Skills and Services

BUSM4176 Introduction to Management
Topic 8 Skills and services

Structure
• Flexible firms
• Knowledge work • Service work • Neo-Taylorism • Emotional labour

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The revolt against Taylorism
• Social science critique of Taylorism • A new workplace and a new worker?

– A post-industrial, information or knowledge economy?
– A service rather than a knowledge economy? – The changing character of labour: hand, heart or head?

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Flexible futures
• The decline of Fordism and bureaucracy in the developed economies • Changes in their labour markets • Flexibility as the solution

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Flexibility (Thompson and
• Functional flexibility

McHugh 2009)

–Workers able to undertake a wider range of tasks including some involving the exercise

of discretion and problem solving on workplace issues

• Numerical flexibility
–Variations in the hours worked or headcount to accommodate changes in demand.

Accomplished through part-time, temporary and contract working, and changes in shift and over-time working. School of Management Diagram source: Magnum and Magnum (1986, p. 14)

Knowledge work and portfolio people
• The knowledge economy – Increasing knowledge

intensity – Portfolio workers (Handy 1989)
• But does this mark a trend? • And what of knowledge work?

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What characterises the service sector?
• Five attributes of service work
(Blyton and Turnbull 2004) – Intangibility – Perishability – Variability – Simultaneous production and consumption – Inseparability

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Consumerism and the rise of the service sector
• Substantial increase in the number of “customer-facing” jobs • Customer service and its link to competitive advantage – “the emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself” (Hochschild 1983, p. 5) • New concept of emotion work

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Emotions and emotional labour
• Emotional labour occurs in the public sphere and has three features: – Feelings become commodities – An unequal power relationship

– Rules are laid down by management
• Different ways of performing emotional labour (Hochschild 1983): – Surface acting – Deep acting

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Enid at work in the cinema
• Enid and Emotional Labour (Ghostworld)

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Is ‘Neo-Taylorism’ a better description of service sector work
• Taylorised service work (Ritzer 1993) • Focus on service quality • Organisational “culture” (Schein 1985)

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The new economy
• From narrow tasks to flexible, interchangeable labour • From grudging compliance to high commitment • A move from the “hard S’s” to the “soft S’s” • The contradictions and tensions of flexible organisation: – Job insecurity vs. organisational commitment – “Macjobs” vs. “Mcjobs”

• Increasing need for human resource managers

Summary
• New jobs develop under postFordism • New skills are demanded of employees • Flexibility in labour practices • Increased focus on human resource management

Reading
• The reading this week is Handy, C 1989, The Age of Unreason, Business Books, London, pp. 87-115. • This reading is examinable.

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References
• Blyton, P and Turnbull, P 2004, The Dynamics of Employee Relations, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

• Handy, C 1989, The Age of Unreason, Business Books, London.
• Hochschild, AR 1983, The Managed Heart, University of California Press, Berkeley. • Legge, K 2007, ‘Putting the missing H into HRM: the case of the flexible organisation’, in Bolton, S and Houlihan, M (eds), Searching for the Human in Human Resource Management, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. • Magnum, GL and Magnum SL 1986, ‘Temporary work: the flip side of job flexibility’, International Journal of Manpower, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 12-20.

• Ritzer, G, 1993, The MacDonaldization of Society, Pine Forge Press, Newbury Park. • Schein, E 1985, Organisational Culture and Leadership, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. • Thompson, P and McHugh, D 2009, Work Organisations: A critical approach, 4th edn, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

References: • Blyton, P and Turnbull, P 2004, The Dynamics of Employee Relations, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. • Handy, C 1989, The Age of Unreason, Business Books, London. • Hochschild, AR 1983, The Managed Heart, University of California Press, Berkeley. • Legge, K 2007, ‘Putting the missing H into HRM: the case of the flexible organisation’, in Bolton, S and Houlihan, M (eds), Searching for the Human in Human Resource Management, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. • Magnum, GL and Magnum SL 1986, ‘Temporary work: the flip side of job flexibility’, International Journal of Manpower, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 12-20. • Ritzer, G, 1993, The MacDonaldization of Society, Pine Forge Press, Newbury Park. • Schein, E 1985, Organisational Culture and Leadership, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. • Thompson, P and McHugh, D 2009, Work Organisations: A critical approach, 4th edn, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.