Loughborough University
Browse
Vidal_for SAGE_261112 - MV final proof.pdf (195.64 kB)

Low-autonomy work and bad jobs in postfordist capitalism

Download (195.64 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2017-11-24, 15:40 authored by Matt VidalMatt Vidal
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 Relations

Volume

66

Issue

4

Pages

587 - 612

Citation

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 Journals

Version

  • 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

2013

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Human Relations and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726712471406

ISSN

0018-7267

eISSN

1741-282X

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC