| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Mike Noon and Paul Blyton, The Realities of Work, Second Edition (New York: Palgrave 2002)

MIKE NOON AND PAUL BLYTON have produced a book that will serve for some time as a complete, comprehensive, and useful textbook for students of industrial relations and human resource management (HRM).

This is the second edition of a book that originated in a course offered by the authors at the Cardiff Business School to encourage students to think about the actual experience of employees who are subjected to the management's decisions, tactics, and strategies. They make the worker the central reference point, in contrast to so much that is written in this field, in which the employee is either completely ignored, or is treated as a regrettable and sometimes troublesome cost of doing business.

The book also challenges the tendency to supply simple answers to human resource problems. It demonstrates the complex and even self-contradictory nature of the study of work, which makes it so time-consuming, confusing, and even disillusioning — exactly what is not wanted by a market that is geared to "quick-fix" solutions, the "six steps to success." This remarkable book somehow manages to accommodate all of this in a manner that is clear, manageable, and still academically rigorous.

Realities of Work is a treasure, because it addresses so many of the concepts, theories, and images used by those who study the workplace. Even better, it begins with a discussion of "theory" itself. Instead of assuming that readers are comfortable with such notions as "theory," "model," or "typology," Noon and Blyton provide an introduction, making this an even more valuable learning resource for those who want to test dominant theories of work against the reality experienced by workers.

This second edition uses feedback from peers and students, and as a result, is even more critical and inclusive, particularly with the addition of two valuable chapters on "knowledge work" and "representation at work." As well, the structure of the chapters makes the book particularly useful as a learning tool, as each begins with a list of key concepts, chapter aims, and learning outcomes, and includes such pedagogically useful features as pull-outs, exercises, and sum-up paragraphs.

The authors identify the issues of work one by one, summarizing and deconstructing the mainstream view in a straightforward and simple way, in contrast to scholars who complicate these issues beyond comprehension, or HRM consultants who deal out rhetoric and utopian enthusiasm. Typical is the unstartling, but often overlooked observation, that the mainstream study of work largely ignores unpaid labour, a huge area, which if paid for, would overwhelm the total value of paid work.

In typical fashion, the chapter on "work values" dismembers theories that explain why people work at all. In their analysis of the "moral necessity" theory, most often referred to as the "work ethic," for example, the authors do a delightful job of showing that it is not exclusively "Protestant" at all; it is also Islamic, Buddhist, and Catholic. They also inflict considerable damage on the popular notion that the "work ethic" is in decline.

Noon and Blyton are able to summarize the essential features of a broad range of theories and approaches into simple text, which leaves the reader with a good sense of their contribution to the study of work, and links them to their own experience. Richard Hyman, Karl Marx, and Harry Braverman are among those whose theories are called on in this manner to add meaning to what might otherwise appear as prosaic observations.

In this way, the chapter on dominant forms of work organization, and competing theories of skill opens the door to the debate over labour process by focusing on how workers actually cope with fundamental shifts in the organization of their work. It offers a clear and uncomplicated commentary on Taylorism and Fordism as dominant traditions of work organization, and likewise clarifies much of the contention surrounding Braverman's thesis on deskilling and degradation of work. I was particularly impressed with the discussion of gender and skill, in which "the social construction of disadvantage" is based upon an ideology of gender that labels certain attitudes and forms of behaviour as masculine and others as feminine, and in which work role is seen as a reflection of natural ability, i.e., biological.

Likewise, euphemisms and rhetoric that serve to obscure more than they reveal about the world of work are tackled one by one, e.g., the concept of "enterprise culture," which, by heralding the growth of self-employment in Britain, served to mask the reality of working life under Thatcherism. Likewise, the notion that knowledge has become a key element in the workplace is challenged. For example, they ask whether knowledge has not always been important to work. As well, they provide insights into such concepts as "knowledge work," "knowledge worker," and the "information society," ending with a discussion of the expropriation techniques developed by employers to "capture" the knowledge of their workers.

The chapter on trade liberalization and the growth of supranational alliances (i.e., 'globalization'), clarifies the nature of changes occurring in the workplace that are tied to international political developments. It also destroys some of the official explanations as to why these are happening. It shows how dominant concepts and categorizations used to describe these developments not only encourage over-generalizations about the direction in which the world is heading, they also embody unfounded assumptions about where it has been. This chapter also adds a useful section on the EU Charter of Fundamental Social Rights of Workers (the Social Charter) that was signed into the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.

The sharp, critical distinction the authors draw between accepted theories and the experience of workers is especially productive when applied to some of the priorities and specific projects of human resource managers — the ones that so often drive workers mad. The chapter on "time and work," for example, critically dissects the obsession of management with the re-definition of working time to exclude all non-productive periods, and to increase their flexibility with assignment of work. It shows how the way time is utilized is fundamental to workers' experience of work, and why their abilility to control their own time has always been a major focus of individual and collective negotiations.

The insights the authors provide into "survival strategies at work" are particularly interesting. "Making out," "fiddling," "joking," "whistle-blowing," sabotage, and "escape" illustrate how resourceful and creative workers can be in devising strategies to take back some control, and construct meaning for work. They are also turned by the authors into an analysis of two major themes in industrial relations — consent and resistance to work. Workers engage in both, much to the chagrin of academics who would prefer a "hard line."

These strategies illustrate a theme that runs throughout the book, i.e., that workers develop counter-rationalities to management policies and plans. Additional rest periods, ways of increasing income and reducing pressure are therefore not temporary deviations from management orthodoxy. They are persistent and rational responses of workers who only partially identify with the aims of their employers, and have an overriding interest in preserving as much life, energy, income, and time as possible.

The value of the authors' ability to distill such complex themes into a few lines of text is clearly seen in their discussion of "emotion work," one of the best I have seen. Shifting industrial patterns are increasingly assigning workers to work that consists of the management of their own and other people's emotions; e.g., to make them feel good, motivated, more willing to engage in forms of behaviour, etc. An increased emphasis on customer service, where the ability to deliver service in a certain 'emotional' way is seen as key to competitive advantage, produces new demands and pressures on workers, with which they must find ways to cope; e.g., dissonance between felt and displayed emotions.

The only difficulty I have with Realities of Work is that it consistently ignores or downplays the role of unions. The chapter on representation at work may contain useful points on why unions exist and the difficulties they are encountering. After the rich and insightful treatment given to other topics, however, its treatment of unions is disappointingly thin. Collective action by workers should have been a consistent theme throughout all of the chapters. Self-estrangement and other problems for workers caused by emotion work, for example, require the type of strong and plausible alternative to management's construction of the world of work, which unions are in a position to offer. As workplaces and processes increasingly exploit workers' feelings and emotions, the capacity to ensure that they can share understandings and norms will become increasingly important, and might well be the single most important service that trade unions can offer to workers facing the reality of work today.


Winston Gereluk Athabasca University

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