Book Review: Wilfredo Alvarez, Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor

Abstract

also a new chapter on bullying, which, as the authors point out, has gone from being little discussed to being a central theme in accounts of poor workplace treatment. Additionally, the chapter on sexual misbehaviour has been thoroughly reworked to better reflect contemporary concerns and experiences. This chapter and the one on humour, previously provided lucid accounts of workplace undercurrents (dynamics that I also found present in my PhD research into contemporary retail work); but were somewhat one-sided, ignoring the darker side that such activities frequently take on. Conceptually, a major addition is an extended discussion of the location of misbehaviour within ‘managerial regimes’. This chapter concludes that low trust, high regulation ‘direct control regimes’ of the Fordist/Taylorist era have, at least partially, been displaced by hybrid ‘after-Fordist’ regimes. These high involvement, high regulation regimes rely on the use of normative controls, flexibility and teamwork, at the same time as enhanced surveillance and monitoring. The authors also argue that a second phase of managerial change has taken place in the 21st century, as firms have become increasingly financialised. These financialised regimes give rise to new managerial trends such as the platformisation, precarisation, extensive performance management and digital Taylorism and surveillance. Not only have these changes in managerial regimes reshaped worker misbehaviour, they have opened up terrain for corporate management misbehaviour, which is explored in depth in another completely new chapter. Over the past 23 years, the first edition of Organisational Misbehaviour has become a classic in the sociology of work. In updating their arguments to reflect cutting-edge academic developments and empirical debates, and by making significant new conceptual arguments, this second edition ensures that Organisational Misbehaviour will remain essential reading for the next 23 years.