Despotism on Demand : : How Power Operates in the Flexible Workplace / / Alex J. Wood.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2020
• VerfasserIn: Wood, Alex J.,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2020]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (192 p.) :; 1 chart

Despotism on Demand draws attention to the impact of flexible scheduling on managerial power and workplace control. When we understand paid work as a power relationship, argues Alex J. Wood, we see how the spread of precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism; a novel regime of control within the workplace.Wood believes that flexible despotism represents a new domain of inequality, in which the postindustrial working class increasingly suffer a scheduling nightmare. By investigating two of the largest retailers in the world he uncovers how control in the contemporary "flexible firm" is achieved through the insidious combination of "flexible discipline" and "schedule gifts." Flexible discipline provides managers with an arbitrary means by which to punish workers, but flexible scheduling also requires workers to actively win favor with managers in order to receive "schedule gifts": more or better hours. Wood concludes that the centrality of precarious scheduling to control means that for those at the bottom of the postindustrial labor market the future of work will increasingly be one of flexible despotism.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Flexible Despotism: An Introduction -- Part 1. POWER AT WORK -- Part 2. THE DESPOTISM OF TIME -- Part 3. THE DYNAMICS OF WORK AND SPACES OF RESISTANCE -- Conclusions: Control in the Twenty-First Century -- Methodological Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index