Policy Press

The Harms of Work

An Ultra-Realist Account of the Service Economy

By Anthony Lloyd

Published

Oct 9, 2019

Page count

200 pages

Browse the series

Studies in Social Harm

ISBN

978-1529204032

Dimensions

234 x 156 mm

Imprint

Bristol University Press

Published

Oct 31, 2018

Page count

200 pages

Browse the series

Studies in Social Harm

ISBN

978-1529204018

Dimensions

234 x 156 mm

Imprint

Bristol University Press

Published

Oct 31, 2018

Page count

200 pages

Browse the series

Studies in Social Harm

ISBN

978-1529204049

Dimensions

Imprint

Bristol University Press

Published

Oct 31, 2018

Page count

200 pages

Browse the series

Studies in Social Harm

ISBN

978-1529204056

Dimensions

Imprint

Bristol University Press
The Harms of Work

As the percentage of people working in the service economy continues to rise, there is a need to examine workplace harm within low-paid, insecure, flexible and short-term forms of ‘affective labour’. This is the first book to discuss harm through an ultra-realist lens and examines the connection between individuals, their working conditions and management culture.

Using data from a long-term ethnographic study of the service economy, it investigates the reorganisation of labour markets and the shift from security to flexibility, a central function of consumer capitalism. It highlights working conditions and organisational practices which employees experience as normal and routine but within which multiple harms occur.

Challenging current thinking within sociology and policy analysis, it reconnects ideology and political economy with workplace studies and uses examples of legal and illegal activity to demonstrate the multiple harms within the service economy.

Dr Anthony Lloyd is Co-Director at the Teesside Centre for Realist Criminology and Senior Lecturer in Criminology & Sociology at the School of Social Sciences, Humanities & Law, Teesside University. His research interests include work and employment, labour markets and the leisure and service economy, consumer culture, social harm, critical criminology, youth identity and transitions, political economy, debt, social theory, class cultures, and social change.

He researches broadly on the topics of work and leisure, most recently investigating the lives of young men and women engaged in low-paid service sector jobs in the North East. He has published work in this area, including his first book, Labour Markets and Identity on the Post-Industrial Assembly Line (Ashgate, 2013).

Introduction;

Chapter 1 – Reinterpreting social harm;

Chapter 2 – Restructuring labour markets;

Chapter 3 – Organisational culture and management practice;

Chapter 4 – The absence of stability;

Chapter 5 – The absence of protection;

Chapter 6 – The positive motivation to harm;

Chapter 7 – The violence of ideology;

Conclusion.