Making Light Work: Rethinking the Service Organisation

Service workers are often not regarded as free and rational human beings by the organisations in which they work. Instead, their actions are viewed through the lens of a management-measurement philosophy which has held sway in large enterprises since the early part of the twentieth century.

Service should be a vocation. Helping others is a natural and rewarding activity, but the current paradigm of top-down processes, procedures and targets has hijacked the humanity of these workers. It treats them as deterministic components in a soulless, mechanistic system.

In sectors as diverse as IT, healthcare and education, workers are implicitly aware of this state of affairs. As too are users of these services who often feel profoundly short-changed by the limiting and limited tick-box model that staff are required to comply with.

Peter A. Johnson is a graduate of the University of Sussex and the Institute of Work Psychology (University of Sheffield). He has worked in the IT sector for over thirty years. He is also a dyed-in-the-wool maverick and is most comfortable when challenging orthodox thought.

Referencing diverse ideas including existentialism and those of Ralph Stacey, Thomas Kuhn and Immanuel Kant, he describes deep-seated issues in the current approaches to ‘good’ service practice and – importantly – outlines an alternative.

Excellent service is the key to the productivity of our workers, the well-being of our healthcare users and the development of our children; it is in fact central to our society and lives.

This book offers a chink of light in this regard; and perhaps a brighter future for us all.