Hello, in the previous class, we discussed a little about the relationship between work and some characteristics of contemporary workers. In today's class, we will show how these new characteristics produce and are also products of new work relationships. Today's world of work, the world of organizations, in particular has produced some important transformations in work relations.
We can observe a characteristic of intensification and expansion of service practices. Even within an organization or industry, internal jobs are considered services rendered between sectors that service each other as internal clients. It is a very striking feature that service relationships, including specific monetization strongly intersect the relationships within the organizations themselves.
Parallel to this, there is a sharp decrease in procedural demands. Today, we are much more managed through products. It doesn't matter so much how you do it, but what you do, how you deliver, and especially the quality of what you deliver.
Therefore, there is greater control over deadlines. You have many more deadlines and goals to achieve. Increasingly intense goals and deadlines are interrelated so that you produce as much as possible, in less time.
This is a striking characteristic of today's world. Linked to this perception of shorter deadlines and an increase in goals, there is also this perception that there are fewer procedures, and workers sometimes have the perception of increased autonomy. But there is always, inevitably, a greater increase in the responsibility of those workers.
They are more subjected to answer for their choices, regardless of the conditions that are offered for them to make these choices. Thus, the increase in supposed autonomy is correlated with the increase in accountability. Jobs also tend to be carried out in teams, creating, on the other hand, something curious, because you are forced to work in a team and you are responsible for team goals, but your career development is always individual.
So, regardless of what your team produces, there is always a strong competitiveness with your peers, because the opportunity for career development is always individual, so there is not a very close relationship between the collective and the individual. On the contrary, there is an attempt to reconcile personal interests with the interests of the group, but everyone is forced to think first of themselves, and their own careers, and there is also a lot of hierarchical division within the organizations themselves. There are multiple levels.
It's not just the big boss and the factory floor anymore, it doesn't work that way nowadays. There are several managerial levels and a diversity of contract types. There are contracts that are permanent, temporary, outsourced, etc.
, so there is a huge range of work possibilities, bonds, and relationships, all of which make work organizations much more complex. Workers in general, and especially those who have a career ascension are also expected to have a greater affective and cognitive investment in the organization. It is expected that they have a professional, and in particular, affective bond in terms of value with the organization.
So, those famous “vision”, and “mission” statements, which may seem somewhat random and abstract, are in fact an attempt to engage and capture the worker's desire, and interest in the organization. There are also certain breakdowns of responsibility between organizational levels. So, even if the worker believes that he or she is on a career path and their responsibility increases, the structure is so complex that it feels like they never really manage to define anything.
Therefore, these new relationships make the management and control of the decision-making process much more complex than before. On the other hand, there is extreme tension between reducing production risks, a cleaner and more adequate production with less pollution, and reducing costs. There is always an increasingly intense dispute between risk reduction, problem reduction, and cost reduction so very often cost is valued more than risk.
There are also very interesting and evident changes in the continuous reformulation processes that organizations go through. They are always aiming to reduce costs and improve production efficiency. This discourse, always in the sense of making production better and cheaper, has obvious effects, like instability, and insecurity in work relationships, which are intensified in moments of crisis.
And these occasions are often used as an excuse to lay off some of the workers in order to downsize the organization, sometimes even without necessity, and this makes the remaining workers intensify their production process. More than that, those who are fired are used as an example of what not to be, as if to justify firing them for being less effective and creative. And also, with the objective of telling those who remain in the organization that they must intensify production, be more creative, involved, committed, and more resistant to change.
So, this continuous downsizing and staff improvement also has an effect of continuous instability and greater investment from the workers in their own production process. We will see in the next class that this process also has other facets that have effects on people's illness processes in the contemporary world.
