Power At Work
Autor: Marcel Van Der Linden , Nicole Mayer-ahuja
Número de Páginas: 387Between working men and women (which may include “free” wage earners, chattel slaves, indentured labourers, sharecroppers, domestic servants, and many others) and those employing them, there has always been a constant – mostly silent but sometimes overt – struggle concerning employers’ discretionary power and over the interpretation of formal and informal rules. There is a constantly shifting frontier of control, that is, an ongoing struggle for control in the workplace, with managers and supervisors trying to increase their power over their subordinates, and their subordinates, in reaction, trying to maintain and increase their relative autonomy. The detailed case studies in this volume span three centuries and cover different parts of the world. Still, they speak to each other in many ways, highlighting the fact that power at work, whether on the shopfloor or beyond, results from a wide range of complex interrelations. Between technological innovations and the ways in which they are actually implemented. Between the division of labour at the site of production or service provision and changing standards of social segmentation beyond the premises of the company, which...
