui les retient loin de chez eux pendant deux semaines d'affilée. Bien que beaucoup donnent la priorité au salaire et à l'horaire de travail qui vont de pair avec un emploi sur une plate‐forme de forage, certains recon‐naissent qu'à bien des ègards le travail a empiété sur leur vie privée.There have been few platform‐based studies of the work‐home relationship in the North Sea oil industry. This article explores the asymmetrical power relations and institutionalized inequalities that characterize the offshore industry. Focussing on men and women contract workers, it examines the economic and time‐space pressures they face, both offshore and onshore. These workers have no employment security and have to cope with the problems of working away from home for two‐week stretches. While many prioritized the economic and temporal compensations of offshore work, in practice, work spilled over into personal life in various negative ways.

The focus of this paper is on the organizational significance of shop-floor humour and in particular its relationship to gender identity and working-class resistance. A brief review of the literature on organizational humour is followed by a more detailed examination of the illuminating analysis by Willis of school/shop-floor counter-culture. Although his research provides a strong basis for the case study presented below, it is criticized for a tendency to romanticize working-class culture, humour and informal opposition. In contrast, by means of an empirical analysis of joking forms in the components division of a lorry producing factory, the paper then explores not only the collective elements, but also the internal divisions and contradictions that characterize shop-floor relations. By critically questioning the workers' manifest search to secure a highly masculine sense of identity, the paper is able to highlight a 'darker side' of shop-floor culture, which underpins and ultimately undermines the creative humour and collectivity found in the factory.

This paper describes the procedures used to recruit temporary and part-time warehouse workers in the mail order industry. It seeks to explain how and why temporary `picking' and `packing' jobs continue to remain `women's work' even within a region of severe male unemployment. Theoretically, the evidence suggests that some writers may have been too hasty in their total rejection of the contribution of the reserve army of labour thesis to an understanding of women's relationship to paid employment.

This article seeks to extend the growing interest in time-space issues within social and organizational theory (Giddens, 1984, 1987; Harvey, 1990) by focusing on management and gender in the workplace. It examines the impact of what we have termed `time-space surveillance' on managers who have survived delayering and also addresses the gendered conditions and consequences of these processes. Drawing on research from the UK insurance industry, we explore the various managerial responses to increased time-space surveillance, how intensified monitoring generated considerable problems for both men and women managers in attempting to balance `home' and `work', and the significant gender-specific effects of these processes. Finally, we consider the extent to which these empirical dynamics might have a wider generalizability.