The Degradation of Work?: Skill, De-Skilling and the Labour Process

Originally published in 1982 and now reissued with a new Preface by Stephen Wood the contributors of this book discuss the issues surrounding the organization of labour. They use insights from industrial sociology, historical research and Marxist-Feminist debates. In particular they stress that work organization cannot be seen simply as a reflection of the strategy of an omniscient management; any examination of it must involve product and labour markets, technology, trade unionism and, above all, the way in which production systems are jointly created out of the interrelationship between management and workforces. The Degradation of Work? asks if there has been a general de-skilling and routinization of jobs and if ’skilled’ jobs are really any different from semi-skilled or unskilled ones.

Stephen Wood is Professor of Management, University of Leicester, and a Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences. He has a broad range of expertise in the study of work and employment. His recent research has centred on employee well-being, including how employee involvement, homeworking, work-life balance practices, job characteristics, and workplace abuse affects it. He is on the editorial board of Journal of Management and International Journal of Human Resource Management, and was Chief Editor of British Journal of Industrial Relations and is on its International Advisory Board. He was Deputy Director and Research Chair at the Institute of Work Psychology, University of Sheffield from 2001-2010, and Co-Director of the its Economic and Social Research Council Centre for Organisation and Innovation from 2001-2006. He is a co-author of the report on the 2011 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (B. van Wanrooy et al. (2013).