Fourth edition
Tony J. Watson

Sociology, Work and Industry aims to provide as full as possible an overview of the ways
in which sociology can help us understand the role of work in people’s lives and in modern
societies. The overview offered is set within a characterisation of the nature and key
characteristics of sociological thinking and research. This makes it possible for people
without a previous sociological education fully to appreciate what is distinctive about the
sociological imagination. But, in identifying just how the study of work and work-related
institutions fits into the broader sociological discipline, this aspect of the book should be
equally helpful to readers with an existing knowledge of sociology. That knowledge should
be deepened and enriched by its application to issues of work experience and organisation.
The account of the sociology of work and industry provided by this volume is not just
theoretically and methodologically grounded. It is also historically grounded, showing how
the original emergence of sociology and the later development of the sociology of work
and industry have been inextricably linked to the changing social and industrialising world
of which it is a part. This equally entails looking at changing thinking over recent decades,
as the pace of change in the world of work has accelerated, as it entails attending to the
emergence of industrial capitalist ways of organising social life in the first place. Just
because sociologists tend to write currently about, say, issues of worker ‘subjectivity’ in
call centres does not mean that we turn our backs on earlier concerns with labour
processes, technological implications thinking or human relations research. And neither
does it mean, for example, that in attending to the decline in the contemporary influence
of trade unions we forget that there once existed such institutions as the ‘closed shop’ or
that we bury the still relevant and valuable sociological insight that closed shop
arrangements and patterns of shop steward representation of the mid-twentieth century
were partly the outcome of the exercise of managerial interests and not simply
arrangements forced on employers by trade unions. An understanding of matters like these
is seen as vital to understanding the rather different, but not radically new, patterns that
are currently emerging.

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