Coping with control? Retail employee responses to flexibilisation

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.

‘I didn't feel like I was alone anymore’: evaluating self‐organised employee coping practices conducted via Facebook

“…This extension comes by way of attempts to widen the concept from being largely understood as a narrow and exclusive workplace‐based phenomenon, to a phenomenon, with the help of SNS technology, based on a much wider geographical component and including members beyond the organisation. More importantly, the findings suggest SNSs allow communities of coping to exist in and between organisations where employees lack a capacity to act on a collective basis (Carls, ).…”

“…The literature on coping tends to be differentiated on the grounds of research focused on individualised forms of employee coping behaviour and group/collective forms of employee coping behaviour. Individualised coping behaviour, however, appears to be explained in large part by the lack of capacity of labour to act collectively in the work setting (Carls, ). For instance, a range of research relates individual coping behaviour to tightly controlled labour processes (Mullins, ; Hyman et al ., ) or highly individualised/precarious organisational roles (Mantler et al ., ; Jennings and McDougald, ).…”

“…Defining and describing coping is one thing, yet considering why employees seek to cope is another. Where research has sought to explore the conditions for self‐organised forms of coping, reference is often made to employment‐related problems, such as patient violence (Baines and Cunningham, ), racial discrimination (Datta et al ., ), irate and abusive customers (Korczynski, ; Sloan, ), negative spillover of work into non‐work life (Hyman et al ., ), work intensification and forced work flexibility (Carls, ; Deery et al ., ), sexual harassment (Handy, ), contradictions in emotional labour practices (Lewis, ; Filstad, ; Stroebaek, ), contradictions in organisational culture (Korczynski, ; Raz, ), isolation at work (van den Broek et al ., ; Hislop and Axtell, ), and low pay and low occupational mobility (Mullins, ). However, the employment‐related problems discussed in such research are unified in many ways.…”

“…The interviews revealed RetailCo employees experience a range of employment‐related problems similar to the problems faced by employees uncovered in previous research on self‐organised coping practices. For instance, work intensification (Carls, ; Deery et al ., ) appeared to be a concern of RetailCo employees:

We have hour‐long waits at the register. Everyone is running round the store on skeleton shift.

…”

Coping With Moral Stress in the Swedish Public Services

“…A central assumption within this emerging field of research is that coping develops new expression in relation to the contemporary exercise of power. Coping should not just be regarded as a passive adaptation, but as an expression of subjectivity as well (Bolton & Houlihan, 2009;Carls, 2009). Employees are understood as active, meaning creating participants, as the functioning of the work organization depends on their capacity to balance stress and contradictions, even if their capacity to act remains limited (Carls, 2009).…”