Sociological Approaches to Stress and Labor Process Theory

2018 ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Chris L. Peterson
1991 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 690 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Jermier ◽  
David Knights ◽  
Hugh Willmott

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
April J. Spivack ◽  
Ivana Milosevic

Building on the main tenets of labor process theory, this study introduces perceived location autonomy (PLA)—the autonomy to generate, evaluate, and choose where to perform one’s work tasks—and tests the relationships between PLA and worker productivity and well-being. Using a sample of academic knowledge workers ( n = 319), our results suggest that workers experiencing higher PLA choose work environments to enhance both their productivity and their well-being through increased intrinsic motivation. Consistent with labor process theory, PLA acts as a form of empowerment that aligns knowledge worker and organizational goals to realize productivity gains while simultaneously allowing workers to enhance well-being. Together, these results suggest that managers may wish to consider integrating PLA into job and organizational design, as an alternative to control, as an effective strategy for boosting knowledge worker productivity and well-being.


Author(s):  
Nancy H. Harding

This chapter draws on labor process theory to argue that the discourse of meaningfulness in the context of neoliberal capitalism may represent a means for organizations to control and manipulate individual identities. A “politics of meaningful work” is proposed that demonstrates how individuals move between abject alienation on the one hand and the proud identity associated with meaningful work on the other. Drawing on Marx’s notions of the alienated self, the chapter argues that meaningless work is alienated work since it is associated with the production of a commoditized self. Both meaningful and meaningless work can coexist through the notion of emplacements. Where the individual is subject to the managerial gaze and work is routinized and controlled, alienation is the outcome. In other emplacements, meaningfulness and a non-alienated self arise outside formal organizational constraints. A sense of meaningfulness may arise even in the face of neoliberalist attempts to quash it.


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