Thursday 12 April 2012 at 14:00 - 15:30


WORK, EMPLOYMENT AND ECONOMIC LIFE RECESSION


McCann, L., Granter, E., Hassard, J., Hyde, P Casting the Lean Spell: Mechanisms of Hope in NHS Restructuring


Many public sector workplaces are claiming to adopt 'lean' operations as they attempt to cut costs and increase efficiency in times of austerity. This paper explores the adoption of lean principles in an NHS Foundation Trust hospital ('Milltown Hospital') through ethnographic observation of lean training events and an analysis of local textual and visual lean-promoting materials. Exploring both the 'selling' and the 'buying' of lean the paper analyses the complex dynamics of hope, expectation, resistance and disappointment surrounding lean adoption. Observations of managers and medical practitioners in the hospital demonstrated highly ambiguous relationships to lean. On the one hand lean is attractive as a dynamic new system that can galvanize staff in their efforts to improve the workings of their parts of the hospital. On the other hand it is also unattractive given its agenda of heavy standardization, something that was often described as untenable in the context of healthcare work. We argue that it is useful, up to a point, to interpret lean as a 'mechanism of hope' (Brunsson 2006); lean is a managerial ideology around which legitimacy can be generated for cost-cutting measures. But the data also demonstrates the radical ambiguity and malleability of lean in practice. As champions of lean respond to critics and sceptics, the meaning of lean is stretched until it becomes absurd and meaningless, thereby stripping it of the functional role that Brunsson attributes to mechanisms of hope.


Kennedy, P. Deconstructing the Age of Austerity


As with most professional bodies funded by tax-paying citizens, Sociology aspires to be of service to the public. One public service offered by Sociology is the deconstruction of language that disempowers and misleads citizens. 'The Age of Austerity' is one such language game, constructing in its wake potential beneficiaries and losers under the guise of 'we are all in it together', while also disguising how 'austerity' is but one possible political and economic project announced to manage a profound crisis of capitalism, stretching across the social, (geo)political and economic fabric of society.


Through analysis of key Government policy documents, business and trade union media, this paper demonstrates how the rhetoric of 'the age of austerity' protects vested interests, shores up neo-liberalism and prevents discussion of more profound alternatives. The paper will also address the proposition that public interest in and support for Sociology will grow in line with Sociology's willingness to not only consider what 'the age of austerity' may hold for the fate of Sociology as a discipline, or how 'the age of austerity' might impact on employment trends and working life, etc., but also in line with its willingness to engage with a critical analysis of the wider crisis engulfing economy and state and to discuss the more fundamental social changes required to resolve it.


Atkinson, W.J. Time and Class Habitus: The Case of Employment Insecurity


This paper examines the consequences of the recent economic downturn and current and impending government spending cuts, as exacerbations of prevailing trends in neo-liberal employment policy, on temporal perception, specifically as it relates to the adaptation of subjective anticipations of and projections into the future to objective prospects by


class. Grounded in a phenomeno-Bourdieusian conceptualisation of class and time and


contextualised by statistics on chances of job loss, it draws on intensive qualitative research - including interviews, observations and time diaries - with 29 families from across the social spectrum, as well as users of a debt advice agency in Bristol, to chart differing dispositions toward the future. Firstly, the dominant class, while displaying some anxieties toward the to-come and temporary disorientation when redundancy has befallen them, generally possess a secure, stable perception of the long-term future assuming career progression, largely thanks to a sense of being 'future-proofed' by their knowledge and skills (cultural capital) or their savings and redundancy packages (economic capital). Secondly, those more in the intermediate zone of social space are less secure but, due to their social and technical capital, seem fairly confident of their possibilities and cautiously project realisable long-term plans. Finally, those in the dominated class are generally oriented more toward the immediate or short-term future (solving the problems of necessity) and either exhibit a mix of fatalism and cynicism about the time ahead or, especially its lower sections, retreat into unrealistic fantasies and dreams.


207 University of Bristol Glasgow Caledonian University ROGER STEVENS 21 University of Manchester


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