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The Sociology of Work (and Industry):An outline

Since his recent untimely death, Apple co-founder and design guru Steve Jobs has
been exalted to the level of a cult hero by an outpouring of fans on social media and
many commentators in the traditional news media. Under Jobs direction, Apple
launched a series of hi-tech products that were not only trailblazing but also retained
both a coolness factor and a user-friendliness that rival companies have yet to even
mimic, let alone surpass.
The narrative of Jobs-the-entrepreneur helps reaffirm the dominant American
narrative of individualism and meritocracy. This is a thoroughly free market narrative:
Clever, hard-working individuals drive innovation in the economy, and in the end
everyone wins.
A sociological perspective would question this story. Sure, Jobs was a genius at
designing consumer electronics. But didnt he build on the ideas of others, catching a
technological wage at just the right moment? Werent iPhones and iPads the result
of billions of dollars in investment and the collective labor of Apples research and
development teams?
The individualism-and-free markets narrative is seemingly supported by the
discipline of economics, and the latter tends to dominate discussions about work and
occupations, in part because it aligns so neatly with the dominant narrative. But even
ostensibly basic issues about how the economy works are highly contested and many
scholars analyze the economy from outside of mainstream economics. There are a
variety of sociological perspectives on the economy. A central area has historically
been the sociology of work, occupations and organizations. The sociology of work
goes back to the classic sociological theorists: Marx, Durkheim and Weber. Each
considered the analysis of modern work to be central to the incipient field of
sociology.
Sociology is a fundamentally historical discipline. Whereas economists has theorized
an ahistorical market society indeed, a so-called pure and free market that only
exists in their imaginations and textbooks each of the classical sociological theorists
began with the historical transition from traditional feudal society to the emerging
market-based society. In particular, they were all concerned in one way or another
with the development of the modern labor market, where individuals buy and sell
their labor for a wage in an open market to an employer.
Marx was the first social theorist to seriously examine the conditions of work in the
new factories that were popping up all over England during the industrial revolution,
examining how the transition from independent craft work to working inside a
factory for a boss resulted in deskilling and alienation. The Marxist tradition
continues to look at power dynamics in the workplace and different forms of
managerial control of labor.

Durkheim was more concerned with how societies achieved stability based on
traditions, customs and norms. He saw that traditional society, composed of peasants
and lords, had a very homogeneous set of customs and norms based around feudal
obligations and familial relationships. As these traditional relationships and related
norms begin to dissolve during the industrial revolution, Durkheim wondered what
would be the basis for social stability under the new market norms of individualism
and competition. He thought that various industrial and occupational associations
could provide such a basis. We see such associations today across the economy:
medical associations, lawyers associations, community associations and the like.
Durkheimian sociologists thus study the development of professions (and their
associations) among other things.
Weber also focused on the transition from traditional to modern society, but his
emphasis was on the development of new forms of rationality and how they
provided a basis for new types of authority as vested in modern bureaucratic
organizations. Specifically, he distinguished forms of authority in traditional society
from an emerging form of rational-legal authority.
Traditional authority rested in holders of powerful positions (e.g. priests or lords)
whereas charismatic authority was based on loyalty to an individual person because
of their personality or charm. In contrast, rational-legal authority derives from ones
position within a bureaucratic organization: someone holds a legally established
office (a boss or a public servant). Rationalized bureaucracies are managed by rules
(rather than arbitrary power of a traditional leader) and individuals hold offices
because of their qualifications (rather than kinship or class). Weberian scholars thus
focus on forms of bureaucracy and forms of authority. For an interesting Weberian
analysis of Steve Jobs and Apple, see a recent blog post by Kieran Healy.
The research traditions built on the analyses and insights of the classical scholars
have been incredibly vibrant and productive. Much of this research has been
qualitative in nature, and it has generated a richly nuanced understanding of
workplace dynamics and labor market institutions, in stark contrast to economics
which for decades considered the business firm to be nothing more than an equation
relating inputs to outputs. Today it is still rare for an economist to actually look inside
organizations to understand the dynamics of the social relations inside them.
Sociologists have examined things like racial and gender discrimination in the
workplace, the role of different cultural understandings in shaping managerial
strategy, and the role of power relations in shaping the organization of work. One
example would be And Donald Tomaskovic-Deveys classic Gender and Racial
Inequality at Work.
Much sociology of work is comparative, looking at differences in employment
relations and organizational forms across societies (as well as over time). Among
other things, sociologists look at why Americans work on average more than 150
hours per year more than Germans. To answer this question, sociologists would
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examine how institutions in the economy vary across countries, such as the role of
unions and the government, without assuming that economies with less union or
state intervention are freer or even more efficient. More generally, the qualitative
sociology of work and organizations has consistently demonstrated that culture,
social and political institutions, and power relations remain fundamental to a full
understanding of work life, organizational behavior and, indeed, the functioning of
the market.
Returning to Jobs, the sociological lesson would be that despite the dominant
narrative of individual entrepreneurship, much of what Jobs has been given credit for
is actually the result of vast amounts of collective labor, often of teams (not
individuals) working in massive R&D labs (not garages), shielded from market
competition.

By Matt Vidal
Kings College, London
November 7th 2011 at Everyday Sociology Blog

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