Efficiency and the Fix Revisited: Informal Relations and Mock Routinization in a Nonprofit Nursing Home |
| |
Authors: | Steven Henry Lopez |
| |
Institution: | (1) Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, 384 Bricker Hall, 190 E. Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210, USA |
| |
Abstract: | Participant observation in a nonprofit nursing home reveals that informal patterns of work routinization depart markedly from
official procedures designed to protect the health and safety of workers and residents. Six aspects of the informal organization
of work are found to correspond closely to patterns observed by Roy (1954): the mismatch between time and tasks, the development
of new (informal) skills, the institutionalization of rule-breaking, negative effects on quality, the collaboration of shop-level
supervision, and workers’ experience of managerial irrationality. However, whereas classic manufacturing studies emphasized
upper management's periodic attempts to force compliance to official rules and routines, here upper management engages only
in symbolic interventions, collaborating with workers and nursing home residents in the “mock routinization” of work. The
article concludes by showing how, in the context of contradictory external workplace regulation, all three parties to the
labor process of the contemporary nursing home experience mock routinization as compatible with their own interests.
|
| |
Keywords: | Routinization Bureaucracy Service work Nursing homes |
本文献已被 SpringerLink 等数据库收录! |
|