Powerful Times

Flexible Discipline and Schedule Gifts at Work

Bibliographic Data

ID2374214
AuthorsAlex J Wood (0000-0003-0569-7145, University of Oxford, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume32
Issue6
Pages1061-1077
Publication date2018-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueWork Employment and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0950-0170 • E-ISSN: 1469-8722
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0950017017719839
OpenAlexW2748282505
LanguageEN
Citations received43
References cited39

This article uses two ethnographic retail case studies to investigate contemporary workplace control. The findings highlight how flexible scheduling has serious consequences for workers and causes insecurity. This provides managers with a powerful and unaccountable mechanism for securing control. The benefits for managers of using flexible scheduling to secure control are shown to be its ambiguity and flexibility. Moreover, flexible scheduling creates an environment where workers must continually strive to maintain managers' favour. Little evidence is found to suggest that this control is aided by work games obscuring workplace relations. Flexible scheduling does, however, enable misrecognition of workplace relations due to the schedule gifts which it entails. Schedule gifts act to bind workers to managers' interests through feelings of gratitude and moral obligation

Ambiguity · Business · Control (management · Economics · Ethnography · Gratitude · Management · Obligation · Operations management · Political science · Public relations · Schedule · Scheduling (production processes · Sociology · Work schedule · Computer Science · Employment and Welfare Studies · Labor Movements and Unions · Law · Management and Organizational Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology