Introduction

This book concerns work. Work occupies a substantial proportion of most people's lives and has often been taken as a symbol of personal value: work provides status, economic reward, a demonstration of religious faith and a means to realize self-potential. But work also embodies the opposite evaluations: labour can be back-breaking and mentally incapacitating; labour camps are punishment centres; work is a punishment for original sin and something which we would all rather avoid - something which was, to quote a woman munitions worker in the Second World War, 'the blank patch between one brief evening and the next' (Mass Observation, 1943: 43).

The ambiguous nature of work is a central theme running through this book. Rather than restricting the review to paid labour, and concentrating upon male factory workers as much industrial or occupational sociology has done, it considers work in a rather wider context, including unpaid domestic labour, which highlights the links between the sphere of employment and the domestic sphere, and which incorporates the notions of ethnicity and gender as well as class. Inevitably, an introductory text of this type can barely skim the surface of most of the debates here and we have not attempted to provide a comprehensive introduction to all forms of work in all varieties of society throughout all known periods of time. Instead, we have selected substantive fields that we consider significant and have attempted to illustrate these both with conventional material and with some rather less traditional. Since an underlying theme of the approach is the complexity and differences which exist at work, rather than the uniformities, the selection of substantive fields and source material is inevitably asymmetrical: it is, for example, because we dispute the allegedly archetypal significance of the male factory worker isolated from his domestic world that the book looks beyond him to female domestic workers, to eighteenth-century sailors, to twentieth-century women civil servants and to twenty-first-century service workers for the evidence. By definition, therefore, we miss out far more than we consider, but our intention is both to introduce the sociological world of work and to undermine some traditional myths, rather than to provide the definitive account of typical work - whatever that might involve.

Although introductory texts are, by their very nature, overviews of broad areas we do not think this means the book should avoid pursuing particular and explicit theoretical lines with regard to the current orthodoxies of the day. Each chapter has its own specific viewpoints to engage with but perhaps we should acknowledge an overriding engagement with four areas.

First is the denial of the superordinate position of class at the expense of gender, race and ethnicity, and the concomitant denial of the supremacy of the labour process separated from home and all else. The spheres of work, employment and home are all necessarily intertwined and to separate them as if they could exist independently is to misconceive the complex reality of work and misunderstand the significance of the relationships which it embodies. Moreover, to decant elements of social groups or individuals into categories like class, gender and ethnicity is to imply that individuals interpret the world through a single lens. If, on the other hand, individuals and the social groups they engage with are considered as heterogeneous constructs, for whom the world is perceived through a multifaceted lens, then we should concern ourselves with the fragmentation of work experience. Rather than puzzling over the 'failure' of the working class to develop a solidaristic political organization we might instead puzzle over why any collective organization exists and persists. In sum, what may appear to one person or analyst to be a self-evidently important social cleavage may not be interpreted as such by another.

The second issue is the polarization of organizational features into social and technical, with either the former or the latter being endowed with determinate qualities. Adopting the actor network approach, we argue that it is the mixture of human and nonhuman elements which generates significant resources, though how these 'alloys' are deployed is determined not by the content but by the interpretative actions of various agents within the network.

The third line we wish to pursue is that work is itself socially constructed and reconstructed. This implies that much of what we take for granted as inevitable or technically required or economically determined should be subjected to the most vigorous of critiques: if work is socially constructed then it is contingent and requires perpetual action by agents for its reproduction - it does not just happen but has to be brought off. Relatedly, whereas it is common to differentiate the moral economy of the pre-capitalist period from the market economy that displaced it, we argue that the moral and social aspects of work are still an essential component. To believe that contemporary employment is configured and constrained only by appeals to the rationality of market forces is to misconstrue the nature of work. If workers seek pay rises in line with inflation, rather than company profitability, or decry the disproportionate but performance-related increases of directors' salaries, then the market model can explain these only be asserting the irrationality of such workers; but if we retain the notion of work as a social and moral sphere, as well as a market sphere, then workers' actions become not irrational but rational from a different viewpoint. This does not mean that morality displaces market rationality and it would perhaps be more appropriate to consider the two as resources which different groups draw on to legitimate their particular campaigns at specific locations in space and time.

Fourth, and as an underlying feature of the above three issues, this book proceeds from the assumption that the world of work is one actively constructed through the interpretative acts of agents involved. Here, then, we should leave the world of 'objective' analysis, of certainty and predictability, and replace it with one constructed by indeterminacy, contingency and alternative viewpoints. What is important in attempting to explain the world of work is not what that world is but what those involved in it take it to be. In short, what counts as 'work', what counts as 'inevitable' and what counts as 'rational behaviour' does not lie within the object or the phenomenon itself but within the social relations and interpretative processes that sustain it.

Chapter 1 sets out to discuss this indeterminacy by establishing the enigmatic essence of work. It begins by noting the significance of any activity being labelled as work in so far as an evaluation may be placed upon such an activity. What appear to be identical activities very often embody widely contrasting norms of behaviour such that the same 'work' of individuals in war and peace may be either 'heroic' or 'bestial', depending on the social circumstances and relations under which they are undertaken. This equivocal feature of work is highlighted by focusing upon non-Western and historical approaches to work. It then moves on to consider the consequences of attempts to persuade workers that their efforts were either sanctioned by God or an essential element of their humanity or a necessary means to buy their way out of the hell they found themselves in. The chapter finishes by looking at informal work, particularly domestic labour and unemployment, through which the nature of work as a social construct is re-emphasized.

Chapter 2 explores the historical dimension of work in radically different societies. From Roman Britain to the Luddites to nineteenth-century textile factories and beyond we argue against any reduction of work to a single form and illuminate the moral economy of pre-capitalist work relations on land and at sea. Noting the occupational diversity that also typifies British industrial experience, we consider the redistribution of domestic labour and influence at home which accompanied the Industrial Revolution, and the consequential disappearance from visible paid employment by the majority of married women, especially the middle class, during the Victorian era. This is linked to the activities of the early trade unions which, in conjunction with the paternalistic concerns of the state, coerced women out of many areas of skilled employment and attempted to corral them within the home. Finally, we trace the rise of women's employment through the advance of clerical labour and the two world wars to a point where, despite patriarchal influence, the beginnings of wage equality at work were established.

Chapter 3 moves from the substantive field of historical work to the theoretical endeavours of the historical 'gang of three': Marx, Weber and Durkheim. While noting the limitations of such classical approaches, especially the gender blind or patriarchal influences of all three, each has something in particular to offer our contemporary analysis of work though none individually nor all three together provide anything like a coherent account of work. They are, then, important but flawed foundation stones rather than the adumbrations that merely need to be fleshed out.

Chapter 4 switches from the historical to the contemporary and delves into the complex world of the modern organization and its multitude of competing viewpoints and analyses. Running through...