Monthly Archives

August 2022

Research Findings

Waging war from remote cubicles: how workers cope with technologies that disrupt the meaning and morality of their work

and
August 25, 2022

In a recent study, we conducted an inductive study of military personnel operating drones for the U.S. Air Force to understand how workers experience and respond to emerging technologies.

The introduction of drone technology in the U.S Air Force has fundamentally changed traditional warfare. The drone program has removed the need for direct physical deployment of personnel to an active war zone and instead have operators stationed in remote command centers in the US to remotely control drones from afar. In other words, drones have “unmanned” the aircraft.

By drawing on a set of 43 unsolicited personal diaries of those involved, paired with interviews with the diarists to understand their experiences, archival material and ethnographical observations in the field, we address how an emerging technology can prompt changes in the core meaning, and values of work.

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New book

Working Democracies: Reducing inequality with participatory bureaucracy and pluralistic worker identity


August 18, 2022

Is worker ownership the way to eliminate workplace inequalities?

While organizational scholars here and elsewhere have long focused on the range of mechanisms that create and maintain a variety of social inequalities within workplaces, the context of capitalism and investor-owned firms minimizing worker voice and power is generally treated as a given.

However, an alternative form of enterprise exists: worker cooperatives, businesses owned and democratically controlled by their workers. Although worker cooperatives are still a small proportion of U.S. enterprises, an estimated 4,700 workers in as many as 1000 worker cooperatives produced over US$238 million in revenue in 2020. Indeed, as part of the anti-inequality activism that arose from the Great Recession, worker cooperative numbers have essentially doubled in the last decade across multiple industrial sectors, increasingly with the support of unions and local municipalities, and have shown great resilience during the pandemic years. Under conditions of worker ownership and control, we might assume resistance to and disruption of the kinds of class, ethnoracial, and gender inequalities that have been central to these social movements and their organizations.

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New book

How Surveillance Unfolds in Retail Clothing Work

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August 11, 2022

Corporate managers used to track stores through weekly or monthly sales records, phone calls, and in-person visits. Today, software creates near-constant – but not necessarily meaningful – communication between store managers and their senior corporate counterparts.

Metrics like “sales per hour,” which captures a store’s sales revenue per labor-hour, now drive moment-to-moment corporate decisions about staffing. These just-in-time scheduling practices try to match the sales volume to workers on the clock at any moment.

The goal is to minimize labor costs. Yet, the result may not be higher profits.

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Research Findings

Where did all of the coaches come from?


August 4, 2022

There is a “coach” for everything these days. There are dating coaches, health coaches, career coaches, and speaking coaches. There are coaches to help you find wellness, financial freedom, and the serenity of a decluttered closet. And, perhaps most audaciously, there are legions of self-described “life” coaches.

Where did all these new experts come from? And, given their general lack of credentials, why do people hire them?

You may wonder if this a multi-level marketing kind of arrangement – suspecting, correctly, that coaches are much less successful than they let on and are hoping to sell others on an entrepreneurship class (also correct). You may wonder if this is outright fraud, ideological snake-oil, or just the blind leading the blind. And you may also ask yourself, occasionally, does it work?

In a recently published article, I report results from a year I spent studying career coaches, in particular – observing their pitches and conducting in-depth interviews with both coaches and their clients. I find that none of these characterizations quite capture why and how “coaching” has grown to $3 billion industry in recent years.

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