Learning about Pay at Work: A Labour Process Approach to Pay Transparency

Fuk Ying Tse

Work, Employment & Society, 2023, vol. 37, issue 5, 1147-1164

Abstract: Using a labour process approach, this article examines how workers in three factories in China learnt about the workplace-level pay systems governing their employment relationships. By outlining the processes through which workers learnt about pay at work, this article sheds light on how workers, faced with a perplexing variable pay system and managerial control over pay disclosure, can overcome the pathways towards ignorance and ultimately challenge the workplace-level pay communication regime. It is shown that pay transparency, rather than being merely an outcome of managerial practices to improve employee motivation and organisational performance, is an outcome of dynamic and contested social interactions between management and labour.

Keywords: China; labour process; pay communication; pay transparency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211070442 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:woemps:v:37:y:2023:i:5:p:1147-1164

DOI: 10.1177/09500170211070442

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().