Technical Workers In An Advanced Society

First published in 1989, this book examines the work, careers and politics of French engineers and technical workers employed in traditional and high-technology settings. In the process, it critically evaluates several theories of social change and advocates a unique approach to class theory and the comparative analysis of nations. Neither owners of productive property nor wage workers performing routinised labour. Engineers occupy an ambiguous social position that has elicited a good deal of controversy about trends in their situation and ideology. Where theories of professionalism anticipate occupationally based challenges to the legitimacy of bureaucratic authority, Marxian and neo-Marxian analyses foresee class-based opposition to capitalism. Yet all these theories share a preoccupation with the effects of technology and the division of labour on social values and group identities. This book maintains that such a preoccupation obscures the significance of career situations and the distinctively national institutions that shape them. The book presents a fresh view of the interplay of occupation, class and nation.

From bestselling writer David Graeber—“a master of opening up thought and stimulating debate” (Slate)—a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs…and their consequences. Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After one million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer. There are hordes of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. “Clever and charismatic” (The New Yorker), Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation and “a thought-provoking examination of our working lives” (Financial Times).

Engineers appear in recent social science as central, though somewhat elusive, figures. They play a particularly critical role in the various attempts to understand the impact of 'science-based' industry on the class structure of advanced capitalist societies. In this book, Peter Whalley brings these engineers into sharper focus. He argues that engineers should not be seen as members of a glamorous 'new class' of professionalized knowledge workers, nor as a radicalized 'new working class' or partially de-skilled technical proletariat. Rather, they should be viewed as 'trusted employees,' selected, socialized, trained, and rewarded to perform the discretionary tasks necessarily delegated by employers in the complex organizations of advanced capitalism. The book draws extensively on observations and interviews to compare engineers' work and understanding in the high- and low-tech settings of two British companies: "Computergraph," an advanced electronics firm, and "Metalco," a traditional British engineering giant. Whalley compares the technical work structure of Britain with those of France and the United States. He argues that the impact of technological change on class structure is critically mediated by nationally specific modes of organizing technical work and producing trusted workers. The book goes beyond cultural explanations of these national variations to examine how they are created and reproduced in the organization of work and the structuring of occupations.

What explains the international mobility of workers from developing to advanced societies? Why do workers move from one region to another? Theoretically, the supply of workers in a given region and the demand for them in another account for the international mobility of laborers. Job seekers from less developed regions migrate to more advanced countries where technological and productive transformations have produced a shortage of laborers. Using the Dominican labor force in New York as a case study, Ramona Hernández challenges this presumption of a straightforward relationship between supply and demand in the job markets of the receiving society. She contends that the traditional correlation between migration and economic progress does not always hold true. Once transplanted in New York City, Hernández shows, Dominicans have faced economic hardship as the result of high levels of unemployment and underemployment and the reality of a changing labor market that increasingly requires workers with skills and training they do not have. Rather than responding to a demand in the labor market, emigration from the Dominican Republic was the result of a de facto government policy encouraging poor and jobless people to leave—a policy in which the United States was an accomplice because the policy suited its economic and political interests in the region.

Engineers, often perceived as central agents of industrial capitalism, are thought to be the same in all capitalist societies, occupying roughly the same social status and performing similar functions in the capitalist enterprise. What the essays in this volume reveal, however, is that engineers are trained and organized quite distinctly in different national contexts. The book includes case studies of engineers in six major industrial economies: Japan, France, Germany, Sweden, Britain and the United States. Through a comparison of these six cases, the authors develop an approach to national differences which both retains the place of historical diversity in the experience of capitalism and accommodates the forces of convergence from increasing globalisation and economic integration. Contributions from: Boel Berner, Stephen Crawford, Kees Gispen, Kevin McCormick and Peter Whalley.

Aims to bring together, present, and discuss what is known about work and organizations and their connection to broader economic change in Europe and America. This volume contains a range of theoretically informed essays, which give comprehensive coverage of changes in work, occupations, and organizations.

Between Craft and Science brings together leading scholars from sociology, anthropology, industrial relations, management, and engineering to consider issues surrounding technical work, the most rapidly expanding sector of the labor force. Part craft and part science, part blue-collar and part white-collar, technical work demands skill and knowledge but is rarely rewarded with commensurate status or salary.The book first considers the anomalous nature of technical work and the difficulty of locating it in any conventional theoretical framework. Only an ethnographic approach, studying the actual doing of the work, will make sense of the subject, the authors conclude. The studies that follow report daily practice filled with disjunctures and ironies that mirror the ambiguities of technical work's place in the larger culture. On the basis of those studies, the authors probe questions of policy, management, and education.Between Craft and Science considers the cultural difficulties in understanding technical work and advances coherent, practice-oriented insights into this anomalous phenomenon.