Scientific Management
Title:Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life.
Author(s):Rob B. Briner.
Source:Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 69.n3 (Sept 1996): p.p311(3). (2073 words) From Expanded Academic ASAP.
Document Type:Magazine/Journal
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Full Text :COPYRIGHT 1996 British Psychological Society (UK)
Perhaps the most puzzling and disappointing feature of the discipline of psychology is just how little it helps us to understand ordinary human behaviour. I would guess that most of us started to study psychology in the vain hope that it would provide us with profound insights into why people do things. However, we soon come to learn that psychology isn't quite like that. Although it does help us to understand some aspects of human behaviour, it does not consider the ordinary and mundane aspects of life - the everyday ebb and flow - which seem to characterize much of our actual experience. The same is also true of the contribution occupational and organizational psychology makes to understanding everyday working life. However, each of these books, written not by occupational and organizational psychologists but by sociologists and organizational behaviour researchers, helps to shed some light on ordinary work experience.
In Fast Food. Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life Robin Leidner offers a rich, illuminating and compelling account of the ways in which work experience can be heavily routinized and, in some cases, quite literally scripted for service workers. Although the parallels with Taylorism are obvious, Leidner refuses to make obvious comparisons and easy moral judgments. Rather, through interviews and participant observation in two organizations she provides a detailed description and analysis of how service workers learn and perform routinized work.
Following two introductory...
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