Human relations

Annotations:

• WorkLife Balance as well

1. Work and non work
   1. What kind of work do you do?
      1. Classical question since its a defining feature in our identity and also allows others to judge
   2. Why do people work
      1. To gain economical benefits in order to enjoy leisure (Extrinsic)
         1. People also work for intrinsic rewards e.g self-esteem friendship
      2. Differences between paid and non paid work
         1. Paid
            1. Cab be dangerous and unhealthy
               1. Manual labour face more than office
            2. Women tend to receive less pay
         2. Unpaid
            1. Examples include cooking, child rearing and cleaning
               1. Unpaid work is undertaken by one half of the population:woman
   3. Features of work
      1. Purpose is to gain economic benefits
      2. Structured spatiality
         1. 21st century new expectations of spatial mobility and temporal flexibility
      3. Always involved social relations between people e.g employees and employers
         1. Conflictual
         2. hierarchical
         3. Eglaitarian
      4. Remunerated(Reward)
         1. Extrinsic
         2. Instrnsic
2. Development of work
   1. Industrial revolution (around 1780-1830)
      1. Manufacturing operated on small scale
         1. Used little fixed capital
         2. Labour intensive
         3. Low productivity
      2. Putting out system
         1. decentralized method of manufacturing
            1. Various processes for creating a product were performed by different workers
               1. Critism including stealing and fraud of the workers
                  1. required to be monitored up close
               2. High skilled workers required
      3. Factory based work
         1. Offered new opportunities for controlling the pace and quality of work
            1. Extended division of labour
            2. Required disciplined workforce
         2. Reactons to this
            1. Men were reluctant to join due to their unaccustomed rules and discipline
               1. Women and children didn't mind so they were the majority 70%
                  1. . 1969 Child labour begun from the age of 4 in order to obliged parents
                     1. Matthias P 1969 a man entered an factory with his whole family. Displine was imposed largely by the the parents
                        1. This made the harshness socially tolerable
                           1. After 1850. capitalism tended to create a clear distinction between paid work opportunities of women and men
                              1. Large scale food processing factories were female dominated
                              2. In working class families women remained in the labour market to support income
                              3. Middle class women were primarily expected to withdraw from paid employment
                                 1. Stereotypes of men as strong and competitive and women as frail and turturing
   2. Classical work (Early 20th Century)
      1. Scientific management
         1. Job fragementation
         2. Separate planning and doing
         3. Minimization of skill req
      2. Fordism
         1. Created by henry ford uses principles of T.
            1. Mass production using assembly line tech
      3. Human relations movement (Hawthrone studies)
         1. Attempted movement to address limitations of T and F
            1. Shifting attention to the Perceived Psychological and Social needs
               1. Experiment by Elton Mayo in 1920s
                  1. They found out that not only economic incentives motivated workers
                     1. recognition and social cohesion were also important
                        1. Criticisms
                           1. Plays down the basic economic conflict of interest between the employer and employee
                           2. Neglections of wider socioeconomic factors
                           3. people only work if monitored closely by an interviewer or researcher
                              1. was the experimental setting and most notably the presence of the researchers that created an atmosphere of cooperation among the workers, strengthening their social cohesion, and eventually leading to the formation of genuine team culture.
                           4. Original Hawthorne experiments (or for that matter even the numerous studies conducted in their wake) did not exhaust all the possibilities for reasonable interpretations concerning of the Information technology functioning of organizations as systems of culturally mediated symbols and informal personal relationships (Pyroia 2005).
                              1. Collins (2000) says that Mayo and his colleagues were wrong in relating informal with irrational and formal with rational: “By focusing upon the formal system as the only plausible and rational account of the workplace, therefore, the Hawthorne researchers failed to understand the complexity of the workplace, and so misunderstood the contours and rhythms of the workplace culture at the Hawthorne plant”
                           5. Rudimentary research design faulty
                           6. Concepted work organizations into romantic and harmonious terms and neglected workplace conflict due to bias
                        2. Neo Human relations
                           1. Maslow self actualization and McGregor's XY Theories
                              1. Maslow
                                 1. Self actualization
                                    1. Self asteem
                                       1. Love and belonging
                                          1. Safety
                                             1. Psychological
                        3. Also involved testing work groups
                  2. Involved testing the effects on productivity
                     1. Workers felt they were working for the best boss due to privileges(Roethlisberger and Dickson(64)
                  3. show how formal and informal patterns of interaction, i.e. visible hierarchies and latent social relationships, are equally crucial for organizations (Mayo, 1933, 1945; Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1949).
                     1. the researchers manipulated such factors as the intensity of lighting and introduced various methods of payment and working time arrangements.
         2. Investigators set out to study the influence of physical working conditions, such as lighting (Sundstrom, 1986), but instead found surprises.
   3. 1970s(Post-Fordism)
      1. Job Enrichment
         1. Wider range of tasks to perform and some discretion over how the tasks were performed
            1. E.G Fast food outlet from flipping burgers to enlarging the task to making the sandwich and inspect quality
      2. 1980s (Information Revolution)
         1. Japanese work and employment practices were held up as a model for uk and us
            1. Flexibility
               1. Arranging machinery in a group
               2. Employing a multiskillled workforce
            2. Control
            3. Minimum Waste
               1. Just in Time Techniques
                  1. Aim to produce no more than the nece components in the nec quantities of the nec quality of the nec time
         2. 1990s
            1. Flexibility
               1. Flexible specialization
               2. Lean production
               3. Re-engineering
               4. high performance work systems
            2. Emergence of knowledge workers
               1. Horwitz et al, A knowledge worker is an individual with the ability to communicate and apply professional knowledge as well as manager other employees
                  1. Essential to maintain competitive advantage
            3. Emotional work
3. Neo Fordism
   1. Refers to an work configuration that has modified the core principles of Fordism through flexible working practices to fit contemporary operations
4. Post Fordism
   1. Refers to organizations that do not rely on the principles of Taylorism or Fordism and is often associated with high performance work systems with self management and with a high degree of autonomy in work