Master of Arts (by dissertation) — Industrial Sociology postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every second Thursday I reconcile timesheets for about three hundred workers placed by the labour broker where I work as a payroll clerk. Most weeks the numbers agree. When they do not, the gap usually sits in overtime: a supervisor's handwritten note saying a line ran forty minutes late, against a biometric clock that recorded something else. Resolving these discrepancies is my job, but the questions they raise about who has the authority to say how long someone worked are why I want to undertake a Master of Arts by dissertation in Industrial Sociology.

My interest began during my BSocSci in Sociology, when a second-year course on work and labour markets introduced me to Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital. His argument that management deskills work by separating its conception from its execution was persuasive, but I was more drawn to the replies it provoked, particularly Michael Burawoy's Manufacturing Consent, which asks why workers often cooperate in intensifying their own labour. Burawoy's account of shop-floor games made me think about the small negotiations I had seen in a holiday job packing boxes in a warehouse, where speed was partly imposed and partly a matter of pride.

For my Honours research project I interviewed fourteen workers and two shift supervisors at a poultry processing plant outside Durban, with permission from the plant and ethical clearance from my department. I set out to study how rotating shift rosters affected household routines. The interviews kept returning instead to the roster itself: who drew it up, how swaps were arranged informally through WhatsApp groups, and how permanent employees and broker-supplied workers were treated differently when shifts changed at short notice. I coded the transcripts thematically and argued that the informal swap system gave permanent workers a flexibility that placed workers could rarely use, because they feared losing future placements. My supervisor thought the argument was sound but noted that fourteen interviews could only suggest, not establish, this pattern. I agree, and a longer dissertation would let me test it more carefully.

Working in payroll since graduating has given me a different view of the same system. I now see how contracts, client agreements and clocking data shape what workers are paid, and how much depends on records that workers themselves seldom see. I am careful not to treat my job as research, and I would not use confidential payroll information. It has, however, sharpened my proposed question: how do workers employed through labour brokers understand and contest working time when attendance is recorded digitally? I would like to explore this through interviews and observation in a sector such as food processing or warehousing, reading it alongside literature on labour broking in South Africa and debates about the 2014 amendments to the Labour Relations Act concerning temporary employment services.

Outside work, I help coordinate volunteers for a soup kitchen run by my church on Sunday evenings. Much of this involves rotas, which has taught me, with some humour, how quickly a fair-looking schedule can fall apart when people have unequal claims on their time. I also play chess at a local club, and preparing openings has made me more patient with long, slow work that rarely shows immediate results.

I know a dissertation-based degree demands independence. I managed my Honours project alongside part-time work, kept to deadlines and rewrote my analysis chapter twice after feedback. I would bring that discipline, practical familiarity with how employment records are made, and a research question that has grown from both my studies and my working life. I hope to develop it into a careful study of working time and precarious employment.