No abstract

Purpose -This paper deals with flexibilisation of work and employment in large-scale retailing. Its aim is two-fold: first, to highlight how an authoritarian workplace regime and normative forms of control interact, in the attempt to achieve workforce alignment to flexibility. Second, to explore how employees make sense of experienced workplace conflicts, and to what extent they are able to develop capacities to act and to influence their working conditions. Design/methodology/approach -The paper draws on a qualitative study undertaken in four large-scale retailing companies in the Italian city of Milan. It is based on 45 semi-structured, problem-centred interviews with employees, shop stewards and union officers. Findings -Analysis reveals how control manifests in "forced availability" based on individualised, informal daily flexibilisation, and sustained by resulting precarisation. Employees are active participants, as the functioning of the work organization depends on their capacity to balance in-built contradictions. Yet, their capacity to act remains limited. They are trapped by individualised concepts of labour relations: a merit-oriented understanding of work as a "fair exchange" and a personalised perception of social relations and interactions at the work place.Research limitations/implications -The research encountered challenges in accessing temporary employees due to their fear of negative repercussions. This makes the sample slightly biased towards permanent, part time and fulltime, employment. Yet, it is also an opportunity, as it makes it possible to map experiences of precarisation across different employee groups. Originality/value -Using the concepts of "coping practices", "common sense" and "capacity to act", the paper proposes to go beyond the dualisms of the resistance-control debate. It points at the contradictory and interlinked character of employees' coping practices of adaptation, appropriation, conflictive negotiation and resistance.

No abstract

The present contribution interprets current digital transformations of work and related power dynamics through the lens of Alquati's concept of hyper-industrial society. The paper starts from a re-elaboration of Alquati's thought, mainly on the basis of the re-reading of some unpublished writings dating back to the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, it takes up the categories of (a) hyper-industrialisation, (b) enhancement versus impoverishment of human capacity, and (c) machinic subjectivity, and reconsiders them in light of current technological developments. These categories are then used as tools for analyzing three work contexts in which processes of digitization appear to be particularly intense: manufacturing, banking, and work in digital distribution platforms. This empirical exploration shows how current transformations of work can be interpreted as effects of a hyper-industrial mode, understood as an abstract organizational logic capable of dividing, standardizing and reassembling objects and knowledge.