Abstract
Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital tapped into a late twentieth century sense that work while appearing ever safer, cleaner and more automated, was actually, less skilled, more controlled, and more intensive. For Braverman the general movement in work in the twentieth century had been towards degradation of skill and worker control, devoid of creative technical content and thought. Braverman’s monumental book drew on Marx’s writings on technology and the labour process, for the conditions of American capitalism in the 1970s. He provoked such heated debate that the term ‘Bravermania’ has entered the sociological lexicon. His analysis on the labour process in late modernity has seen scholars of organization, work and society at loggerheads over an array of issues. While some writers have attacked Braverman for underplaying the potential for worker resistance, others have defended his analysis as more nuanced and ultimately true to its Marxist inheritance. These debates, which continue to this day on both sides of the Atlantic, but as the paper demonstrates, there has been a movement away from some of the grander themes of Labor and Monopoly Capital (the state, the class structure, the universal market) towards a narrow focus on skill. But there has also been a widening of debates, with new themes (embodiment of labour, globalization, heightened mobility of labour, fragmentation of employment contracts, and spatial division of labour) which has moved labour process theory on and continued to rejuvenate discussion around the control and direction of work that Braverman helped to initiate.
Introduction
The development of labor process analysis was heavily based on Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (LMC). French and Italian Marxists in the 1970s had used labor process ideas derived from Karl Marx’s Capital Volume 1, but their impact was limited geographically and to small left circles. Braverman’s book in 1974 had a huge impact around the world, especially in Anglo-Saxon societies, and across many academic disciplines. Moreover, his work has been an inspiration for theory building and development and the establishment of a labor process perspective or framework, with robust concepts of management control, indeterminacy, and workplace regimes. Ackroyd (2009) has suggested that labor process analysis has evolved over this time into what he calls “normal science”—an established domain of thought and writing with a community of scholars and researchers anchored within agreed terminologies.
This paper reviews developments in labor process writing from Braverman, with a strong U.K. orientation. It is structured into four sections. First, Braverman’s contribution and legacy—what he said in LMC and what has been taken forward by researchers and scholars, following Braverman’s death in 1976, shortly after the publication of LMC. Second, I look at what’s been left behind, namely, those elements of LMC that were not developed in the explosion of interest in labor process ideas in the 1980s and 1990s. Much of this relates to the political economy of capitalism, class structures, the state, labor markets (especially the reserve army of labor), and Marxist ideas linking these elements together. Third, I look at what was missing or underdeveloped in LMC, and how the development of labor process theory and research expanded these areas, especially the national institutional setting of the labor process and employment relations; the importance of space and geography of capitalism and work; the politics of production and linking of workplace relations to the state and wider political structures; the subjectivity of actors—workers and managers—and the importance of conceiving of social relations in embodied terms. Finally, I examine the continued renewal of labor process analysis, and vitality of the ideas, as capitalism evolves into a global political economy, and how the discourse around capitalism, the labor process, skills, and work develop ideological autonomy from structural developments, and the need therefore to address both talk of the labor process (actual new labor process and labor power developments) and underlying structural shifts in the organization of work in twenty-first century capitalism.
Harry Braverman and LMC
It is forty-one years since the publication of LMC, which has not been out of print, and has gained more than 12,000 citations (Google Scholar citations July 2015) and continues to acquire 400 plus citations per year. LMC has sold more than 150,000 copies in English, the bulk of sales occurring in the 1970s and 1980s. It has been translated into Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, French, Swedish, German, Dutch, Greek, Norwegian, and Serbo-Croatian, among others.
The concept of the labor process is taken from Marx’s political economy and refers to purposeful activity in which a natural object or raw material is transformed into a useful product that satisfies a human need. The labor process is a transformation process—a conversion movement whereby the labor power of the worker enters a production process in which labor is realized to produce a concrete commodity or service that contains a use and exchange value (and surplus value that the employer or capitalist takes as reward). What Marx ([1867] 1976, 284) called the “simple elements of the labor process” consist of human labor, the object on which work is performed, instruments or tools, and a purpose or goal.
Building on Marx’s writing about the “labor process,” Braverman set out to critically analyze what he considered to be the degrading effects of technology and scientific management on the nature of work in the twentieth century. Principally, he proposed that the drive for efficient production is also a drive for the control of workers’ movement and creativity by management. Managerial control is achieved through monopolizing judgment, knowledge, and the conceptual side of work, and concomitantly excluding workers from control and ownership of knowledge of production as a whole process. For Braverman, the expansion of capitalist work in the twentieth century was one of work degradation—as knowledge is systematically removed from direct producers and concentrated in the hands of management and their agents. This leads to the impoverishment and debasement of the quality and experience of working, both for manual and mental workers, who are condemned to execute an expanding range of routine and conceptually depleted tasks in the service of capital. Expressed succinctly, Braverman (1994, 24-25) said, The ideal organization toward which the capitalist strives is one in which the worker possesses no basic skill upon which the enterprise is dependent and no historical knowledge of the past of the enterprise to serve as a fund from which to draw on in daily work, but rather where everything is codified in rules of performance or laid down in lists that may be consulted (by machines or computers, for instance), so that the worker really becomes an interchangeable part and may be exchanged for another worker with little disruption.
What is central to Braverman’s work is the linking of work to political economy and capitalist expansion, and the unequal distribution of power over work in the capitalist workplace, whether office or factory. It can be argued that Braverman . . . single-handedly caused a major upset by insisting on viewing work as a labor process, so placing the fact that work contributes centrally to processes of accumulation that are specifically capitalist back at the center of attention. (Ackroyd 2009, 265)
The Scholarly Impact of LMC
Braverman’s death in 1976 two years after the appearance of LMC gave the debate around the labor process a slightly unreal inflection. Because Braverman was not around to either respond to critics or apply the ideas within LMC to new circumstances as work in capitalism changed, LMC became artificially frozen as text, providing a target that could not answer back and an icon for the faithful to venerate. Without the central author around to expand and coordinate the narrative, LMC rapidly became codified into a few catchphrases, such as the “de-skilling thesis,” for an army of PhD students to examine. In the United Kingdom, for example, there have been around 120 PhDs on the topic of the labor process since the publication of LMC. Across North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, many hundreds of students studied Braverman and the labor process debate that developed, especially from the 1980s.
Initially, writers responded to Braverman’s agenda. This agenda was broad—including the expansion of capitalism and growth of waged labor in the United States, the expansion of white-collar workers, the role of the state in capitalist society, and the reserve army of labor. Many of these sociological and economic subjects were lost as the debate on the labor process developed post-LMC. The main elements that were taken forward were management control, de-skilling, and Taylorism—in other words, a narrow set of concerns, isolated from monopoly capitalism, the giant firm, the labor market, and the state.
We can also classify reactions to LMC in terms of those stressing how Braverman neglected certain themes—subjectivity (see chapters in Knights and Willmott 1990; and Thompson and Smith 2010 for a review), consciousness and agency (Burawoy 1979), resistance (P. Edwards 1986, 2010), gender (see chapters in Thompson 1989; Thompson and Smith 2010; Wood 1982, 1989), managerial strategy and national diversity within capitalism (Burawoy 1985; Littler 1982; Smith and Meiksins 1995), and later the ideas of national institutions, the employment relationship, and the geography of capitalism as the global economic system expanded.
What Is Taken Forward
Control
Control is the major concept in the labor process literature on worker-management relations. Whether through a catalog of the various “means” of management control or the historical evolution of employer’s control strategies (R. Edwards 1979; Storey 1985), it has been argued that management as an agency is simply synonymous with labor control. Professional justification or managerial ideology for Braverman goes back to the writings of Fredrick Taylor, and The Principles of Scientific Management, which has as its raison d’être managerial control over workers’ movement, thought, and skill. Fordism, through the assembly line, introduces a technology aimed at pacing and controlling the action of workers. Control in the labor process directs attention to working environments in which there is low trust, coercion, limited worker responsibility, and a generally directed and regulated working environment.
An early critic of this bonding of management with control was the late Craig Littler (1982), who made an important contribution to the labor process arguments on control by blending Marxist analysis of control and capitalism with Weberian theories of bureaucracy and legitimation. He proposed a three-level framework for analyzing the labor process, consisting of employment relationships, the structure of control, and job design. The labor process sits within this nest of levels, and his 1982 book provided a historical analysis of the spread of Taylorist job design into the United Kingdom and a useful comparative portrait of the labor process in Japan—drawing from Japanese scholars such as Cole (1971) and Dore (1973), who, while not using labor process ideas explicitly, did thorough research on the sociology of work and industry in Japan.
Braverman assumed management direct control was the primary glue of social relations within all societies in the era of monopoly capitalism. However, post-Braverman labor process writing focused on both the themes of compliance and consent, suggesting that employers may more productively use labor power by engaging with it rather than controlling it. Groups of relatively autonomous workers, who are increasing as manual labor declines in certain parts of the world economy, either cannot, will not, or do not need to be tightly controlled. Indeed, rigid control is expensive and can be counterproductive. This does not mean the end of managerial control, as some claim (Raelin 2011). Rather, appeals to professional values, creativity, career, goodwill, or trust are deemed more suitable methods of translating the capacity of skilled and professional workers into labor effort and value. R. Edwards (1979) saw control cycles evolving through contradictions of conflicts between labor and capital, but more recently, control has not been conceived in zero-sum or replacement terms, but as coexisting in multiple forms (Thompson and Hartley 2007).
Skills
Struggles between labor and capital can be around use values of workers—the skills required in producing surplus value—and higher skills can mean not only higher productivity but also higher costs, and levels of skills of workers (the use values workers possess and sell) are important for both workers and employers. While Braverman judged capitalism to possess a “degradation imperative,” whereby high value skills are replaced by low value ones, in practice, this is one tendency, among several, more contingent than absolute.
Conflict
Conflict is at the center of the relations between employers and employee as a structured interest antagonism, in other words, something not contingent upon the subjective attitudes of either side. Marx forces us to consider the fundamental power imbalance between labor and capital—capital needs labor to expand, but labor needs capital to survive, and starvation and fear can be the whip that keeps workers at work. The collective power of labor, both structural and associative (Wright 2000), is different from capital, which can move through different forms and store itself (in money) in different places (in housing property, which is never used, but held as exchange value in cities like London, for example). Although Marx, following Adam Smith, saw labor power as “variable capital” (see below), it is important to note the substantive structural differences between labor and capital. As a recent discussion by Hodgson (2014, 1063) notes, capital is money or a deposit external to the individual, and in this sense “‘human capital’ can only be collateral if the humans involved are slaves. ‘Social capital’ can never be used as collateral and it is not even owned.” This strict definition of capital misses its symbolic, emotional, and status elements, which are part of the way it is represented beyond material form. But labor power cannot be stored or transformed—at least not in the short run—while moving within and outside one’s country to work is always a possibility—controls on labor flows are greater than on capital flows (Sassen 1988), and migrant and illegal workers are always more vulnerable to super-exploitation (Anderson 2010, 2013).
What Was Missing or Underdeveloped in LMC
Braverman drew on his own experience and the work of others, but did not engage in empirical fieldwork in the conventional sense. Many reactions to his work have applied standard methodological “tests” through surveys, but most especially case studies, to examine whether or not skills are declining and work degraded by new technology and managerial control. Reactions have also challenged the theoretical basis of Braverman’s work—his determinism in judging Scientific Management the “one best way” of capitalist practice and his historical chronology—in the transition from contracting relations to employment relations and Taylorism (see Burawoy 1985; Clawson 1980; Knights and Willmott 1990; Littler 1982; Zimbalist 1979). A central empirical shortcoming of his work was around the so-called “de-skilling” thesis, which writers have explored historically, sectorally, occupationally, and nationally to check whether de-skilling has occurred as a universal tendency (see Brown (2013[1992]) for a review of the evidence on de-skilling; Fitzgerald, Rainnie, and Burgess 2013; Grugulis and Lloyd 2010).
Agency—Micro and Macro
The most significant Marxist sociologist of the labor process—an influential theorist and ethnographic researcher—has been Michael Burawoy. His Manufacturing Consent appeared in 1979 based on his PhD of ethnography of life inside a Chicago machine shop—the same company that the famous industrial sociologist Donald Roy had researched thirty years earlier. Roy had produced an analysis of the rationality of workers’ shop floor behavior that empirically destroyed the patronizing view of workers in the Human Relations school, which assumed workers restricted output for emotional or irrational reasons. Manufacturing Consent is partly a dialogue with Roy, but principally with Marx, Braverman, and other theorists of labor market segmentation and the labor process. It is in the best traditions of single case studies—theoretically embedded and creative—seeking analytical interrogations of the shortcomings of both Marx’s (and Braverman’s) understanding of social life inside a large modern, unionized corporation with strong internal labor markets and a labor process where winning workers’ consent, not managing through coercion, was required.
Michael Burawoy’s other key text on the labor process was from the same era—The Politics of Production, published in 1985, but already flagged as forthcoming in his 1979 Manufacturing Consent book, and therefore needs to be read as coming from the same period of thinking about and researching production relations. The Politics of Production looks at the conditions under which consent and coercion are produced. Consent was strong at firms like Geer/Allied (his case study company for Manufacturing Consent) because these were unionized factories with strong internal labor markets, collective bargaining, and an “internal state” of consent and compromise between labor and capital in a wider American economy of dominant monopoly capital. Such conditions created “hegemonic production politics” or “factory regimes”—evident at Geer, with workers’ activity producing through shop floor games the conditions for their continued economic oppression. This was contrasted to despotic regimes—where welfare, unions, and internal labor markets were absent, thus increasing workers’ dependence of wages, which were difficult to stabilize due to competitive labor markets.
In broad terms, Michael Burawoy opened access to the micro level of shop floor practices where workers are active agents in the resistance and reproduction of capitalist social relations as well as more macrocomparative labor process research, and the linkages between factory regimes and societal and market conditions. In The Politics of Production, he could draw from his earlier empirical work in Zambian mining, and in later work, he worked on the shop floor in Hungary to gain insight into labor processes in a then command economy.
LMC, Institutions, and Capitalism
Comparatively, Braverman’s message of “work degradation” fitted some capitalist societies better than others—the United Kingdom and the United States especially had greater “de-skilling tendencies.” But even in countries with institutionalized craft apprenticeship systems and an abundance of skilled labor, such as German-speaking countries, writers have confirmed parts of Braverman’s thesis of “skill polarization” or bifurcation, and uncovered within the firm, managers committed to rationalizing work through skill substitution as well as skill upgrading (Altmann, Kohler, and Meil 1992). But de-skilling was not a simple process. In a recent review, Gallie (2013, 339) highlighted strong survey evidence of upskilling, but noted “. . . that the assumption that rising skills would necessarily lead to greater employee influence at work is incorrect.” In other words, skills do not automatically equate with job control. It appears national institutional arrangements mediate any such effect—such that one cannot read off common outcomes from generic tendencies in the labor process without factoring in institutional elements.
Therefore, the lack of a general fit between the degradation of work thesis and particular societies reveals one important limitation of Braverman’s thesis, namely, coupling to capitalism a universal division of labor that is more properly anchored to particular institutions—occupational and training systems. There was one reference to Japan in LMC. Yet in the 1980s and 1990s, the Japanese workplace was seen to typify a major contrast with the United States—where greater employment security for workers (especially male ones) working in large companies was exchanged for higher utilization and managerial control over the deployment of labor power (Elger and Smith 1994, 2005). The place of national institutions was underdeveloped by Braverman, but as Elger and Smith (2005) showed, it is possible to combine together a labor process and institutional perspective for analyzing workplace relations and the function “nationality” of capital plays in shaping labor process practices.
Chris Smith has made conceptual contributions to comparative theory and the labor process with his development of the system, society, and dominance (SSD) framework and applications to occupations and transfer of work practices between countries (Elger and Smith 2005; Smith and Meiksins 1995). The SSD framework emphasizes the importance of national institutional boundaries and rules, but additionally the centrality of systemic and dominant models—that create common and best practices, such as human resource management (HRM), lean production, total quality management—that are imposed across societies. Other contributions have been his understanding of the organization of the labor process in China, with his concept of the “dormitory labor regime” (Ngai and Smith 2007; Smith 2003). This builds upon the work of Burawoy, but explores the interaction between the reproduction of labor power and the production process. It has been picked up as a way of characterizing workplace regimes in export factories in China (Kim 2013; Zhang 2014).
Gender
Although Marx said that labor power is the “property” of the worker, it is different from capital (which has objective multiple identities independent of the capitalist) because labor power is part of “the person of the worker.” In other words, labor power possesses what can be called embodiment and as such workers or sellers of labor power come in different bodies—by gender, age, nationality, ethnicity, skill, region, and so on—and this differentiation makes uniting labor power into collectives harder, and the management of labor more particular and problematic.
Braverman was challenged by feminist writers who argued the gendered or embodied identity (of craft workers) was missing in his work. Craft and skilled labor is highly gendered as Pollert (1981) made clear in her book on tobacco workers, and Cavendish (1982) made clear in her book on assembly workers, and Cynthia Cockburn (1983) demonstrated in her book on print workers. Rubery (1978) was part of the early feminist writers examining the shortcoming of LMC; coming from a radical economist background, she used Braverman to extend dual labor market theory and institutional economics to develop a theory of the social character of labor market segmentation. Like Burawoy, who emphasized the agency of labor, Rubery (1978, 34) argued that labor markets are structured not just by the actions of capitalists, but by the capacity of workers “to maintain, develop, extend and reshape their organisation and bargaining power.” In this, gender was an important way male workers could maintain controls over work and structure labor markets into noncompeting segments, an idea close to Weber’s ideas of “occupational closure”—rather than the Marxist notion of the reserve army of labor found in Braverman. Feminist writers have produced more dynamic explanations of the lived experience of discrimination on the shop or office floor (see, for example, Gottfried 1994), as well as theorization of the interactions between gender “structures,” such as patriarchy, and economic structures, such as capitalism and class (Gottfried 1998).
More recent work has looked at struggles around the body (Wolkowitz 2006; Wolkowitz and Warhurst 2010) and the inclusion and exclusion of certain “body types” (e.g., the aesthetics of labor; Warhurst et al. 2000). The race of bodies has a long history in the United States (see Roediger and Esch 2012 for a history of race and work in U.S. management), and all this research highlights the fact that while the capitalist purchases “labor power,” this always comes embodied, and there is a valuation placed on certain bodies by the employer or customer.
Space
The spatial division of labor was largely absent from Marx’s and Braverman’s discussion of the labor process. Radical geographers working within a Marxist framework have theorized the spatial distribution of production and the main elements of the labor process—including workers. Increased geographical movement of labor and capital can create what Harvey (1982) called a “spatial fix” that capital can utilize in bargaining with governments and employees, that is, movement or threat of closing workplaces in one country or locality can be used to bargain with states and workers’ representatives, such threats often extracting concessions on working conditions and wages. Such threats are only possible because of the spread of the capitalist system geographically and the opening up of new territories for expansion and relocation. At a macro level, countries compete for Foreign Direct Investment and this can mobilize the distribution of “human resources” by institutions like local authorities and schools to serve the demands of new entrants (see Smith and Chan 2015). “Space” is therefore an important element of management control and a factor of production—see also Harvey (1982), Massey (1995), Peck (1996), and McGrath-Champ, Herod, and Rainnie (2010) who elaborated on the implications for the labor process of a more fluid understanding of space as resource for capital, and mobility as a resource for labor. All explore how labor markets develop alongside social and political institutions.
Mobility and Flow
Braverman saw worker’s autonomy as a function of skill. He assumed a powerful relationship between skill, job autonomy, knowledge, and control. He separated education and work; the increased formal education of the workforce did not translate into increased skill levels—this was a myth in monopoly capitalism. Braverman rightly stressed the importance of production (not the training or preparation of labor power prework) as central to capitalism. But this did understate the mobility of labor into and out of work, and the consequences of free waged labor for the organization of the labor process.
An explicit attempt to apply movement and mobility into labor process theory was developed in a paper by Smith (2006). This incorporated the importance of “mobility power” into labor power in what is called a “double indeterminacy” framework. Labor power possesses two components or indeterminacies: mobility power and effort power. The first indeterminacy emerges from the distinction between labor and labor power made by Marx, reflecting the decentralization of the authority over the disposal of labor power to the individual worker who has the burden and freedom (constraint and choice) as to where and to which employer the individual sells his or her labor services. This can be called mobility power, which is indeterminate in the sense that the decision on which employer the worker sells his or her labor power is given to the individual and therefore remains an uncertainty for the employing firm in calculating whether or not workers will remain with them (Smith 2006). It is also an uncertainty for the worker as to whether or not the employing firm will continue to buy their labor services. Around the issue of mobility power, both capital and labor strategize, plan, and mobilize resources of a collective and individual kind as rational-strategic actors (Alberti 2014).
The second indeterminacy is around labor effort and the wage-work bargain in production (Baldamus 1961). How much effort is required for a particular wage for supporting the basic level of reproduction of labor has been the primary subject of labor process theory that has focused on management strategies to control labor and realize the returns from labor once hired (Thompson and Smith 2009, 2010). Similarly, how workers develop formal and informal work rules to limit effort and contain managerial claims on their time and body have also been widely discussed (Burawoy 1979). We therefore have mobility and effort power as indeterminacies for capital and labor, and forming the basis for labor and management strategies, tactics, and policies to direct the exchange process within the capitalist employment relationship.
Mobility power has a strong political dimension—with employers seeking to limit the freedom of workers to move employment at will, through contracts that stipulate length of service, notice periods for mutual separation, and limitations on labor supply and mobility (Jacoby 1998). Within the firm, the uncertainties over mobility create what Mann (1973) called a “mutual dependency” obligation, in which workers reduce job searching for internal promotion opportunities, and employers give up seeking external labor, through focusing on the utilization of existing labor. In some economies (e.g., Japan and Korea), and in some companies, a paternalist practice is widely espoused that reinforces mutual obligations beyond the naked cash nexus (Smith 2003, 2006).
This attention to mobility was expanded into what he calls a “flow approach” toward labor power that combines the importance of mobility and movement in new capitalism (Smith 2010). A flow perspective on the labor process is against human capital and resource-based views of the firm, and versions of HRM that advocate a “high commitment workplace” perspective, as well as “organisation-centric models of capitalism.” All these approaches represent labor power as fixed, centered, and located, rather than moving and dynamic—with mobility-capability as a core characteristic. They represent the employer’s perspective on containing labor mobility as something positive for both workers (guaranteeing access to work) and employers (securing access to labor). A “flow approach” brings in the nature of labor power, mobility, turnover, migration, and employment contracts and challenges the orthodoxy of labor as fixed commodity. Labor power can be “stored” socially through occupations (professions with exclusionary rules), organizations (large firms with strong Inernal Labour Markets [ILM] systems), social networks (e.g., exclusive family, kin, and place networks for migrant labor), industrial districts/communities (mining, company towns, industrial towns, etc.), and social institutions—workers’ store of collective identity and organizations (e.g., trade unions comprising craft/work rules of job boundaries, even transfers of jobs through father-to-son dynasties, or London printers before computerization). Stores are, however, partially “fictive” and vulnerable because labor power is not property like capital, and the need to animate labor power through the labor process to secure exchange/realization (in the form of wages) forever requires labor power to seek out capital. Stores are vulnerable to change as a result of class struggle between labor and capital around the double indeterminacy of labor (both effort power and mobility power). They are vulnerable to technological and market change that can overturn established patterns.
Precarious Employment
Braverman saw capitalism evolving into monopoly forms and the expansion of waged labor within the giant firm. Post-Braverman, we have seen the expansion of “flexible and precarious labor” that has an increasingly weak attachment to the firm. This suggests that while capitalism is historically the most dynamic production system, it is difficult to plot a linear trend to the development of the labor process in capitalist societies. As new countries are pulled into global capitalism, “old forms” can be revised, or new technologies allow renewal of old systems. Informalization and the expansion of self-employment during the recent financial crisis mean decline in waged labor formally managed/controlled through the firm’s bureaucratic hierarchy, and the rise of contractors, self-policing, and self-control: . . . Developing economies are marked by the existence of an overwhelmingly large volume of economic activities that fall within what is described as the informal sector. It is an economic space in which workers engage in economic activities in ways that are very different from the capitalist organisation of production. In particular, the prevalent form of labor in the informal sector is self-employment, which is different from the usual wage-based employment resting on the alienation of labor from capital. (Sanyal and Bhattacharyya 2009, 35)
Informal working is now being researched more thoroughly in developed economies (Williams and Nadin 2012).
There has been a systemic growth of different categories of worker on different contracts and the growth of employment agencies to source labor globally. There has been a shortening of the length of employment stay within one organization, although rates of tenure vary between, say, Europe and the United States, and within different branches of capital. While flexible or precarious work has been much debated in the United States and Europe, contract changes have been more dramatic in East Asian societies. Organization dependency, which characterized the large firms that Braverman (and Burawoy 1979) had used to characterize the good jobs (high wage and high security) in what was a hegemonic, welfarist employment pattern of monopoly capitalism throughout the twentieth century (Gospel 1992; S. M. Jacoby 1997; Montgomery 1979, 1995), now looks increasingly untenable. Writers continue to explore the connection between the labor market, social networks, and labor process, examining the development of new informalities and old labor forms (Kalleberg 2009), for example, the return of gang labor in the United Kingdom (Strauss 2013a) or the growth of third parties, such as employment agencies, in employment relationship (Enright 2013; Fudge and Strauss 2013).
While the movement from cottage industry to factory production was a productivity and control transformation for industrial capitalism, it would be wrong to consider this a historical movement. Today, having workers at home (or anywhere with Internet access connection) has been part of a cost reduction strategy of today’s capitalists, where contemporary technologies, especially Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), can put-out or disaggregate production and producers into new cottage systems, and draw in competitive labor production from across borders and temporal zones, thus ensuring continuous production, often in civil society and from workers on the move, at a higher productive performance than in fixed centers such as a factory or office (Felstead and Jewson 2000, 2012). In developing countries, “factories in the living room” are common (Hsiung 1996). The cottage industry or putting-out system has also been revitalized with the Internet, as distributive service work can create virtual factories composed of workers who only meet online, and employers who contract labor services without building a bureaucracy or firm, as was common to many industries in the last century (Arvidsson and Peitersen 2013).
Struggles over working time have long been part of the narrative of employer-worker engagement, with societal and political struggles part of this story, from the ten hours movement in the nineteenth century, to the introduction of the thirty-five-hour week in France, to zero-hours contracts in the United Kingdom, and annualized hours increasingly part of the debate around time in work. In abstract, in capitalism, workers are selling their time—they are “merchants of time”—and there will always be debates around how this time is used (the intensity of labor) and for how long (the extensiveness of labor). In annualized hours, there is abstraction of working hours, from the standard punctuation of everyday time—by days, weeks, and months—into a more remote yearly cycle. This is part of the abstraction of working time from the regular intervals of social life (Arrowsmith 2007; Heyes 1997; Rubery et al. 2005). Struggles around rewards—the terms of exchange—for what wages workers get for their “effort bargain” with employers—is central to workers’ interests and interest group representation on both sides of the collective bargaining relationship. Struggle are also around the content of work—what is to be done, how workers are directed and the scope for autonomy and self-management.
Continued Renewal of Labor Process Analysis
Materialism Not Marxism
Braverman was explicit in theorizing the labor process within a Marxist political economy. One trend in recent work has been to disconnect a materialist analysis of the labor process from a Marxist analysis. Paul K. Edwards (1986, 89) moved labor process theory away from Marxism toward materialism, which has no historical transformation agency: “Marxism must propose some logic of social development such that exploitation will be transcended, whereas materialism makes no such claim.” P. Edwards is sympathetic toward workers, but there is no expectation that class conflict will necessarily lead to social transformation or even that the common class situation of labor will result in shared subjective interests. Labor is a particular commodity in capitalism that possesses exchange and use values, but P. Edwards has put emphasis on use value, especially the utility and pride of work for workers. He has also contributed to the comparative approach (not only cross-national) and the diversity and “relative autonomy” of the labor process within capitalism, which does not inevitably produce one dominant control regime, but neither are there an infinite variety of control regimes as suggested by contingency theory. Like both Littler and Thompson (see below), P. Edwards stresses the importance of examining the workplace in capitalism at a series of levels of analysis.
Paul Thompson has also moved away from Marxism toward materialism. He has been strongly identified with labor process theory building in the United Kingdom, being closely associated with the International Labour Process Conference (ILPC). Through publications such as The Nature of Work (1983), Work Organisations (Thompson and McHugh [1990] 2009), Workplaces of the Future (1998), and Organizational Misbehaviour (Ackroyd and Thompson [1999] 2012), as well as many articles on such themes as critiques of postmodernism, Foucault, surveillance, the knowledge economy, discourse analysis, and HRM and ethics, he has consolidated and developed labor process analysis. Paul Thompson and Chris Smith have produced a series of papers and edited books that have offered a critique of postmodernist abandonment of employment relations and core elements of capitalism as real political economy. Smith and Thompson (1992) produced an early political economy book on the transition of labor and the labor process with the end of state socialism in Russia, Eastern Europe, and China.
Thompson (2009) has been especially critical of poststructuralist writing on the labor process best represented by Damian O’Doherty (2001, 2009)—see debate between Thompson and O’Doherty in the Handbook of Critical Management Studies (HCMS). O’Doherty, a student of Hugh Willmott, wrote a PhD thesis against labor process theory and in his 2009 chapter of HCMS, he sought to construct a “Manchester School” of work that had as intellectual tools existentialism and poststructuralism, and developed the analysis of work relations in workplaces and organizations as constituted as power hierarchies. Like Willmott, the concern is with “human subjectivity” and being, not labor power in a Marxist or materialist sense, and the approach is constructionist rather than “realist.” The work is more about organization studies than labor process studies—attention is focused on individuals within organizational settings. But labor processes are about the transformation process of moving labor capacity into labor; how individuals realize labor power through labor processes that can be very diverse whereas capitalism imposes structural limits to variety.
In summaries of the history of labor process debates, Thompson has created “periodizations,” with the first wave containing writing following the immediate reactions to Braverman’s LMC, and earlier labor process theory from French and Italian Marxists. The second wave included writers such as Edwards,R., Burawoy, Freidman—who have all developed “typologies” of “workplace regimes” around a “control-resistance-consent” dialectic, whereby managerial controls produce resistances from workers that then lead on to new control regimes in a cyclical manner. The third wave contained new developments of “alternative paradigms” to Taylorism and Fordism, such as “flexible specialization” (Piore and Sabel 1984); “lean production” (Womack et al. 1990); and “innovation-mediated production” (Kenney and Florida 1993). Many of these new paradigms derived from new players, such as Japan, who entered the debate on how to organize work as Japanese firms moved abroad, and Japanese products and production processes appeared superior to Western ones. These Thompson called “paradigm wars” but in many ways they fit within the cycles of controls found in the second wave—for a review, see Smith (1989, 1994).
Thompson (1990) developed the idea of a “core” set of labor process ideas in the face of attempts to expand labor process writing beyond labor-capital relations in workplaces, with interest by poststructuralist writers (such as Willmott and Knights) focusing on subjectivity and the human condition, thus stretching boundaries of what constituted labor process analysis. He took labor process theory back to a “core” set of elements in which labor process analysis was about “transformation” of labor power by different management workplace regimes, some of which gave workers greater autonomy, but none of which suppressed structural antagonisms of conflict and interests and the “imperative of control” that was a core characteristic of capitalism given the need to extract labor power from the body of the worker. Reinforcing the work of Edwards, P. Thompson emphasized the relative autonomy of labor process and centrality of the employment relationship and importance of political economy as a wider conditioner to labor process practice.
More recently, he developed analytical models of work, with different levels, and returned labor process theorizing back to a wider agenda, beyond the simple elements within production relations. Thompson (2003, 474) argued that “. . . political economy, firm governance, employment relations and the labor process should be treated as ‘distinctive spheres’ and patterns of connection and disconnection within their different trajectories be sought out.” In an update and expansion to this paper, Thompson (2013) proposed four distinct institutional domains: (1) accumulation—with no overall logic, but structure of separation, competition, and coordination between capitals and “elites”; (2) corporate level, which is the domain of firm action by managers and workers; (3) work level or traditional labor process domain, featuring a technical and social division of labor and labor process; and, finally, (4) employment level, consisting of employment relations and industrial relations. This model was applied to what Thompson sees as the dominant feature of capitalism today, namely, financialization or new shareholder capitalism, in which there is greater work intensity and increased employment insecurity. But not all societies are under this model. As Vidal and Hauptmeier (2014, 15) noted, . . . Thompson (2003, 2013) argued that employment regimes (employment security, wage setting and voice systems) are more diverse across countries than labor processes (systems of skill, control and coordination) because the former are more influenced by national institutions.
In criticism of this multilevel analysis, one could say that Thompson misses problems with the Varieties of Capitalism approach he alludes to, such as the myth of nationally integrated models business models, and that the focus on financialized capitalism may be more about Anglo-Saxon capitalism and not other parts of the world economy, especially Asia.
Conclusion
In LMC, there is a more definite chronological system shift from private, small-scale capital under craft worker control to large-scale, monopoly capital, under Scientific Management as the pinnacle of labor process control. Post-Braverman writers have stressed post-Taylorist stages or phases of the labor process, and highlighted two things. First, the continued evolution of labor process organization within capitalism beyond the possibilities for accumulation afforded by classical Scientific Management. Control through culture, values, and various neo-human relations policies seek to engage, not simply coerce the worker. And second, the role of new national and regional centers of accumulation that offer a synthesis of classical Scientific Management within different cultural contexts and class accords, which allow for post-Taylorist practices to be embedded in unique ways. The organization of the labor process in Japan and the transfer of aspects of the Japanese system to the West is central here (see Elger and Smith 1994, 2005 for an overview) and the emergence of China and India as new international players (De Neve 2014; Lüthje et al. 2013; Ngai 2005). However, the European, especially the German experience of post- and neo-Taylorism, also remains important (see Altmann, Kohler, and Meil 1992; Eichhorst 2014; Eichhorst and Tobsch 2013).
Marx’s analysis of the nature of the capitalist labor process uses England as its historical laboratory. England, the most economically advanced and dominant capitalist economy, represented the future all other societies would mirror. Braverman wrote through the experience of the United States as the dominant capitalist economy of the twentieth century, originator of Scientific Management, and therefore the common model for all other societies. In fact, both were wrong to associate the most advanced with a single future. If we interject country differences into this picture, as cross-national studies of labor process organization have done, then we see that the norm is for there to be both national pluralism to work organization as well as pressures to find a “one best way.” National differences are not infinite, and dominant economies remain important sources of “best practice,” which are used in many societies.
There has been a continual renewal of labor process writing, development of new concepts, such as emotional labor (Bolton 2009, 2010; Bolton and Boyd 2003; Brook, Koch, and Wittel 2013; Hochschild 1983) or aesthetic labor (Warhurst and Nickson 2009; Warhurst et al. 2000; Wolkowitz and Warhurst 2010). There has also been application of labor process ideas to new sectors, such as the creative industries (Smith and McKinlay 2009) and new organizational forms, such as the extensive literature on call centers. We have also seen labor process theory being linked to new areas, such as institutional theory (Elger and Smith 2005) or critical realism (Thompson and Vincent 2010). The prospects for labor process writing to continue to develop are good, and the annual ILPC and associated book publishing (http://www.palgrave.com/series/critical-perspectives-on-work-and-employment/CPWE/) is likely to maintain the domain, as the evolution of forms of control and the continued globalization of capitalism creates a demand for critical writing that engages micro- and macro levels of analysis in a coherent fashion. This is something that labor process analysis in the forty plus years since the publication of LMC has consistently aimed to do.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
