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Low-autonomy work and bad jobs in postfordist capitalism
In this article I present a critical reconstruction of the concept of postfordism, arguing for a regulation-theoretic approach that views Fordism and postfordism not in terms of production models based on a particular labour process but as institutional regimes of competition, within which there are one of four types of generic labour process: high-autonomy, semiautonomous, tightly constrained and unrationalized labour-intensive. I show that over one-third of US employment is in low-autonomy jobs and sketch an analytical framework for analysing job quality. Contrasting the four labour processes with various measures of job quality produces 18 job types that reduce to one of three job quality categories: good jobs, bad jobs and decent jobs. The typology provides a framework for analysing upgrading or downgrading of four aspects of employment quality within and across the four generic labour processes. © The Author(s) 2013.
History
School
- Loughborough University London
Published in
Human RelationsVolume
66Issue
4Pages
587 - 612Citation
VIDAL, M. 2013. Low-autonomy work and bad jobs in postfordist capitalism. Human Relations, 66(4), pp. 587-612.Publisher
© The authors. Published by SAGE JournalsVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2013Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Human Relations and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726712471406ISSN
0018-7267eISSN
1741-282XPublisher version
Language
- en