Grugulis and her colleagues wrote how one manager broke with orders on displaying goods; the resulting layout was far better, and yet he implored the academics not to take photos for fear head office would find out.
Not all routine is bad. The commutes, the tea breaks — these make up the essential scaffolding of our working days. However, when more and more of your work is claimed by routine and control, it becomes hard to bear, especially when you have the qualifications that entitle you to expect more.
The last two decades have seen more British workers get higher levels of skills than ever before and yet over that time they have come to exercise ever less control over their jobs.
Official skills surveys show a plunging proportion of workers who report that they have much influence over how to do their daily tasks — from 57 percent in 1992 to 43 percent by 2006.
If you’re a British health service worker or teacher, you have targets or central curricula to meet; if you’re employed by an outsourcing company, you’ll have two sets of bosses breathing down your neck — those in your office, and the client company too.
The labor-market academic Phil Brown has a phrase for this trend: Digital Taylorism. It’s a play on FW Taylor’s idea of scientific management. Taylor didn’t think much of the US worker.
“The man who is ... physically able to handle pig iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of handling pig iron,” Taylor told the US Congress.
He saw them as mere cogs, working to a fixed pattern set from above.
Where this has already happened to manual work, Brown says, it’s now happening to skilled and graduate jobs: law, finance, software engineering.
From now on, Brown and his colleagues believe that “permission to think” will be “restricted to a relatively small group of knowledge workers in the UK.” The rest will be turned into routine and farmed off to regional offices in eastern Europe or India.
Still, there’s always that green chicken curry to look forward to.
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