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Bailly F. and Léné A. (2015). What Makes a Good Worker? Richard Edwards is Still Relevant. Review of Radical Political Economics. 47 (2): 176–192.

Learning Objective: LO 5-5: Apply a sociological lens to analyze modern bureaucracies.

Summary: With the economic shift from manufacturing into service industries occurring in the United States and other high-income nations since the 1970s, many employers have required their workers to develop new skills and conformity to changing organizational norms.

Questions to Consider:

1. According to the authors, are there differences in the skills necessary to participate in manufacturing verses service industry jobs? What are some of the major characteristics of these job-skill differences?
2. What was the relationship between organizational size, technical control of workers, and the numbers of workers to supervisors in production processes?
3. Compare and contrast the concepts of “technical control of workers” to “increased autonomy of new workers” for how conformity to expectations is enforced by the bureaucracy of these organizational models. What are the major similarities and differences?