Powerful Times: Flexible Discipline and Schedule Gifts at Work
通过两个零售业的民族志案例，研究弹性排班如何成为管理者强大且不负责任的控制工具，并导致工人不安全感，同时排班馈赠通过感激和道德义务将工人绑定于管理者利益。
This article uses two ethnographic retail case studies to investigate contemporary workplace control. The findings highlight how flexible scheduling has serious consequences for workers and causes insecurity. This provides managers with a powerful and unaccountable mechanism for securing control. The benefits for managers of using flexible scheduling to secure control are shown to be its ambiguity and flexibility. Moreover, flexible scheduling creates an environment where workers must continually strive to maintain managers’ favour. Little evidence is found to suggest that this control is aided by work games obscuring workplace relations. Flexible scheduling does, however, enable misrecognition of workplace relations due to the schedule gifts which it entails. Schedule gifts act to bind workers to managers’ interests through feelings of gratitude and moral obligation.