T1 – Richard Sennett, How the work is changing

PAROLA D AUTORE | T1 Richard Sennett The Culture of New Capitalism, Yale University Press, New Haven & London 2006, pp. 50-53 How the work is changing In the following text the American sociologist Richard Sennett describes some of the major trends in contemporary work and organizations. In particular, he sketches some of the consequences of temporary work on workers wellbeing. Socially, short-term task labor alters how workers work together. In the chain-of-command pyramid, you do your duty and fulfill your function, and eventually you are rewarded, as the holder of an office, for performance or seniority; or passed over or demoted. Either way, the infrastructure of the firm is clear enough. In shifting, short-term task-labor, it isn t. The structure of the firm is not a solid object to study, its future cannot be predicted. In interviewing temps, I ve found that those who prosper in this milieu have a high tolerance for ambiguity. One administrative assistant told me, Each time you start a new job, you need to fake it. The boss expects you know how things should be done and what he wants. But of course you don t. It s a challenge. It s no accident that flexible organizations emphasize human relations skills and offer interpersonal training. Strip away the psychological fluff and a solid need remains; in these environments people need to be proactive when faced with ill-defined circumstances. [ ] In order to deliver quick, flexible results, work groups have to be given a certain measure of autonomy. Indeed, the firm will try to motivate autonomy through internal markets; the center sets the terms of competition between teams in writing a piece of computer code, raising money, or designing a product, then five or six teams compete against each other to do it. In Taylor s way of thinking, based on pyramid form, this would be highly inefficient, since you have duplication of effort, but in the new, flexible way of thinking, what matters is producing the best result as quickly as possible. That s a more modern measure of efficiency. This kind of internal competition leads to what the economist Robert Frank calls winner-takes-all rewards: the big prizes come only to the winning team, and there are few or no consolation prizes. The system produces high levels of stress and anxiety among workers, as I and many other researchers have found. All competition, of course, breeds stress; the stakes are raised in winner-takes-all markets. Internal markets raise the anxiety stakes again higher, since the line between competitor and colleague becomes unclear. In contrast to the administrative assistant quoted above, one of my subjects at a West Coast high-tech firm complained that the winning team in an internal competition took advantage of her need to go home early to attend to her young children; they knew they could win because of her small family. They were false colleagues. Answer 1. What does the expression winner-takes-all refer to? 2. What are the consequences for workers of a highly competitive work environment? 3. Why temporary workers haves to have a high tolerance for ambiguity ? | Una società sempre più digitale | 393