| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 50

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Stephen J. Frenkel, Marek Korczynski, Karen A. Shire, and May Tam. On the Front Line: Organization of Work in the Information Economy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999)

QUESTIONS ABOUT the quality of work in the information economy have been central to a number of recent studies. The good jobs/bad jobs debate continues, with it often argued that workers have experienced important losses, especially with regard to control over work and its intensity. This book contributes to that debate and clearly demonstrates how complicated the question of quality of work and the good jobs/bad jobs debate may be.	1
One strength of this book is the breadth of its methodology. Based on a 5-year study of over 1,000 workers at 8 companies in the US, Japan, and Australia, this multi-layered and methodologically sound study considers work experiences at similar levels within different work structures. The authors examine work arrangements among service, sales, and knowledge-based workers within different work contexts and the ways in which these various organizational forms affect the experience of work. The study is configured as a matrix, considering vertical and lateral work flow within the three different organizational types — bureaucratic, entrepreneurial, and knowledge intensive — and with respect to five elements of work — work relations, employment relations, co-worker relations, control relations, and customer relations. It is this attention to both structure and process along with the comparative dimension that differentiates this book from other recent ones that consider the changing structure of work within the new economy.	2
The book is as much a study of organization as of work experience. While there is some promise here as well of discussion of policy implications of this applied research, the implications for public policy and changes in employment practices and law to which the authors refer are ultimately unclear.	3
Focussing on the front-line worker, the authors argue that these workers are pivotal in several ways within the information economy. While others discuss the rise of service and contingent work within the information economy, these authors conclude that front-line work has taken on an increased significance in the new economy that has led to greater and faster diversification of tasks within front-line as compared to back-office and other levels of work. What is most significant to these authors is the front-line workers' level of contact with customers within the new economy and hence their elevated importance to their work organizations. They argue that this contact at the front line is a distinguishing feature within globalized economies. It is this contact that not only contributes to the success of the business, but also creates a challenging work environment in which workers are spontaneously expected to call upon their organizational and technological knowledge to respond to customers' needs.	4
The significance of the front-line worker in terms of their numbers is without question. It is important, however, to critically assess the nature of front-line work and the customer contact these authors view as contributing to a positive work experience. For many front-line workers, particularly in fields such as sales and telecommunications, the customer contact is largely scripted and workers are monitored to ensure that they stay within the script. Rather than concluding that work has become more routinized and set within a regimented bureaucratic context, these authors point to the increasing complexity of work and to the growing popularity of the empowered work organization in which, they suggest, the complexity of work has loosened the formality associated with regimented work contexts. Within these structures, the complexity itself has become the challenge which stimulates workers in the modern work organization. Despite their tendency to argue that work on the front line has, in many contexts, taken on new dimensions of respect, to their credit, the authors do not present sweeping or simplistic conclusions that work on the front line has improved (or worsened). Rather, they point to the necessity of detailed comparative analysis and the importance of context or structure in assessing the nature of work. It is this question of relativity which is the highlight of this study. As detailed as this study is, what is most disappointing is that the authors overlook the question of alternatives workers may see for themselves. They also skirt discussion of the impact of changes in work structures on workers' experience. There is little sense of workers' agency, and despite the number of interviews conducted for this study, workers' voices are not prominently featured. Given the length of the book and the detail presented, it is understandable that relatively little attention is directly paid to workers' voices. The authors might, however, consider developing the qualitative data into a parallel volume to enrich what is sometimes too dense a discussion of organizational structures and work flows.	5
Overall, the authors adopt a disappointingly uncritical understanding of the changes within the organization of work and the experience of service at the front line. This is not to suggest that there be a simplistic conclusion that work in the context of the globalized economy has deteriorated. But, there should be some greater sense of the ways in which work today may have lost some meaning for some groups of workers, particularly given the recent literature that emphasizes the tendency for workers to be overworked, underemployed, highly stressed, closely monitored, and in increasingly contingent categories of work within the information economy.	6
In conclusion, this book is very dense with presentation of the data and discussion about the complexities of workflows within different forms of work organization. The ambitiousness of the study and the questions raised make the volume well worth reading. Yet there is little evidence here that in the work contexts in which sales, service, and knowledge-based workers find themselves today, they have real decision-making authority and are truly challenged by the level and variety of work tasks expected. Rather than referring to work becoming more complex, and as such, a challenge, the authors might consider more closely the question of work intensification and the pressures that intensification entails with regard to the minute decisions regarding work process.	7
Norene Pupo York University

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