Work and Occupations

The United States is characterized by what may be best described as a “permanently new economy” because radical changes can be expected to continue to occur. Four broad types of change are discussed-those external to the United States, internal changes, changes in technology and knowledge, and demographic shifts. While various subareas within sociology have made important contributions to our understanding of these changes, there is a strong need for the revival of economic sociology to deal in a more general manner with economic changes. A resuscitated economic sociology could help us focus on the relationship between the economy and other social institutions. Also of great utility would be increased cross-fertilization between economics and economic sociology.

In this article I argue that changes in the structure of occupational life over the last half-century have outmoded the classical agenda of questions about occupations and the division of labor. I propose some new questions about this new occupational structure. The first concerns how different types of divisions of labor are established and why those different types are arrayed as they are in the current work world. The second concerns whether occupations in fact have any effective existence in that world. The third involves a critique of both our cultural construction of work and its uncritical acceptance by social scientists. The fourth issue concerns the co-optation of consumers as members of the division of labor. The fifth concerns the intricate modern relation of division of labor, occupation, organization, and such staffing institutions as the educational system.

With the acceleration in the rate of U.S. union membership decline since 1970, organized labor has issued legislative demands for redistributing wealth and for protecting unions as organizations. Yet research on labor political action has de-emphasized not only the development of labor's legislative agenda, but also the forces, such as socioeconomic status and class conflict, which cause diverse occupational and industrial sectors of unions to issue different legislative demands. Analysis of resolutions passed at the 1981-87 AFL-CIO conventions shows that declining and/or predominantly white, male unions in construction and manufacturing tended to issue organizational legislative demands, while growing, service-industry unions with large minority and women memberships tended to issue redistributive legislative demands. The findings suggest that unevenness in class conflict across unions affects which unions issue organizational demands and that inter-union diversity in socioeconomic status affects which unions issue redistributive demands.

A definition of organizational form is proposed in terms of labor power, the object, means, and division of labor, and the control of labor at the organizational and institutional level. A number of typological approaches are then reviewed, focusing on the delineation of new organizational forms. The central hypothesis is that new organizational forms are emerging as a result of the transition from industrial to postindustrial capitalism. This hypothesis is elaborated by means of a number of historical and structural subhypotheses specifying the links between corporate dynamics and postbureaucratic organizational forms, the role of computer-integrated production in the internalization and replacement of external, bureaucratic rules by software, and the role of an ideology of responsiveness in service organizations and government agencies. Finally, six characteristics emphasizing the flexibility of postbureaucratic, technocratic organizational forms are examined: informalism, universalism, weak classification and framing of options, loose coupling, interdependence and networking, and the propagation of a corporate culture to counteract the centrifugal and deconstructive tendencies of structural flexibility. In contrast to the technical rationalization of work by computers, these elements of structural flexibility are seen as a form of social rationalization.