- Description
Description
Despotism on Demand draws attention to the impact of flexible scheduling on managerial power and workplace control. When we understand paid work as a power relationship, argues Alex J. Wood, we see how the spread of precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism; a novel regime of control within the workplace.
Wood believes that flexible despotism represents a new domain of inequality, in which the postindustrial working class increasingly suffers a scheduling nightmare. By investigating two of the largest retailers in the world he uncovers how control in the contemporary "flexible firm" is achieved through the insidious combination of "flexible discipline" and "schedule gifts." Flexible discipline provides managers with an arbitrary means by which to punish workers, but flexible scheduling also requires workers to actively win favor with managers in order to receive "schedule gifts" more or better hours. Wood concludes that the centrality of precarious scheduling to control means that for those at the bottom of the postindustrial labor market the future of work will increasingly be one of flexible despotism.
Author: Alex J. Wood
Publisher: ILR Press
Published: 05/15/2020
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.64lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.44d
ISBN13: 9781501748882
ISBN10: 1501748882
BISAC Categories:
- Political Science | Labor & Industrial Relations
- Business & Economics | Workplace Culture
- Political Science | Human Rights
About the Author
Alex J. Wood is Lecturer in the Sociology of Work at the University of Birmingham and a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Follow him on Twitter @tom_swing.
