Information technology change,work complexity and service jobs: a contingent perspective

We examine the contingent impact of implementing an enterprise‐wide information technology system (Enterprise Resource Planning) on perceptions of work complexity in clerical, technical and managerial service sector jobs. Using matched and control samples of employee survey data, we compare pre‐ and post‐intervention perceptions of work complexity and importance of analytical skills across three hierarchical job levels: clerical, technical and managerial. We find that employees in clerical jobs, at the lowest level in the hierarchy, experience a significant increase in work complexity and need for analytical skills, whereas those in technical and managerial service jobs do not. Implications for theory, management of technology and employment policy are discussed.     

EPM technology and the psychosocial work environment

This paper examines the self‐measured psychosocial work environment among employees working in six Icelandic companies, having similar jobs. Some are surveilled by electronic performance monitoring (EPM) technology and some are not. We find that employees working under EPM technology reported a worse psychosocial work environment than their colleagues.     

Making gigs work: digital platforms,job quality and worker motivations

Technology has driven new organisations of work and employment relationships, rendering changes that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. The rise of digital platforms has not only enabled new forms of work activity but also transformed the way workers find new opportunities. This development, referred to as gig work, is distinct from traditional employment in that it is mediated through online platforms. While we can somewhat objectively designate traditional job characteristics as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, designating gig work itself as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ overlooks the fact that workers are inclined to evaluate the quality of their jobs according to their own individual needs, priorities, backgrounds and other circumstances—even if those jobs are objectively the same. Unlike previous scholarship on gig work, which has viewed job quality largely from a platform-focused perspective, this article takes a worker-centric approach and provides a typology of gig workers. The typology demarcates how gig work is used and indicates key attributes that differentiate how workers approach such jobs. Moreover, the typology reveals heterogeneity in gig workers’ motivations, characteristics and intentions. Consequently, platforms with ‘bad’ job quality characteristics can still offer work that some workers will see as ‘good’ and vice versa.     

Should humans work?

Should humans work? A simple question at a time when the advent of AI, automation and robotics claims a privileged position in the future of work. The question is perplexing and confusing however once we enquire into the meaning of technology and work as such: some claim that human jobs and well-being might be threatened by technological advances while others predict an increase in high skilled demand.In short, we claim that standard debates obfuscate the question. That is, while animating the debate, standard arguments are instrumental to avoiding confrontation with the fundamental relation between humans, technology and work, namely, our position regarding what to do with technology and work, i.e. humans are “absent” in an “advancing” environment. We propose that focusing debates on the advantages and disadvantages of the development of advanced technology with the potential to do any human task does not necessarily clarify the situation, but rather unveils the obscurity of our relationship with technology by illuminating the lack of clarification.     

Re-examining technology's destruction of blue-collar work

Despite research suggesting certain death of blue-collar work due to technological advancements, blue-collar jobs continue to be in demand. Through a study of the blue-collar dominant Transport and Logistics sector in Australia, we apply a Critical Realist framework to consider the tendencies contributing to, and limiting, technological uptake and worker displacement. Our analysis of interviews with sector managers demonstrate how technological uptake decisions to enact labour saving technologies are often constrained by other causal mechanisms and associated (counter) tendencies. Causal mechanisms related to geographical artifacts, industry structure and established business models, along with class structure, mitigate against ‘big bang’ technological transformation and the demise of blue-collar work. We conclude that tracking the future of work is important, but it cannot be done solely on the basis of technological capacities to displace labour or without consideration of the complex interplay of causal mechanisms and tendencies shaping employer decisions about technology.     

The nature of managerial work roles in Malaysian public enterprises

This paper examines the work roles of public enterprise managers, the classifications of the work roles, and the importance of the work roles across hierarchical levels, functional speciality, business sector and the size of the organisation, based on Mintzberg's framework of managerial roles. The result showed that 105 managers ranked the role of entrepreneur as most important and the role of spokesman as most unimportant in performing their jobs. The principal component solution resulted in three interpretable categories of work roles: internal roles; external roles, and internal-external roles. There were also variations in work role importance across hierarchical levels, functional speciality, business sector and size of the organisation. Implications for further research and management practice are also presented.     

A behavioural measure of information work

Information work is defined from a behavioural perspective, as the manipulation of information, when performed by workers. A set of activities characterizing information work are identified, drawing on Blooms Taxonomy as the reference source. Using this measure, the 1977 Dictionary of Occupation Titles was content analysed to identify those occupations which could be behaviourally classified as information work. 40% of all occupations were determined to be informational in work behaviour. These occupations were found across all sectors, although they were concentrated in the service sector. Many occupations, old and new, have taken on an informational character.     

Offshoring Professional Services: Institutions and Professional Control

We examine the reasons why one might expect it to be more difficult to offshore professional work than manufacturing work in a globalized world. We then provide data on the variations in a specific case — the offshoring of diagnostic radiology from the USA, UK and Singapore. We show that existing theories on the ‘offshorability’ of jobs have not captured how national institutions and occupational regulations continue to define professional work. We then review the question of supply from India's perspective and report that both macro‐institutional and organizational contexts make it complicated for Indian doctors to supply much of this service.     

Gender matters in the global outsourcing of service work

This paper provides a gendered analysis of the outsourcing of service work to developing economies taking, as illustration, call centres, shared service centres and the general ICT sector. The paper challenges the suggestion that changes in global capitalism, facilitated by ICT-enabled employment, offer new opportunities that benefit women, and suggests a degree of caution is needed before assuming a reduction of gender inequalities.     

Internationalization and the Spaces of Temporary Labour: The Global Assembly of a Local Workforce

An increasing number of low‐status consumer service jobs in the UK are undertaken by economic migrants, who are often recruited through the aegis of employment agencies. This article explores the use of migrant agency workers by a London hotel and a hospital, looking at the ways in which such a labour force is recruited and assembled in parts of the service sector in Greater London. It argues that even in the most locally‐based of service‐sector jobs, typically involving face to face interactions, new sets of transnational connections are producing a globalized labour force.     

All work intensity is not created equal: Effort motives,job satisfaction and quit intentions at a grocery chain

Prior research has shown that the well-being of employees engaged in intensive work can vary with the discretion their jobs afford regarding how and when to carry out the work. This article explores a different avenue. It argues that well-being also varies with employees’ individual motives for working intensively. The article introduces self-determination theory to the domain of work intensity and focuses on two hypotheses. The first is whether intensive work driven by explicit or implicit incentives is more positively associated with an employee's job satisfaction than intensive work driven by job demands. The second is whether intensive work driven by intrinsic motives is more positively associated with job satisfaction than that driven by explicit or implicit incentives. In both these cases, the article also examines whether equivalent effects exist on (reduced) quit intentions. Original data from a major Greek grocery chain provide corroborative evidence that is robust to a rich set of covariates, including increasingly demanding adjustments for job discretion. The findings contribute to a more complete understanding of why differences in well-being exist among employees performing intensive work, with implications for workers and employers.     

Dualism in Part-Time Employment

This paper draws on open-ended interviews of managers to characterize two distinct types of part-time employment in service industries. "Secondary" part-time employment displays the typical characteristics of a secondary labor market; "retention" part-time jobs are primary labor market jobs. Some predictions of this model are tested on Current Population Survey data.     

The role of ICTs in the servitisation and degradation of IT professional work

Recently IT work has been subjected to management approaches that apply production methods to service work. Specialised information and communication technologies (ICTs) used by IT professionals have played an important role in this ‘service turn’, but this has not been adequately explored in the literature. Via a qualitative study of IT professionals situated across the servitised IT functions of five UK‐based organisations, this article considers how these ICTs are inscribed with managerial logics that afford control benefits to managers while undermining professional autonomy and job quality. The article makes two main contributions to the literature. Firstly, it sheds light on how ICTs introduced into organisational IT functions support managerial control objectives and impact the job quality of IT professionals. Secondly, it suggests that ICTs may infect the logic of professionalism that takes pride in the quality of the work performance with a dominant managerial logic that places an emphasis on meeting management objectives.     

在京流动劳动力的就业状况调查与分析

利用2006年北京市1‰流动劳动力调查数据,从职业特征厦工资水平、职业培训、职业保障与政府服务等方面对在京流动劳动力的工作特征进行考察,得到的主要结论有：在京流动劳动力从事的大多为建筑业和城市传统服务业,且“工作类型”升级缓慢;作为雇主、雇员、自营劳动者、家庭帮工等四个工作类型的受访者在工资水平、求职方式、职业保障等方面存在较大的差异;流动劳动力进入北京后接受的培训有所增多,工人主动提出培训要求的趋势明显,培训费用职工内部化趋势加强;在京流动劳动力的职业保障令人担忧,政府在为流动劳动力提供公共服务的种类、数量及服务质量方面还有待加强。     

Occupational Stereotypes and Gender‐Specific Job Satisfaction

Using representative data containing information on job satisfaction and workers’ gender‐specific prejudices, we investigate the relationship between stereotyping and job satisfaction. We show that women in stereotypically male jobs are significantly less satisfied with their work climate and job content than in stereotypically female jobs but more satisfied with their income in those same jobs. Our findings indicate that women trade off their higher income satisfaction against the negative consequences of stereotyping. As long as we take into account that stereotypically male jobs are physically more demanding than stereotypically female jobs, men are generally more satisfied with stereotypically male jobs.     

Balancing Work and Family: The Role of High-Commitment Environments

Recently, researchers have begun to recognize that the nature of jobs, the workplace environment, and more generally, the culture of the workplace can have a significant impact on the ability of workers to balance their work and family lives. This article examines the effect of high-performance work practices, job characteristics, and the work environment on workers' views about whether the company helps them balance work and family. Using data from a survey of workers across three manufacturing industries, we show that a high-commitment environment—characterized by high-performance work practices, intrinsically rewarding jobs, and understanding supervisors—positively influences employees' perceptions that the company is helping them achieve this balance. This article reinforces the view that helping workers balance work and family responsibilities is not just a matter of benefits and formal family-friendly policies. Rather, it also depends on the characteristics of jobs within the business enterprise.     

Is There a Wage Payoff to Innovative Work Practices?

During the 1980s, wage inequality increased dramatically, and the economy lost many high-wage jobs that had provided middle-class incomes to less skilled workers, increasingly restricting these workers to low-wage jobs lacking union or other institutional protections. A number of scholars have suggested that a new paradigm of work, often called high performance , is emerging that offers such workers more skilled jobs and higher wages. Using a unique national dataset, we find little evidence that practices associated with high-performance work systems are associated with higher wages.     

Women, social skill and interactive service work in telephone call centres

This paper contributes to current debates about gender, work and skill in the service economy, focusing specifically on the case of women's employment in telephone call centres. The paper asks whether call centre employers are capitalising on women's 'feminine' social skills, and examines the degree to which these skills are being developed, acknowledged and recognised.     

Job selection among salespeople: A bounded rationality perspective

Recent research has documented how complex interactions between individual, SBU, and corporate characteristics come together to influence salespeople's evaluations of their current jobs. An unresolved question, however, is if these characteristics influence job choice among salespeople. We develop a conceptual framework of how specific individual and SBU level factors impact choice of sales job and test the framework empirically in a business-to-business service context. Results support a bounded rationality perspective in that salespeople elicit simple criteria when selecting jobs.