Search results

This paper is based on a case study concerning the change in office work within the state sector. It shows how unequal power relations, cross pressure, contradictory rationalities and hegemonic values connected with the process of modernisation make it difficult to realise the new strategy of the Danish trade union movement: ‘Work that develops’. The organisation in the case study defines itself as a learning organisation, implying that learning and development should be a possibility for everyone, but that there also exists an obligation to learn and develop. The author suggests that one problem in the present strategy of the trade unions for work that develops is that it can easily have an oppressive effect in relation to the collective attention to interests because, in practice, development has already been hegemonised as a concept for harmony between the needs of the individual and socially necessary development, and because to a large extent it is not legitimate to express that one does not want the type of development that is professed in the discourse of modernisation.