Session Information
32 SES 09, Organizational Culture and Organizational Learning. Studies on Companies and Schools
Paper Session
Contribution
According to the conference theme this abstract is about leading of learning about ‘what works’ in organizations that to a relatively high cost hire staff. The purpose is to develop an understanding of the dimensions of power that can be associated with attempts to exert influence at work. The main argument is that temporary staff does not always follow the same rational and functional use as hired staff, but is instead often coloured by intergroup relations in terms of “us” and “them”. The research question that will be answered in this study is: What power mechanisms perceived by temporary staff and regular staff are expressed in connection with temporary staffs’ potential access to knowledge about a) the Client Company (CC) in its entirety where they are leased, b) the CC’s various areas of activity, and c) how various issues are determined?
The study’s key concepts are influence, politics, and power. Influence, which is an important form of collaboration, refers to “all such cases of co-operative activity, where individuals or groups significantly affect one another in the absence of a conflict of interest between them” (Lukes, 2005, 35). It is the possibility to influence power that is the focus of this study.
The roots to the concept of power are found in political theory and political philosophy (Clegg, 1989). It is therefore important to describe the origin in political science of the dimensions of a desire for, and a limitation of, influence. The basis of the dimensions is a definition of politics as reported in the Wall (2011). Wall believes that “politics can be understood as an event within the regulated forms where the realisation of a controversial content takes place” (19). The implication of this definition is that politics may have different content as long as it within regulated forms is about an event with a controversial content. This means that politics is not exclusively associated with affairs of state, but can also involve patterns of behaviour and approach in other areas. With the help of the dimensions of polity, policy, and politics, Wall divides the political process into knowledge of “the political system [polity], different political areas [policy], and how a decision will be made [politics]” (20).
The area of influence that is relevant in this context is the work organisation, and specifically the relationship between temporary and regular staff within the client company. Wall’s (2011) definition gives us a framework for analysis, in which politics constitutes the regulated forms of labour law and its applicable laws and agreements, the course of events is associated with staff hiring, and the controversial content is represented by the discussions and eventual differences of opinion in temporary staffs’ view of the CC’s work organisation (polity), its different areas of activity (policy), and how various issues are determined within the it (politics).
Power means “the ability to constrain the choices of others, coercing them or securing their compliance, by impeding them from living as their own nature and judgement dictate” (Lukes, 2005, 85). In this study power mean that a party’s interest of influence is promoted and protected at the same time, as another party’s interests are disadvantaged. Because the study uses the perceptions of influences as its object, at the analytical level the attempt to influence that the research persons perceive is manifested when agency staff acts in a CC.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Atkinson, J. (1984). “Manpower strategies for flexible organisations.” Personnel Management 16: 28–31. Atkinson, J. (1987). “Flexibility or fragmentation? The United Kingdom labour market in the eighties.” Labour and Society 12 (1): 87–105. Augustsson, G. (2012). “The organizational control of temporary workers: An interview study in Sweden.” International Journal of Management 29 (3): 48-63. Augustsson, G. (2014). “Temporary and Regular Workers Fulfill Their Tasks Side-by-Side, But in Different Learning Conditions.” Journal of Workplace Learning 26 (2): 79-90. Augustsson, G. (2015). “The client company marginally utilizes the knowledge of highly-skilled temporary staff.” Journal of Education and Work, 10.1080/13639080.2014.997681. Augustsson, G., & Rasmusson, M. (2015) “Unstructured skills transfer between regular and temporary staff in project organized business.” Accepted to ECER 2015, Education and Transition. Contributions from Educational Research, Budapest, Hungary, September 7-11, 2015. Clegg, S. R. (1989). Frameworks of power. London: Sage. Connelly, C. E., Gallagher, D. G., & Webster, J. (2011). “Predicting temporary agency workers’ behaviors: Justice, volition, and spillover.” Career Development International, 16 (2): 178–194. doi:10.1108/13620431111115622. Elias, N., & Scotson, J. L. (1994). The established and the outsiders: a sociological enquiry into community problems. 2. ed. London: Sage. Ercikan, K., & Roth, W.-M. (2006). “What Good Is Polarizing Research into Qualitative and Quantitative?” Educational Researcher, 35 (5): 14–23. doi:10.3102/0013189X035005014. Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mertens, D. M. (2012). “What comes First? The Paradigm or the Approach.” Journal of Mixed Methods Research 2 (4): 255–57. doi:10.1177/1558689812461574. Olsson, E. (2015). Inhyrd personal för miljardbelopp [Agency staff for billions]. SvD Nyheter. As if December 29, http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/inhyrd-personal-for-miljardbelopp_7230723.svd. Rundberg, H. (2014). Kostnader för inhyrd personal skenar [Payments for agency staff runaway]. Svt.se Nyheter Regionalt. Retrieved December 29, 2015, from http://www.svt.se/nyheter/regionalt/abc/kostnader-for-inhyrd-personal-skenar. STA. (2015). Vem gör vad av myndigheterna inom transportområdet? [Who is doing what among the authorities in the STA sector?] Retrieved November 4, 2015, from http://www.trafikverket.se/om-oss/var-verksamhet/korta-fakta-om-trafikverket/vem-gor-vad-av-myndigheterna/Vem-gor-vad-av-myndigheterna-inom-transportomradet/ Wall, P. (2011). EU-undervisning. En jämförelse av undervisning om politik på nationell och europeisk nivå [EU-teachings. A comparison of teaching about politics at national and European level]. Fakulteten för samhälls- och livsvetenskaper, Statsvetenskap, Karlstad University Studies 2011:14. Yin, R. K. (1994). Case study research: design and methods. 2. ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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