approache s to work in the conte x t of e xperience and ac tion
There was evidence of a partial shift of attention for entrepreneurs in the trades towards finance, investment and real estate speculation.
In sum, the structural conditions for pursuing entrepreneurship exist in a complex inter-relationship between several conditions mentioned above (mar-ket timing, capital, time investments, etc.). The right constellation of structural conditions seemed decisive for whether those who had experienced a motiva-tion to take charge had pursued entrepreneurship, and whether they succeeded or not. This meant that, although the rewards from this type of action could potentially be high – and it was in theory “open to all” to have a shot at it (rela-tively independent of educational background) – starting up was unpredict-able and risky.
The motivation for more autonomy and
between becoming motivated for more control of larger work processes (others) and more control of one’s own work. In the following, the cases of Bjarte and Rune are used to describe the relationship between the experience of motivation for more autonomy and the action of scaling down.
Bjarte: skilled as a builder, born in 1950
Bjarte was skilled as a builder in 1970. During the first half of his working life he tried both starting up and climbing up. He filed for bankruptcy twice, and was foreclosured once, during the economic recessions of the late 1980s and early 1990s. After this, he came to the conclusion that “climbing up the ladder wasn’t so grand”. He felt he had “tried it” and was no longer motivated to take charge. After the last bankruptcy, in 1992, of a business with fourteen employees, which he co-owned and co-ran with colleague, he decided to scale down and work by himself. He thus returned to working in the first line of production after a period of more administrative work. Bjarte claimed that that his bell-shaped trajectory in terms of organisational size was com-mon for builders.
Bjarte Many of my colleagues who I keep in touch with, they’ve all done the same thing. We have a saying for it: to hang up your hammer and then take it down again. Many of my colleagues have done like me, come back to doing manual work. I returned to where I’d begun, and have found satisfaction in that.
Bjarte was very satisfied with his current work situation. In contrast to his previous work situation as manager/owner, it involved a low degree of com-mand (since he had no employees or subordinates) but a higher degree of con-trol and autonomy in the performance of his work tasks. He was able to choose his work assignments carefully, and thereby avoid heavy assignments. These properties of his work situation were important in order to understand how it was that Bjarte, who at the time of the interview was 58 years old, could keep working in the first line of production in the private sector. Bjarte planned to keep working like this until retirement at the age of 67 – provided his health held that long.
approache s to work in the conte x t of e xperience and ac tion
When Bjarte was asked what was the best thing about his current job, he answered that it was coming up with, and carrying out, “creative solu-tions”. His favourite assignments were those where the customers were not too worried about the costs and consulted his advice in finding “creative solutions”.
Bjarte A lot of customers come to me for advice, and so I try and give them a few creative solutions. … I very rarely work from technical drawings. That’s not the way I work at all. The custom-ers will have an idea or two about how they want things done.
And then I come into the picture, and then we discuss it, how they want it. So I try and listen to what they want, and then I draw it all together, so we … well we actually work it all out together. … that’s one thing that makes it a bit special, my job.
But at the same time very interesting. So if my customers say they want it done this way or that, well then they get it this way or that. We work it out along the way.
In other words, a characteristic trait of Bjarte’s work situation was that he planned his work himself, or in cooperation with his customers. And, it is also significant to note that not only did he take part in both job planning and job performance – these seemed to take place as simultaneous processes. In his terms: “We work it out along the way”.
Rune: skilled as a plumber, born in 1979
Rune trained as a plumber in 1999. He kept working in the large plumbing company in which he was trained until 2008. This company specialised in big construction projects (nybygg). In the course of his nine years in this company, Rune began to desire more autonomy. Finally, in 2008 he applied for a job in a small business that specialised in smaller service assignments. Here, he was the only employee. In the following section, Rune described both his motivation for more autonomy and why he found scaling down to be the type of action most appropriate to this experience.
K What were the reasons for you leaving that job?
Rune When I was there I was pretty much always working on big con-struction sites, and in the end I’d just had enough. I felt I’d been doing that for a long time. Didn’t’ get any enjoyment out of it any more. So I was ready to try something, well something new, a small business with much better working conditions.
K Ok. What were the working conditions like?
Rune Well, I mean, I got more responsibility in a small business. Now, for much of the day I’m on my own. There’s more freedom.
When Rune mentioned freedom, it is important to take note. Because, Rune’s notion of freedom was similar to, but also different from, that of Harald (above). Both related freedom to an escape from subordination, but whereas Harald related it to taking charge and pursuing entrepreneurship, Rune related it to deciding how to perform his own work tasks. For Harald, freedom was associated with proving that his “ideas and thoughts about how to run a busi-ness” held water. Rune, in contrast, felt freedom just by getting to be his own boss, by deciding the course of his own days. In the following section, Rune was encouraged to elaborate on his remarks about how his current job pro-vided him with “more freedom”.
K Right. Tell me more about that, … what are you thinking of when you say “more freedom”?
Rune Well, the way it works now is that I’m sort of part of the decision making and so on, I have a say in what we’ll be doing in the coming week, like, I’m doing my bit in the planning of what we’ll be doing, and that sort of thing. And then, well there’s that part of it that you’re your own boss most of the day … you call your customers, set up meetings, and that sort of thing. Right? So in the job I was at
approache s to work in the conte x t of e xperience and ac tion
For Rune, freedom was associated with control, autonomy and predictability.
This was what had motivated Rune when he decided to scale down. He did not, like Bjarte in the case above, become self-employed, but he scaled down by making a job shift to an already existing small business. This seemed to have had much the same effect on Rune, as becoming self-employed had had on Bjarte. In his current work situation, he felt like he was “master of my own house” more than he had been in his previous work situation.
Discussion
The structural conditions for scaling down are in large part equivalent to those of pursuing entrepreneurship. The success of the endeavour is dependent on the state of the market, and also (though less directly) on the availability of capital and opportunities for considerable initial investment of time. It is interesting to discuss the motivation for more autonomy in light of some points from Braverman’s classic study Labour and monopoly capital (1974). Braverman argued that a “degradation of work” was taking place in the 20th century through the spreading of what he called scientific management. According to Braverman, these practices divested workers from time- consuming mental functions (as it assigned these functions
before, I would just meet up and be given a pile of job slips, and then, see ya! Right? That’s a different kettle of fish. Cause where I am now, I’m more a part of it from scratch. Right? So if the boss is on holiday, well, then I run the place on my own. And answer phones, set up meetings with customers, you name it. So you’ve got the freedom to run your days as you wish. Though I don’t know if you’d regard that as freedom (laughs).
K Right right. See what you mean.
Rune But you are more your own boss. … me, I like very much to know the day before what I’ll be doing the next day. I don’t like to come to work and then get told that I’m needed there and there and there. Right?
I like to have things planned out a few days ahead.
elsewhere – with management). He associated this with the influence of Taylorism and argued that the central feature in Taylorism was the tion of conception and execution: “A necessary consequence of the separa-tion of concepsepara-tion and execusepara-tion is that the labour process is divided between separate sites and separate bodies of workers” (1974: 124).9
One might say that the small scale work organisations that Rune and Bjarte were so satisfied with (at the time of their interviews), had served as escape routes from the “degradation” that Braverman (1974) was concerned about.
Scaling down can be interpreted as a counterplay against Taylorism. Bjarte and Rune (above) sought work situations with higher degrees of variation, control and predictability. Under these conditions, they felt they could be cre-ative. An important pre-requisite for their creativity to unfold was that they could participate in contention and execution as continuous processes.
In other words, the types of work that Braverman assigned to the past seem still to exist well into the 21st century. For cases skilled in the crafts trades, highly autonomous work situations (entailing a combination of contention and execu-tion) could still be pursued by scaling down. However, it should also be men-tioned, scaling down could have some important drawbacks. Self-employment especially seemed to involve a higher degree of risk and uncertainty, compared with being on an employment contract with a larger company. More generally, smaller businesses might be more vulnerable to market fluctuations. Another drawback of self-employment (in Norway) is that it involves fewer entitlements with respect to worker insurance, sickness benefits etc. Self-employed workers have to rely on costly private insurance schemes to match the benefits they would get through an employment relationship.