Abstract
The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment, edited by Stephen Edgell, Heidi Gottfried, and Edward Granter, provides a useful reference for organizational communication scholars because of its attention to the history and current status of work as well as its discussion of trends and research questions that require exploration in today’s global world. With six parts (containing five to seven chapters each) organized around six core themes, this handbook complements organizational communication scholarship and points to further intersections between the sociology of work and organizational communication.
Like The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Communication, edited by Linda Putnam and Dennis Mumby (2014), Edgell et al.’s handbook covers social movements, work–life balance, historical contexts, difference, gender, impact of technology and globalization, postbureaucratic organizing, leadership, change, organizational culture, and responsibility, among other topics. Unlike Putnam and Mumby’s (2014) broader handbook, however, The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment concentrates on how and why the world of work and employment is changing as well as the potential consequences. The concerns among organizational communication scholars and sociologists are similar but manifest at different levels and with different foci. For instance, the nature and meaning/fulness of work has garnered much recent attention in organizational communication scholarship. Interest in work has ranged from dirty or stigmatized work and occupations through work–life concerns, employment precarity, difference, leadership, networks of innovation and influence, volunteering, and globalization effects. For organizational communication, researchers tend to examine how these aspects of contemporary life are constituted communicatively and through what means. Organizational communication scholars might also examine how communication can be used to develop interventions and to explain organizing patterns or networks and inclusionary/exclusionary practices in employment and unemployment. In organizational communication, researchers use diverse theoretical and methodological approaches as well as mixed methods and multilevel analyses. At the heart of organizational communication studies is an effort to understand how individuals, communities or organizations, and the global society understand, make sense of, and recreate or change structures and experiences around labor market trends. This brief overview neglects much that is happening in organizational communication but is meant to show how organizational communication provides different theoretical and methodological entrée points into topical areas of mutual interest.
As already noted, the broad sociological account of such issues offered by The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment can benefit from communication scholars’ accounts of individuals’ and groups’ sensemaking and organizing about the same phenomena. Indeed, in several cases, the editors and chapter authors of The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment describe a behavior or trend, such as the acceptance of risk and precarity, but cannot account for why and how people are acting in ways that seem to contradict their own best interests. Communication scholars can explicate such contradictions by showing how they are rooted in the constitutive processes underlying work and employment. In addition, whereas The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment chapter authors offer global trends and policy implications about the gendered, raced, and classed findings in their field, they do not describe and analyze how difference is socially constructed in everyday interactions and linguistic choices. Although it seems unfair to fault a handbook in another discipline for not taking a communication lens to issues, the editors and authors do point out the need for interdisciplinary scholarship that can provide more complete pictures of how people experience work and employment phenomena. Unfortunately, among those disciplines listed, organizational communication is missing. Indeed, only a few names of organizational communication scholars are even cited. Clearly, The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment is a great resource for research and teaching, as noted earlier, but also for developing better ties between disciplines to enhance understandings of global and local labor markets.
The six parts of The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment focus on “work and employment at the global frontier,” as the subtitle of the introductory chapter indicates. These six parts and chapters are “historical context and social divisions” (Chapters 2-6 on career, social theory, class, gender, and race), “experience of work” (Chapters 7-13 on good and bad jobs, dignity, labor and employment relations, management and leadership, workplace misbehaviors, labor, and skills), “work and organization” (Chapters 14-19 on forms ranging from bureaucracy to networks, organizational culture, industrialization, post-Fordism, interactive service work, and the organization of service work), “non-standard forms of work and employment” (Chapters 20-24 on risk, destandardization, informal employment, precarious work, and unpaid domestic labor), “work and life outside employment” (Chapters 25-29 on unemployment, volunteering, work–life balance, time, and social policy), and “globalization and the future of work” (Chapters 30-35 on value chains, outsourcing, labor migrations, critiques of work, informal and precarious jobs, and building better work alternatives).
The first half provides a sweeping overview of the history of the sociology of work, beginning by surveying the foundational concepts of theorists such as Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, to important sociological terms and theories related to the experience of work, and then focusing on sociohistorical trends in the organizing of labor and the economic and cultural consequences of such trends. Here, key historical shifts such as industrialism, postindustrialism, and globalization are discussed, providing spatiotemporal context. The second half examines why workers behave as they do, and how, for example, destandardization matters for workers’ experiences. Readers can see how and why shifts in the labor force, particularly employment and nonwork phenomena, are changing workers’ connections to and attitudes about work. Readers also can see why and how work and employment need to be questioned anew in today’s world.
Most chapters contain an organizational scheme that begins by providing historical context and overviews of existing theory and research before launching into new aspects of work more recently documented in the literature, such as transnational value chains and employment practices being driven by multinational corporations’ agendas (p. 395). Some of the broader themes that emerge from these chapters are shifts in language, such as the movement from “bureaucracy” to “networks” and “management” to “leadership,” shifts in perspectives such as Fordism and post-Fordism, as well as discussion of emerging research and policy opportunities. Chapter authors also note the need to untangle complicated and often ironic processes of dignity, difference, and employment–nonwork. Despite these broader trends, authors do not make uniform recommendations. For instance, many discuss the need to better operationalize certain aspects of work, such as dignity or job quality. Yet other chapters urge more qualitative and in-depth research, such as the chapter discussing “unruly subjects” that decries placeless, decontextualized studies that cannot ascertain the depth, nuance, and impact of worker resistance. Still other chapters discuss the “need to raise awareness of the continuing significance of race as an organizing principle in the labor market” (Chapter 6, p. 105). They discuss what can be learned by comparing and contrasting key issues and policies in areas such as gender, work–life balance, and skills from several national and regional contexts. Sometimes chapters enter into debates about theoretical explanations, operationalizations, and findings, such as the section on “leisure” in Chapter 28.
In sum, The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment would be useful to emerging organizational communication scholars trying to get a handle on the world of work and employment. For scholars already researching and teaching in these areas, the concise overviews and engagement with ongoing debates might provide fresh insights about contemporary language, scholarship, and trends in work, employment, and the global labor force.