The birth of French labour sociology after the War: some reflections on the nature of the corporate state and intellectual engagement for the sociology of work in the UK today

Introduction

Sociologists in the UK and, in this context, sociologists of work, are under a range of contingent and long term pressures. The impact of disciplinary encroachment (see inter alia Cooper, 2013) can be taken as an important exemplar of the latter, while the former, largely exogenous in origin, are typified by the embrace of new public management (NPM) agendas. NPM is witnessed in myriad forms and, especially with respect to research, it exerts a deleterious impact on academic autonomy. Furthermore, this neo-liberal ethos has been given added strength following the new formula for sector funding (especially at the time of writing in England). This all adds to uncertainties for the professional sociologist and his or her complex relationship to the state. While this role has arguably always been part of a compromise for state employed academics, Burawoy (2005) has called for a ‘public sociology’ to respond to the pressures individuals face in contemporary capitalist society, including the sociologist’s own workplace. Nevertheless, even with a defined socio-political commitment to a critical-radical external (i.e. non-institutionally based) space for research activity, a public sociology can also be defined as simply a policy sociology which is not always straightforwardly distanced from state pressures. Anyone with even a remotely critical agenda and who has to deliver for research councils will be aware of this. Certainly, while many sociologists work entirely on radical research agendas and without links to dominant institutions in any guise, nevertheless it is still necessary to consider the extent to which it is possible for sociologists to practise a critical engagement, a ‘public sociology’, while acting within the limits of the dominant institutions (publicly funded universities).

If the scope for a sociology beyond the reach of the state in the broadest sense may currently be difficult for many practitioners to attain, then what scope might exist for a critical sociology of work that nevertheless obtains, or aspires to, state sponsorship in some guise: to remain, that is, within the institutional context of universities? One question then might be whether it is possible, let alone desirable, for sociologists ever to seek closer engagement with the state? Specifically, by this we mean under the rubric of state funding, predominantly though not only the ESRC. While we may be critical of engagement with the neo-liberal state, how different might it be engaging with a state regime more amenable to a sociology committed to independent research than is currently possible? Arguably, this is also then a question of the nature of the autonomy that sociologist-practitioners might attempt to define in relation to the state, whatever its ideological and institutional variations but especially in periods of neo-liberal hegemony. This is a plausible consideration since if one recognizes problems today given the current dispensation, would a more encouraging state and institutional context allow for sociologist-practitioners to practise a public sociology with some degree of state support? To explore this theme we examine the French experience in the immediate post-war period when state dirigisme ¹ drew in a range of intellectual and academic-sociological practices to a determined explicit agenda of national reconstruction. To this end, we consider the fate of explicit streams in the sociology of labour ² benefiting from the state’s financial and ideological largesse: the research trajectories of Pierre Naville and Georges Friedmann. Naville was close to Trotsky from 1929–39 while Friedmann, though never a communist, had supported the USSR. While state dirigisme was vital to the success of the discipline in this period it was, significantly, underpinned by a range of non-state institutions including the French labour movement and notably the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and its trade union the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT).

With this in mind, this article is concerned with the contribution of labour sociology to the general discourse at the time in the context of state support. In an era of national reconstruction and a powerful workers’ movement, labour was central to people’s economic, political and social concerns. In turn, workplace change and the conflicts which this engendered encouraged the development of the sociology of labour even though it was devoid of openly Marxist research agendas including engagement with organized labour. Sociologist-practitioners today wanting to engage in what Burawoy describes as public sociology need to be cautious in wishing for a warmer, permissive even, state-society environment since the outcomes, while often positive, can also deliver unwanted surprises. What sociologists are able to do when the state is driving outcomes also depends upon their sustaining ideas and beliefs and the ways in which sociologists may call upon these to establish spaces for relatively autonomous research practice. In the exemplar here, even accounting for the powerful character of state dirigisme in the French Republic after 1945, external, non-state influences also impacted significantly upon critical researchers: especially Marxist influences in the shape of the PCF but also in non-party forms. The latter included other socialist influences together with social movements resisting the institutional and ideological practices of the capitalist state.

In post-war France, engagement between the state and our key sociological protagonists (Friedmann and Naville and their various allies) illustrated the positive role played by critical intellectuals in the academy. The form of quasi-corporatist participation allowed for a critically and relatively autonomous engagement with capital despite a certain early methodological orthodoxy. Moreover, because the state sanctioned a permissive environment it sustained, in Naville’s case, a distinctive and more critical policy agenda than was pursued by Friedmann. If Friedmann’s work was consciously driven by commitment to the nostrums of an academy focused largely on the greater good of national reconstruction, Naville’s developing oeuvre, by contrast, was less concerned with paeans to what he saw as class compromise. The substance, agenda and tone of Friedmann’s engagement, though often critical of the employers, was arguably productivist and reflective of a range of compromises between those involved with state fonctionnaires.

To address these relationships, between the rise of labour sociology and the role of the state and state fonctionnaires, that also drew in conventional and radical sociologists (especially in the absence of direct engagement with labour), the article will now consider the social and national environment before turning to union federations and their relationship to government and the socially and politically committed academic sociologists of labour. We are referring not only to the state but also to other influences upon the sociology of labour: the PCF and the CGT and extra-academy interests in relation to Naville and Friedmann, principally. Discussion then considers the nature of the hegemonic institutions and funding mechanisms that gave birth to the sociology of labour. Then brief consideration is given to more recent historical trajectories after the key period in the formation of the discipline. Finally, the article returns to the question of the relevance of the French experience for sociologist-practitioners within the academy.

State sponsorship and the origins of the sociology of labour in France in a period of national reconstruction

Rise of the sociology of labour during the post-war years and the transformation of work, 1945 to the early 1960s

The post-1945 period witnessed both rapid and extensive introduction of automation in factories, together with the generalization of labour control strategies combining Taylorism and Fordism. Understandably, given sociology of labour’s research focus on internal work and organizational relations, sociologists mainly concentrated on the effects of these innovations, focusing initially on blue collar workers before moving onto office employees, engineers and farmers. A key aspect of this research was the analysis of workers’ reactions to innovation, partially because of the concern with creating less conflictual industrial relationships in a period of heightened strike activity. This was the critical feature marking the discipline’s rise. The assumption was that since sociologists would participate in national reconstruction, understanding workers’ reactions to innovation would illustrate sociology’s relevance to post-war recovery. The majority of researchers were left wing Catholics and reformist socialists committed to less conflictual industrial relationships. In terms of the methodology employed to make sense of worker responses sociologists emphasized an approach to fieldwork strongly influenced by an American social psychology, favouring quantitative methods. These methodological approaches were presented as a technocratic alternative to existing (supposedly ideological) approaches to labour and were as much about promoting a vision of disciplinary respectability.

From 1950 to 1960, the ISST ran two research projects along these lines, the most salient being in 1955 when four ISST researchers (Dofny et al., 1966) undertook a long term study of the Mont Saint Martin sheet metal factories at Longwy in eastern France, funded by AFAP (Durand, 2000: 5). The main commitment was to ‘technological progress’ leading to social progress, but a progress in which jobs and the role of trade unions and employers’ unfair distribution of productivity gains was a research theme. ³

Naville and his team based their research in the 1950s and early 1960s on criteria borrowed from the natural sciences (Friedmann and Naville, 1962: 45–6). Naville’s major automation survey sought to create an objective measurement of the level, degrees and scope of production units’ automation by applying a variety of existing American and European research methods (Bright, 1958; Naville, 1961, 1963). For Naville, automation would make it possible to conceive of humanity’s liberation through the ‘elimination of whatever aspects of human labour are unbearable’.

Friedmann began studying labour during the 1930s, in part by visiting factories located in the USSR and the USA (Friedmann, 1934). Problèmes humains du machinisme industriel (1947) was the culmination of this research, which was also a critique of Taylorism. He argued that modern forms of labour create industrial fatigue, especially in the USA and France. Following his critique of the Hawthorne experiments, he suggested workers’ inefficiency would increase where team members were ‘disagreeable’ or where the purpose of their labour was obscure and discussion limited; this was revisited in Le travail en miettes, where tasks are described as fragmented and repetitive (see Friedmann, 1964 [1950]).

So what can this brief account of the differences between the approaches by Friedmann and Naville to the sociology of labour tell us about the relationship between the academic world and state dirigisme? The immediate answer is that it could be said to highlight the scope for a pluralistic approach to labour (and class recomposition) by state sponsored research groupings despite the seemingly state-technocratic commitment to planning for national renewal. The second associated response is to argue that it was possible for Naville’s sociology of labour to connect openly with his political agenda and though the same might be true of Friedmann, the latter’s specific orientation to social renewal, his instrumentalism, as opposed to (Naville’s) social transformationism, chimed more comfortably with the ambitions of the technocratic state. Moreover, arguably both researchers could advance their respective agendas precisely in the absence of a culture of centralizing managerialism, a motif of later state dirigisme including, interestingly, the neo-liberal British state today.

Interpretations of the place of labour in sociology

Yet while the situation just described allowed a degree of accommodation between instrumentalism and transformationism, the origins of participation were founded in a combination of state paternalism and a desire by labour sociologists for institutional support. Usefulness would be gauged by the willingness of researchers to share knowledge with France’s political and union leaders. Indeed, this was the perspective guiding much research funding from national productivity bodies, the CES and the CNRS. Technological determinism seemingly dominated actors’ understanding of change. According to Maurice (1980: 25), for Friedmann the ‘notion of “technological progress” usually appeared as a variable that was relatively exogenous and independent of the “social conditions” most likely to cause harmful side-effects.’ For Naville, by contrast, ‘The role he attributed to technological change in his own analyses – plus his hope that automation was a means for transforming social relationships – means that he sometimes seemed to share a Marxian utopia […] of a “scientific and technological revolution”’ (Maurice, 1980: 25).

While many of those investing in the nascent discipline or working at ISST’s behest in the French Ministry of Labour quite conventionally modelled themselves on the American social sciences, nevertheless their vision was anything but utilitarian. ⁴ Then again, the influence of the USA could be seen where French industry imported Taylorist scientific management while at the same time, unsurprisingly, French industry and the country’s political leaders also sought American style industrial relations specifically to counter the power of the CGT. ⁵

Yet, what of the nature of research on workers by Marxist researchers otherwise sidelined by the PCF and the CGT? Naville and his supporters still wanted to study the working class even if the PCF and the CGT remained ambivalent about what academics might want to say. Despite general agreement – on both left and right – on the principle of national reconstruction and on the goal of achieving a ‘better society’ (i.e. the programme pursued at the time by the CNR), sensitivities varied widely. Naville who, as we noted, was close to Trotsky and thus excluded from the PCF, had supporters who grumbled about ‘reformists’ when referring to Friedmannians, a group comprising sociologists from the ISST and the CES (when they were not close to Naville). Navillians were affiliated with the Syndicat National des Chercheurs Scientifiques union, which had close links to the PCF, whereas most other researchers were members of the Syndicat Général de l’Education Nationale union, part of the more centrist CFTC confederation. Although Marxism exerted a general influence in the broad sense that Naville’s group considered the economic environment when studying factory workers and other employees, research orientations tended to diverge from the Friedmannites in terms of their objectives and with regard to intended societal projects. While most sociologists might appear indifferent to a commitment to anti-capitalist research activity, confining their agenda to workplace improvement, Navillians by contrast hoped that their work would help to challenge capitalism. The difficulty was that the institutional (and this included, as pointed out, academic) commitment to national reconstruction sought consensus in terms of encouraging an instrumental research programme. The academics, in the case of the sociology of labour, were revelling in the financial support that followed the academic attachment to national reconstruction. Nevertheless, some, in this instance Naville, achieved a relative autonomy from these pressures such that they were able to act within and without the state due to various anti-capitalist socio-political commitments.

As a consequence of competing perspectives (researchers largely excited by and committed to the beneficence of state largesse and those others who, while beneficiaries, such as Naville, had anti-capitalist intentions) a number of ideological and political fissures opened up. ISST sociologists (or CES people working there) originated largely from a background in social Catholicism. In Friedmann’s view, given his weak links to the PCF and the CGT, social movements were seen as key opponents of employer excess. Communists, on the other hand, argued that the challenges of capital required rather more political focus than any other broad social movements might provide. This is a view that would make sense to Naville. To restate the point, as well as the state’s hegemonic agenda that drew so many to the national flag, other influences allowed for more critical and anti-capitalist research orientations.

Among those who might feel comfortable with reform alone and whose agenda would stop short of going beyond anything redolent of radical change, Friedmann’s la civilisation technique addressed a technocratic future in which machines would play a vital role (Rolle, 1962). Whereas for Friedmann, automation and all its benefits could be used as a way to ameliorate the problems posed for labour in capitalist production, for Naville, automation, despite its potential for social change, could accommodate subordination quite readily. For Naville, more radical, socio-political challenges to the power of capital in work were required and his research was geared to finding out how these might be advanced. What then of subsequent developments? Clearly, we have seen how external ideological and political commitments impacted on the development of the sociology of labour in the context of a drive for national reconstruction. While there were many willing academics, others found space to develop relatively autonomous research agendas despite receiving state funding, remaining critical of both its intentions and the system itself.

Of course, the slow run-down of the trente glorieuses (the 30 years of social democratic modernization and economic expansion from 1945 to 1975) would see an increasing fragmentation of labour sociology and other academic perspectives as wider social, ideological, and hence methodological, perspectives sought to make sense of changes in work and employment. In the recent period other influences have been defining labour sociology, including gender studies, ‘conventionalism’ (a French theory based on contract theory and methodological individualism) and the so-called ‘sociology of activities’. The current trend has seen an interest in psychosocial disorders and has been especially highly profiled in the media given the high number of workplace suicides in France (30–40 per annum). This new theme has intriguingly brought labour sociologists, for the moment at any rate, into closer contact with unions.

Discussion and conclusion

In this brief account of the early post-war development of the sociology of labour in France we have argued that the state played a pivotal role in a hegemonic moment that significantly drew many leading social scientists to the totem of national reconstruction. One consequence of this was that the prevailing quasi-corporatist patronage and brokerage encouraged a range of complementary agenda: national reconstruction not only required support from natural allies but, in the process of disbursement, the state largesse would also have to be shared with potential enemies, or at any rate, those demanding plus change (far-reaching/revolutionary) over quotidien change (piecemeal reform). To illustrate this we highlighted the fact that despite the leading protagonists (Friedmann and Naville) having quite distinct objectives, an important dimension to Naville’s ‘acceptance’ by the establishment was his and his laboratoire’s otherwise conventional methodological approach. In short, the point is that while the state inevitably sought compliance in pursuit of national reconstruction, dirigisme allowed, arguably paradoxically, a degree of pluralism. Yet, just as importantly, it is obvious that departure from the mainstream message only emerged where researchers (and we highlight Naville here) were defined by and committed to a distinctive, radical social and political agenda that allowed them to practise orthodoxy while thinking and acting against the interests of dominant social forces. If there is a lesson for UK sociologists it might be that in each context of state defined research narratives, it is also possible to construct alternative research agendas and practices where researchers define their activities in alliance with a range of alternative social and cultural constituencies; though this can be no guarantee of autonomy of practice or outcome.

Arguably the bifurcation of the sociology of labour continues today. In the absence of an all-encompassing hegemonic project, the social and political orientations of the two dominant traditions are evident in what are effectively implicit manifestos. Thus, for the Friedmannians, a reformist commitment to more business facing agendas has readily embraced the needs of the corporations and institutions of the state in its current neo-liberal phase, while a new radical tradition committed to a critical social and political research agenda finds space within Les journées internationales de sociologie du travail and a range of alternative publications.

In France, while the CNRS drove a technocratic agenda it also dragged along, in the slip stream of investment in the new sociological enterprise, a more critical agenda articulated by a number of sociologists influenced by a non-PCF Marxism and a fragile engagement with organized labour. This experience is highly germane to the contemporary situation in Britain, where the academic world is being increasingly corralled by the marketizing needs of the state as interpreted by recent neo-liberal governments. In contrast to the French case after 1945, when state fonctionnaires encouraged and then created institutional space and financial resources that allowed a variety of intellectual and research coalitions, in the UK the recent incorporation by a range of state fonctionnaires has been driven by bureaucratic domination (for example the Research Excellence Framework) tied to financial stringency. A significant outcome in the UK today is arguably the institutional impulse to subordinate critical engagement to the needs of a marketized, business facing academia. This is most immediately evident in the rise to prominence of what might be termed the impact agenda: for UK governments, clearly by ‘impact’ is meant ‘relevance for business’. Critical researchers understand this and so it is a tough time for those worried about how research designed for those seeking to undermine the capitalist state might be assessed, let alone how to present glowing references from trade unions and social movements on the vital impact of their studies.

In France, despite neo-corporatist structures and institutional processes that encouraged methodological orthodoxy, a significant measure of autonomous engagement was nevertheless possible and still thrives in a number of third level institutions. By contrast, while certainly not extinct in the UK, radical agendas find oxygen difficult to obtain and insofar as they are given life this is more by perseverance than design. Arguably, the pursuit of a business facing academy may be hampered since by contrast with the French case after 1945, incorporation is being sought by means of institutional-academic subordination, a rather limited form of involvement lacking the wider possibilities for critical research engagement offered by earlier forms of social democratic hegemony. Then again, as in France, alternative agendas will not come by internal relationships alone but will surely depend upon alliances with external socio-political and cultural forces. It is difficult to imagine how this might be construed in the UK today where many sociologists are not actively involved with, or politically committed to, challenging the status quo in their work. The ideology and practical application of the ‘impact agenda’ makes critical work difficult enough in the current situation and sociologists pressing a radical agenda under the auspices of research council funding really do find it difficult, though not impossible, to defend radical research in an open manner. On occasion some fearless types, in a flight of institutionally acceptable radical fancy, will latch onto the false balm of critical realism (which from the perspective of offering radical research engagement, is neither critical nor realistic) as a way to give their work the sheen of radicalism to outsiders – and some insiders too. As an institutionally acceptable soi-disant methodological radicalism, critical realism, the new conventionalism, can be neither critical nor radical. As such we can safely be assured that it will be benign and thus harmless to the academy and the state. Challenging the state and hegemonic (business facing) research paradigms is risky and radical researchers know this to be the case. Since critical, anti-institutional, anti-state agendas frequently must be hidden by degrees of subterfuge for the purposes of research bids it is entirely understandable that few are willing to take this path: neo-liberal hegemony has long tentacles reaching deep into the psyche and institutional mechanisms of UK universities.