Occupational health and safety (OHS) is under-researched in the sociology of work and employment. This deficit is most pronounced for white-collar occupations. Despite growing awareness of the significance of psychosocial conditions – notably stress – and musculoskeletal disorders, white-collar work is considered by conventional OHS discourse to be ‘safe’. This study’s locus is clerical processing in the UK public sector, specifically Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, in the context of efficiency savings programmes. The key initiative was lean working, which involved redesigned workflow, task fragmentation, standardization and individual targets. Utilizing a holistic model of white-collar OHS and in-depth quantitative and qualitative data, the evidence of widespread self-reported ill-health symptoms is compelling. Statistical tests of association demonstrate that the transformed work organization that accompanied lean working contributed most to employees’, particularly women’s, ill-health complaints.

Despite their continuing importance to the UK economy and their employment of significant numbers of workers from a range of professions, the utilities have received scant attention from critical scholars of work. This neglect represents a missed opportunity to examine the impact of nearly twenty years of privatisation and marketisation on workers, their jobs and their unions. This thesis aims to make a contribution to knowledge here by investigating, contextualising and explaining changes in the labour processes of a privatised utility in the United Kingdom. The research is informed by oral history methods and techniques, rarely adopted in industrial sociology, and here used alongside labour process theory to reconstruct past experiences of work. Drawing on qualitative data sets, from in-depth interviews with a cohort of employees who worked continuously over three decades at the research site, British Gas’s Granton House, and on extensive company and trade union documentary evidence the research demonstrates how British Gas responded to restrictive regulation and the need to deliver shareholder value by transforming pre-existing forms of work organisation through introducing call centres. The call centre provided the opportunity for management to regain control over the labour process, intensify work and reduce costs. In doing so, the study identifies the principal drivers of organisational change, documents the process of change evaluates the impact on workers’ experience. Thus, as a corrective to much recent labour process theory the research offers both an ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ account of change over an extended time. The contrast between workers’ experience of working in the clerical departments and in the call centre could not be starker. Almost every element of work from which workers derived satisfaction and purpose was abruptly dismantled. In their place workers had to endure the restrictive and controlling nature of call centre work. The relative absence of resistance to such a transformation is shown to be a consequence of failures in collective organisation, rather than the totalisation of managerial control, as the postmodernists and Foucauldians would have it.

This thesis is a case study about the choices and constraints faced by women clerical workers in a labour market where they have very little autonomy in negotiating their pay and conditions of employment. On the one hand, clerical work has developed as a feminised occupation with a history of being low in status and low paid. On the other hand, it is an ideal occupation for women wanting to combine work and family across their life cycle. How these two phenomena impact upon women clerical workers ability to negotiate enterprise agreements is the subject of this thesis. From a theoretical perspective this thesis builds upon Catherine Hakim�s preference theory which explores the choices women clerical workers� make in relation to their work and family lives. Where Hakim�s preference theory focuses on the way in which women use their agency to determine their work and life style choices, this thesis gives equal weighting to the impact of agency and the constraints imposed by external structures such as the availability of part-time work and childcare, as well as the impact of organisational culture. The research data presented was based on face-to-face interviews with forty female clerical workers. The clerical workers ranged in age from 21 to 59 years of age. The respondents were made up of single or partnered women without family responsibilities, women juggling work and family, and women who no longer had dependent children and were approaching retirement. This thesis contends that these clerical workers are ill placed to optimise their conditions of employment under the new industrial regime of enterprise bargaining and individual contracts. Very few of the women were union members and generally they were uninformed about their rights and entitlements.

This thesis is a case study about the choices and constraints faced by women clerical workers in a labour market where they have very little autonomy in negotiating their pay and conditions of employment. On the one hand, clerical work has developed as a feminised occupation with a history of being low in status and low paid. On the other hand, it is an ideal occupation for women wanting to combine work and family across their life cycle. How these two phenomena impact upon women clerical workers ability to negotiate enterprise agreements is the subject of this thesis. From a theoretical perspective this thesis builds upon Catherine Hakim�s preference theory which explores the choices women clerical workers� make in relation to their work and family lives. Where Hakim�s preference theory focuses on the way in which women use their agency to determine their work and life style choices, this thesis gives equal weighting to the impact of agency and the constraints imposed by external structures such as the availability of part-time work and childcare, as well as the impact of organisational culture. The research data presented was based on face-to-face interviews with forty female clerical workers. The clerical workers ranged in age from 21 to 59 years of age. The respondents were made up of single or partnered women without family responsibilities, women juggling work and family, and women who no longer had dependent children and were approaching retirement. This thesis contends that these clerical workers are ill placed to optimise their conditions of employment under the new industrial regime of enterprise bargaining and individual contracts. Very few of the women were union members and generally they were uninformed about their rights and entitlements.

Автор осуществляет теоретико-правовой анализ информационно-документационных технологий кадровой работы, выявить специфику их применения в органах местного самоуправления (МСУ) и разработать проект, направленный на их совершенствование. Метод исследования - основан на применении классических научных методов и приемов, на основе особенностей информационно-документационные технологии кадровой работы в органах местного самоуправления. Вместе с тем, в процессе выполнения магистерской диссертации были использованы различные подходы: экономический, индексный, сравнительный, экспертный, статистический, дедуктивный, т. д. Таким образом, проведенная работа подтверждает актуальность развития информационно-документационные технологии кадровой работы в органах местного самоуправления и демонстрирует возможность широкого практического применения разработанных методов по внедрению новых модулей в 1С 8 Предприятие, позволяющих не только оценивать текущую ситуацию, но и осуществить повышение эффективности информационно-документационных технологий кадровой работы Администрации города Екатеринбурга. / The author carries out a theoretical and legal analysis of information and documentary technologies for personnel work, identifies the specifics of their application in local authorities (LSGs) and develops a project aimed at improving them. The research method is based on the application of classical scientific methods and techniques, based on the peculiarities of information and documentation technologies of personnel work in local governments. At the same time, in the process of completing the master's thesis, various approaches were used: economic, index, comparative, expert, statistical, deductive, etc. Thus, the work carried out confirms the relevance of the development of information and documentation technologies for personnel work in local governments and demonstrates the possibility of wide practical application of the developed methods for introducing new modules in 1C 8 Enterprise, allowing not only to assess the current situation, but also to increase the efficiency of information and documentation technologies of personnel work of the Administration of the city of Yekaterinburg.