Labour process perspectives on employee voice

Marks, A; Chillas, S

doi:10.4337/9780857939272.00014

Labour process perspectives on employee voice

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Abigail Marks

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Abstract

© Adrian Wilkinson, Jimmy Donaghey, Tony Dundon and Richard B. Freeman 2014.Employee voice is used as an umbrella term to cover formal and informal avenues through which workers and their representatives are able to contribute to decision-making in organizations. The neutral tone of employee voice masks organizational processes such as participation, engagement, involvement and empowerment, which in some circumstances are used interchangeably and in others are given a specific meaning attached to a particular theoretical perspective on employee relations with associated management practices. Human resource management, for example, casts voice as an involvement mechanism that contributes to worker well-being, whilst simultaneously fulfilling management aspirations for continuous improvement in task-based participation and work organization (Marchington, 2007). Accordingly, perspectives on employee voice can be conceptually arranged along a spectrum ranging from voice as a mechanism for emancipation and engagement, typical of a best practice human resource management view (Gatenby et al., 2011), to voice as a manifestation of exploitation in what Martŉez Lucio (2010: 123) characterizes as ‘the age of self-harm as the socioeconomic system turns further inwards onto the body to extract ever more intense levels of worker activity and effort’. The spectrum occurs as a result of the different underlying theoretical perspectives which are subsumed under a neutral term encompassing a range of activities and work organization in contemporary society (Wilkinson and Fay, 2011). Employee voice is a literal term, suggesting channels of communication, yet it is also metaphorical, covering control mechanisms and representing enactments of power relations in organizations.