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Observations On and Around Jobs

Distinguishing the job from the person filling it is a conceptual leap we all make. What is to be done, what the job requires, is known by those most intimately involved. On the position of salesperson, for example, though dealing with vastly varied products and services the job at bottom is to assist and encourage a potential buyer to make a decision. Each particular job will have its central pattern around which are additions, subtractions, and variations.

The actual person filling a job, even while adhering to the required form, will infuse the work with own style and personality. What is actually done is both uniform and unique. This outcome varies extremely over types of work and situations. The central elements may be fuzzy, inexact, involve different interpretations. The pattern may not be clear. Variations among the concrete instances may be wildly wide. The light bulb might be replaced by a candle or a spot-light.

Still, as one who served in the old U.S. draft army can witness, the table of organization, the rules of engagement, the uniform dress and training, and actual practice in the field suggest that for certain jobs there is an official indifference to who takes it. Private soldiers are light bulbs, all standard issue and immediately replaceable.

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The degree of fidelity to the model varies considerably. In religious ritual or magical incantation exact matching of form is required. In engineering and scientific work precision is essential. Otherwise there is room for variation and initiative.

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Focus can fall on the individual or the group. Both can direct their actions toward a goal which is one element in the definition of job. An organization can be the unit of analysis. The group can even be ad hoc, assembled for the job and maintained only for the duration of the work. Movies for commercial distribution tend to be made this way. The actors and associated workers list in their biographies transient companies to which they belonged. Careers involving such episodes of work are suspenseful. There is no guarantee that one will be called again. But workers with reputations of success and skill and a popular following can have rich careers spanning years and decades. Unskilled illegals who shape-up outside of hardware stores in hopes of being picked for a private job for the day are also into episodic work as were (in the old days) shaping-up longshoremen, musicians, seamen, construction workers.

Most jobs are integrated into large conglomerations of interlocked and coordinated positions. All the actions of participants contribute toward the group’s goal. The product or service made is exchanged for money. The wage for each worker connects him to the larger exchange system of trading goods and services for money. Work and get money then turn and buy something produced by another. The money theoretically always in play, always on its merry way. Overall a giant operational and not entirely rationalized division of labor.

Those who work independently must also make arrangements with others for the exchange of product and service for money. Without money the individual has no access to needed and desired values.

There is co-ordination through the linked market transactions. A field of producers, each centering between its suppliers and customers who in turn are similarly centered. Hale, hale the gang’s all here. The circulation of goods, actions, services and money endless and no one can see beyond his own patch.

(There are other ways to get money. There’s the rub.)

But we have to recognize that job and work can take place under parallel ordering systems–like purely voluntary work, like the giving work of religious and ethical communities, like work in family, kin and friendship circles, like egoistic and private jobs and work with limited outreach. One could analyze each possibility in an attempt to get a more inclusive sociology of the job.

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A major distinction among jobs, in fact, is found in the measure of job security, Tenure for college professors and for judges just about guarantee employment for life. It assures the worker that the directions his work may lead him, even if unpopular, will not endanger his livelihood. It permits creative freedom. It presumes a high degree of autonomy and energy and originality that is not always met.

There are occasions when the job and the person seem the same, a unique unity of who one is and what one does. Robert Moses in New York City constructed a modern road system for his city by gathering funds and political permissions when conventional politicians had been unable to act because any and every decision was controversial. He lost his touch eventually just before he paved over the entire city and was never replaced. J. Edgar Hoover became the indispensable head of the federal criminal investigative agency (FBI) and transformed it into a professional elite force where before his appointment it had been limited and weakened by political influences. After his death he became a target for derision and criticism Those who have followed him have shrunk the model to the size of an ordinary lawyer. Or maybe a lock of sorts is still there, now less publicized

This tight connection of person with job is not the same as tenure nor as the charismatic inventor of the new religion who draws loyal followers and organizes them as an expression of his own personality and energetic. Yet they are not entirely the products of the organized life in which they find themselves. In a sense the Hooveresque person manipulates the existing organizational and cultural options to lock himself into his job. Dictators, trade union officials, elected politicians, managers at leadership levels and even long-time workers at a variety of line and staff jobs seem to have a key to this lock. Persistence in place suggests some kind of unique success. The key is the immunity to, or ability to ward off, challenge. Doing the job gracefully with care and craft might be all it takes. Old-timers are not all Machiavellian.

Certain blocks to the presumption of a lock-like ownership over a position can break-up this informal power of possession. Things like term limits, recall elections, public criticism. In theory and myth solid and open competition keep everyone unlocked, bags packed, ready to move on.

In the other direction is the vulnerability of the light bulbs. People are subject to dismissal without personal cause. A worker does his job well, is disciplined, loyal, cooperative, does his fair share, walks the extra mile and still loses his job because of a situation beyond his control. Down-turn in the economy, employer’s rational search for lower costs, a line of products discontinued. And out the fellow goes, sometimes after years of service.

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The stability of the person-position connect has this continuing iffy quality. There are situations and moments when the two approximate a unity. But the tendency toward split is more usual. Off the cuff examples: the temp office workers who sweep in and out of jobs regularly—easily called up and easily laid-off. They are used as a cheap alternative to permanent staff. At the university and college there is a similar stratified system—the tenured staff versus the auxiliaries, the assistants, the lecturers, the instructors with far less pay and just about no rights.

Part-time, junior, temporary, substitute, reserve, auxiliary, trainee, replacement–a tenuous lock on one’s job is not rare. The teetering between job and unemployment, in fact, has a normal quality. For some which side of this line one is on, on any given day, is an open and continuing mystery. This class of immediately vulnerable jobs and workers expands upward during hard times. It is a way to define hard times. But the threat exists for a significant portion of us all the time.

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I am back to the full-employment concept which I have been thinking might be the more appropriate social objective for our society in or out of economic crisis. But this is a political question. It does highlight a presumption about work, jobs, unemployment accepted in our society—that work is a consequence of the state of a particular type of economic order where unemployment and underemployment are not rejected outcomes. One could argue that full-employment should be one of the purposes of this order instead.

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A little more to say about jobs, we’ll revisit.

P.S. A few out-takes…..The social order for some jobs is similar to the social order of games. There is the formal expression of rule and pattern and its associated class of concrete expressions. The examples below from music and dance are simplified but point in the right direction.

The job of the symphony orchestra is to replicate in a display of sounds the invented musical piece written prior to the exhibition. The symphony is the given ideal, the model, that is repeated by organized gatherings of skilled musicians. Over time we have the model and the class of associated concrete events. In this job the central order of sound (model) is concretely reproduced.

So with the dance. Swan Lake, a sequence of established coordinated movements by a troupe of dancers replicates the ideal held in a special notation and in memory that had previously been constructed by the original composers. There is the ideal Swan Lake model that is associated with the class of concrete performances.

But then we have either the spontaneous or the slowly evolving invention of the dance where the form of the dance and the dancer seem inseparable—where we can’t tell the dancer from the dance–the creation of the thing itself. If noted and recorded or remembered it may be rendered into a model and followed with a sequence of concrete enactments based on it. The same in music where improvisation around a theme, as with jazz, can be accumulating and almost endless.

It is like a photograph of a group of people. The initial tableau frozen in the image that can later be replicated by actors with imitation clothes and physical positioning.

A central distinction of sociology—(1) the spontaneous action, the response in and to a situation, the newly created act (2) as against the recalled or imitated disciplined re-enactment.

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Observations On and Around Jobs

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