IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-137-37058-7_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Overcoming Alienation: Irreducible Autonomy and Phronetic Techne in a Practical Rationality of Caring

In: Meaningful Work and Workplace Democracy

Author

Listed:
  • Ruth Yeoman

    (University of Oxford)

Abstract

Never has work appeared to be so divided, intense, separated from our personal control and divorced from our sense of who we are. From Biauners (1964) industrial blue collar workers labouring under changes to the division of labour as a consequence of automation to the ‘managed hearts’ of Hochschild’s (1983) airline attendants, the complaint is that the experience of work has been systematically deskilled and subjectified by a capitalist project which aims to increase profit by appropriating and controlling workers’ agency in the exercise of their skills and the formation of their identities. The critique that contemporary conditions of work are thoroughly alienating opposes deskiiled and subjectified work to the mastery and secure identity of craft work, but, I shall argue, this dualism presents a narrative of work as irretrievably degraded which is not consistent with work as it is experienced by workers. I shall show the limits to the opposition between alienated work and craft work by describing a floor-level of irreducible autonomy in every act of work, which reveals that there is no completely alienated work from which the possibility of autonomous action has been eliminated. I shall propose that the identification of a level of irreducible autonomy enables us to conceptualise personal autonomy in work as fundamentally relational, and the pre-condition for the exercise of political autonomy.

Suggested Citation

  • Ruth Yeoman, 2014. "Overcoming Alienation: Irreducible Autonomy and Phronetic Techne in a Practical Rationality of Caring," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Meaningful Work and Workplace Democracy, chapter 3, pages 68-95, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-37058-7_4
    DOI: 10.1057/9781137370587_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-37058-7_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.