Marek Korczynski
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 246347 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Marek Korczynski |
| NOMBRES | Marek |
| APELLIDO | Korczynski |
| FIRMA | KORCZYNSKI M |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Nottingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1517-6001 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 48 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 406 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 46 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 4 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1995 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
Laaser, K. and Karlsson, J. The Politics of Working Life and Meaningful Work
Informal Cultures of Resistance and Worker Mobilization
In the context of the rising power of capital over labour, research on labour mobilization is important. From the research literature, we know that labour mobilizations might be initiated by trade unions or via workers' self-organization. Yet, we know little about the cultural and social processes through which individual workers come to self-organize in the first place. To address this gap, we present ethnographic research on precarious migrant …
How Institutional Logics Inform Emotional Labour
Sociological analysis of emotional labour can be aided by considering how institutional logics inform the performance of emotional labour. We consider the link between institutional logics and emotional labour by conducting an in-depth case study of junior doctors in a large UK hospital. We point to three key institutional logics - bureaucratic, consumerist and professional logics - and show how they inform the emotional labour of junior doctors.…
The Sociology of Contemporary Work
This book injects a burst of energy into the sociology of work, offering a perspective that is both innovative and deeply informed. Leading sociology of work scholar, Marek Korczynski, praises the discipline’s comprehensive approach to theory, its focus on uncovering power dynamics and its ability to reveal how social injustices often stem from workplace inequalities. Offering an accessible overview of the field, the book: · analyses both the soc…
The Sociology of Contemporary Work
Social Theory at Work
Work is fundamental to human society and modern organizations, and consequently has been central to the thinking of major social theorists and social science disciplines. This book offers a 'one-stop-shop' guide to classical and contemporary perspectvies of work written by leading international experts. Schools covered include: Weberian, Marxian, Durkheimian, feminist, neo-classical economics, institutional economics, ethics, Foucauldian, postmod…
The Role of Community Organisations in the Collective Mobilisation of Migrant Workers
In examining the collective mobilisation of migrant workers, scholars have explored the emergence of community organisations as alternative forms of worker representation. However, community unionism scholars tend to adopt a union-centric perspective, which leaves unexplored the complex nature of community organisations. We argue that it is important to adopt a 'community'-oriented perspective. Such a perspective allows us to explore varied capac…
The improvised language of solidarity
There are considerable language barriers facing the potential collective labour organization of multi-ethnic migrant workers. From the research literature, we know little about linguistic practices that might overcome these barriers. Based on an ethnographic study of the participatory organizing of S.I. Cobas multi-ethnic migrant workers in the Italian logistics sector, we point to three linguistic practices that help overcome language barriers –…
The art of labour organizing
There has been an upsurge of interest regarding how actors engage with art within organizational processes. However, scholars have tended not to study the role of art within contemporary collective labour organizing. This article focuses on how participatory art may support flat, participative labour organizing, particularly among marginalized, relatively powerless workers. We present an ethnographic account of how art practices are deeply embedd…
The consumption of work
This article focuses on representations of the nexus of work, meaning and consumption as experienced by university students. We develop an empirically based argument that the meaning of work is being constructed as an object of consumption on a British university campus. We suggest that this indicates two key changes in representations of the meaning of work. First, there is a significant shift in the social construction of orientations to work t…
The Workplace Commons
One of the most important focuses in social theory within the last decade has been upon the commons. We contribute to the emerging scholarship on the commons. We point out that this literature tends to neglect the workplace. We then argue that the workplace should be included as a potentially important arena of commoning. Going to studies of the workplace, we find that scholarship has implicitly found key emergent elements of commoning within the…
Client Abuse to Public Welfare Workers
We analyse a case study of workers' experience of client abuse in a Danish public welfare organisation. We make an original contribution by putting forward two different theoretical expectations of the case. One expectation is that the case follows a pattern of customer abuse processes in a social market economy - in which workers are accorded power and resources, in which workers tend to frame the abuse as the outcome of a co-citizen caught in s…
Hearing music in service interactions
There is an extensive literature concerned with the impact of music on customers. However, no study has examined its effects on service workers and their interactions with customers. Drawing together literatures on service work and music in everyday life, the article develops a theoretical framework for exploring the role of music in service exchanges. Two central factors are identified – first, how workers hear, and respond to, the music soundsc…
Service Work
Taking as a starting point the useful abstraction that all jobs involve work on one of materials, information, or people, service work can be defined as work that involves working on people. The presence of the service recipient within the labor process is the central definitional element of service work. Service work in this sense involves intangibility, perishability (service work cannot be stored), variability (of service recipient expectation…
The Caring Self within a Context of Increasing Rationalisation
The current political economy imposes cost-saving rationalisation within home care work. In this context, a key question is whether home care aides act with indifference to clients or whether home care aides continue to espouse and act out of the caring self, which centres on the desire to give meaningful care to clients. This article assesses the thesis of the caring self within a context of rationalisation in relation to home care aides in thre…
When the ‘unorganizable’ organize
The collective mobilization of migrant workers is an important issue for analysis. Three key barriers to the mobilization of migrant workers have been identified – employment conditions, which tend to prevent migrant workers coming together; the framings held by migrant workers, which marginalize an understanding of their position as that of exploited workers; and the issue of the sustainability of any mobilization. The article examines migrant d…
Organizations and their consumers
The last 20 years or so have seen a far-reaching reconfiguration of the characters that dominate the world of organizations. For much of its life, the study of organizations was dominated by two central characters, the manager and the worker, whose relationship with all its tensions, conflicts and accommodations unfolded with within a broader environment of markets, governments, shareholders, social institutions, technological forces and so forth…
Customer abuse to service workers
Evidence from a range of sources suggests that customer abuse to service workers is a significant phenomenon. This article argues that a large part of customer abuse is endogenously created within the fabric of the service economy. Thirty book-length ethnographies were coded for relevant data and a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis was undertaken. The findings show that frequent customer abuse is associated with a configuration of the pr…
The customer in the sociology of work
Customers play a key part in the working experience of a significant proportion of the working class in contemporary service work. This e-special issue features articles selected from previous issues of Work, Employment and Society which have made significant contributions to our understanding of the role of the customer within the social relations of interactive service work. This introduction argues that the literature in this area is implicitl…
Stayin' Alive on the factory floor
When Caring and Surveillance Technology Meet
There is an important research gap regarding how the service triangle in care work is affected by the use of surveillance technology. This article addresses this gap by reporting quantitative and qualitative research undertaken in three U.K. local government home care organizations. Through regression analysis, it is found that discretionary effort is positively related, and organizational commitment negatively related, to information technology …
The Mystery Customer
This article charts the historical and contemporary absences in the sociology of service work. Although studies of service work have now become the empirical mainstream in the sociology of work, there have been few attempts to conceptualize broad patterns of worker-customer relations in ser vice work. This neglect is to be regretted because whether the customer is an alienating figure for service workers constitutes a key unasked question in cont…
Service Work
"Everyday, we are bombarded with advertising images of the smiling service worker. The book is written with the aim of focusing beneath the surface of these fairytale images, to seek out and understand the reality of service workers' experience. Within the sociology of work and related literatures, there are an increasing number of empirical studies of different types of service work, but there has been little progress in attempts to theorize the…
The last British work songs
This article examines the widespread practice of singing during the picking of hops in the Kent hop fields from the 1920s through to the 1950s. The singing is analysed both in terms of its position as a late, rare and therefore potentially revealing example of British work songs in the 20th century, and in terms of the light it casts on the musical culture of the singers, working class women of London’s East End. It is argued that the songs expre…
Music at Work
Increasingly, music is being recognized as an important element in the structuring of social interaction and experience in many social spheres. However, little attention has been paid to music in the sphere of work. The importance of this gap in our knowledge, and the reasonsfor the gap's existence, are highlighted. Addressing this gap requires a historical perspective, placing music within the key historical contexts of the nature of the labour …
Re-Constituting Work
Service Work in Consumer Capitalism
There is an important literature suggesting that the consumer has become a key focus of identity and figure of authority in contemporary society. Within this literature, however, there is little consideration of the role that the identification with the customer could play in management control within production, nor of the ensuing potential contradictions. This paper examines these issues in front line call centre work. Control in this setting i…
The Mystery Customer
This article charts the historical and contemporary absences in the sociology of service work. Although studies of service work have now become the empirical mainstream in the sociology of work, there have been few attempts to conceptualize broad patterns of worker-customer relations in ser vice work. This neglect is to be regretted because whether the customer is an alienating figure for service workers constitutes a key unasked question in cont…
Customer abuse to service workers
Evidence from a range of sources suggests that customer abuse to service workers is a significant phenomenon. This article argues that a large part of customer abuse is endogenously created within the fabric of the service economy. Thirty book-length ethnographies were coded for relevant data and a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis was undertaken. The findings show that frequent customer abuse is associated with a configuration of the pr…
When the ‘unorganizable’ organize
The collective mobilization of migrant workers is an important issue for analysis. Three key barriers to the mobilization of migrant workers have been identified – employment conditions, which tend to prevent migrant workers coming together; the framings held by migrant workers, which marginalize an understanding of their position as that of exploited workers; and the issue of the sustainability of any mobilization. The article examines migrant d…
On the Front Line
The importance of customer service is widely emphasized in business today. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the organization and dynamics of front-line work. The volume is based on a four-year study of over a thousand employees and eight leading companies in the United States, Australia, and Japan. On the Front Line reveals similarities and differences found in work environments--such as variance in authority relations and div…
Gender and Service
When Caring and Surveillance Technology Meet
There is an important research gap regarding how the service triangle in care work is affected by the use of surveillance technology. This article addresses this gap by reporting quantitative and qualitative research undertaken in three U.K. local government home care organizations. Through regression analysis, it is found that discretionary effort is positively related, and organizational commitment negatively related, to information technology …
The invisibility of violence
This article explores the social construction of violence within the front-line context of job centres in the Employment Service (ES). The issue of violence within organizations is typically approached using positivistic methods. In contrast, this article deepens understandings of violence in organizations by using an interpretive approach. Through an analysis of data generated through an in-depth case study, this article argues that although ES …
Back-Office Service Work
Much of the current literature on service work has focused on front-line, customerfacing jobs. Research and theory suggest that while the way in which this work is organized is to a significant degree underpinned by rationalization, there is also an important customer-oriented strand in the organization of front-line work. This begs the question of how work is organized in back-officeservice work, i.e. service jobs involving work with and for the…
The art of labour organizing
There has been an upsurge of interest regarding how actors engage with art within organizational processes. However, scholars have tended not to study the role of art within contemporary collective labour organizing. This article focuses on how participatory art may support flat, participative labour organizing, particularly among marginalized, relatively powerless workers. We present an ethnographic account of how art practices are deeply embedd…
The customer in the sociology of work
Customers play a key part in the working experience of a significant proportion of the working class in contemporary service work. This e-special issue features articles selected from previous issues of Work, Employment and Society which have made significant contributions to our understanding of the role of the customer within the social relations of interactive service work. This introduction argues that the literature in this area is implicitl…
Instrumental music? The social origins of broadcast music in British factories
This paper explores the social origins and development of music relayed through loudspeakers in British factories during World War Two, focusing on the BBC programme Music While You Work, which provided a national soundtrack for factory work, and the contemporary institutions of Industrial Psychology, which promoted music as a highly 'valuable' accompaniment to work and formulated scientific principles governing its broadcast. Combining archival …
The Role of Community Organisations in the Collective Mobilisation of Migrant Workers
In examining the collective mobilisation of migrant workers, scholars have explored the emergence of community organisations as alternative forms of worker representation. However, community unionism scholars tend to adopt a union-centric perspective, which leaves unexplored the complex nature of community organisations. We argue that it is important to adopt a 'community'-oriented perspective. Such a perspective allows us to explore varied capac…
The Menu in Society
We live in curious times. People's sense of individual autonomy co-exists with structures of power. How do these two phenomena co-exist? An important answer to this lies in the menu. The menu operates as a key form of mediation between people's sense of individual autonomy and larger structures of power, allowing both to co-exist. This article illustrates the operation of the menu in society within consumption, within production, and within citiz…
Derecognising Unions and Centralising Bargaining
There has been a recent rise in employers derecognising unions. The oil and chemical industries have been identified as critical for the analysis and practice of derecognition. This paper presents data showing that major oil and chemical firms have, on the one hand, derecognised unions for key internal staff, but on the other hand, have enforced a centralised bargaining framework for their on-site contractors engaged in the out-sourced repair, ma…
The Caring Self within a Context of Increasing Rationalisation
The current political economy imposes cost-saving rationalisation within home care work. In this context, a key question is whether home care aides act with indifference to clients or whether home care aides continue to espouse and act out of the caring self, which centres on the desire to give meaningful care to clients. This article assesses the thesis of the caring self within a context of rationalisation in relation to home care aides in thre…
Informal Cultures of Resistance and Worker Mobilization
In the context of the rising power of capital over labour, research on labour mobilization is important. From the research literature, we know that labour mobilizations might be initiated by trade unions or via workers' self-organization. Yet, we know little about the cultural and social processes through which individual workers come to self-organize in the first place. To address this gap, we present ethnographic research on precarious migrant …
Client Abuse to Public Welfare Workers
We analyse a case study of workers' experience of client abuse in a Danish public welfare organisation. We make an original contribution by putting forward two different theoretical expectations of the case. One expectation is that the case follows a pattern of customer abuse processes in a social market economy - in which workers are accorded power and resources, in which workers tend to frame the abuse as the outcome of a co-citizen caught in s…
Stayin' Alive on the factory floor
The improvised language of solidarity
There are considerable language barriers facing the potential collective labour organization of multi-ethnic migrant workers. From the research literature, we know little about linguistic practices that might overcome these barriers. Based on an ethnographic study of the participatory organizing of S.I. Cobas multi-ethnic migrant workers in the Italian logistics sector, we point to three linguistic practices that help overcome language barriers –…
Hearing music in service interactions
There is an extensive literature concerned with the impact of music on customers. However, no study has examined its effects on service workers and their interactions with customers. Drawing together literatures on service work and music in everyday life, the article develops a theoretical framework for exploring the role of music in service exchanges. Two central factors are identified – first, how workers hear, and respond to, the music soundsc…
We Sang Ourselves Through That War
This paper examines the role of music in women's experience of factory work in the Second World War — an important topic but one largely overlooked in the existing literature. Two important forms of music flourished in war factories — the relaying of Music While You Work through loudspeakers, and the collective singing of workgroups. Drawing on a range of sources, the paper shows that music served to both express and create community in the workp…
The Workplace Commons
One of the most important focuses in social theory within the last decade has been upon the commons. We contribute to the emerging scholarship on the commons. We point out that this literature tends to neglect the workplace. We then argue that the workplace should be included as a potentially important arena of commoning. Going to studies of the workplace, we find that scholarship has implicitly found key emergent elements of commoning within the…
Service work, social theory, and collectivism
Re-Constituting Work
Beyond bureaucracy? Work organization in call centres
Call centres are a rapidly growing, IT-based channel for service and sales delivery, particularly in the financial services and telecom industries. Although little research has been undertaken on the human resource aspects of call centres, two contrasting images are emerging. The first emphasizes the bureaucratic, constraining nature of these work settings, while the second image points towards worker empowerment characteristic of knowledge-inten…
On the Front Line
The importance of customer service is widely emphasized in business today. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the organization and dynamics of front-line work. The volume is based on a four-year study of over a thousand employees and eight leading companies in the United States, Australia, and Japan. On the Front Line reveals similarities and differences found in work environments—such as variance in authority relations and divi…
The Restrictive Practices of Capital
The engineering construction industry, 1960–80, apparently provided a classic example of the British Worker Problem. The industry was host to widespread military and suffered very poor performance. Public reports at the time made a causal link between the two. Research, however, shows the importance of employer commercial opportunism, or restrictive practices, in generating the poor performance. Examples of this opportunism included contractor fi…
Service Work in Consumer Capitalism
There is an important literature suggesting that the consumer has become a key focus of identity and figure of authority in contemporary society. Within this literature, however, there is little consideration of the role that the identification with the customer could play in management control within production, nor of the ensuing potential contradictions. This paper examines these issues in front line call centre work. Control in this setting i…
Derecognising Unions and Centralising Bargaining
There has been a recent rise in employers derecognising unions. The oil and chemical industries have been identified as critical for the analysis and practice of derecognition. This paper presents data showing that major oil and chemical firms have, on the one hand, derecognised unions for key internal staff, but on the other hand, have enforced a centralised bargaining framework for their on-site contractors engaged in the out-sourced repair, ma…
Human Resource Management in Service Work
This book fills a gap in the market for a long overdue book on HRM in the service sector. The focus on human resource management is essential to aid any understanding of the service economy and with increasing numbers of courses focusing on services rather than manufacturing, it is fast becoming a very important and neglected area in terms of textbooks.
On the Front Line
On the Front Line
On the Front Line
The importance of customer service is widely emphasized in business today. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the organization and dynamics of front-line work. The volume is based on a four-year study of over a thousand employees and eight leading companies in the United States, Australia, and Japan. On the Front Line reveals similarities and differences found in work environments--such as variance in authority relations and div…
Communities of Coping
This article argues that communities of coping among frontline service workers are an important part of what Hochschild has called `collective emotional labour' in service work. The analysis is framed in a sociological understanding of the customer as a key source of both pleasure and pain for service workers. Irate and abusive customers, who are systematically part of the social relations of the service workplace, may occasion real pain to servi…
Back-Office Service Work
Much of the current literature on service work has focused on front-line, customerfacing jobs. Research and theory suggest that while the way in which this work is organized is to a significant degree underpinned by rationalization, there is also an important customer-oriented strand in the organization of front-line work. This begs the question of how work is organized in back-officeservice work, i.e. service jobs involving work with and for the…
The Point of Selling
Although the point of selling is one of the key moments of exchange where the latent contradictions in capitalist social relations may become manifest, there is a gap in our knowledge about exactly what form of consumption takes place within sales interactions. The key contribution of this paper is that it offers an original conceptualization of the form of consumption that is promoted within the sales interaction. It argues that sales management…
Special Section on Consumption and Service Interactions
Gender and Service
We Sang Ourselves Through That War
This paper examines the role of music in women's experience of factory work in the Second World War — an important topic but one largely overlooked in the existing literature. Two important forms of music flourished in war factories — the relaying of Music While You Work through loudspeakers, and the collective singing of workgroups. Drawing on a range of sources, the paper shows that music served to both express and create community in the workp…
The invisibility of violence
This article explores the social construction of violence within the front-line context of job centres in the Employment Service (ES). The issue of violence within organizations is typically approached using positivistic methods. In contrast, this article deepens understandings of violence in organizations by using an interpretive approach. Through an analysis of data generated through an in-depth case study, this article argues that although ES …
Social Theory at Work
Work is fundamental to human society and modern organizations, and consequently has been central to the thinking of major social theorists and social science disciplines. This book offers a 'one-stop-shop' guide to classical and contemporary perspectvies of work written by leading international experts. Schools covered include: Weberian, Marxian, Durkheimian, feminist, neo-classical economics, institutional economics, ethics, Foucauldian, postmod…
Social theory at work
Instrumental music? The social origins of broadcast music in British factories
This paper explores the social origins and development of music relayed through loudspeakers in British factories during World War Two, focusing on the BBC programme Music While You Work, which provided a national soundtrack for factory work, and the contemporary institutions of Industrial Psychology, which promoted music as a highly 'valuable' accompaniment to work and formulated scientific principles governing its broadcast. Combining archival …
The Menu in Society
We live in curious times. People's sense of individual autonomy co-exists with structures of power. How do these two phenomena co-exist? An important answer to this lies in the menu. The menu operates as a key form of mediation between people's sense of individual autonomy and larger structures of power, allowing both to co-exist. This article illustrates the operation of the menu in society within consumption, within production, and within citiz…
Service work, social theory, and collectivism
Harmonious relations? Music at work in the Rowntree and Cadbury factories
The history of music in the workplace is a neglected area of study. This article explores the policies towards music in the paternalist Rowntree and Cadbury confectionery factories from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. We argue that the two firms were pioneering in their early use of music before becoming key players in the industrial welfare movement following the First World War. The broadcasting of music by Rowntree and Cadbu…
Music and Meaning on the Factory Floor
This article examines an unexplored topic within industrial sociology-the terrain of music for meaning making on the factory floor. The article is based on ethnographic research undertaken in a blinds factory. Although contemporary popular music appears to speak only rarely to the arena of work, this article shows that workers reappropriated music to articulate their experience of working in the factory. Many workers independently created meaning…
Service Work
"Everyday, we are bombarded with advertising images of the smiling service worker. The book is written with the aim of focusing beneath the surface of these fairytale images, to seek out and understand the reality of service workers' experience. Within the sociology of work and related literatures, there are an increasing number of empirical studies of different types of service work, but there has been little progress in attempts to theorize the…
Sociology (36 obras) · Political science (34 obras) · Labor Movements and Unions (25 obras) · Engineering (24 obras) · Business (22 obras) · Law (20 obras) · Economics (17 obras) · Public relations (17 obras) · Computer Science (14 obras) · Emotional Labor in Professions (14 obras)