New Forms Of Work Organization

A remarkable development in the sociology of work in recent years has been the explosion of brilliant cross-national and cross-cultural studies in Europe examining the conditions of labor against the background of different economic systems, and differences within each of the major free market, mixed welfare, and planned economic systems that dot the European landscape. In Vienna and Budapest in particular, a group of intellectual workers have gotten together for what can only be described as breakthrough studies in the conditions and purposes of work in post-industrial society. The question of new forms of work organization focuses on job satisfaction, participatory democracy in the work place, levels of productivity, and issues of health and safety in the occupational environment. That these elements are important have long been known. But what this collection of studies emphasizes is the specific mix that produced specific outcomes. It does not shy away from dangerous and tough questions: worker control and control of workers, political participation in contexts of authoritarian regimes, and personal rewards in contexts that once frowned upon private acquisition of capital. The volume is rich in empirical studies and draws the theoretical implications that can and already have had vast policy consequences for workers in the modern " context. Issues relating to job rotation, enrichment, enlargement and autonomy, and others related to new forms of organization starting with the shop floor and extending throughout the management of the enterprise as a whole are dealt with candidly. The social character of labor, long frowned upon as a mechanism for evading bread-and-butter issues, is now recognized, East and West, as a dimension of concern that is growing precisely as the size and character of the labor sector is diminishing. This is must reading for those interested in new forms of social and policy synthesis, and ways of meliorating competing claims of different sectors in modern societies.

Presents a collection of articles discussing the characteristics and emergence of a new division of labour, the role of technology, new forms of work organization and the extent to which they have become diffused across different nation states. The chapters have been arranged in three parts: Part I, deals with the basic conceptual and theoretical issues concerning the new division of labour; Part II, discusses findings from international comparative studies or perspectives including more than one country. Part III, presents case studies of new forms of work organization in different countries and different branches of the economy.

New Ways of Organizing Work offers a broader understanding of changes to the way work is organized and the implications for relevant stakeholders. It brings together contributions from a well established group of international scholars to examine the nature and consequences of new ways of working. The book draws on studies of a variety of new forms of work, involving a diverse range of employees and drawing on experiences in a variety of countries. It includes three main empirical sections. The first focuses on different forms of work and working arrangements, stimulated by the use of technology, increased competitive pressure and media portrayal of work and working. In contrast to much other work in the field, a strong theme of this book is individuals’ experiences of new ways of working. The second empirical section examines this theme with a specific focus on remote workers and their responses to new ways of working. Exploring contemporary trends towards increasing use of global teams, the third section examines the implications of distributed teams and the challenges for managing performance and knowledge transfer.

The digitalization is currently fundamentally changing our world of work. One important trend in this context is the “platform economy”, with crowdworking platforms as an increasingly relevant platform type. Many of these crowdworking platforms and their surrounding work systems including participants, nformation, technologies, as well as processes and activities, are comparatively new and often designed incrementally. What is currently still lacking is systematic knowledge about the efficient design of such crowdworking platform systems (CWPS). This dissertation provides such design knowledge in the form of a nascent design theory. One important focus lies on the question how such CWPS should be designed to also use this novel form of work organization for more complex work. This dissertation furthermore shows how a close interlinking of external crowds and internal employees of an organization helps to harness the advantages of crowdworking while at the same time mitigates its disadvantages.

Monograph on new forms of work organisation and job design in connection with the quality of working life in Western Europe - analyses individual Motivation and attitudes to work and job satisfaction, and brief case studies on organisational choice, etc., and includes current trends and developments. Bibliography p. 103 to 106.