What are bullshit jobs? How are they related to changes in the economy like the growth of the service sector, the concentration of wealth, and growing inequality?
Industrial revolution (when, where, what)
Impact on work/employment
Alienation, Define and specify types/modes
Industrial labor
Braverman
What is scientific management?
What problems does it solve for management?
What problems does it create?
What is the labor process? (hint: labor capacity as a potential versus the actual labor expended)
Ford
5 dollar day, reasons
Fordism
Lichtenstein. State of the Union
What challenge does industrial work pose to democracy? What is industrial democracy?
Wagner Act
Flint Sit-down strike
Deindustrialization
Causes, Consequences (hint: rise of service)
Chan. The Life of a Chinese Worker
Why did industrial manufacturing move to China and other countries in the global south?
How does work in Foxconn illustrate Taylorism?
What are the features of the workforce in Foxconn, China?
Global Commodity Chain
Hochschild. Love and Gold
Commodity Fetishism
Why is gold an apt metaphor for the migration of nannies from the global south?
How is the immigration of nannies like a global commodity chain?
Leidner, Over the Counter at McDonalds
Why did workers like scripts?
Compare and contrast the use of emotion work and routinization/scripting as worker control strategies.
Bureaucracy, main features
White collar work
Reasons for expansion. Role of bureaucracy.
How did scholars make sense of the structural position of white collar work?
(Hint: Contradictory class location)
Differences in male and female jobs (hint: ladders)
Human Relations School/Elton Mayo/Hawthorne experiment.
Ho, Liquidation
What compensation practices are described by this reading?
How do these compensation practices affect the organization and experience of
work for investment bankers?
In 1986 the average bonus for Wall Street investment bankers was $13,000. By 2006 it was $190,000. Describe the changes in regulations that impacted these compensation practices with special attention to the Glass-Steagall Law. How might work practices in investment banks, described by Ho, be linked to the economic recession of 2008?
Professions – definition, struggles over jurisdiction
Wingfield, “Are Some Emotions Marked ‘Whites Only?”
What are the dominant feeling rules in the professional workplace?
How are these feeling rules radicalized?
Sample Solution
