Sociology of Work and Employment

Conceptual Overview

Paid work and employment relations are central features of modern capitalist societies. The wage or salary resulting from such employment is crucial to the welfare and consumption patterns of individuals and households, while the conditions under which people work affect their lives both during and outside working time. Thus social research has given considerable attention to the analysis of paid work and employment relations, though their interaction with other forms of the social organization of work also needs consideration, both historically and in contemporary societies. Thus comparisons of work in conditions of slavery, serfdom, debt bondage, marriage, waged labor, or volunteering lead into investigations of the ways in which these different forms have operated over time and space. In recent years, for example, renewed attention has been given to the conditions under which paid work may replace, coexist with, or be displaced by forms of unpaid family labor; while some middle-class families may pay others for cleaning and childcare, public authorities may expect volunteers or relatives to take on more caring activities.

The sociology of paid work and employment has a long history, rooted in the classics of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and the Webbs. In their efforts [Page 1446]to understand capitalist development, each of these theorists offered distinctive accounts of the dynamics of management policies, work hierarchies, labor markets, occupational associations, and labor movements, founding contrasting theoretical traditions that still inform much contemporary debate. While such traditions placed employment relations in a broader societal context, a contrasting strand of research and theorizing arose more directly from the efforts of employers to manage their workforces. This focused on ways of facilitating technical and organizational change while controlling and mobilizing workers within the work-place. By the 1950s, these strands had uneasily converged into a professionalized industrial sociology, which was nevertheless characterized by substantial methodological and theoretical heterogeneity.

The more critical sociological traditions have focused particularly on the inevitable incompleteness and potential contestability of the employment contract. This furnishes a basis for critiques of economic models that treat employment exclusively as a market transaction and of management theorists who emphasize the shared interests and values of employers and employees. Instead sociologists have emphasized that the labor contract is open ended and contestable because what is purchased is a worker's potential to perform work according to the shifting requirements stipulated by the employer. This orientation has underpinned research on the varied management policies that have been devised to manage this incompleteness, involving, for example, the detailed specification of rules, procedures, and the pace of work; the linkage of performance measurement with career progression; the use of modest forms of worker participation; and/or the orchestration of a language of shared corporate culture. Considerable attention has been given to the ways in which such policies have been developed and combined and to the consequences in terms of work organization and employment relations. This research also addresses the ways in which employees have responded to such management initiatives, involving varied and changing patterns of cooperation, consent, compliance, dissent, or rebellion. Particular attention has been given to the relationship between individual survival strategies in the workplace and coordinated forms of collective worker organization, be they trade unions or professional associations, which may have a greater capacity to influence the wider parameters of employment relations through bargaining with employers or the state.

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