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Richard Edwards  

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  • In Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (1979), Richard Edwards (1949–) offers an influential set of answers to two key questions in the sociology of work: Why is work in the modern world organized as it is? and How has the organization of work changed during the last century? The heart of Edwards's account is the identification and description of three different methods used by employers to control workers and thereby extract the maximum amount of effort from them, while avoiding collective action by workers (i.e., unions). The three types of control are simple control (based on the personal relationship between the owner and worker), technical control (based on the extensive use of machinery in the production process), and bureaucratic control (based on the extensive use of formal rules and procedures). [Source: Sociology of Work: An Encyclopedia; Edwards, Richard]

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https://concepts.sagepub.com/social-science/concept/Richard_Edwards

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