Marek Korczynski

The importance of customer service is widely emphasized in business today. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the organization and dynamics of front-line work. The volume is based on a four-year study of over a thousand employees and eight leading companies in the United States, Australia, and Japan. On the Front Line reveals similarities and differences found in work environments—such as variance in authority relations and division of labor—as well as significant contrasts between management approaches used in Japan and those used in the United States and Australia. By examining how work differs among service, sales, and knowledge-based settings, it also shows how bureaucratic, entrepreneurial, and network forms of organization coexist in the informational economy.This seminal analysis of work in the service sector offers both a benchmark for consultants working with customer-contact organizations and valuable information for anyone concerned with the changing nature of work.

This book injects a burst of energy into the sociology of work, offering a perspective that is both innovative and deeply informed. Leading sociology of work scholar, Marek Korczynski, praises the discipline’s comprehensive approach to theory, its focus on uncovering power dynamics and its ability to reveal how social injustices often stem from workplace inequalities. Offering an accessible overview of the field, the book: · analyses both the social structures around work and the voice and agency of workers; · examines the role and impact of artificial intelligence at work; · provides a consistent thread on gig work, service work and knowledge work; · has an end-section in each chapter where students are asked to put their sociological imagination to work on relevant topics. This is an enlightening exploration of sociology of work, and of the evolving world of work itself.

This book injects a burst of energy into the sociology of work, offering a perspective that is both innovative and deeply informed. Leading sociology of work scholar, Marek Korczynski, praises the discipline’s comprehensive approach to theory, its focus on uncovering power dynamics and its ability to reveal how social injustices often stem from workplace inequalities. Offering an accessible overview of the field, the book: · analyses both the social structures around work and the voice and agency of workers; · examines the role and impact of artificial intelligence at work; · provides a consistent thread on gig work, service work and knowledge work; · has an end-section in each chapter where students are asked to put their sociological imagination to work on relevant topics. This is an enlightening exploration of sociology of work, and of the evolving world of work itself.

In Songs of the Factory, Marek Korczynski examines the role that popular music plays in workers' culture on the factory floor. Reporting on his ethnographic fieldwork in a British factory that manufactures window blinds, Korczynski shows how workers make often-grueling assembly-line work tolerable by permeating their workday with pop music on the radio. The first ethnographic study of musical culture in an industrial workplace, Songs of the Factory draws on socio-musicology, cultural studies, and sociology of work, combining theoretical development, methodological innovation, and a vitality that brings the musical culture of the factory workers to life. Music, Korczynski argues, allows workers both to fulfill their social roles in a regimented industrial environment and to express a sense of resistance to this social order. The author highlights the extensive forms of informal collective resistance within this factory, and argues that the musically informed culture played a key role in sustaining these collective acts of resistance. As well as providing a rich picture of the musical culture and associated forms of resistance in the factory, Korczynski also puts forward new theoretical concepts that have currency in other workplaces and in other rationalized spheres of society.

In Songs of the Factory, Marek Korczynski examines the role that popular music plays in workers' culture on the factory floor. Reporting on his ethnographic fieldwork in a British factory that manufactures window blinds, Korczynski shows how workers make often-grueling assembly-line work tolerable by permeating their workday with pop music on the radio. The first ethnographic study of musical culture in an industrial workplace, Songs of the Factory draws on socio-musicology, cultural studies, and sociology of work, combining theoretical development, methodological innovation, and a vitality that brings the musical culture of the factory workers to life. Music, Korczynski argues, allows workers both to fulfill their social roles in a regimented industrial environment and to express a sense of resistance to this social order. The author highlights the extensive forms of informal collective resistance within this factory, and argues that the musically informed culture played a key role in sustaining these collective acts of resistance. As well as providing a rich picture of the musical culture and associated forms of resistance in the factory, Korczynski also puts forward new theoretical concepts that have currency in other workplaces and in other rationalized spheres of society.

This book fills a gap in the market for a long overdue book on HRM in the service sector. The focus on human resource management is essential to aid any understanding of the service economy and with increasing numbers of courses focusing on services rather than manufacturing, it is fast becoming a very important and neglected area in terms of textbooks.

This book fills a gap in the market for a long overdue book on HRM in the service sector. The focus on human resource management is essential to aid any understanding of the service economy and with increasing numbers of courses focusing on services rather than manufacturing, it is fast becoming a very important and neglected area in terms of textbooks.