
Chris BaldryUniversity of Stirling · Stirling Management School
Chris Baldry
BSc. (Soc.Sci.); MSc.; PhD.; FRSA
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67
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Introduction
Chris Baldry is Professor Emeritus in the Stirling Management School, University of Stirling. His research interests include the future of work, technological change, and the built working environment.
Publications
Publications (67)
The introduction of open-plan (OP) academic offices is critically examined through interviews undertaken in Scotland and Australia. The development is discussed in the context of the increased managerialism in higher education. The conclusion is that, despite a rhetoric of synergy, the dominant rationale for OP is one of cost reduction and that the...
The current era has seen a number of academic and policy debates over the claimed increase in the porosity of the boundary
between the work and domestic spheres of social activity (Baldry et al., 2007; Houston, 2005; Warhurst et al., 2008). The
causes of this have been identified variously as the shift to more “flexible” forms of employment (Depart...
Following the diffusion of HRM as the dominant legitimating managerial ideology, some employers have started to see the built working environment as a component in managing organizational culture and employee commitment. A good example is where the work space is designed to support a range of officially encouraged ‘fun’ activities at work. Drawing...
The coming of the information age has been associated with widespread social transformation and new, or dissolved, class structures. Central to this claim is the emergence of `knowledge workers' including information technology professionals. While previous discussion has focused on the paradox faced by IT workers as both professionals and employee...
This article concerns the manner in which the European Union Information and Consultation of Employees (ICE) Directive has been implemented in the UK in the harsh corporate conditions of restructuring, redundancy and site closure. Drawing on interview and documentary evidence from six case companies (Peugeot-Citroën, General Motors, Prudential, Avi...
Given the widespread introduction of empowerment within the UK, this article examines meanings of the concept and the implementation of specific initiatives. From a study of thirteen organisations it is suggested empowerment has limitations and tensions including little power dissemination, close control over employees, poor prospects of extra remu...
Draughtsmen could until recently legitimately be seen as a ‘white-collar craft’ group. This article examines the degree to which Computer-Aided Design is fragmenting the cohesiveness of the drawing office, and thus threatening to undermine the craft control which has been the basis of the strength of the union, AUEW/TASS.
Here the authors examine the unions' experience of building-related sickness among their members and argue that we can no longer treat the built working environment as a neutral factor when analysing the labour process.
In recent times, a new orthodoxy has become established, claiming simultaneously to describe, explain and indeed shape contemporary economy and society. Concepts associated with the knowledge economy now permeate academic, populist, policy maker and practitioner thinking, to such an extent that they have become axiomatic nostrums informing governme...
Discussions, assertions and policy statements concerning the nature of work at the end of the twentieth century can only be fully understood if we review them against wider socio-economic contexts. These comprise both substantive and observable trends in employment and society in the UK and, given the location of this study, in Scotland, and also o...
The original title for this book was ‘Should life all labour be?’ Tennyson’s evocative summation of the duality that work has always represented in our lives: recognized for its sustaining necessity but at the same time resented for its dominance. It could be argued that, historically, the prevailing work ethic in society has striven to enhance the...
This chapter examines whether the influential analyses of the changing patterns of social class and perceptions of class identity amongst employees, symbolized by the ‘death of the working class’ thesis, are verified in our two leading new economy sectors, namely, software and call centres. These analyses concern the assumed disintegration of Marxi...
As previous chapters demonstrate, much contemporary management rhetoric is geared toward engaging the commitment of employees, exhorting them to co-operate with management demands to extend and flex working hours, to require availability to customers through call-outs, evening and weekend working and to take work home to meet required schedules.
One of the research goals was to evaluate whether, after twenty years of the HRM agenda as the new orthodoxy, work had been elevated to a more central position in employees’ lives, as measured by stated levels of organizational commitment. Despite the stated aim of integrating employment practice to company business strategy (Storey, 1992; Guest, 1...
In this, and the following chapter, we are concerned with the overarching and broadly-defined concept of organizational life, and focus on two core themes. In the present chapter we examine work organization, labour process and management control, and employee experiences and perceptions in relation to these, and explore the contrasts that exist be...
A little-discussed component of the knowledge society model has been the predicted eradication of the gendered inequalities that have been a feature of industrial capitalism. Castells (1996), for example, claimed that information and communication technologies would reverse the relegation of women to deskilled or menial jobs as historical stereotyp...
Of particular concern in this chapter is the shape of career trajectories within our exemplar areas of work and the extent to which employees are able, and choose, to identify over time with an organization or a single area of expertise. The chapter begins with a consideration of the institutional and organizational infrastructure of the two employ...
Towards the end of the century many grandiose assertions were made about changes in the workplace and what these implied for the role of work in our lives. Many of these were incorporated into the idea of the 'knowledge economy' in which working with the new technologies was supposed to be more intrinsically satisfying, knowledge workers displayed...
What is the link between working life and the nature of production on the one hand, and the changing organization of the firms and institutions in which work and production take place? In this book leading socio-economic theorists analyse how these have changed over the last two decades. They look at changing employment practices and systems of wor...
Purpose
The purpose of this research is to focus on the serious but under‐examined incidence of fatalities and injuries among rail trackworkers. It identifies the pressures on trackwork, locating them within an analysis of the economic structure of the privatised rail industry and illustrates the consequences of these pressures at the operational l...
Recent speculation about the impact on family life of contemporary patterns of work has prompted considerable and concerted social research activity in which the workplace and household have figured prominently.This article extends these studies to examine employment in prototypical new sectors of the economy, namely call centres and software, whic...
Recent evidence confirms that many working people, full-time as well as part-time, also carry significant caring and domestic responsibilities (Dex, 1999). With political and economic pressures exerted on people, including mothers, to enter into and remain in paid employment (Taylor, 2002), workers with caring responsibilities are faced with the ne...
This article fills an important gap in our knowledge of call centres by focusing specifically on occupational ill-health. We document the recent emergence of health and safety concerns, assess the responses of employers and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), critique the existing regulatory framework and present a holistic diagnostic model of o...
The paper evaluates the centrality of work to employees in two growing employment sectors, call-centres and software development. It then examines evidence for extensions of work into household and family life in these two sectors. Extensions are identified as tangible, such as unpaid overtime, or intangible, represented by incursions imported from...
The paper evaluates the centrality of work to employees in two growing employment sectors, call-centres and software development. The paper then examines evidence for extensions of work into household and family life in these two sectors. Extensions are identified as tangible, such as unpaid overtime, or intangible, represented by incursions import...
Despite the furore over safety in the British railway industry, until recently infrastructure workers concerns have largely went unnoticed. However, our research into the effect of 'contractorisation' has found a marked discrepancy between the apparent rigour of the safety case regime and the experience of the employees at track level. While strenu...
For too long the built working environment has been excluded from the analysis of work organisations. Buildings, like other cultural artefacts, encapsulate social and economic priorities and values, and represent prevailing power structures. Work buildings, such as offices and factories, both make possible the organisation of the labour process and...
For too long the built working environment has been excluded from the analysis of work organisations. Buildings, like other cultural artefacts, encapsulate social and economic priorities and values, and represent prevailing power structures. Work buildings, such as offices and factories, both make possible the organisation of the labour process and...
From the outside, the contemporary office certainly looks good: curtain walling of smoked or reflective glass, a marble-floored entrance area, perhaps an atrium with luxuriant plants (some of them real). It is a built environment clearly designed to impress the passer-by or the visiting client with the suggestion of corporate or organisational pres...
The internal and external appearances of offices are Fat; front value-free, shows this review of their built environment. Pointing to the synchronous development of office buildings, space and work. the author explains the links between changes in the physical space and in the social significance of office work., Using social and architectural hist...
Although the debate over convergence has been fuelled by two observed trends - the harmonisation of labour market conditions and the adoption of new models of employment and production - these developments seem to be going in different directions. The article distinguishes between the context of employment relations and generic changes in productio...
The primary aim of this paper is to analyse the introduction of information technology into the labour process and work experience of white-collar staff in local government. To this end we shall draw on research carried out in a large Scottish local authority, with supporting reference to other research on the municipal sector. In pursuit of this o...
It is clear from the evidence of the previous chapters that new technology isperceived by those who have to work with it as having quite profound actual and potential consequences for their working lives, even if some of this potential has yet to be realized. For this reason, the trade unions have come to the fore in much of the copious amount of a...
In international comparisons of levels of industrial conflict and “strike- proneness,” Britain usually appears towards the middle, displaying neither the high propensity for strikes of the Italians nor the very low levels of the Swedes. However, during problem periods in British industrial relations, it is not surprising that British management hav...
If the predictions as to the effects on employment were diverse, those relating to the effects on the quality of working life are perhaps even more so, ranging from a vision of future new-technology-based work being intrinsically much more satisfying, creative, and skilled than the majority of jobs created by industrialism, to the countervision of...
To say that technology affects employment seems almost a truism: as citizens of an industrial society, we intuitively expect technological changes to manifest themselves in movements both of the number of people employed and in the types of jobs that they do and the skills that these require. This is, of course, an expectation peculiar to our own h...
We have demonstrated that microelectronics has the potential to alter substantially both the quantity and the quality of work that is offered; but, as has already been cautioned, when we say it can do such a thing, this is merely a linguistic shorthand. We have seen that the way information technology develops, how it is used, and what it is used f...