Re-Tayloring Management

Re-Tayloring Management
Author: Dr Christina Evans
Publisher: Gower Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2013-06-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1472401654

Over a century has passed and yet there is growing evidence that knowledge workers across the globe today are as constrained by F.W. Taylor's much-maligned The Principles of Scientific Management, as factory workers were in the early twentieth century. Re-Tayloring Management looks critically at Taylor's philosophy on management and contrasts it with other perspectives that have since emerged, along with the professionalization of management and the growth in business and management education. The contributors demonstrate that despite the complexity and uncertainty that organizations face, instead of designing work systems where knowledge and service workers have the freedom to apply knowledge and skills at the point they are most needed, managers are obsessed with maintaining tighter control. This approach conflicts with contemporary job design principles, which emphasise ‘job crafting’, whereby individuals are encouraged to craft their role in a way that is congruent with their identity. Drawing on insights from academics with diverse backgrounds and interests, and organised around 'past', 'present' and 'future' themes, this book is a thought-provoking read for professional managers, as well as for postgraduate students and academics teaching and researching organizational studies and management.

Work Organisation in Practice

Work Organisation in Practice
Author: P-O Börnfelt
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2023-05-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3031216679

This textbook provides an overview of organisation models used in practice from over a century ago to the present day. It outlines the effects these models have on efficiency, learning, innovation and workers’ health and offers critical reflections for students. Some of the models covered are Taylorism, bureaucracy, the socio-technical school, process organisation such as lean production, learning organisations, knowledge management, project organising including agile, platform economy, professional organisations, new public management and sustainable organisations. Featuring learning objectives and reflective questions for students of organisation studies and design, this textbook has a pedagogical structure based on the division of work and the coordination of work. Conclusions are presented on contemporary work organisation models’ impact on working life, ultimately encouraging students to ask the question, how can we create more sustainable work organisations.

Contested Learning in Welfare Work

Contested Learning in Welfare Work
Author: Peter H. Sawchuk
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107034671

Drawing on the field of cultural historical psychology and the sociologies of skill and labour process, Contested Learning in Welfare Work offers a detailed account of the learning lives of state welfare workers in Canada as they cope, accommodate, resist and flounder in times of heightened austerity. Documented through in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis, Peter Sawchuk shows how the labour process changes workers, and how workers change the labour process, under the pressures of intensified economic conditions, new technologies, changing relations of space and time, and a high-tech version of Taylorism. Sawchuk traces these experiences over a seven-year period that includes major work reorganisation and the recent economic downturn. His analysis examines the dynamics between notions of de-skilling, re-skilling and up-skilling, as workers negotiate occupational learning and changing identities.