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Juliet Webster and Keith Randle Eds., Virtual Workers and the Global Labour Market (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), ISBN: 978-1-137-47918-1

Virtual workers need careful definition in order to distinguish them from other types of ubiquitous digital labour. Drawing on a growing literature in this field, this introductory chapter suggests that virtual workers have three distinguishing features: they are spatially dispersed, they are precarious, and the boundaries in their lives—as well as our analytical boundaries—are being progressively dismantled. The chapter considers the class, gender, and race dynamics of virtual work, arguing that virtual workers are not classless, nor are they a new class. Their diversity makes them difficult to place and their likely class identity complex, but continuities with earlier forms of work are clearly apparent in virtual work.

This paper compares women's employment in two contrasting areas of the labour market, both of which involve computing work to some degree. First, the paper considers an established area of women's work, financial services, where women have traditionally and been employed principally in junior clerical and cashiering functions, in what constitutes a secondary labour market separate from the professional and managerial occupations dominated by men. Although this has historically been manual clerical work, the financial services sector has become a major user of information technology systems and networks, and many jobs in this sector, even at the most junior levels, involve a significant element of computing work. The paper then examines a newly emerging area of women's work, namely, employment in new media, where technical work is central to the job. The paper discusses the work and technical skills involved, the conditions of work and women's experiences of working with technology. It also consid...

This paper considers the skills and development prospects of women working in European services. Skills are increasingly job-specific, including the relational skills necessary to the delivery of customer service. Formal training is declining and being replaced by informal learning techniques. Opportunities to acquire comprehensive or transferable skills are rare, as are women's progression opportunities in the ‘knowledge society’.

This paper contributes to current debates about gender, work and skill in the service economy, focusing specifically on the case of women’s employment in telephone call centres. The paper asks whether call centre employers are capitalising on women’s ‘feminine’ social skills, and examines the degree to which these skills are being developed, acknowledged and recognised.

This paper is concerned with the work experiences and career opportunities of women employed in technology-intensive offices known as telephone 'call centres'. Call centres have grown rapidly across Europe in recent years, creating a significant number of new jobs and receiving considerable attention within the media, business and academic communities. However, despite the fact that the majority of call centre jobs have been taken by women, researchers have so far paid little attention to their position in this new 'industry'. The article addresses this research gap. In particular, it is concerned with the question of whether call centre work is offering women new opportunities for skill development and career progression, or whether a more familiar trend is taking place in which women are being drawn into a highly routinized, 'de-skilled' and de-valued area of work. The paper also uses the specific example of call centre work in order to reflect on broader issues about the changing nature of women's work...

This article sets out the conceptual and analytical framework underlying a 3-year long, 8-country research project which will examine the dynamics of women's employment in sectors critical to the so-called 'Information Society'. The project is fundamentally concerned with the gender dynamics of employment in the 'Information Society' or 'Knowledge Economy', and with whether they signal potentially greater gender equity than we currently have in contemporary capitalist society. Specifically, the project's central objective is to examine the prospects for women workers to develop new forms of expertise and skill which promote their career and personal development potential. It will focus on women's work and employment in two growing service sectors, retailing and retail financial services, in the context of leading edge innovations in technology and work organization. This article outlines the thinking behind the research project, in particular the major conceptual frameworks and the research questions whic...

This article considers the development of Computer Aided Production Management as a function of paradigms of work organization. CAPM design has been heavily influenced by manufacturing fashions—U.S. models of centralized production, and now, Japanese manufacturing methods. CAPM implementation is an important site for further technological innovation. To make CAPM workable in local conditions, users have to expend considerable effort in system customization. Case studies demonstrate how these systems are reconfigured when the standardized structures and rigid procedures of CAPM fail to fit users' own idiosyncratic manufacturing circumstances. Innovation therefore continues into the implementation stage of a technology's development.

In many contemporary discussions of service employment, considerable emphasis is placed on services with a high knowledge content. Immaterial, ‘weightless’, knowledge-intensive services, particularly services which can be provided and consumed using information and communications, have for the past decade been seen as central to the health and continuing development of European economies. These high-end ‘knowledge-intensive services’ have been treated in social, economic and regional policies as the drivers of economic development, the means by which countries, regions and organizations can grow, create wealth and secure competitive advantage (Hauknes 1996). Human capital is one of the key resources in the creation and development of these services, the element which adds value to specialized activities in design, marketing, programming, engineering, management, consultancy, and that which drives innovation in all these and other service areas.

Concepts of technological paradigms and trajectories have been advanced to explain patterns of technical innovation and their implications for work organization and content. This article examines three existing technologies where some trajectory has been imputed—computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools, robotics and office automation—and one emerging technology—computer-aided production management (CAPM). It reviews the ways in which these technologies were initially conceived and developed, how they were implemented, and how they have evolved in use. Existing frameworks are oversimplified and unhelpful both as theories and as guides to practice. Detailed examination of the implementation of technologies offers a more dynamic understanding of processes of innovation and the relationship between technological and organizational change. These insights are particularly relevant to the analysis of organizationally complex technologies such as IT networks.

This paper considers the ways in which technologies are underpinned by patterns of work organisation and power relations in manufacturing industry. It takes as its starting point the emergence of manufacturing technologies during the Industrial Revolution, showing how these were imbued with the methods of factory organisation which were then gaining currency - the visions of industrial entrepreneurs, engineers and political economists. Technologies have continued to be associated with particular patterns of work organisation, both actual and envisioned. The major concern of the paper is with a contemporary manufacturing technology, Computer-Aided Production Management (CAPM). It shows how CAPM has developed according to the dominant templates of manufacturing organisation - first American and now Japanese. It charts the growth of the ‘enterprise culture’ in the West — a discourse which stresses flexibility and prescribes production methods, such as just-in-time, which mimic those of the Japanese. It looks at the promotion of CAPM as a technology which can assist in this process and at the incorporation within CAPM of facilities for doing so. Finally, the paper shows that these manufacturing agendas are not easily implemented. CAPM user organisations find the technology inappropriate to their existing patterns of work, and so modify systems to fit these. CAPM technology therefore embodies patterns of work organisation at several levels. It incorporates both the dreams and programmes for work organisation which are promoted by the industrially powerful at anyone time, and the actual practices of work organisation which pertain in the sphere of use.

Employment in IT professions has increased greatly in recent years. Aside from the crisis of the dot.com crash in 2001, there has been significant growth in hardware manufacturing and particularly in software and IT services. In the European Union, employment in computer services doubled between 1997 and 2001, and grew by 10% in 1998 alone. This pattern has not been matched by a parallel increase in women’s participation in IT work. Women’s employment in IT has remained resolutely around an average of 28% across the EU; in the professional areas of IT work (as opposed to clerical and other non-professional occupations), women made up only 17% in 2001 and their representation is in fact declining (Millar, 2001; Millar & Jagger, 2001; Webster & Valenduc, 2003). It is an issue of some concern to policy makers, employers, and indeed gender equality practitioners that, despite more than 20 years of attempts to attract women into this comparatively well paid and privileged area of the labour market, women remain such a small and, worse, apparently declining, proportion of IT professionals. Why are women still so poorly represented in IT professions in the EU? What is the nature of working life in IT and what are the working conditions like? Why have more than 20 years of initiatives to get more women into technology professions had so little apparent impact?

CAPM systems have been promoted as offering a straightforward and orderly means for improving control over the coordination and planning of production. However medium-sized manufacturing firms in the UK have faced enormous difficulties in implementing CAPM packages. The capacities of computer-based systems have not matched the needs and practices of user organisations, which often do not possess the formalised systems of production planning and control that CAPM requires. As a result systems have been only partly installed and existing packages have been extensively ‘customised’. In many cases CAPM has not delivered the expected benefits and has been abandoned. The paper contrasts the ways in which CAPM was promoted with the experience of implementing CAPM in three case-studies. The imputed ‘technological trajectory’ in the computerisation of manufacture, in which CAPM was seen as a stepping-stone to Computer-Integrated Manufacture, has not materialised. Instead of this ‘technology-led’ approach, current thinking emphasises the contribution of the user firm to developments in manufacturing practice. In place of standard CAPM packages, niche-specific versions have been created in the attempts to implement CAPM. And alternative approaches to the coordination of production are gaining currency, which emphasise organisational innovations such as Just-In-Time and group working.

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the changing nature of British populations. The data source on Britain's ethnic minorities is the decennial census that includes the respondent's country of birth. However, this involves accepting a definition of ethnicity based on immigrant status—that is, being born abroad, as the census does not separate those born to immigrant parents from the indigenous population. Apart from the Irish, who in 1981 constituted the largest single group of immigrants to the United Kingdom, most immigrants are either of Indian subcontinent or West Indian origin, and this is only since the 1950s. The process of commonwealth immigration to Britain was not uniform but was characterized by peaks and troughs in which different groups came in response to differing demands in the British labor market and as a result of immigration controls in the early 1960s. Migration of West Indians and those from India was well under way during the 1950s, and the former made up the bulk of immigrants during that decade. Indian and Pakistani arrivals did not become substantial until the 1960s. In 1961, when immigration from the Indian subcontinent became significant, only 4818 or 15% of the 39,737-strong Pakistani community were women. This discrepancy shows the difference in number and composition of men and women in each immigrant group. Immigration from the Caribbean has always included more women and by 1971, they had overtaken their male counterparts and continued to do so in 1981.