Abstract
This article examines theories about the labour process that have become widespread during the last 30 years, focusing particularly on how subjective control/resistance processes play out in the workplace. My objective is to contribute to theories that highlight how employers’ incorporating worker subjectivity into management technologies cannot be simply understood as increased domination in the workplace; these new approaches introduce new variations in the entangled production of workers’ resistance and compliance. To understand the range of worker responses I argue for a processual power imbricated approach to the construction of subjectivity within the production process in service industries. My contribution to this discussion draws on the main conclusions of my research about the labour experiences of supermarket workers in the city of Rosario, Argentina. I specifically examine subjective control and its connection to the mobilization of the customer’s evaluation of workers.
Introduction
In this article I examine the most important theories pertaining to control/resistance processes in the workplace and, more specifically, how these processes influence workers’ subjectivity. My objective is to engage with the theories that explain incremental degrees of workplace domination in terms of the incorporation of worker subjectivity as an aspect of corporate control. I use these approaches to analyse subjective control in the labour experiences of supermarket workers in the city of Rosario, Argentina, through the deployment of customers’ evaluations of these workers.
I view subjective control not as a logical condition of all labour processes, but as a contested terrain between capital and labour. The classical studies of Labour Process Theory (hereafter LPT) placed special emphasis on concepts that have proved useful in my research: the indeterminacy of labour, the relative autonomy of control processes and consideration of the capital/labour relationship as structured antagonism. From these theories and concepts, presented in detail in the next section, my own theoretical position evolved on the subjectivity of the control/resistance issue, which I used to frame the ethnography presented in my Ph.D. thesis. In this article, which grew out of that work, my research is organized in four subsections: (a) a description of customer assistance policies and how they help to construct a particular subjectivity among supermarket workers; (b) the persistence of indeterminacy in the conversion of the workforce to concrete labour and how this is expressed in customer assistance; (c) the specificity of work as a power relation and the importance of technical conditioning; and (d) the development of an adequate concept of subjectivity to study control/resistance at work.
These last three points allow me to argue, in conclusion, that subjectivity control is not exacerbated in the new forms of work organization. On the contrary, it is more useful to consider the control/resistance process from a materialist theory that reiterates classic aspects of LPT as well as from an anthropological perspective on work.
Theoretical perspectives on control of the labour process
In debates about the labour process, the LPT approach has gained strength since the 1970s. The breakdown of the concept of industrial consensus favoured LPT’s development as labour conflicts at workplaces were gaining global notoriety by the end of the 1960s. Within the framework of a series of studies recalling fundamental Marxist principles, LPT soon distinguished itself from previous disciplines examining work, among the most important of which are industrial sociology, the French sociology of labour, and industrial relations. Unlike its predecessors, a main characteristic of this theoretical undertaking considers the labour process as contested terrain.
Harry Braverman (1998 [1974]), one of LPT’s founders, 1 contributed to Marxist reflections on the labour process the idea that relationship transformations between workers and companies via workplace skills were mainly inspired by control and class power issues, not by abstract organizational effectiveness principles. This important theoretical concept is the first LPT principle that I wish to highlight in relation to my case study: control does not imply an abstract exercise of productive efficiency, but, rather, conveys class power relationships.
Braverman (1998 [1974]) broke with the optimistic view of labour that industrial sociology was developing in the 1960s, which ‘considered technological advance as a sort of liberation from human labour’ (De la Garza Toledo, 2001b: 55). Instead, Braverman argued that the 20th century entailed the perfection of control strategies not only based on the scientific organization of labour (Taylorism and Fordism), but also, and crucially, on the increasing division of tasks and individualization of workers. Eventually it was recognized that, in fact, Braverman (1998 [1974]) overestimated Taylorist domination of other organizational systems and underestimated the variety of control system implementations (Thompson, 1989).
The second highlighted aspect of LPT is the addition of workers’ resistance as an element that conditions control techniques. In this case, the pioneering research of Andy Friedman (1977) and Richard Edwards (1979) has demonstrated the role of worker resistance in mediating the control strategies that deprive workers of their skills. They recognize differentiated periods of control, with workers’ resistance serving as a variable that configures these periods. Edwards (1979) distinguishes three stages of control methods: simple, technical and bureaucratic. 2 In contrast, Friedman (1977) differentiates two strategic poles of corporate control—direct control and responsible autonomy—that bound a continuous spectrum of control strategies. Nevertheless, Friedman finds a tendency in monopoly capitalism towards responsible autonomy as a widespread corporate strategy. Both authors consider labour to be a contested terrain where control needs to be constantly reaffirmed.
What is the theoretical background of this constant reaffirmation of control? Here I offer three concepts to LPT theory. The first reconsiders a fundamental tension within capitalism that was originally formulated by Marx: the indeterminacy of the conversion of the workforce into concrete labour. Expressed differently, a capitalist buys the capacity for using the workforce over a period of time to convert potential into action. In effect, the workforce becomes a form of merchandise. Control of the labour process becomes crucial for the capitalist, since labour generates surplus value.
The second concept could be called the relative autonomy of control mechanisms. In Thompson’s words: The fact that the dictates of accumulation require control of the labor process by capital does not tell us what form of control will be applicable in different circumstances. Nor does it distinguish between management choices based on considerations of short and long term profitability. No one has convincingly demonstrated that a particular form of control is necessary or inevitable for capitalism to function successfully. (Thompson, 1989: 150)
These three concepts constitute a theoretical base from which to analyse the subjective control/resistance processes in labour. The following section considers processes that increase and sustain subjective control, on the one hand, and that locate resistance in the subjectivity of actors, on the other.
The subjective control/resistance issue
This section examines recent approaches dealing with the issue of subjective control that inform my ethnographic research and analysis in the third section. Profound changes in work that have taken place in the last 30 years form the context in which subjectivity control has formed. These worldwide changes have been characterized as productive restructuring: basically, modifications in the manner of organizing labour that do not change its capitalist nature (Antunes, 2005). Antunes asserts that these changes are due to the fact that ‘the capitalist society and its law of value need less and less stable work and more and more diverse forms of outsourced part-time work, which are a constitutive part of the capitalist production process on an increasing scale’ (Antunes, 2005: 109). Companies try to reduce the number of stable employees and develop a more flexible productive structure that can adapt to market fluctuations. Often this strategy involves decentralizing production, outsourcing to third-party companies, and so on (Antunes, 2005). Companies can also turn to new techniques of workforce management, some of which are related to the Toyotism model: Teamwork, Quality Circles and other ways of involving workers in the company.
This represents a change in the dominant conception of workers’ subjectivity in corporate circles. Formerly, corporate strategy aimed to reduce workers’ subjectivity to a minimum via the scientific organization of work. Due to productive restructuring, however, workers’ knowledge, attitudes and emotions are increasingly being incorporated into the capital valorization process. Acknowledgement of subjectivity is aligned to methods that attempt to stimulate participation, improve quality control or involve workers in achieving company goals. Workers are seen as actors who contribute, not only with their labour but also with their knowledge, to perfect their own exploitation. This is why the subjective co-optation of workers has become a major objective for companies.
Modification in concepts associated with control is connected to another tendency in productive restructuring: the growth of the service sector, representing up to three quarters of the jobs in advanced economies (Warhurst et al., 2008). In dependent economies, precarious services employ a huge proportion of a country’s manpower and represent the majority of its GDP (De la Garza Toledo, 2011).
Some research regards these policies as a change in control systems, turning from externalization to internalization. Some authors refer to this as a turn towards control of subjectivity. One of the earliest contributions to this perspective comes from Carol Ray (1986), who argued that control by corporate culture was the last frontier, in that it had enabled organizations to generate sentiment and emotion, simultaneously internalizing control and linking personal with corporate identity (Thompson and McHugh, 2002).
Another early approach to the topic is the study of emotional labour proposed by Arlie Hochschild (1983). According to Hochschild, emotional labour makes workers more vulnerable to the social engineering of their emotions, reducing their control over their labour (Hochschild, 1983: 8). From this point on, jobs that feature interactions with third parties (customers/users, etc.) also induce more psychosocial vulnerability among workers. These positions pave the way for actors’ subjectivity control by companies, especially in service industries where jobs have grown rapidly in the last few years: call centres, supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, among others.
According to researchers who have been analysing LPT over the past few years, the notion of subjective control is ‘the most significant challenge to established labor process frameworks […] A move to seeking employee commitment can be seen as a form of internalized control that does not rely on external rewards and sanctions, or rule-following’ (Thompson and McHugh, 2002: 114). Smith argues that ‘the transformation of labour from a process devoted mainly to producing things into a process devoted to serving other people and establishing relationships with others provided an opportunity to introduce subjective control’ (Smith, 1995: 18–19). This opinion is also found in Ritzer (1998), who addresses ‘McDonaldization’ as part of a more effective control of workers that takes the disqualification and dehumanization of fast-food workers to a new level through new technologies and standardized interactions.
Because subjectivity control is more noticeable in jobs where there is a relationship with a customer, control by the customer has come under scrutiny (Durand, 2011; Smith, 1995). In Durand’s study of supermarkets, the principle of: Customer–King imposed by the management in the name of competence changes the whole situation. By maintaining that a relationship between the customer and the cashier is being created, the management gives all the power to the customer, even the task of setting the cashier’s cadence. (Durand, 2011: 132) the subjectivity of the workforce, the exploitation and the alienation of the labour-merchandise-show relationship reach unthinkable levels of degradation, compared to the classic method of the race to accumulate and the relationship man-machine of industrial society and labour […] If the customer’s manipulated alienation described by Jean Baudrillard is true, it is very rightly so for workers who contribute to the production of such alienation by assimilating it, as a total institution is assimilated. (Curcio, 2005: 107)
Other research, also inspired by Foucault, focuses on the process of resistance to subjectivity control through informal practices that separate workers from managerial dominance. One such author is James Scott (1992), who finds everyday resistance practices in the jokes, parodies, pretended ignorance and so on of subordinate subjects. According to Scott, working places are filled with expressions of disagreement and small actions characterized as ‘resistance’. The new approach shows that subjective actions aimed at distancing workers from companies can be visualized as resistance practices that enable escape from the intent of total control. On many occasions, these actions do not go beyond the individual. Yet in light of this theoretical opening, positions that distinguish several response levels emerge, such as ‘dissent’, ‘misbehaviour’ and ‘resistance’. 4 In general terms, I assert that the debate now focuses on how to characterize the actions of subjects who respond, in different ways, to corporate domination. According to Abal Medina (2014), this polar movement between the defeat of ideas of total control and the romanticizing of workers constantly resisting reveals the distance and the intermediate points between workers who defeat the system and workers who maintain and reproduce it.
This brief outline of theories dealing with the process of subjectivity control/resistance at work allows me to illustrate two conflicting stances, both opposed to the approach I favour. One is the idea that attempts to internalize subjects’ control lead to situations that could be characterized as ‘total control’. To refute this hypothesis, I return to the problem of indeterminacy in the workforce and analyse it in my own ethnography. The other is the notion that there is always effective subjective resistance to attempts at subjectivity control. To refute this hypothesis, I develop the concept of technical specificity in the working relationship based on studies of the Latin American anthropology of work.
Customer assistance in a multinational supermarket company in Argentina
My research on the labour experiences of young workers in a multinational supermarket company in the city of Rosario, Argentina, 5 led to my engagement in critical dialogue with the control of subjectivity concept. With the entry and vast expansion of multinational companies in Argentina in the last 20 years, great transformations have occurred in the supermarket sector. As a result, working conditions in the sector have become much more precarious, with extended open hours, high levels of labour rotation and the systematic hiring of young workers who are starting their working life. To attract customers, big supermarket chains have tried to generate a volatile and diverse demand via the proliferation of customer services, which tend to include ‘high-quality’ assistance provided by their workers (Guiamet, 2016).
The chain I studied has adopted this strategy as a central element in its repertoire, which is aimed at appealing to medium and high socioeconomic sectors. This was accompanied by management’s processes, which are designed to control its workers by using the customer as a motivating figure. However, these intentions coexisted with precarious working conditions, such as long shifts, high turnover and low wages. From 2007–2008 onwards, workers, collectively and individually, have tried to modify the working conditions established by the company. During this period, among the most important claims put forward by the workers was their need for a fixed schedule.
In response, a restructuring of the working organization in the company took place, although other factors, such as the 2008 international financial crisis and the company’s acquisition by two Argentine firms, also came into play. As a result, working conditions have become even more precarious. Some of the most salient changes have been implemented in subcontracting work, staff reduction, schedule reorganization and the outsourcing of some tasks. Describing the changes that have taken place permits an exploration of the company’s re-adaptation processes. These changes have influenced the position and experiences of workers in their relationships to customers, and how the workers respond to the corporation’s control mechanisms.
My research analysed major aspects of how this corporation demanded its workers approach the customer–worker relationship. Corporate ideology presents the shopper as an actor with power over the employees, a kind of ‘boss’; in this formulation the employer’s power becomes invisible. This is expressed not only through discourse but also through test mechanisms such as the ‘mystery shopper’, an assessment tool used by management to test workers’ performance in assisting customers. Referring to workers as representatives of the ‘company’s image’ is an important aspect of this discourse, aiming to legitimate corporate ideology among workers.
Soon, customer image becomes the main way for management to introduce the corporate goals of profitability and productivity precisely at the level of subject practices. This creates a subordination where workers have to manage their emotions, gestures and language according to exacting company expectations. Elsewhere (Guiamet, 2016), I describe company guidelines for customer service in detail, highlighting different levels of control (ranging from concrete assistance guidelines, such as standard greetings, to the introduction of more abstract concepts, such as ‘proactivity’) associated with practices that workers must develop in interactions with both customers and colleagues (characterized by the company as ‘internal customers’). My research demonstrated that many workers appropriated these attitudes to such an extent that they maintained, ‘due to the excellence in assistance, people bought at this supermarket even at higher prices’.
However, some aspects of everyday relations with customers extend beyond the worker subordination proclaimed in corporate ideology, and corporate influence does not imply a total subordination of workers to the company. On the contrary, workers separate themselves from this discourse in different ways. At the level of working practices, employees express sensibilities and goals that differ from those of management. They establish relationships with customers that differ from official guidelines. This happens in three main ways.
First, workers can experience ‘mistreatment’ in the process of interacting with customers. As one worker clearly expressed: ‘Sometimes they treat you badly. Ok, I treat them as they treat me, at this stage! […] you [the customer] pay for the product, you even pay my salary, but you do not need to be rude to me’. These experiences contribute to workers’ impressions of customers, but also express an understanding of relational importance: customers pay workers’ salaries. In my view, this understanding overlays managerial discourse about customers, who are presented as ‘the boss’.
Second, workers can separate themselves from managerial policy by moderating the effort they make on behalf of customers. Workers not only control their workflow, but also their emotional responses to corporate requirements for cordiality, kindness and so on. For example, it was common practice that the cordiality accorded to customers would vary dramatically according to the day of the week, not as a form of voluntary resistance but as an expression of the rhythm of the work on different days.
Third, worker/customer relationships can be characterized by building more trust with regular customers. In these cases, many workers thought of these relationships as recognition of their work, as opposed to lack of recognition by the company. Both customers and workers build particular interactions separate from those suggested by management. I came to conceive of the customer as one who does not mechanically assume hierarchical dominance over the workers. In fact, my ethnography shows that customer attitude was key to whether or not they received kind or cordial assistance.
In 2008 and 2009 the corporation instigated important personnel reductions. These were outlined in my fieldwork, together with modifications in corporate policy that intensified labour and transferred some of the workload to customers. It was intriguing to observe that workers criticized the new labour restructuring policies precisely in terms of the company’s discourse about customer service quality. 6
Thus, the company’s standards of customer service were adopted and re-signified to criticize the company and even legitimize some demands related to working conditions, as will be shown later. Workers particularly embraced this policy in the context of tasks that were transferred to the customer. 7 However, it was not necessarily an instance of conscious resistance. Instead, many workers actually believed in the ‘supermarket’s image’. In some interviews the employees criticized management for no longer exercising control over their aesthetics. According to this demonstrated evidence, I am sceptical about the degree of domination actually achieved by management. Workers showed that they could turn the principle of prioritizing customer service against management, when job cuts and restructuring seemed detrimental to customers as well as workers.
Customer assistance and the indeterminacy of labour
My analysis above differs from viewpoints that consider relationships between workers and customers to represent a new level of worker domination. Here, I explore workers’ subjectivity control in terms of workers’/company/customers’ relationships by returning to some of the theoretical concepts highlighted in the second section of this essay. My fieldwork shows that supermarket workers respond to certain behaviours and actions in ways that drift from the company’s guidelines. These practices are related to making different responses to customers in various situations, such as the way customers approach workers, the day of the week or the sector where the employees work (Guiamet, 2012). I do not consider that customer interaction and other corporate mechanisms to control workers’ subjectivity necessarily imply sophisticated control. Instead, complexities in customer service end up constructing a worker’s subjectivity in which the customer–worker relationship unfolds in different, even contradictory ways.
Here, my first concept—the indeterminacy of the conversion of the workforce into concrete labour—comes into play by promoting subjectivity in control/resistance processes. Workforce merchandise is unique in that it produces an undetermined amount of value. I agree with Bolton’s (2005: 63) assertion that the indeterminacy of labour is: …further exacerbated within the contested terrain of emotional labor process. This contestation is not simply a matter of the persistence of resistance but […] that employees can be active emotions managers within the varied constraints of capitalist and non-capitalist employment relations. (Warhurst et al., 2008: 108)
In general, ‘routinized, interactive service work can increase workers’ control over work processes, not least over difficult customers’ (Collinson and Ackroyd, 2005: 319). This relates to one of LPT’s main theoretical concepts, which argues that no matter how asymmetrical power relations are, managerial control is never complete, and employees invariably find ways of resisting.
From this standpoint, the labour process in the services sector can be analysed via the same concepts used in the industrial sector. According to authors who favour this approach, there are two ways for capitalists to assure surplus value in interactive service activities (Warhurst et al., 2008). The first mechanism attempts to control labour indeterminacy as much as possible through standard, scripted interactions. Although there are already concrete directives for workers interacting with customers, they are not fully incorporated by workers, who grant that assistance should be polite, but not to the point of overwhelming customers. Employees also distanced themselves from ‘McDonald’s style workers where they look like little robots’.
The second mechanism assures the intensity with which the workforce generates surplus value: the management of service sector workers’ emotions and aesthetics via involving them in the labour valorization process (Warhurst et al., 2008). I have already described one of the most important aspects of this mechanism—the fundamental aesthetic of work, where the workers assume ‘the image’ of the supermarket. Worker image management is related to the customer, and the company puts most of its efforts into workers who directly interact with customers. That cashiers must start work wearing makeup exemplifies this control. A strict requirement of the company, this action on the workers’ own bodies takes place before work, but without remuneration for their time, even though the company uses the workers’ ‘image’ to achieve corporate goals. For example, a group of third-party cleaning workers got appropriate clothing after the supermarket’s shop stewards argued that the haphazard outfits worn by the cleaners were damaging the company’s image. Although both ways to control labour indeterminacy (standardization of interactions and aesthetic use of the workforce) were present in the supermarket where my ethnography was performed, control was never completely assured. On the contrary, in this workplace both mechanisms are open to dispute, tension and re-interpretation on the part of the actors.
Workers’ responses to control: Recovering labour relationship specificity
This section discusses processes of subjectivity control/resistance related to a key theoretical concept: the specificity of labour as a relationship of power. Here, I stress the problem of disengaging control/resistance processes from the technical aspects of work organization. For instance, in the interactions between workers and customers that I analysed in my ethnography, there are several ways in which workers drift away from the model attitudes and emotions the company tries to impose. However, some of these practices have no consequences for capital valorization. In fact, some responses, such as irony or exaggeration of the attitude proposed in company policy, can be read both as resistance by workers and as acceptance of corporate policy.
In order to understand these practices, we need to restore the specificity of workplaces as spaces of power that differ from other areas. As Julia Soul states, we are talking about a space that comprises a ‘web of social relationships determined by the execution of a productive process, in a context of social conditions of production that condition and determine its execution’ (Soul, 2011: 12). The post-structuralist approaches that I described earlier, particularly concepts of subjective resistance that aim to characterize power relations in the workplace, may have neglected the specificity of labour as a power relation in which a productive process is carried out. The technical determinants of the power relation derive from the double dimension of the productive process—as both a labour process and a valorization process.
The anthropological tradition of labour studies, particularly in Latin America, could become a reference framework for the study of subjects’ practices in connection with these technical determinants. As a movement, the anthropology of work was born in the 1960s. Together with the crisis in traditional anthropology, problems related to social history, political economy and the sociology of labour started to be discussed at this time. The first production centres investigated in Latin America were in Mexico and Brazil.
One of the first approaches to workers from an anthropological perspective in Brazil was Leite Lopes’ study of workers in a sugar factory located in the northeast region (2011 [1976]). Work at a sugar plant exhibits seasonal variation, concentration of different kinds of workers (based on the agricultural character of production) and company control of the reproductive sphere. These characteristics are distinctive features of daily workers’ experiences. The author’s analysis of the employees’ representations of their work, and how their representations connect to their different positions in the productive process, disclose the technical conditioning of workers’ experiences.
Going back to the problem of my ethnography, the role that customer service policy plays as a control device has to be understood in a more specific sense. Considering the workplace as a conditioned space—as the place where a technical labour process takes place—enables me to concretely understand how social and political aspects are intertwined in particular ways. Trying to control certain practices by appealing to the customer derives from characteristics of the productive process at the supermarket. Nevertheless, the issue becomes more complex when, also based on characteristics of the productive process, the customer does not play the same role in different working areas.
Basically, my research distinguishes two main roles for customers in two different sectors: checkouts, where engagement with customers is direct; and shelf stocking, where customer presence is secondary. In the latter sector, customer service was sometimes presented as a strategy to interrupt the shelf stocking workflow and the transport of goods. In contrast, the customer was the main scope of work in the checkout line, where customer distribution (adjusted by the employer through the number of checkouts open at certain times) regulated the flow of the labour process. In checkout lines, I found that effectiveness of customer control is not predominantly connected to company intervention in the subjective sphere, but also to technical control, which influences the representations workers create of customer images. Earlier, this article outlined experiences of mistreatment and negative representations of customers, which were mainly from cashiers. Among shelf stockers, representations of customers were not nearly so negative. This is because they could distance themselves from the control of emotions and attitudes that the company tried to exert. The possibility of movement in the workplace was one of the most important differences between these two positions. Thus, technical conditioning had a strong impact on labour experiences. Shelf stockers who moved about with more freedom were more likely to assist customers in a relaxed way. 9 Yet, shelf stocking is not as closely associated with the productive process as running checkouts, where slow customer assistance creates greater consequences for profitability.
If I had only observed the different attitudes in these two groups of workers, the subjectivity control of cashiers would have seemed higher, while shelf stockers would seem to show more subjective resistance. However, articulating these experiences in terms of technical conditioning retrieved the specificity of each position. This was necessary for me to determine that the differences I observed were not evidence of subjectivity control, but of the specific technical control inherent in each productive process. Therefore, workers’ experiences must be interpreted within the structural conditions where they took place. Applying this second theoretical concept distances the subjectivity control/resistance issue from interpretations excessively centred in workers’ attitudes and senses.
Rethinking the concept of subjectivity at work
So far, this article has discussed several perspectives on workers’ control, connecting them to notions that consider the workers’ subjectivity sphere to be controlled or modelled, and engaged critically with a different viewpoint that sees subjective and/or individual resistance in any situation where workers deny or drift away from corporate policy. I have also highlighted two theoretical issues that are at odds with both positions: the concept of the indeterminacy of labour, and the importance of technical conditioning when thinking of labour as a power relation. The third theoretical concept, subjectivity in labour studies, may explain some of the disparity in these views of control/resistance processes.
In general terms, I agree with the authors who, inspired by post-structuralist ideas, assert that LPT’s first advocates implicitly followed essentialist concepts of subjects. It was common among different theoretical movements within LPT to consider subjectivity as everything that human beings make outside or against structure, based on a supposed essence that resists control of the labour process. Thus, workers’ resistance or responses would be expressions of their subjectivity, while the reproduction of dominance conditions (which also supposes subjects acting and providing sense to control strategies) would be the expression of subjects who alienate their subjectivity. The dualist concepts adopted by many labour process studies, characterized by Knights (1990) as part of the ‘control/resistance’ dualist paradigm, derive from this notion of subjectivity.
According to Willmott, this essentialist concept of subjectivity is clearly seen in Friedmann’s theory of direct control and responsible autonomy strategies. Both strategies are considered to apply externally to autonomous subjects, that is, control would be applied to ‘people who are essentially free and independent, but who have alienated their labour capacity’ (Friedman, in Willmott, 1990: 359). The problem with this expression is that it considers human needs as essentials. However, expressions of freedom and independence are socially organized and identified, not ontologically given (Willmott, 1990). According to Knights: Labour Process Theory has been inclined to a view—albeit not always articulated—of subjectivity as representing the productive and autonomous aspects of human existence, which are to be contrasted with the objective structures that constrain them […]. This dualism between the creative subject and the constraining object is unhelpful, since it fails to capture the social character of relations, practices and institutions. (Knights, 1990: 303)
My viewpoint considers a similar concept of subjectivity, focusing on how subjects adopt, transform, re-signify, deny and resist management policies. Ultimately, subjectivity is understood not as a nucleus isolated from structures (which supposes a lack of comprehension of the relationship between agency and structure) but as the ability of the subject to act from and against these structures. Broadly speaking, subjectivity as a process to provide meaning spans the spectrum of human actions, ranging from the reproductive to the transformative.
According to De la Garza Toledo (2001a), subjectivity needs to be considered neither as the bastion of freedom of action and thought in human beings, nor as a calculating and rational action intention, but as a process to provide meaning, mediated by power relations, penetrated by different cultures, different reality levels, interests and so on. Considering subjectivity as a signification process, attention is oriented towards the analysis of different meaning configurations that occur within different subjective fields: cognitive, everyday thinking, emotional, aesthetic, etc.
This notion of subjectivity enables me to return critically to the concept of subjective control. If we consider subjectivity as a process of providing meaning, control will always be, to some extent, subjective because it supposes that actors’ subjectivity is also constructed when reproducing domination. Thus, the distinction between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ mechanisms of control is a false dichotomy, derived from the lack of understanding of actors’ subjectivity.
Finally, I relate the notion of subjectivity to labour control/resistance processes included within hegemonic processes. Although overall hegemonic processes are beyond the scope of this article, the concept of transactions 10 is operative for this research as a way to think of power relations in the workplace while considering the agency of subordinate subjects as active participants. In my own work, this concept allowed me to include the idea of a structured antagonism between capital and labour in my analysis. Acknowledging the complex game of antagonism and cooperation produced in the workplace improves upon the model characterized as ‘control versus resistance’ (Knights, 1990), which tends to portray a subject acting against another subject without recognizing the contradictory elements in each process. The idea of transactions thus enabled me to understand how, on many occasions, subjects simultaneously support and oppose hegemonic conditions.
Although related to hegemonic process theory, this concept facilitates considering ways in which corporate policy is adopted, re-signified and/or transformed, rather than only considering it in terms of control/resistance. This approach to mechanisms of control accounts not only for the ways companies build them, but also for the ways workers adopt, negotiate and resist them. Herein lies the importance of the anthropological contribution, which enables us to answer questions about the everyday ways in which work is organized and how organization connects to relationships established by subjects, either among workers themselves or at different hierarchical levels in the manufacturing space.
In relationships with customers, I have outlined transactional processes where workers dispute the terms of certain corporate policies and practices as stated by the company. Thus, hegemonic processes are not considered as consent generators, but as prescribed ways of expressing both acceptance and dissatisfaction (Roseberry, 1994). This Gramcian approach implies that a transaction takes place within a field limited by dominant conditions.
This appears in my assertion that supermarket workers were critical of company restructuring, not only for its negative impact upon themselves but also for its negative impact upon the customers. This implies a dispute in the hegemonic field structured by the company, which created strong limitations. On the one hand, this dispute was presented in fundamentally discursive terms, without incorporating grand scale collective actions. On the other hand, the dispute limited the vindication spectrum. The claim for appropriate clothing for the outsourced cleaning workers illustrates this idea: I believe this claim was successful because it was presented in the hegemonic language of the company. However, not all claims can be presented this way. This limitation can currently be observed in a union claim for Sunday rest (2014 onwards) that, according to some union leaders, did not obtain the expected support among company workers.
Final considerations
This article analyses different labour theories, such as Marxist-oriented LPT, the anthropology of work and the post-structuralist version of LPT. Attempting to put these three currents of thought into dialogue may be this article’s main contribution. I hope that these reflections are deepened by considerations of the subjectivity construction process and its relationship with corporate control mechanisms, as shown in my ethnography of supermarket workers.
These mechanisms aim to construct the subjectivity of a specific type of worker: a young person, fully available, with no previous working experience, who can be imbued with company goals. The figure of the customer is vital to the construction of subjectivity. Eventually company policy is modified, not only by the workers’ labour experience, which contrasts the management ideal with their own precarious working conditions, but also because of the company’s attempts to sustain labour intensity. Moreover, the worker/customer relationship may result in scenarios that differ from the aims of the company: from mistreatment to ‘friendship’ experiences. In summary, all daily encounters at the company between workers and customers illustrate deviation from theories that project that the management of service workers through the controls described here produce total, subjective and/or internalized dominance.
As an alternative theory, I have developed three issues pertinent to understanding subjective control/resistance mechanisms. The first relates to the indeterminacy of labour as a founding aspect. There, I reconsider LPT positions and contend that control over indeterminacy is key in capitalism and that control processes must be constantly renewed. In analysing the subjective dimension of work (expressed in ways of treating customers), this kind of control poses new challenges. Workers may vary in their cooperation. This is seen, for instance, in differences in the attention paid to customers according to the days of the week, a common element during the years of my research that the company could not reverse.
The second issue is the connection of the power relationship with technical requirements of the productive process. This explains the emphasis on customer assistance, not only as an instance of subjectivity control, but also as a mechanism necessary for generating surplus value in supermarket jobs. I examined the differences between two kinds of positions, cashier and shelf stocker, to show how an approach centred excessively in subjective resistance hinders the explanation of workers’ practices.
These two reflections complement a conceptualization of subjectivity that differs from the underlying notions present in most labour studies. In this sense, my third reflection departs from analyses that link subjectivity to resistance or a subject’s autonomy Instead, I characterize subjectivity as a process through which structural conditions are given meaning with respect to many diverse positions, from reproduction to open resistance. However, in most cases it implies that subjects act both from and against these conditions, and can even modify them. I employ this reflection to consider the subject as an active participant in hegemonic processes, recovering the Gramscian approach. Likewise, I emphasize the notion of transactions as a daily performance of hegemonic processes at the company. Incorporating this dimension shows how an approach used by the company to formulate legitimate ways for workers to act could be used by the workers to demand legitimate actions from the company—always ‘for the customer’s sake’. Throughout, I have tried to prove that, even though service work has many specific characteristics, subjectivity control does not suppose a shift towards the internalization of control; rather, it contains its own limitations.
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) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research is funded by a postdoctoral grant awarded by the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) of Argentina.