1. For an overview, see Wood, “Flexible Scheduling, Degradation of Job Quality and Barriers to Collective Voice.”
2. Although the slightly different wording of questions asked across the surveys means that the findings cannot be directly compared, it is clear that broadly similar levels of precarious scheduling exist across Europe and the United States.
3. Lambert, “Passing the Buck.”
4. See, for example, Rubery, Grimshaw, et al., “ ‘It’s All about Time.’ ”
5. McCrate, “Flexibility for Whom?” Precarious scheduling in this study refers to workers who are rarely or never able to change their schedule and only know what their schedule will be one week or less in advance.
6. The General Social Survey is a nationally representative survey. The figures quoted here are the author’s own calculation based on T. Smith et al., General Social Surveys, 1972–2016.
7. Based on Eurofound’s European Working Conditions Survey, which paints a wide-ranging picture of Europe at work across countries, occupations, sectors, and age groups once every five years. The 2015 survey interviewed nearly 44,000 workers in thirty-five countries, including the UK. Analysis by Wood and Burchell, “Precarious Scheduling in the UK.”
8. Lee et al., “Working with Machines”; Rosenblat and Stark, “Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries”; Wood et al., “Good Gig, Bad Gig.”
9. Pesole et al., Platform Workers in Europe.
10. Freelancers Union and Upwork, Freelancing in America: 2018.
11. Henly, Shaefer, and Waxman, “Non-standard Work Schedules”; McCrate, “Flexibility for Whom?”; Wood, “Flexible Scheduling, Degradation of Job Quality and Barriers to Collective Voice.”
12. J. Hyman, Scholarios, and Baldry, “Getting On or Getting By?,” 719–720.
13. Lambert, Haley-Lock, and Henly, “Schedule Flexibility in Hourly Jobs,” 304.
14. Author’s own calculation based on T. Smith et al., General Social Surveys, 1972–2016.
15. Lambert, Fugiel, and Henly, “Precarious Work Schedules among Early-Career Employees in the US.”
16. Schneider and Harknett, “Consequences of Routine Work-Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Well-Being.”
17. Based on Eurofound’s European Working Conditions Survey, which paints a wide-ranging picture of Europe at work across countries, occupations, sectors, and age groups once every five years. The 2015 survey interviewed nearly 44,000 workers in thirty-five countries including the UK. Analysis by Wood and Burchell, “Precarious Scheduling in the UK.”
18. Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism.
19. Lambert, Haley-Lock, and Henly, “Schedule Flexibility in Hourly Jobs.”
20. Webb and Webb, Industrial Democracy, 842.
21. Flanders, Management and Unions.
22. P. Edwards, “The Employment Relationship and Field of Industrial Relations.”
23. P. Edwards, Conflict at Work.
24. E. Wright, Class Counts, 10.
25. In this book, what is meant by “power” is social power: mastery of one’s social environment, i.e., power over other people. See Mann, The Social Sources of Power, 1–6. Specifically, power is defined as A’s capacity to affect B, so that B’s capacity to realize their interests is suboptimal, a conception that is based on Lukes’s definition of power in Power, 27.
26. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, xiii.
27. Scott, 20.
28. Hollander and Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance.”
29. Ackroyd and Thompson, Organizational Misbehaviour.
30. Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 126.
31. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 161, 182.
32. Gramsci, 263.
33. Poulantzas, “The Problem of the Capitalist State.”
34. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 285, 310.
35. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent; Burawoy, The Politics of Production.
36. R. Edwards, Contested Terrain, 132.
37. P. Edwards, Conflict at Work, 3.
38. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent; Burawoy, “The Roots of Domination.”
39. Gramsci argues, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, that, unlike in the United States, hegemony in Europe was born in state and civil society institutions, not in the workplace. However, as European capitalism continued to develop, attempts were made to emulate U.S. workplace hegemony. For example, Gramsci details a failed attempt at Fiat.
40. Burawoy does not conceptualize his typology as a tendency but rather implies that these regimes are the dominant paradigms of each era. Burawoy, in The Politics of Production, would later add a third “hegemonic despotic regime”—dominant from the late twentieth century onward. However, as detailed below, this regime is better understood as a transitory phase in which the hegemonic compromise equilibrium is in the process of breaking down.
41. Burawoy, The Extended Case Method, 252.
42. P. Edwards, Conflict at Work, 52.
43. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity.
44. Burawoy, The Politics of Production.
45. Burawoy, 150.
46. P. Edwards and Scullion, The Social Organization of Industrial Conflict.
47. Webster, Lambert, and Bezuidenhout, Grounding Globalization.
48. Foucault used Bentham’s famous panopticon prison design as a metaphor for modern society. This design enables the guards to view the inside of each inmate’s cell from a central viewing station. Of course, it is not possible for the guards to simultaneously observe all cells, but as the prisoners cannot know if they are being monitored, they are forced to act as if they are being watched at all times; see Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
49. Foucault, 201.
50. P. Thompson and van den Broek, “Managerial Control and Workplace Regimes.”
51. Bain and Taylor, “Entrapped by the ‘Electronic Panopticon’?”; Callaghan and Thompson, “Edwards Revisited”; P. Taylor and Bain, “An Assembly Line in the Head”; Woodcock, Working the Phones.
52. Bélanger and Edwards, “The Nature of Front-Line Service Work”; Fuller and Smith, “Consumers’ Reports”; Sherman, “Beyond Interaction.”
53. Fuller and Smith, “Consumers’ Reports,” 11.
54. Lee et al., “Working with Machines”; Rosenblat and Stark, “Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries”; Wood et al., “Good Gig, Bad Gig.”
55. As noted by Sarah O’Conner in a Financial Times article, “When Your Boss Is an Algorithm,” September 7, 2016.
56. See, for example, Blum, “Degradation without Deskilling”; Chang, “Korean Labour Relations in Transition”; Chun, “Flexible Despotism”; Gottfried, “In the Margins”; Nichols et al., “Factory Regimes and the Dismantling of Established Labour in Asia”; Sallaz, “Manufacturing Concessions.”
57. Jennifer Jihye Chun in “Flexible Despotism.”
58. Doogan, New Capitalism?
59. Geary, “Employment Flexibility and Human Resource Management.”
60. Pollert, “The ‘Flexible Firm.’ ”
61. Kalleberg, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, 86.
62. See Wood, “Flexible Scheduling, Degradation of Job Quality and Barriers to Collective Voice.”
63. Heyes, “Annualised Hours and the ‘Knock.’ ”
64. Beynon, Working for Ford, 146.
65. Chun, “Flexible Despotism”; Gottfried, “In the Margins”; Price, “Controlling Routine Front Line Service Workers.”
66. Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk.
67. Sallaz, “Permanent Pedagogy.”
68. Durand and Stewart, “Manufacturing Dissent?”
69. Heyes, “Annualised Hours and the ‘Knock’ ”; Peng, “The Impact of Citizenship on Labour Process”; Sallaz, Labor of Luck. Sallaz argues that the workers he studied experienced high levels of job insecurity due to lacking a union and having an “at will employment status,” which meant that they could be fired without notice. However, dealers in Las Vegas require a license that takes six weeks of training to obtain at a cost of $800. As Sallaz puts it on page 32, “While dealing is officially classified as semi-skilled labor, mastering even the rudimentary aspects of the job is not easy.” Dealers are also expected to have strong interpersonal skills. Sallaz’s dealers, therefore, do seem to have a great deal of labor market security. If they lose one job, they can easily get another, and thus they experience a degree of both certainty and labor market bargaining power.
70. Kunda, Engineering Culture.
71. Mann, in The Social Sources of Power.
72. Lukes, Power, 23.
73. Vallas, “The Adventures of Managerial Hegemony,” 204–205.
74. Vallas.
75. Fleming and Sturdy, “ ‘Being Yourself ’ in the Electronic Sweatshop.”
76. Burawoy and Lukács, The Radiant Past, x.
77. Mears, “Working for Free in the VIP,” 1101.
78. Mauss, The Gift.
79. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice; Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice.
80. Burawoy, “The Roots of Domination”; Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations.
81. Rubery, Grimshaw, et al., ‘ “It’s All about Time.’ ”
82. Lambert, “Added Benefits.”
83. Bozkurt and Grugulis, “Why Retail Work Demands a Closer Look,” 2.
84. UK figures based on Rhodes and Brien, “The Retail Industry”; U.S. figures based on BLS, Industries at a Glance.
85. Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution; Vidal, “On the Persistence of Labour Market Insecurity and Slow Growth in the US.”
86. Giddens, The Constitution of Society.
87. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.
1. Marx, Capital, 549–553.
2. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England.
3. Burawoy, The Politics of Production.
4. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 127, 138.
5. McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline.”
6. Pollard, “Factory Discipline in the Industrial Revolution,” 262.
7. Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
8. Fraser, A History of British Trade Unionism, 1700–1998. According to this author the density among women workers was less than 3 percent.
9. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men.
10. Moreover, Hamish Fraser, in A History of British Trade Unionism, 1700–1998, acknowledges that these figures do not include many small strikes.
11. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 184.
12. Beynon, Working for Ford.
13. Burawoy, The Politics of Production. See also P. Edwards, Conflict at Work.
14. Brown, Piecework Bargaining, 24.
15. Flanders, The Fawley Productivity Agreements.
16. P. Edwards and Scullion, The Social Organization of Industrial Conflict, 198–199, 265.
17. P. Edwards and Scullion, 44.
18. Nichols and Beynon, Living with Capitalism, 121, 129 (emphasis in original).
19. Gallie, In Search of the New Working Class, 184.
20. Beynon, Working for Ford, 140, 158.
21. Pollert, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives.
22. See, for example, P. Edwards, Conflict at Work.
23. Pollert, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives, 53, 61, 131.
24. Glucksmann [a.k.a. Cavendish], Women on the Line.
25. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. See also Kalleberg, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs.
26. BIS, Statistical Bulletin: Trade Union Membership, 2012.
27. Brown, Deakin, Hudson, et al., The Individualisation of the Employment Contract in Britain; Brown, Deakin, Nash, and Oxenbridge, “The Employment Contract.”
28. All informants at PartnershipCo and ConflictCo have been given pseudonyms to protect their identity.
29. Kelly, “Social Partnership Agreements in Britain.”
30. See, for example, Woodcock, Working the Phones.
31. Fuller and Smith, “Consumers’ Reports.”
32. Using the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is not influenced by house prices, reduces this anomalous finding to just 0.3 percent. The CPI was 3.6 percent in 2008; 2.2 percent in 2009; 3.3 percent in 2010; 4.5 percent in 2011; and 2.9 percent in 2012; and averages 3.3 percent over the five years, so it makes no substantive difference to the decline in real wages at PartnershipCo ONS, 2015 Consumer Price Indices.
33. Gallie, In Search of the New Working Class. See also Hyman, “The Politics of Workplace Trade Unionism.”
34. Batstone, Boraston, and Frenkel, Shop Stewards in Action.
35. Simms, Holgate, and Heery, Union Voices.
36. Kelly, Rethinking Industrial Relations.
1. Burawoy, The Politics of Production.
2. Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor.
3. R. Edwards, Contested Terrain.
4. Priestland, Merchant, Soldier, Sage.
5. R. Edwards, Contested Terrain.
6. Kaufman, The Global Evolution of Industrial Relations.
7. Mann, The Sources of Social Power.
8. Riga, “Ethnicity, Class and the Social Sources of US Exceptionalism,” 200.
9. Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness.
10. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2.
11. Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor.
12. Montgomery, 115.
13. Beynon, Working for Ford, 19.
14. Burawoy, The Politics of Production, 142.
15. Burawoy.
16. Silver, Forces of Labor.
17. R. Edwards, Contested Terrain.
18. Burawoy, The Politics of Production.
19. Burawoy.
20. Kaufman, The Global Evolution of Industrial Relations.
21. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent, 194.
22. R. Edwards, Contested Terrain.
23. Kaufman, “Paradigms in Industrial Relations,” 328.
24. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent.
25. Burawoy, The Politics of Production.
26. P. Edwards, Conflict at Work.
27. Silver, Forces of Labor, 152.
28. R. Edwards, Contested Terrain, 141.
29. Compa, “An Overview of Collective Bargaining in the United States.”
30. More details are provided in the methodological appendix.
31. The “ConflictCo Policy Guide” that informs this analysis was produced by the worker association and brings together all the policies into one handbook, which was then provided to the association’s members. However, these members constituted only a very small proportion of ConflictCo’s workforce.
32. Kelly, “Social Movement Theory and Union Revitalisation in Britain,” 66.
33. Bear, “ ‘This Body Is Our Body.’ ”
34. Mann, “Response to the Critics.”
35. See Burawoy and Lukács, The Radiant Past; Fleming and Sturdy, “ ‘Being Yourself’ in the Electronic Sweatshop”; Vallas, “The Adventures of Managerial Hegemony.”
1. In a personal correspondence Burawoy has pointed out that he paid little attention to working time, as he took it for granted as being fixed both in its duration and its location in the day. He could not imagine the scheduling nightmare the workers in this study experience.
1. Burawoy, “Ethnographic Fallacies.”
2. E. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 93–94.
3. Brown, Deakin, Hudson, et al., The Individualisation of the Employment Contract in Britain; Brown, Deakin, Nash, and Oxenbridge, “The Employment Contract”; Kalleberg, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs.
4. See also Henly, Shaefer, and Waxman, “Non-standard Work Schedules”; J. Hyman, Scholarios, and Baldry, “Getting On or Getting By?”; Lambert, “Passing the Buck”; Lambert, Haley-Lock, and Henly, “Schedule Flexibility in Hourly Jobs.”
5. Wood, “Flexible Scheduling, Degradation of Job Quality and Barriers to Collective Voice.”
6. This excludes online-only “stores” that customers do not visit. This is because it was not possible to access these stores. However, new flexible contracts were also introduced for these stores. In these workplaces, the rationale stated in the guide to flexible contracts was that they enabled the daily matching of changes in orders and thus eliminated the previous need for agency workers and the associated agency fees. Consequently, these flexible contracts differed from those used in traditional stores, as the workers were contracted to work 3.75 core hours three to five days a week, which could be increased by up to 3.75 hours with two hours’ notice.
7. Burchell, “The Prevalence and Redistribution of Job Security and Work Intensification”; De Witte et al., “Associations between Quantitative and Qualitative Job Insecurity and Well-Being”; Standing, Global Labour Flexibility; Wood, “Powerful Times”; Wood and Burchell, “Unemployment and Well-Being.”
8. For similar accounts see, Beynon, Working for Ford; Chun, “Flexible Despotism”; Gottfried, “In the Margins”; Heyes, “Annualised Hours and the ‘Knock’ ”; Price, “Controlling Routine Front Line Service Workers.”
1. The research took place before the Affordable Care Act came into force. However, the prevalence of low hours and the intensity of the unpredictability at ConflictCo were claimed to have been exacerbated, though not caused, by ConflictCo reducing the number of workers who received thirty hours of work a week and who would, therefore, be eligible for employer provided insurance when the act’s employer mandate came into force in 2015.
2. Giddens, The Constitution of Society.
1. See Bélanger and Edwards, “The Nature of Front-Line Service Work”; Fuller and Smith, “Consumers’ Reports.”
2. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent; Burawoy, “The Roots of Domination.”
3. Friedman, “Responsible Autonomy versus Direct Control over the Labour Process.”
4. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent; Burawoy, “The Roots of Domination.”
5. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent, 86.
6. Burawoy, “The Roots of Domination,” 7–8.
7. Roy cited in Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent, 84.
8. Burawoy, 89.
9. Roy, “Work Satisfaction and Social Reward in Quota Achievement.”
10. Roy, “Banana Time.”
11. Beynon, Working for Ford, 118. I am grateful to Huw Beynon for pointing out this finding of his research to me.
12. Pollert, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives, 141, 144.
13. Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk.
14. Sallaz, “Permanent Pedagogy.”
15. Durand and Stewart, “Manufacturing Dissent?”; Sallaz, Labor of Luck.
16. Heyes, “Annualised Hours and the ‘Knock’ ”; Peng, “The Impact of Citizenship on Labour Process.”
17. Leidner, in Fast Food, Fast Talk, shows how work games in the fast-food sector were incentivized through symbolic prizes such as music albums, etc.
18. P. Edwards, Conflict at Work.
19. Sallaz, “Permanent Pedagogy.”
20. Beynon, Working for Ford.
21. Roy, “Banana Time.”
22. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent; Burawoy, “The Roots of Domination.”
23. Ackroyd and Thompson, Organizational Misbehaviour.
24. Pollert, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives.
25. Rachel also provided an exemplary illustration of “contradictory consciousness,” for, despite stating that this abuse had been going on for fifty years, twelve minutes later she extolled the virtues of the founder and said that if he were alive “he’d be saying ‘wow, I can’t believe my kids are doing this.’ ”
26. Mears, “Working for Free in the VIP,” 1101.
27. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 192.
28. I am indebted to Michael Burawoy for pointing this out to me.
29. Burawoy, “The Roots of Domination,” 193–194.
30. The account of a retail manager provided by Andrew Smith and Fiona Elliot in “The Demands and Challenges of Being a Retail Store Manager” suggests that schedule gifts are the result of genuine attempts by managers to try to help workers reconcile life-work conflict and that they are oblivious to their control function. This account supports Bourdieu’s assertion in Outline of a Theory of Practice that misrecognition leaves the dominator just as deceived as the dominated.
1. As predicted by R. Hyman, “Strategy or Structure?”
2. Kelly, Rethinking Industrial Relations.
3. Blackburn and Mann, “Ideology in the Non-skilled Working Class,” 155; Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity; Mann, “The Social Cohesion of Liberal Democracy”; Mann, Consciousness and Action among the Western Working Class.
4. Beynon, Working for Ford.
5. See Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.
6. Ackroyd and Thompson, Organizational Misbehaviour.
7. Coulter, Revolutionizing Retail; Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution.
8. See, for example, R. Hyman, Strikes.
9. Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Swarming and the Future of Conflict; Heckscher and Carré, “Strength in Networks.”
10. Chun, Organizing at the Margins.
1. Although social media may provide workers with an alternative source of power, at present workers’ experiments with leveraging symbolic power remain embryonic.
2. Chun, “Flexible Despotism.”
3. Beynon, Working for Ford; Chun, “Flexible Despotism”; Gottfried, “In the Margins”; Heyes, “Annualised Hours and the ‘Knock’ ”; Price, “Controlling Routine Front Line Service Workers.”
4. Weber, Economy and Society.
5. Granovetter, “The Impact of Social Structure on Economic Outcomes.”
6. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent.
7. Mears, “Working for Free in the VIP.”
8. P. Edwards, Conflict at Work.
9. Ackroyd and Thompson, Organizational Misbehaviour, 23, 60, 101.
10. Ackroyd and Thompson, 61, 101.
11. Thompson, “Dissent at work and the resistance debate: departures, directions, and dead ends,” 7.
12. See Rosenblat and Stark, “Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries,” for a discussion of how workers with formal autonomy over working time can be “nudged” to work at certain times in the gig economy. Lehdonvirta, “Flexibility in the Gig Economy,” and Wood et al., “Good Gig, Bad Gig,” provide evidence of the structural constraints inherent to the gig economy, such as lack of work, competition, and high levels of dependence, which limit genuine worker choice over working time.
13. Lee et al., “Working with Machines”; Rosenblat and Stark, “Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries”; Wood et al., “Good Gig, Bad Gig”; Wood, “The Taylor Review.”
14. Fuller and Smith, “Consumers’ Reports,” 11.
15. O’Conner, “When Your Boss Is an Algorithm”; Owen, “Customer Satisfaction at the Push of a Button”; Buckingham and Goodall, “Reinventing Performance Management”; Kesslar, “The Influence of Uber Ratings Is About to Be Felt in the Hallways of One of the World’s Largest Banks.”
16. Ivanova et al., “The App as a Boss?”
17. Anderson, “Where Despots Rule.”
1. Lukes, Power.
2. Mann, “In Praise of Macro-Sociology.”
3. Burawoy, The Extended Case Method.
4. Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity.
5. Fantasia, 6.
6. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.
7. Burawoy, introduction to Ethnography Unbound, 5.
8. Similar to the approach taken in Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity.
9. Burawoy, introduction to Ethnography Unbound, 6; Burawoy, The Extended Case Method, xv.
10. Vaughan, “Theory Elaboration.”
11. Burawoy, “Introduction: Reaching for the Global,” 7.
12. Bryman, Social Research Methods.
13. Bryman, 542.
14. Wainwright and Russell, “Using NVivo Audio-Coding,” 3.
15. As suggested by Charmaz, Constructing Grounded Theory.
16. Schofield, “Increasing the Generalisability of Qualitative Research.”
17. Burawoy, The Extended Case Method.
18. Burawoy.
19. Glucksmann [a.k.a. Cavendish], Women on the Line.