Summary
Although white-collar work is of vast importance to the economy, the operations management (OM) literature has focused largely on traditional blue-collar work. In an effort to stimulate more OM research into the design, control, and management of white-collar work systems, this paper provides a systematic review of disparate streams of research relevant to understanding white-collar work from an operations perspective. Our review classifies research according to its relevance to white-collar work at individual, team, and organizational levels. By examining the literature in the context of this framework, we identify gaps in our understanding of white-collar work that suggest promising research directions.
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Managing White-Collar Work: An Operations-Oriented Survey
1. Introduction
Operations management (OM) is concerned with the processes involved in delivering goods and services to customers (Hopp and Spearman 2000, Shim and Siegel 1999). At the core of many of these processes is the work of human beings. Indeed, the field of OM has its roots in the labor efficiency studies of Frederick W. Taylor and other champions of the Scientific Management movement of the early 20thcentury. Because these early studies focused on the physical tasks in manufacturing, construction, and other industries, the OM field developed a tradition of studying what we colloquially call "blue-collar" work. The dramatic improvements in direct labor productivity over the past several decades suggest that this line of research has been highly effective.However, in recent years, the US economy has steadily shifted toward service and professional jobs that we associate with "white-collar" work (Spohrer and Maglio 2008). Workers in such jobs now constitute 34% of the workforce according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) (Davenport et al. 2002). Furthermore, according to the BLS, workers in "management, business, and financial occupations" and in "professional and related occupations" will increase by 14.4% and 21.2%, respectively, from 2004 to 2014, which ranks them as the third and first fastest growing occupation categories.1 This trend suggests that future economic growth will depend much more on improving productivity of white-collar work than on achieving further improvements in blue-collar work productivity.Despite the obvious importance of white-collar work to the economy, it is much less understood in an operations sense than is blue-collar work. Well-known principles of bottleneck behavior, task sequencing, line balancing, variability buffering, and many others (Askin and Goldberg 2002, Hopp and Spearman 2000) help us evaluate, improve, and design systems involving blue-collar work. But in systems where white-collar work predominates, in which tasks are less precisely defined and controlled than in blue-collar systems, we do not yet have principles for guiding operations decisions. Fundamental questions remain unanswered. For example: What is the bottleneck of a white-collar work system? What are appropriate measures of productivity? How do learning and collaboration affect performance? To answer these and many other questions, the OM field needs to expand its scope and methods to facilitate operations analyses of systems in which white-collar work is an essential component.A variety of fields, beyond OM, including Economics, Sociology, Marketing, and Organizational Behavior, have produced streams of research relevant to white-collar work. While these have not focused on operations issues directly, research in these fields has yielded useful insights that could be useful in operations contexts. In this paper, we survey a wide range of research that offers promise for understanding the operations of white-collar work. Our objectives are to bring together these disparate threads, provide a framework for organizing them, and identify needs and opportunities for developing a science of white-collar work.2. Definition of White-Collar WorkTo achieve these objectives we must first define what we mean by white-collar work. Historically, the term "white collar" has been used loosely to refer to salaried office workers, in contrast with hourly "blue-collar" manual laborers (Shirai 1983).2 Other definitions of white- and blue-collar work are based on whether the worker performs manual work. For example, Prandy et al. (1982) used the term "white collar" to refer to non-manual labor, e.g., supervisors, clerks, professionals, and senior managers. Still other definitions of white-collar work have focused on job categories. For example, Coates (1986) divided white-collar work into three categories: clerical, professional, and managerial. Because of the nature of the work, some scholars have equated white-collar workers with knowledge workers (McNamar 1973, Ramirez and Nembhard 2004). In this vein, Stamp (1995) summarized eight important aspects of white-collar work: (1) surfacing and aligning values and vision, (2) thinking strategically, (3) focusing key resources, at the same time maintaining flexibility, (4) managing priorities, (5) measuring performance, (6) accepting ownership, responsibility, and accountability, (7) influencing, while maintaining interpersonal awareness, and (8) continually improving people, products, and processes.Although these definitions give a general sense of what constitutes white-collar work and how it differs from blue-collar work, they do not provide a precise or consistent statement that we can use to focus research on the operations of white-collar work. For example, Coates (1986) classified clerical work, such as typing, as white-collar work. However, typing does not have any of the eight features of white-collar work as defined in Stamp (1995). Moreover, ...See the full content of this document
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