Job Rotation Meets Gendered and Routine Work in Swedish Supermarkets

• Swedish food retail trade employers are required to counteract the strain of checkout work through job rotation. As checkout work tends to be seen as a “women's job”, this makes the industry a potentially interesting site for negotiations within gendered organizations. Based on interviews with nine food retail trade managers, this study investigates how job rotation is incorporated into specific work organization models, focusing on the implications of work requirements, organizational divisions along the lines of gender, and the visibility of gender patterns in the managers' descriptions. Three different models of job rotation were distinguished analytically: limited, partial, and extended, differentiated by the extent to which job rotation was used. While these different models had specific effects on gender patterns of working within the stores, these effects seemed accidental rather than conscious, which corresponds with the managers' more general tendency to make gender into an organizational non-issue. Job rotation was also found to be enabled not by training but by the standardization of work tasks, suggesting that job rotation supports rather than challenges the general de-skilling affecting the industry.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Maskinteknik -- Produktionsteknik, arbetsvetenskap och ergonomi (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Mechanical Engineering -- Production Engineering, Human Work Science and Ergonomics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Genus och teknik

Gender and Technology

Industrial Work Environment

Industriell produktionsmiljö

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)