Changing Contours of Work. Stephen Sweet
and funnel parcels for delivery. Their successes are not built on unique products or customized services; rather, they are based on the application of mass production distribution techniques built with high technology and advanced accounting systems. And then there is Amazon, whose “fulfillment centers” now employ huge numbers of workers across the globe ensuring that online orders reach their destinations promptly and accurately. Amazon’s employment practices have been the subject of increasing journalistic scrutiny in the past few years, scrutiny that has revealed a twenty-first-century workplace that has married modern computer technology to very familiar, twentieth-century ways of organizing work. Here’s how one observer described it:
Amazon’s shop-floor processes are an extreme variant of Taylorism that Frederick Winslow Taylor himself, a near century after his death, would have no trouble recognizing. With this twenty-first-century Taylorism, management experts, scientific managers, take the basic workplace tasks at Amazon, such as the movement, shelving, and packaging of goods, and break down these tasks into their subtasks, usually measured in seconds; then rely on time and motion studies to find the fastest way to perform each subtask; and then reassemble the subtasks and make this “one best way” the process that employees must follow. (Head 2014)
Jobs like these are not skilled or challenging tasks that lead to career advancement; they are the type of routine work that one pursues in order to earn a paycheck.
Finally, within the services megasector, which includes a wide array of enterprises—including leisure services, restaurants, hotels, real estate, financial, and public administration—mass production methods also can be found, often in highly developed, innovative forms. This sector includes some enterprises that do not rely on mass production—there are many relatively small enterprises in this part of the economy, such as bed and breakfast establishments, food trucks, and craft breweries. Businesses such as high-end restaurants rely on workers’ skills to produce a “unique” product for the consumer. However, this sector also contains many highly standardized operations that use the techniques of mass production to good effect. Each McDonald’s, for instance, is little more than a small factory, composed of deskilled jobs designed to execute production of a limited array of standardized goods. Every aspect of the process, including the dispensing of condiments, the design of the stores, and the way in which customers are greeted, has been standardized so that the experience of eating (or working) in a McDonald’s is essentially the same wherever it is located. Even housecleaning teams are organized to work according to Taylorized methods, and the goals remain the same—to extract the maximum effort from each individual and minimize their chances of relaxing on the job (Ehrenreich 2001, Ritzer 2011).
In sum, there is a tendency to assume that the declining importance of manufacturing in the U.S. economy means that mass production is on the wane. It is not. Indeed, what has happened is that mass production techniques have been widely integrated into other sectors of the economy, including the rapidly growing service sector. Many of the key elements of traditional mass production, including the use of technology to pace work, careful design of routine work tasks, careful matching of workers to work tasks, and the use of insecurity and performance pressures to motivate workers, now characterize types of work that, in the past, were rarely organized in this way. It can be argued, in fact, that the ideas pioneered by Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford have become more, not less, influential in the contemporary “postindustrial” economy.
To be sure, new technologies and production methods have required an expansion in certain worker skills and transformed the ways in which work is performed. However, those same machines and methods also have replaced many workers, both in manufacturing and elsewhere, and the persistence and spread of mass production methods cannot be ignored. As discussed next, the reality is that the new economy relies on both high-skill and low-skill work, and it uses both mass production techniques and new flexibly specialized systems to produce goods and services.
New Skills?
The fact that the new economy is characterized by a new mix of industries has led some to conclude that it requires a new set of skills from the workforce. According to this argument, the traditional low-skill work characteristic of the industrial economy is being automated out of existence, while the new economy demands a workforce with “soft skills” needed for successful social interaction in service sector jobs. It also demands a more highly educated workforce, as the emergent “knowledge economy” relies heavily on highly trained workers with substantial quantities of technical and intellectual skills. Some argue that, as these new skills have supplanted manual skills, the trend toward work simplification also has been altered—even reversed. This is because the predictable, carefully designed, strictly managed, routine jobs typical of mass production might be difficult to transfer to activities that require face-to-face interaction or sophisticated knowledge and problem-solving skills. Thus, the new workforce will have to be more highly educated and able to work independently, outside the strict controls imposed on routine manufacturing work. Let us examine some of these “new” skills to determine whether the claims being made about them can be supported.
Interpersonal Skills in the Workplace
Suppose that you needed to hire a lawyer. What type of person would you select for the job? One might assume that the best legal representation would be lawyers who are able to find obscure loopholes and introduce a wide range of legal precedents into court proceedings. That assumption would miss an important observation—most legal decisions are straightforward and do not require a mastery of arcane knowledge. What lawyers bring to the table is relational expertise, such as their knowledge of whether a judge is likely to respond to appeals for sympathy. In reality, the legal success comes from the lawyer’s rudimentary knowledge of how courts work and ability to guide clients (and judges and juries) to be considerate of formal and informal rules of conduct (Sandefur 2015). Given the importance of interpersonal relationships, you would probably be better off hiring a local lawyer who did poorly on her bar exam, as compared to hiring a newcomer to your community who graduated at the top of her class.
Alternately, suppose you wanted to hire a person to be a fire fighter. Obviously, a good candidate would need to have the physical strength and experience to perform the tasks effectively and safely. But beyond technical skills, the ideal candidate would be someone who can effectively fit in with the cultures that exist among fire fighters so as to perform a very dangerous team-oriented job. Most fire fighters are men, and their interactions are rich with emotional displays that convey joviality (good humor) and companionate love (feeling that their fellow fire fighters are “like family”). The bonds created by these types of values promotes trust, which in turn carries over to effective teamwork and interpersonal relationships (O’Neill and Rothbard 2017).
Lawyers and firefighters are old economy jobs that continue to exist in the new economy. Both occupations demonstrate that interpersonal dynamics and emotions on the job are not altogether new concerns within the world of work. However, the new economy evidences an increased reliance on these job elements, especially in interactive service work that necessitates direct personal encounters between employees and customers. These types of jobs require the workers to interact effectively with clients and, more often than not, to manage encounters that leave clients satisfied not only with the services rendered, but also with the experience of being served.
One clear conclusion of a growing body of literature is that skills such as the abilities to communicate effectively with others, to present oneself appropriately, and to function effectively in a range of social situations are essential components of contemporary jobs and are valued highly by employers. Depending on the type of service being provided and customers’ expectations, it is important to be able to put on emotional displays that are intense (e.g., smile frequently) and authentic (e.g., actually experience the warmth and friendliness beneath the smile) (Wang et al. 2017). This type of emotional labor can leave employees feeling emotionally depleted at the end of their workdays and, over the long term, it can contribute to burnout (Uy, Lin, and Ilies 2017). For some workers, the skills to engage in service interaction work have been cultivated through years of informal socialization, such as that received from parents, so that they already know how to “fit in” with the types of people to be served. However,