Anthony Gould’s research (see box) revealed that many McDonald’s workers were satisfied with their jobs. Do you find this surprising?

The significance of this development is that much of the current literature about thenature of work and workplace organization is discussed in terms of Ritzer and hisMcDonaldization thesis, rather than in terms of Braverman and his deskilling and workdegradation thesis. The key point is that both writers address broadly the same issues.Academics such as Bryman (2011) and Gould (2010) criticized the shortcomings of commentators and researchers who had written about and studied McDonaldization:
• Reliance on polemic rather than empirical research data;
• Imposition of their own views on others’ experiences, not taking the perspective of users
into account;
• Dependence on qualitative and ethnographic research methods that identified only theproblems but not the advantages of fast food jobs;
• Promulgation of a simplistic view of the globalization process that ignores local adaptations to the global spread of McDonaldization principles;
• Minimization of the role and significance of countervailing trends such as customers’desire for variety and mass customization;
• A focus on a narrow range of aspects of fast food jobs, e.g., work organization, HRM
policies.There have been many criticisms of Braverman and his deskilling thesis. These includethe following (Noon and Blyton, 2007; Fincham and Rhodes, 2005):
• It ignores alternative management strategies. It ignores management’s ability to choosebetween using Taylorism to deskill a job or empowering workers to create responsibleautonomy. Leaving employees with some discretion can be to management’s advantage.
Thus, employee empowerment facilitates greater worker interchangeability, thereby allowing better assembly line balancing. These employees are not deskilled, but managementnevertheless continues to control the labour process. This suggests that deskilling is
neither inevitable nor necessarily always desirable.
• It overstates management’s objective of controlling labour. The thesis underestimates thediversity and complexity of management objectives and plurality of interests, many ofwhich may be competing (Buchanan and Boddy, 1983; Child, 1985). Marketing, technological, financial, and political considerations may have as much, if not more, impact onwork organization. The cost of direct labour is, in many cases, only a small proportionof the total cost of a product, and its control today may not be as significant a factor asit was in the past.
• It treats workers as passive. The thesis treats workers as passive and compliant, yet thereis evidence of collective, union, and individual resistance to deskilling. The manifestationsof such resistance have been extensively documented, although not widely discussed
(Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999; Wilson, 2004). Historically, management’s shift from directTaylorist forms of control to technological and bureaucratic control and now to a culturaltype of control is a testimony to the existence and effect of such resistance (Ray, 1986).
• It underestimates employee consent and accommodation. There is contrary evidence ofworkers welcoming rather than resisting the opportunity to Taylorize their own jobs.This phenomenon was originally proposed by Burawoy (1979), and has been observed
by managers. ‘They [workers] understood the technique because it had been done to themfor years, and they liked the idea because now they had the chance to do it for themselves’.
• It ignores gender. Braverman’s concept of skill ignores gender dimensions. Acting asa social group, men have in the past socially constructed their notion of skill to benefitthemselves and to disadvantage women. Research by Suchman (1996) in a law firmemploying lawyers (mainly men) and support staff (female) illustrated this. The useof image-processing technology called ‘litigation support’ required skilled coding andretrieval of documents by the women. The males described this work as ‘mindless
labour’ which could be automated, thereby rendering this form of knowledge work invisible by their gendered definition of skill.
• It overlooks skill transfer possibilities. Deskilling in one area may be balanced by upskilling.
in another. The ‘areas’ may be different national economies, different jobs within thesame plant, or perhaps even different aspects of one person’s job. Observers of Japanesejust-in-time (JIT) production systems note that one facet of a production worker’s job canbe upskilled (e.g. when they participate as a group in a job’s design), while anotheraspect of it can be deskilled (e.g. when they have to perform the job that they themselveshave ‘Taylorized’ (Conti and Warner, 1993)).