The findings from ConflictCo and PartnershipCo suggest that a form of flexible despotism is key for understanding workplace control of workers in the twenty-first century. However, this flexible despotism is not one that is based on the use of temporary workers and dual labor markets, as previous accounts have stressed. Instead, ConflictCo and PartnershipCo suggest that control can be simultaneously both secured and obscured through the operation of flexible scheduling and the flexible discipline and schedule gifts it entails. This form of flexible despotism has far greater applicability to a wide range of workplaces than previous accounts of flexible despotism have suggested. However, there are limits to this control, and resistance is possible. In fact, the insecurity that precarious scheduling generates can also heighten feelings of injustice and, in part, has led some workers at ConflictCo to participate in open collective resistance. Moreover, the growth of social media networks suggests that, in the future, even small numbers of workers may be able to leverage symbolic power in order to challenge their employers and raise labor standards through the threat of reputational damage to the organization.
Flexible despotism has emerged from the death of hegemony. The hegemonic workplace regimes of the mid-twentieth century were the outcome of a number of specific social processes. In particular, hegemony was predicated on workers possessing high levels of bargaining power with which they could force concessions from employers. At the same time, employers were inclined to agree to moderate concessions demanded by workers. Markets had become monopolistic, with reduced competition, resulting in higher profits, which in turn enabled employers to offer workers some real compromises and raise labor standards. However, the compromise equilibrium that lay at the heart of hegemony was undermined by the space-time compression that began in the 1970s. Employers faced increasing product market competition, while workers’ labor market bargaining power was eroded. The transition to flexible accumulation and the corresponding growth of service sector employment in the United States and the UK further eroded the basis for hegemony, with these jobs tending to provide workers with little structural economic power.
Working-class service sector jobs usually require neither scarce skills nor expertise. Nor do they afford workers with a strategic position within the social division of labor from which it is possible to cause significant economic disruption. In addition, workers’ labor market bargaining power in both the UK and the United States has been undermined by high levels of underemployment and increasingly restrictive social security, all of this against the background of a dramatic decline in the associational power granted to workers by unions and collective bargaining in both countries. Therefore, the potential for workplace control to be maintained through hegemonic regimes in the twenty-first century is limited.
The findings from ConflictCo and PartnershipCo confirm the limits of hegemony in the contemporary age. Neither of the workplace regimes made use of truly hegemonic practices, that is, stable compromise equilibriums maintained through the concrete coordination of capital’s and labor’s interests. Even at PartnershipCo, where a union was recognized and collective bargaining existed, there was little evidence of the union being able to extract significant concessions from the employer or a willingness for the firm to compromise. However, it was expected that workplace regimes in the UK would tend to be further along the continuum from despotism to hegemony than in the United States, a result of there being fewer institutional barriers to labor unions and collective bargaining in the UK, as reflected in higher union membership and greater collective bargaining coverage. In addition, the UK state intervenes to a greater extent directly in the workplace to provide a wider range of employment rights and protections, while social security is also less restricted.
The absence of hegemony can be seen by the fact that ConflictCo was marked by an internal state featuring a high level of worker surveillance, while the unstable and opaque nature of the company policies placed few constraints on managers’ arbitrary discipline. Mechanisms that would have protected workers from abusive managers and led to improved working conditions were absent in the organization. Workers were denied a collective voice, with ConflictCo refusing to recognize a union, while individual voices were curtailed by the undeveloped and ineffective grievance procedure. Moreover, workers’ “at-will” employment status granted them few legal protections, leading to the unbridled power of managers manifesting in verbal abuse, threats, and bullying. There were therefore few mechanisms by which the interests of workers could be concretely coordinated with those of their employer. The mechanisms that did exist (such as the 401(k) retirement, share, bonus, and health insurance schemes) were of little consequence, for they provided only minimal concessions to the workforce. There was also little sign of hegemony in terms of the work organization at ConflictCo. Employees lacked control over their work and experienced it as both intense and arduous. Pay was low and therefore a cause of outrage, while the pay structure itself was a source of confusion, disappointment, and bitterness, with workers recognizing that they had little opportunity for genuine vertical mobility.
As expected, the workplace regime at PartnershipCo did have more hegemonic features. In particular, the union policed the disciplinary and grievance procedures that rationalized discipline, constrained manager discretion, and provided workers with employment protection. Traditional forms of punishment (e.g., threats of dismissal) were therefore limited at PartnershipCo, where the hegemonic features of the workplace regime rationalized discipline and constrained manager discretion over the formal disciplining of workers. Additionally, PartnershipCo had a loyalty scheme in which workers received a bonus in the form of company shares. It also operated one of the last remaining private sector defined benefit pension schemes. There was also greater contentment with regard to pay, even though this was declining in real terms. This satisfaction derived from workers understanding their situation as being better than that of comparable workers who were less well paid or receiving no pay rise at all. However, contentment with pay does not mean it was a source of consent. Likewise, workers also believed that there was potential for promotion to management. Nevertheless, this contrasted with experiences of mobility within the job structure for hourly paid workers, who had few opportunities for progression unless they managed to become managers.
PartnershipCo’s internal state was clearly less despotic than ConflictCo’s. Yet, here too, the compromise equilibrium had been actively undermined by management, and the hegemonic mechanisms were in fact structured around extracting concessions from labor. At the heart of PartnershipCo’s internal state was a consultation committee process whereby worker representatives could raise issues at the store, regional, or national level. However, this process detached collective issues from the workplace and enabled PartnershipCo to dominate the agenda of these committees. The result of the internal state being structured in this way was that PartnershipCo could extract concessions from the workforce without being challenged effectively by the union. For example, during the time of my fieldwork, PartnershipCo was able to avoid awarding any loyalty bonus shares and claim that it had consulted the union—provoking considerable worker outrage aimed at the union. PartnershipCo was also able to raise the age at which the pension could be claimed, restrict the payment of sick leave, and consistently reduce real pay. Therefore, as predicted by the workplace regime theory outlined in the book’s introduction, while PartnershipCo retained some hegemonic features, neither here nor at ConflictCo was control achieved hegemonically. That is to say that control was not based on a stable compromise equilibrium maintained through the concrete coordination of interests between labor and capital.
The accounts of work discussed in this book suggest that the hegemonic regimes of the past are unlikely to be restored in the postindustrial working-class workplaces of the twenty-first century. Contemporary workers lack the structural economic power to win concessions from their employers and enforce stable compromise equilibriums.1 The absence of hegemony should not, however, be mistaken for a return to the despotism of the nineteenth century, as some contemporary accounts have suggested. For even at ConflictCo, the securing of control through despotism was constrained by the ability of the unrecognized union and worker association to leverage symbolic power and utilize state procedures to enforce and raise labor standards. Despite ConflictCo’s famed hostility toward organized labor, the worker association and state institutions curbed the ability of managers to blatantly utilize traditional despotic means of control. The limits to despotism at both ConflictCo and PartnershipCo therefore made it imperative that control be achieved by other means than traditional blatant coercion. The findings presented in this book suggest that a workplace regime termed flexible despotism can provide one alternative by which labor control in the twenty-first century is realized.
Sociologist Jennifer Jihye Chun coined the term “flexible despotism”2 to refer to the manner in which “flexible firms” achieve control through a dual despotic/hegemonic regime along the lines of the core/periphery workforce segmentation model. In this form of flexible despotism, contingent workers face a despotic regime and core workers a hegemonic one—albeit with the increased, generalized insecurity created by the presence of contingent workers facing despotic treatment. We can term this workplace regime numerical flexible despotism. However, there are two issues with numerical flexible despotism that limit its generalizability. First, the temporary employment on which it is based is fairly unrepresentative of wider labor market experiences in the United States and the UK, and therefore this type of flexible despotism has limited applicability. Second, the distinction between core and periphery workers has become blurred by the increasing insecurity faced by all workers.
In numerical flexible despotism it is the use of temporary workers and dual labor markets that both secures and obscures exploitation. However, ConflictCo and PartnershipCo demonstrate that contemporary flexible firms can achieve flexibility temporally via precarious scheduling, with flexibility not being confined to just the temporary workers. In fact, temporal flexibility was experienced across employment statuses at both firms, and its increased use at PartnershipCo had the explicit aim of reducing reliance on temporary and agency workers who were associated with greater recruitment and training costs. This suggests that flexible firms do not need to rely on contingent workers and workforce segmentation strategies, but can instead achieve flexibility through implementing a general flexible regulation of working time across employment statuses. As a consequence, there was little evidence of a dual use of market despotic/hegemonic workplace regimes at either PartnershipCo or ConflictCo. Instead the findings presented in this book enable the identification of what can be termed temporal flexible despotism. This new form of flexible despotism secures and obscures exploitation through the flexibility of working time and the flexible discipline and schedule gifts that this enables.
As has been highlighted by a number of researchers, flexible scheduling provides managers with a potent source of power within the workplace in a variety of settings.3 Indeed, the widespread use of flexible scheduling provides an alternative means of constituting flexible despotism, through “flexible discipline.” ConflictCo and PartnershipCo demonstrate the manner in which flexible discipline significantly increases the discretionary power of managers, enabling them to flexibly discipline workers outside of formal procedures by altering their schedules. These alterations force workers to work at times that clash with their home life, as well as reducing their income and ability to plan. A major strength of flexible discipline as a mechanism of workplace control is its subtlety and ambiguity—it is hard for workers to discern whether they are actually being disciplined and, as a result, whether the blame for their suffering lies with their manager or is just the result of shifting demand. This ambiguity reduces the damage of discipline to psychological contracts and makes it easier for managers to rescind punishment. Flexible discipline, therefore, represents a more nuanced means of securing control than traditional disciplinary methods, offering managers the possibility to modulate and adjust the severity of punishment. It is flexible discipline that enables the securing of exploitation under temporal flexible despotism.
Despite the power that flexible discipline provides for securing workplace control, there remain limits to the effectiveness of achieving control purely through coercion—despite advances in digital surveillance technologies. It remains the case, as sociologist Max Weber noted back in 1922, that coercion is costly.4 This is because surveillance and thus punishment are actually very difficult to undertake when a complex division of labor exists.5 Therefore, to focus only on punishment represents an overly simplistic one-dimensional view of power. As Michael Burawoy puts it, it is necessary to understand how exploitation is both secured and obscured.6
A number of accounts have suggested that, even in the absence of hegemony, control can be aided by work games obscuring the exploitative nature of labor relations. Work games have been identified in some service sector workplaces such as fast-food restaurants, call centers, and casinos, and tend to be based around interactions with customers. Studies in other sectors have found work games involving working time. Given the importance of temporal flexibility to retail firms, it was expected that work games based around flexible working time might play an important role in the workplace regimes of ConflictCo and PartnershipCo. However, there was little evidence of work games, involving time or otherwise, having a significant role in maintaining control at either firm. This was perhaps because workers experienced too much uncertainty due to precarious scheduling for enthralling work games to develop. Without work games to occupy their minds, workers instead turned to escapism and “having a laugh” as coping methods.
This absence of work games raises the question of how control at these firms was aided by the obscuring of labor relations. It was expected that direct normative controls, such as union framing, rituals, and firm propaganda, might provide the answer. Indeed, the union at PartnershipCo had an important symbolic role and did legitimize some elements of the workplace regime. It also avoided framing other contentious issues in ways that would have been detrimental to PartnershipCo’s interests. However, in doing so, it followed its own interests, and these were not always aligned with those of capital. For example, the recruitment activities of union reps involved emphasizing workplace injustices, and, thus, they undermined the creation of consent. Therefore, the union did not always legitimize the workplace regime or increase workers’ integration into the firm. Union reps in particular actively increased discontent with regard to some issues.
In contrast to PartnershipCo, the internal state at ConflictCo did not accommodate the union within its structures. Unsurprisingly, the union and the worker association that it supported attempted to frame workplace issues in a manner that was highly hostile to the interests of ConflictCo and undermined workplace control. In the absence of hegemony, therefore, unions are unlikely to be reliable managerial allies for obscuring workplace regimes in the twenty-first century.
The heavy use of propaganda and rituals at ConflictCo also failed to aid control, beyond making clear to workers the rules of the game in terms of what ConflictCo considered to be acceptable behavior (i.e., hostility to unions). In fact, the use of workplace propaganda actually destabilized the workplace regime by reinforcing a sense of injustice through heightening awareness of the disparity between ConflictCo’s claims and the obvious reality. It also legitimized opposition to those in control by seeming to imply that this discrepancy was due to a betrayal of the founder’s legacy.
With the absence of work games, the unreliability of unions, and the ineffectiveness of rituals, what means of obscuring labor relations exist in the twenty-first-century flexible firm? Ashley Mears, in criticizing the focus on the obscuring effect of work games, argues for the need to go beyond the “situational construction of consent” and instead to place even greater emphasis on the relational nature of control.7 Experiences of precarious scheduling at ConflictCo and PartnershipCo demonstrate the importance of this relational understanding of control. Precarious scheduling not only enables the securing of control through flexible discipline but also simultaneously obscures workplace relations by enabling the giving and receiving of “schedule gifts.” Precarious scheduling necessitates that workers actively and constantly beg managers for schedules to be altered and for more hours to be granted. The acquiescence by managers to a particular worker’s needs is often “misrecognized” as an act of kindness that the worker is unable to reciprocate. The inability of workers to reciprocate schedule gifts binds them to the manager through an emotional debt and a sense of moral obligation, while shrouding the manager’s act as a gesture of generosity and kindness. Under temporal flexible despotism, then, flexible scheduling not only provides a means for the securing of exploitation, via flexible discipline, but it also enables the obscuring of labor relations through schedule gifts. It is this simultaneous securing and obscuring of exploitation via flexible working time that constitutes the core of this form of the flexible despotic regime.
Workplace regimes represent the political dynamics, institutional rules, and norms that workers encounter as they go about making their living. While workplace regimes are relatively autonomous to their external contexts, they are, nevertheless, influenced by the wider societal balance of power between capital and labor. For this reason a comparative approach was taken. On the face of it, the two firms shared similar profiles in terms of their domestic market position, yet seemed to have contrasting workplace regimes that were reflective of wider contextual differences between the United States and the UK and thus can help us understand how flexible despotism manifests in different contexts.
Comparing the situation of workers in both the UK and United States, we can see that the UK has a more inclusive and extensive welfare system, workers have greater statutory employment protections and rights, and organized labor remains stronger than in the United States. Mirroring this wider context, at the UK case study workers were found to experience greater security due to their employment rights and the policing of a collective agreement by an independent union with significant membership. Workers were thus protected from the extremes of manager tyranny and abuse, while traditional discipline was rationalized by the developed grievance and disciplinary procedures.
The situation found in the UK contrasted with that at the U.S. case study, where workers experienced high levels of employment insecurity and were very fearful of losing their jobs. This was a consequence of the limited rights that at-will employment law granted workers and of the limited protection offered by the welfare state if workers were to lose their job. Moreover, organized labor is significantly weaker in the United States, and employers are drastically more hostile to unions. Reflecting this context, ConflictCo refused to incorporate the union within its internal state and was notorious for its avoidance of unionization and its tradition of ruling through fear on the shop floor. Instead of offering labor concessions, workers experienced poverty pay and poor benefits.
Despite these highly divergent policies and the notable differences in political and economic contexts that they reflected, this book has highlighted how the workplace regime at both firms can best be understood through the lens of flexible despotism, that is, workplace control being achieved via workforce flexibility. At both PartnershipCo and ConflictCo, precarious scheduling was central to control because it enabled flexible discipline and schedule gifts. It was the subtlety of this control that made it such an insidious source of power at both workplaces. However, the greater bargaining power of workers in the UK seemingly gave rise to a more progressive form of flexible despotism than the reactionary form found in the United States, where it complemented more obvious forms of despotism.
That flexible discipline was central to understanding control at ConflictCo, where more traditional forms of discipline were readily available, as well as at the more hegemonic PartnershipCo, is significant. The identification of the role of flexible discipline and schedule gifts at both firms strengthens the case that flexible despotism is a vital feature of workplace regimes in the twenty-first century. Therefore, regardless of industrial relations climates, employment protections, and welfare systems, flexible despotism has the potential to have a wide application given that precarious scheduling is typical of postindustrial working-class jobs and affects between a sixth and a fifth of workers in the United States and Europe—around twenty million and forty million workers in the United States and Europe, respectively.
Attempts at the historical periodization of workplace control, such as the one carried out in this book, have been criticized. It is undeniable that variations have existed between workplaces within the same economic sectors and industries and even across nominally similar firms during the decades that this book has identified as “market despotic” and “hegemonic.”8 This fact has led some scholars to object that such periodization constitutes “over-ambitious attempts to create overarching models which explain the sequence or central characteristics of periods of capitalist production.” Yet a close reading of these critics finds that, while explicitly opposing such periodization, they implicitly adopt similar ones in their own work. For example, Ackroyd and Thompson speak of the postwar social settlement in which the balance of power between managers and labor ebbed and flowed according to the economic cycle. This period, they argue, collapsed in the 1970s “as employers in Britain launched a major offensive … against the informal job controls and formal bargaining mechanisms.” They argue that the breakdown of the postwar settlement led to a new pattern of conflict and resistance. Furthermore, they explain how in the 1980s employers “took back control” with the aid of more flexible labor markets and greater state control of labor unions.9
These authors go on to argue that the 1990s were marked by greater product market competition, deregulation of internal and external labor markets, and the decline of unions. They then state that this changed the “ground rules” according to which conflict at work takes place, with managers having “greatly increased powers,” and that, therefore, “the conditions for the production of responsible autonomy have now gone.”10 In fact, Thompson has gone on to argue in a 2016 article, that there has been a decisive shift in workplace regimes so that “control [now] rests largely on market discipline and performance management.” This transformation is argued to be the result of the decline in traditional manufacturing and industrial sectors, where historically worker organizations were strongest, combined with weakened state, corporate employment protections, and the growing financialization of accumulation.11 While it is no doubt difficult to judge our own position in history from our vantage point of the present, now that the dust has settled on the previous periods, it is quite clear that a unique historical tendency toward hegemony existed for about thirty-five years in the workplaces of the United States and the UK between the Second World War and the end of the 1970s. There was, therefore a generation of researchers who spent their entire career studying hegemonic regimes and believing these to be the norm. However, when we place their work within a wider historical body, it becomes clear that before this hegemonic period there was another era in which a much greater tendency toward coercion existed.
If this form of flexible despotism has wide applicability to low-end workplaces in the twenty-first century, what does the future hold for workers? Although predictions are a dangerous game, it seems clear that the astronomical growth of personal data has the potential to transform work and employment. More and more of our everyday activities are facilitated by Internet-based platforms and smartphone apps, and the data produced is a highly valuable asset that is captured by the tech giants. We now live in an almost permanent state of connectivity, and the so-called advent of big data and the “datafication” of social life are helping to disrupt long-held business conventions. The growing centrality of data to contemporary economic processes is likely to have two implications for control at work: heightening flexibility and introducing algorithmic control. As technology companies hoover up more and more information on our habits and likes in order to sell this behavioral data to other companies, it has the potential to further heighten the flexible temporality of capitalism. The wealth of data that now exists about our activities, interests, and social groups helps inform ever more sophisticated modeling of demand. And as employers become able to model demand increasingly accurately, an on-demand labor supply will become ever more attractive to them.12 It seems likely that the on-demand economy, and the precarious working time it entails, will become more common as the century progresses. The flexible despotism identified by this book will, therefore, continue to be a central method of control in low-end workplaces.
As demonstrated by the growth of gig economy platforms, the datafication of economic processes also makes a second form of control possible. Platforms such as Uber make use of what has been termed “algorithmic management,”13 in which algorithmic control is enabled by platform-based rating and reputation systems. Workers are rated by clients following the completion of tasks and automatically disciplined for not meeting client expectations by work being filtered toward the workers with the highest ratings. In many cases, those with the lowest ratings are even “deactivated”—in other words, dismissed. Algorithmic control is an extension of the “customer management” strategies that first developed in retail in the early 1990s. They entailed positioning customers “as agents in the management circuit” so that “customers, rather than managers, are … the ones who must be pleased, whose orders must be followed, whose ideas, whims and desires … dictate how work is performed.”14
Algorithmic control is starting to spread out from the gig economy, with similar rating platforms being used to manage traditional employees.15 The advantage, in terms of control, of algorithmic-based rating and reputation systems is that they reduce the difficulty and cost of surveillance: customers and coworkers provide the observation of workers and monitoring of performance. The platform’s algorithm then automates discipline by putting together these ratings with other relevant information and makes a decision on how the worker should be treated, in other words, whether they should be rewarded or disciplined. The development of algorithmic control reduces barriers to the temporal and spatial fragmentation of work, as a manager does not need to be directly present to monitor workers’ activity. Again, this innovation in control suggests that the on-demand nature of work will continue to grow in coming years.
The future of control for low-end workers will likely combine the algorithmic management enabled by platform-based rating and reputation systems with the discipline and misrecognition entailed by flexible despotism. In fact, research suggests that in the gig economy at least one firm may already be combining algorithmic management with flexible despotism. This gig economy platform uses algorithmic management to automatically determine which shifts workers can select, with the best shifts being offered only to those workers with a high rating on the platform.16 However, the absence of hegemony means that the frontier of control in the future is unlikely to be stable, and the insecurity produced by both the reliance on algorithms and precarious scheduling can be expected to create new forms of resistance and collective organization. Future research is needed to understand the form that resistance to flexible despotism and algorithmic management will take and how this will shape wider conceptions of class conflict in the United States and the UK.
Regardless of the specific workplace regimes that emerge as we progress through the twenty-first century, the task for egalitarians will remain the same. That task, as Elizabeth S. Anderson so eloquently articulates, is not only to highlight those workplace relations that entail domination, subordination, and humiliation, but to challenge them—and, ultimately, to support the oppressed in confronting and transforming those relations that unjustly constrain freedom.17