Recent Changes In Organisational Form And Personnel Strategies Essay

Recent Changes In Organisational Form And Personnel Strategies - Essay Example Differences between the connotations of the words "labor" and "work† suggest the reorienting effect that Braverman's formulation had on views regarding work, workers, and the workplace (Rowlinson, 2000, p.13-14). Labor is an economic commodity exchanged in the market. Braverman held that work had been degraded by capitalism thus turned into mere labor. Taylorism separated the hand from the brain and vested the brains in management and the hands in labor. Work became deskilled as technological and bureaucratic controls supplanted the self-direction of skilled workers. This process of deskilling standardized work activities robbed work of meaning, leveling skill distinctions among workers. It enlarged and homogenized the proletariat, which came to include clerical and semi-professional occupations. Braverman's focus on skills had the effect of conceptualizing the outcomes of the industrial transformation as technological, psychological, and economic rather than social. Harry Brav erman does not make clear the definition of skill but sees the degradation process as involving the separation of mental and physical activities. One might be concluded that Harry Braverman has identified skills as cognitive abilities of workers, then generalized beyond that point to make skills technical characteristics of jobs. Sociological conceptions of work based on workers' relations to each other, group control over activities, and normative definitions of technical relations are missing.