Shaping Women's Work by Juliet Webster

Author:Juliet Webster [Webster, Juliet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317893486
Google: z8S3AwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 14776897
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1996-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

Office wives and office workers

I qualified as a secretary at the end of the 1970s, at a time when middle-class young women were either directed towards some kind of profession or, if they were not considered to be academically bright (which I wasn’t), learnt shorthand and typing, and went to work in offices. For a short period I worked in a variety of offices and organisations, all of which still used a collection of ‘old technologies’. Some had not even invested in electric typewriters for their secretaries; the manual versions required considerable strength to operate and a great deal of affinity with the machine. There was no automatic correction facility on these machines and mistakes had to be rubbed or ‘tippexed’ out; in fact, Tippex correction paper was considered to be the epitome of labour-saving technology for the typist.

I was lucky to have the opportunity to study at university, and my period of undergraduate study was precisely the period during which the first generation of new technologies was making an appearance in organisations. In the process, they were generating frantic speculation about their likely effects on work and on society at large. In an echo of the automation debates of the 1950s, concerns were expressed about the effects of new technology upon the nature of work – on working routines, on skills and on job satisfaction. The labour process debate of the 1970s and 1980s generated a stream of research studies into transformations taking place in many spheres of work – in engineering and technical work, assembly line work, and coal mining, for instance. Many of these early studies, however, concerned the labour processes of men; the theorising, conceptual categories and empirical focus of the labour process literature were all male-dominated.

It was, however, widely recognised that with the introduction of new technologies, one of the areas of work most susceptible to automation and to changes in work process would be the office, and that it would witness changes perhaps more dramatic than those likely to take place in factories. Indeed, the key exponent of the labour process perspective, Harry Braverman, devoted a large part of his analysis in Labor and Monopoly Capital to the imminent rationalisation of office work, which he saw as a critical element in the transformation of modern work. Yet it was left to feminist writers to point out the gender-blindness of the analysis of Braverman and his followers (West, 1978; Beechey, 1982), to stress that office work is predominantly performed by women, and to argue that certain office jobs -especially secretarial jobs – are characterised by peculiar relations of control based on patriarchy which are very different from those operating in other workplaces (Benet, 1972; Barker and Downing, 1980; Pringle, 1988). Changes in women's office work could not simply be read off from a conventional labour process analysis, but required in addition a feminist perspective – an understanding of the nature of ‘skill’ in women's work, and a recognition of the gender relations creating power and subordination in the office.

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