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Market, Class, and Employment


Description: Drawing on a range of employee and employer surveys, this ambitious study presents a comprehensive examination of the conditions, attitudes, and experiences of British employees over the last twenty years. Based on the Future of Work research programme this book will shape our understanding of employment in Britain for the foreseeable future.

Much of the received wisdom about the world of work emphasizes the marketization of the employment relationship; the decline of class-based forms of inequality, and the individualization of employment relations. Non-standard forms of employment, the delayering of organizational hierarchies and the use of individual performance-based payment systems are all held up as examples of a new neo-liberal order in which employers and employees no longer feel a sense of obligation to each other.

Drawing on a range of employee and employer surveys, including the authors own Working in Britain 2000 survey, this ambitious study presents a comprehensive examination of the conditions, attitudes, and experiences of British employees from the mid-1980s to the early years of this century. The authors analyses provides a compelling critique of the received wisdom, while also providing an original, alternative account of recent developments in work and labour markets. Along the way, the book covers such topical issues as the changing nature of trade union membership, the consequences of Britains long hours culture, and the apparent inability of women to ask for pay rises. Significantly, the authors seek to reposition debates about the future of work by restoring the concepts of contracts and social class to the analysis of the employment relationship.

Based on the ESRC funded Future of Work research programme this book is destined to shape our understanding of employment in Britain for the foreseeable future.

About the Author

Patrick McGovern is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the London School of Economics & Political Science having previously held positions at Aston University and London Business School. His research interests are in economic sociology, especially the sociology of work and labour markets, and international migration. He is the author of HRM, Technical Workers and the Multinational Corporation (Routledge, 1998).

Stephen Hill is the Principal of Royal Holloway, University of London and Professor of Management. He has written widely on social theory and economic sociology. His research interests include work and organizations, control systems, quality management, human resource management and the effects of technological change on manufacturing organizations. He is the author or co-author of six books including Competition and Control at Work (Heinemann, 1981), The Dominant Ideology Thesis (Allen & Unwin, 1980), Dominant Ideologies (Unwin Hyman, 1990) and the Penguin Dictionary of Sociology (Penguin, 2006).

Colin Mills is University Lecturer in Sociology and Fellow of Nuffield College, University of Oxford. His research interests are in social stratification, the sociology of employment relations and measurement issues in the social sciences. He previously held appointments at the University of Surrey and the London School of Economics.

Michael White founded the Employment Studies Group at the Policy Studies Institute, University of Westminster, where he is now Emeritus Fellow. He is author of Against Unemployment (PSI, 1991) and co-author of Restructuring the Employment Relationship (OUP, 1998) and Managing to Change? - British workplaces and the future of work (Palgrave, 2004). He was awarded an OBE for services to labour market policy in 2005.


Contents: List of Figures
List of Tables
Glossary of Acronyms

1. The changing economy of work

2. The marketization of the employment relationship?

3. Inequality at work

4. Representation, participation, and individualism

5. Overwork and market discipline

6. Bureaucratic discipline and overwork

7. The family challenge

8. Unequal jobs: job quality and job satisfaction

9. Conclusions

References
Author Index
Subject Index

List of Figures
2.1. Two models of the employment relationship
3.1. Predicted positions of Goldthorpe social classes in the monitoring difficulty/human asset specificity space
3.2. Empirically estimated positions of NS-SEC categories in the monitoring difficulty/human asset specificity space
3.3(a). OLS and logit parameter estimates from regression of benefits on social class, 1992 and 2000
3.3(b). Logit parameter estimates of benefits on social class, 1992 and 2000
3.3(c). Logit parameter estimates from regression of benefits on social class, 1992 and 2000
4.1. Two ways of achieving organizational flexibility
6.1. Estimated gains in earnings from appraisals and incentives
7.1. Per cent ‘completely satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with their hours, 1992 and 2000
7.2. Average dissatisfaction with hours (7 point scale), by hours preferences, for men and women
7.3. How FRS varies with hours worked
7.4. Rejection of traditional gender roles, by birth cohort, 1984 and
1994: % rejecting traditional work-family roles
8.1. Log job rating as a function of log weekly wages. Locally weighted scatterplot smoothing with bandwidth of 0.8 and linear splines with cut points at 0 and 0.8
8.2. Confirmatory factor model of WiB job satisfaction items
8.3. The relationship between the first principal component of the
21 job satisfaction items and the IJD, Cambridge scale, weekly wage, and hourly wage

List of Tables
2.1. ‘Flexible’ forms of employment, 1975-2004 (working age population 16-64)
2.2. LTE in the UK by gender, 1994-2004 (000s)
2.3. Occupational distribution of LTE, 1994-2004 (000s)
2.4. Percentage of employees with current job as part of a formal career ladder by sector, 1984-2000
2.5. Percentage with job that is part of a formal career ladder by social class, 1984-2000
3.1. NS-SEC groups and indicative occupational titles
3.2. Hourly earnings, level, and dispersion by social class grouping (NS-SEC) 1992 and 2000
3.3. Fringe benefits available to employees, 1992 and 2000
4.1. Trade union membership by social class, 1984-2000
4.2. Effects of personal and workplace characteristics on union membership
4.3. Information and consultation by union presence, 1992-2000
4.4. Cross-training and flexibility by unionization
4.5. Employees’ say in decisions affecting their work, 1985-2000
4.6. Effects of employment characteristics on whether employee ‘has any say’ about changes in his/her job (Model 1); and on whether employees ‘should have more say’ in decisions that affect their work (Model 2)
4.7. Factors relating to individual pay negotiations
5.1. Insecure conditions and work effort in 2000
5.2. Development of ‘HPWS’ practices, 1992-2000
5.3. Intensive HPWS practices and change in workforce size, 1992 and 2000
5.4. Workplace contraction, intensive HPWS practices, and work effort
5.5. Change in HPWS practices, by class
6.1. Participation in performance appraisals by class, 1992 and 2000 1
6.2. Employee receipt of incentive pay, 1992 and 2000
6.3. Receipt of group incentive pay by class, 1992 and 2000
6.4. Class analysis of appraisals, individual incentive pay, and earnings, 1992 and 2000
6.5. Controls, incentives, and ‘work demands’, 1992 and 2000
6.6. Controls, incentives, and ‘work strain’, 1992 and 2000
6.7. Controls, incentives, and hours worked, 1992 and 2000
6.8. Class, controls, incentives, and effort, 2000
7.1. Employees’ preferred hours in 2000, by sex and family structure
7.2. Responses to the family relationship strain items, by gender, 2000
7.3. Adverse family relationship strain, for women and men in one-earner and two-earner couples, 2000
7.4. Sharing of household work: women’s and men’s perceptions
8.1. Variables used in constructing the index of job desirability
8.2. Regression of logged job rating on job characteristics
8.3. Percentage of respondents answering yes for selected job and employee characteristics by percentiles of the IJD, weekly wage, and hourly wage rate
8.4. Pearson correlations (or multiple correlations) between the IJD and 6 measures of socioeconomic standing
8.5. Top 20 occupations in the WiB survey ranked by the IJD and median gross weekly wage
8.6. Bottom 20 occupations in the WiB survey ranked by the IJD and median gross weekly wage
8.7. Effects of gender, civil status, and various contract status variables on the IJD and log hourly wages
8.8. Effects of gender, civil status, and various contract status variables on the IJDm and the IJDnm
8.9. Pearson correlations (or multiple correlations) between the first principal component of 26 job satisfaction items and 7 measures of socio-economic standing
8.10. Slope coefficients from the regression of 5 dimensions of job satisfaction on contract status variables, wage, and job desirability
A1. Coefficients of Lasso regression






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