SOCY1002 Lecture 8: The Future and Changing Nature of Work
Lecture Eight]
The Future and Changing Nature of Work
• Talking about Sociology and in particular the nature of work a particular person comes to
mind: Karl Marx
Karl Marx
• Socialism
• He is writing in the 19th Century
• Das Kapital – 1867
• Since the spread of the industrial revolution which creates gigantic factories this has changed
the shape of the landscape, which intervenes biological evolution – e.g. white bark goes to
black bark
• “Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, online lives by sucking living labour, and lives the
more, the more labour it sucks”
- It can only survive if it has the labour powers of others at its disposal
• ‘The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes
the labour-power he has purchased of him’
- While the labour is working, the capital is consuming the thing he has bought
• “If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist”
• Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times highlights the worker: being part of the herd, are reduced
to homogenous products and followers of orders by necessity, dehumanized, meant to be like
everyone else
Henry Ford
• Associate with car production
• Rationalized the production of cars on the assembling line
• Mass production
• Known for the standardization of products
• The deskilling of labour – reducing the workers to the lowest denominator
• Associated with the strict division of labour
Frederick Taylor
• Most known for the scientific management of the workplace – emphasized efficiency
• Rationalized notion of time
• Decision maker isn’t the business of the worker but the business of the employer
• He emphasized the importance of choosing the most skilled person for the tasks
• Highlighted the standardization of the methods we used for the tasks
• Western society is now not the industrial society – but often western societies outsource
industrial labour in developing nations
• Sociologists believe that most of us in the West will be engaged in ‘immaterial labour’
• Precarious labour - Work is becoming increasingly precarious – refers to unstable, irregular,
increasingly casual, work/life balance is becoming irregular
• Historical shift from the production of material things (Fordist stage) to a post Fordist stage,
increasingly involved in immaterial things (e.g. brand, idea, lifestyle of the car)
• Michael Hardt and Toni Negri mention a lot above the above point – they say the product of
immaterial labour:
