SOC101: Introduction to Sociology
Week 11
Selim Reza, PhD
Associate Professor of Sociology
Department of Political Science and Sociology
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Work vs. Occupation
• Work can be defined as the carrying out of tasks that require the expenditure
of mental and physical effort; it has as its objective the production of goods
and services that cater to human needs.
• An occupation, or job, is work that is done in exchange for a regular wage, or
salary.
• In all cultures, work is the basis of the economic system, or economy.
• The economy consists of institutions that provide for the production and
distribution of goods and services.
Who chooses our occupation?
1.
Characteristics of work
Money: A wage or salary is the main resource many people depend on to meet their needs. Without such an income,
anxieties about coping with day-to-day life tend to multiply.
2. Activity level: Work often provides a basis for the acquisition and exercise of skills and capacities. Even where work is
routine, it offers a structured environment in which a person’s energies may be absorbed. Without it, the opportunity to
exercise such skills and capacities may be reduced.
3. Variety: Work provides access to contexts that contrast with domestic surroundings. In the working environment, even
when the tasks are relatively dull, individuals may enjoy doing something different from home chores.
4. Structuring one’s time: For people in regular employment, the day is usually organized around the rhythm of work.
Although work may sometimes be oppressive, it provides a sense of direction in daily activities. Those who are out of
work frequently find boredom a major problem and may develop a sense of apathy about time.
5. Social contacts: The work environment often provides friendships and opportunities to participate in shared activities
with others. Separated from the work setting, a person’s circle of possible friends and acquaintances is likely to dwindle.
6. Personal identity: Work is usually valued for the sense of stable social identity it offers. For men in particular, self-esteem
is often bound up with the economic contribution they make to maintaining the household. In addition, job conditions—
such as the opportunity to work in jobs that are challenging, not routinized, and not subject to close supervision—are
known to have a positive effect on a person’s sense of self-worth (Crowley, 2014).
Capitalist modern society
• Modern societies are capitalistic. Capitalism is a way of organizing economic life that
is distinguished by the following important features:
a) private ownership of the means of production;
b) profit as incentive;
c) competition for markets to sell goods, acquire cheap materials, and use cheap
labor; and
d) restless expansion and investment to accumulate capital.
• Capitalism, which began to spread with the growth of the Industrial Revolution in
the early nineteenth century, is a vastly more dynamic economic system than any
other that preceded it in history.
• Although the system has had many critics, such as Karl Marx, it is now the most
widespread form of economic organization in the world.
GLOBAL OUTSOURCING
WORK AND ALIENATION
• Low-trust systems: Jobs are set by
management and are geared to machines.
Those who carry out the work tasks are
closely supervised and are allowed little
autonomy of action. Where there are many
low-trust positions, the level of worker
dissatisfaction and absenteeism is high, and
industrial conflict is common.
• High-trust systems are those in which
workers are permitted to control the pace
and even the content of their work, within
overall guidelines. Such systems are usually
concentrated at the higher levels of
industrial organizations.
Marx’s conceptualization of alienation at work
• Karl Marx was one of the first writers to grasp that the development of modern industry would reduce many
people’s work to dull, uninteresting tasks, resulting—to use today’s language—in low- trust systems.
• According to Marx, the division of labor alienates human beings from their work. For Marx, alienation refers to
feelings of estrangement and even hostility— initially to one’s job and eventually to the overall framework of
capitalist-industrial production.
• In Marx’s view, workers in a capitalist society lack ownership of the products they make, which they often
cannot even afford to buy; they are dehumanized by tedious and demeaning labor processes over which they
have no control; and they find themselves in competition with their fellow workers for scarce jobs.
• Marx saw this situation as counter to human nature, which he believed involved creativity, control over one’s
activities, and cooperation with others (Marx, 2000; orig. 1844).
• In traditional societies, he pointed out, work was often exhausting—peasant farmers sometimes had to toil
from dawn to dusk. Yet peasants held a real measure of control over their work, which required considerable
knowledge and skill. Many industrial workers, by contrast, have little control over their jobs, contribute only a
fraction to the creation of the overall product, and have no influence over how or to whom it is eventually
sold. Work thus appears as something alien, a task that the worker must carry out to earn an income but that is
in itself unsatisfying.
• The term informal economy refers to transactions outside the sphere of regular
employment, sometimes involving the exchange of cash for goods and services
provided, for which no official records are kept, and which therefore escape
government notice.
• Child’s babysitter might be paid in cash, “off the books,” without any receipt
being given or details of the job recorded; the same may be true of the person
who cleans house or does your gardening, if you have suchservices.
• In poor countries, a significant part of the national economy consists of such informal work.
• One study estimates that the informal economy may account for 70 percent of employment
in sub-Saharan Africa and contribute about 55 percent of the region’s GDP (UN Economic
Commission for Africa, 2015).
• The informal economy in the developing world has a high presence of women, involving as
many as 60 percent of working women (Mbaye and Benjamin, 2014).
• The high prevalence of informal economy work in developing countries has both positive and
negative effects:
A. Positive: Such work provides employment and earnings, and, in many cases, can make the difference
between absolute poverty and subsistence-level survival. While much informal sector work involves
self-employment, in some cases, it also enables people to form small businesses.
A. Negative: Because such work is by definition “off the books,” the informal sector is unregulated,
unreported, unprotected by the state, and prone to abuse. Since informal-sector work is officially
unknown to the state, it does not contribute to taxes or pension funds, which deprives the state of
revenues (although where governments are corrupt, this may actually be a benefit) (Benjamin, 2014).
WORKERS AND THEIR CHALLENGES
• Central importance of paid work.
• The experience of unemployment—being unable to find a job when one wants it—is
still a largely negative one.
• Unemployment clearly brings with it unfortunate effects, including, sometimes, falling
into poverty.
• An individual’s quality of life depends on his or her position in the labour market.
• Low-wage work: Increasingly intense economic competition, now global, has led
many firms to attempt to cut labor costs through wage freezes, cuts in benefits,
increasing part- time or temp labour, offshoring, and other strategies that have had a
negative impact on workers.
• In 1999, Richard Freeman of Harvard University and Joel Rogers of the University of
Wisconsin set out to find out what workers want in regard to the conditions under which
they labor. They designed the Worker Representation and Participation Survey (WRPS).
• A national telephone survey of 2,400 workers in private-sector establishments that
employ 25 or more people.
• The population from which survey respondents were selected covers approximately 75
percent of all private-sector workers.
• The findings range across a wide variety of aspects of people’s work lives, including
causes of worker dissatisfaction, attitudes toward unionization, views of management,
and worker knowledge of protective labour legislation.
• The overwhelming finding of Freeman and Rogers’s study is that what workers want is
more influence at work. American workers believe that if they had more say over how
production is carried out, not only would they enjoy work more, but also their firms
would be more competitive and problems would be solved more effectively.
• Furthermore, influence is associated with a wide range of attitudes about work: Workers
satisfied with their degree of influence report that they enjoy going to work, grade
employee-management relations as excellent, and trust their employers. In contrast,
workers who are dissatisfied with their degree of influence tend to dislike going to work,
report poor relations with management, and distrust their employers.
• One of the most surprising findings of the WRPS concerns the kind of
institutional arrangement workers consider ideal for achieving greater say.
• Contrary to what Freeman and Rogers expected, workers prefer an
organization run jointly by workers and management to one run by
employees alone.
• Workers were also asked to choose between two hypothetical employee
organizations, “one that management cooperated with in discussing
issues, but had no power to make decisions,” and “one that had more
power, but management opposed.”
• Sixty-three percent of all employees chose the former organization,
whereas only 22 percent stated that they would prefer the latter. These
results—in which workers effectively indicated that they would prefer
weaker to stronger organisations, in spite of the fact that they also
reported wanting more say at work-make sense in light of another
question on Freeman and Rogers’s survey.
• When asked if they thought an organization could be effective without
managerial support, nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of all respondents
indicated that they believed an employee organization could function only
with management cooperation.
THE ECONOMY OF THE FUTURE
• Knowledge economy: A precise definition of the knowledge economy is difficult to formulate, but in general, it refers to an
economy in which ideas, information, and forms of knowledge underpin innovation and economic growth.
• In a knowledge economy, much of the workforce is involved in research and development; advanced technologies; and the
design, marketing, sales, and service of innovative products, rather than in their physical production.
• Employees in this economy can be termed “knowledge workers.”
• The knowledge economy is dominated by the constant flow of information and opinions and by the powerful potential of
science and technology.
• The World Bank (2012) created a Knowledge Economy Index (KEI), which rates countries based on their overall preparedness to
compete in the knowledge economy. Knowledge-based industries are understood broadly to include high technology,
education and training, research and development, and the financial and investment sector.
• Knowledge-economy jobs are typically said to include scientists and engineers engaged in innovative research and
development, and research scholars more generally; highly skilled occupations that involve the use of advanced technology;
financial management and services; and, in general, any occupation or profession that requires the ability to think symbolically
and analytically (and that typically involves higher education and specialized skills) (Castells, 2000).
• Scandinavian nations, including Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, topped the list. For example, Sweden ranked
number one because of its high levels of education and Internet penetration, as well as a high number of
patents for inventions. Poor developing nations rounded out the bottom of the list, with Angola, Sierra Leone,
Myanmar, and Haiti receiving very low scores—due primarily to the fact that poverty is a major obstacle to
technological innovation and widespread high-quality education.
• In light of the effect of the knowledge economy and the demand for a flexible labor force, some sociologists and
economists have argued that more and more people in the future will become portfolio workers— that is, they
will have a skill portfolio (a number of different job skills and credentials) that they will use to move among
several jobs during the course of their working lives. Only a relatively small proportion of workers will have
continuous careers in the current sense.
• Some see this move to the portfolio worker in a positive light: Workers will not be stuck in the same job for
years on end and will be able to plan their work lives in a creative way (Handy, 1994).
• Negative: Others hold that flexibility in practice means that organizations can hire and fire more or less at will,
undermining any sense of security their workers might have. Employers will have only a short- term
commitment to their workforces and will be able to minimize the paying of extra benefits or pension rights.
HOW PERMANENT IS YOUR JOB LIKELY TO BE?
• Does the future of work mean the end of the full-time, lifelong career with one or at
best a few employers?
• Since the mid-1980s, in all the industrialized countries except the United States, the
average length of the working week has become shorter.
• Workers still undertake long stretches of overtime, but some governments are
beginning to introduce new limits on permissible working hours.
• In France, for example, annual overtime is restricted to a maximum of 130 hours a
year. In most countries, there is a general tendency toward shortening the average
working career.
• More people would probably quit the labor force at age 60 or earlier if they could
afford to do so.
• Another important employment trend of the past decade has been the replacement of full-time workers by part-time
workers and contingency workers, or workers who are hired on a contract or “freelance” basis often for a short-term task.
• Most temporary or contingent workers are hired for the least-skilled, lowest-paying jobs. But increasingly contingent work
is making its way into professional occupations as well, including higher education. Contingent faculty now comprise three-
fourths of higher education faculty (House Committee on Education and the Workforce, 2014).
• As a general rule, part-time and contract jobs do not include the benefits associated with full-time work, such as medical
insurance, paid vacation time, or retirement benefits.
• Because employers can save on the costs of wages and benefits, the use of part-time and contingent workers has
become increasingly common.
• A 2015 survey found that the proportion of the U.S. workforce engaged in alternative work arrangements, defined as temp
workers, contract workers, on-call workers, and freelancers, increased over 50 percent between 2005 and 2015, from 10
percent in 2005 to nearly 16 percent in 2015 (Katz and Kreuger, 2016). According to the General Accountability Office
(2015), if you expand alternative work to include part-time employees, the proportion rises to more than 40 percent.
• How will work change in the future? It appears very likely that people will take a more active look at their lives than in the
past, moving in and out of paid work at different points.
• These are positive options, however, only when they are deliberately chosen. The reality for most is that regular paid work
remains the key to day-to-day survival and that part-time work is experienced as a hardship rather than an opportunity.
Any questions?
