Job Design Meets Organizational Sociology

The world of work has seen a vast transformation in the three decades since Hackman and Oldham published their foundational research on work redesign. At the broadest level, the US has nearly completed the transition from a manufacturing to a service economy foretold by Daniel Bell (1973). By 2010, perhaps as little as 10 per cent of the American workforce will be employed in agriculture and manufacturing—growing food and making things. During the years of the Bush administration, the manufacturing sector suffered a net loss of 4.2 million jobs—about one in four. Although the steep decline in manufacturing employment is often attributed to offshoring, another fundamental source of job loss is productivity growth. The US still leads the world in manufacturing value added, with almost one-quarter of the world’s total. It simply no longer takes as many people to accomplish this. Just as 1 per cent of the population is sufficient to produce all the food we need, it is possible to foresee a time when less than 5 per cent of the workforce produces all the manufactured goods we need. Where are the jobs now? Today, nine of the 12 largest American employers are in retail or fast food. (In descending order, these are Wal-Mart, UPS, McDonald’s, Target, Kroger, AT&T, Sears Holdings, Home Depot, Verizon, Walgreen, Lowe’s, and Safeway). Wal-Mart alone employs more Americans than the 15 largest manufacturers combined. Thus, the modal job in America today involves selling things, not making them. There is also greater job insecurity at a macro level. Economist Alan Blinder (2006) estimates that in a global economy with widespread access to high-speed internet connections (that is, Thomas Friedman’s ‘‘flat world’’), 40 million jobs in the US are at risk of going offshore, from tutoring students and collecting debts to processing tax returns and reading X-rays. This is an unprecedented shift, increasing the level of competition among laborers around the world. Since the US has historically lacked a substantial welfare state and instead left it to employers to provide for health care and retirement security, the risks of such transitions are great. (Davis, 2009: Chapter 6 provides a grim assessment of the contemporary world of work in the US.) For the jobs that remain, the reorganization of work through successive waves of outsourcing and vertical dis-integration has meant that many more employees are stuck in jobs without career ladders. When the mailroom was an entry-level position, young workers could aspire to move up within the company, but now the mailroom is operated by a specialized contractor, as are payroll, accounting, and maintenance. Far more jobs today are dead-ends compared to the situation in previous generations, which limits the tools available to those managing the workforce and constrains economic mobility for employees (Applebaum, Bernhardt, & Murnane, 2003; Corak, 2004).