The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It, edited by David Weil. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014, 424 pp., ISBN: 978 0 67472 544 7, £22.95, hardback.
| Author | Tashlin Lakhani |
| Published date | 01 March 2015 |
| Date | 01 March 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12099 |
Two limitations of the study need to be mentioned, however. First, due to scarce
information on the sampling strategy and the resulting sample, it is not clear to what
extent the experiences described are to be considered the rule or rather the ‘worst
practice’ in hospitals. Some more systematic information on the larger group of
hospital support staff in the Vancouver region, on the ‘issues of bias’ with his sam-
pling method the author admits in a footnote (p. 131), and on the distribution of the
interviewed employees across the hospitals in the city would have provided some-
what more transparency in this respect. Second, the decision to exclusively rely on
interviews with employees imposes limits on the analysis of management strategies
and the wider organizational context. Zuberi partly refers to other studies in order
to fill the gap, but without however explicitly discussing to what extent they can be
assumed to capture the current situation in the hospitals under study. In his analysis
of the failures of inspection controls, for example, he relies heavily on a case study
on one single hospital in the immediate aftermath of outsourcing. In sum, somewhat
more cautious generalizations from the empirical findings might have been appro-
priate at several instances and at the same time would not have compromised the
political conclusions Zuberi draws from the case study, since the findings clearly
allow the conclusion to be drawn that the ‘bad practices’ described in the book are
far from exceptional.
The study convincingly spells out in detail how the contracting out of presumably
‘non-core’ activities does not only affect employees’ well-being but also entails
multifaceted risks for society. By looking at the linkage between the quality of jobs
and service quality, the book adopts a perspective that is often evoked, but seldom
systematically adopted, in the literature on outsourcing.
KAREN JAEHRLING
Institute for Work, Skills and Training (IAQ)
University of Duisburg-Essen
The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be
Done to Improve It, edited by David Weil. Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
MA, 2014, 424 pp., ISBN: 978 0 67472 544 7, £22.95, hardback.
The last three decades have witnessed a changing organizational landscape as firms
have focused on separating the ‘core’ from the periphery, shedding activities seen as
adding little value to their competitive advantage. Although the business literature
has underscored the benefits of such strategies, much less attention has been paid to
what this means for the growing number of workers who find themselves in the
resulting configuration of firms, working under diverse arrangements such as inde-
pendent contracting, subcontracting, offshoring and franchising. In The Fissured
Workplace, David Weil skilfully examines what he calls the ‘fissuring’ of workplaces
— the shift from direct employment by large companies to indirect employment via
complex networks of smaller, legally independent business units — and the conse-
quences for firms, workers and society more generally.
The book opens with powerful vignettes that bring to light the pervasiveness and
employment ramifications of fissured workplaces. Companies (‘lead firms’) in a wide
variety of industries have reorganized operations and shed responsibility for employ-
ees that they once would have directly employed. As a result, these employees increas-
ingly work in smaller operations that contract with lead firms for the provision of
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Book Reviews 169
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics.
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