Discussion Points
All of these ‘thinking activities’ can be done by the individual reader on their own. But they are also designed to create interesting and lively discussions in pairs or groups.
Chapter 1
Try to think of some work-related ‘personal troubles’ that you have experienced or come across and then subject them to the sociological imagination and try to connect them to some bigger ‘public or ‘structural’ issues.
Taking Snapshot 1.3 as a starting point, think up a work-related research project that you would like to be involved in and consider the various research methods that might be used in that study
Chapter 2
Look at the events covered in Snapshot 2.3 and consider where and when you might have experienced or observed anything like this in your own life – in your studies or in any workplace you might know about.
Read what John has to say in Snapshot 2.6 and consider any parallels that might exist in your own (or perhaps a friend’s or relative’s) life.
Chapter 3
Starting from Snapshot 3.3, think about your own experiences of ‘technology’, whether it be in a workplace or in your study or leisure activities, and consider how relevant or irrelevant the actor-network insight is to you.
Think back to what the term ‘globalisation’ might have meant to you before you read about it in chapter 3 and then say how different your view of it is in the light of the discussion in the chapter.
Chapter 4
With reference to any organisation you have experienced or are currently experiencing (at work or in studies), identify where bureaucratic features might be seen as working to help the organisation function well and where they might be seen as hindering effectiveness.
Look at the list of ‘expressions’ of culture on page 117-118 and attempt an analysis of any organisation you have worked or studied in along the lines of the analysis of the cultural features of Begley’s Foods in Snapshot 4.5.
Chapter 5
Taking Snapshot 5.1 as your starting point, reflect on how convinced you by the argument that what managers are ultimately required to do by the employing organisations is, as Andrew Swan puts it, to keep the organisation ‘on the road’.
Think about how you would personally react to an employer you worked for wanting you to identify very closely with that organisation in the way that advocates of ‘strong’ organisational cultures seem to advocate.
Chapter 6
Think about whether it is at all possible to envisage a society whose occupational structure was not fully complicit in the maintenance of class, status, ethnic and gender inequalities.
After reading the section on ‘domestic work’, reflect on the extent to which the household you live in (or any other with which you are familiar) fit into the type of gender-related division of labour that we see to be dominant in societies which sociologists have investigated.
Chapter 7
Look at what Wei Lei says in Snapshot 7.1 and think about what role any kind of ‘work ethic’ has played in your own life and, perhaps, the lives of your relatives or friends.
What ‘social-identities’ have influenced you or have been ‘drawn upon’ by you in developed your own self-identity would you say?
Chapter 8
Consider the extent to which your own experiences or observations lead you to agree with the statement, ‘Although it is true that some workplace are characterised by a high degree of conflict and dispute whilst other are much more peaceful to work in, it is nevertheless the case that a conflict-free workplace is an impossibility’.
Think of as many examples as possible of joking and humour that you have taken part in or observed in organisational settings where you have studied or worked and consider what function these might have played in those settings beyond the obvious function of amusing people.