Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974) was clear and timely. Some commentators referred to the flood of articles and books that followed as “Bravermania.”2 In this essay I will focus on a selection of work associated with the International Labor Process Conference, which has been meeting in one form or another since 1982, and the work of Michael Burawoy, especially his book The Politics of Production.3 These works remain rooted in Marxism without seeking to defend any particular orthodoxy. For Marx’s and Braverman’s analysis see the first part of this essay.
There is a voluminous management literature now that looks at the labor process instrumentally, in other words seeking to determine the best ways to organize work so as to maximize profits, maintain the enterprise as a going concern, etc. Some of this has been influenced by the post-Braverman international labor process debate discussed below, but I will touch on this work only in passing. My focus is on Marxian theories of the labor process.
Ongoing research on the labor process has been institutionalized through the annual international labor process conference and related book series. This project grew out of the debate over Labor and Monopoly Capital in the UK at the end of the 1970s and has produced a rich body of case studies exploring various techniques of management control and to some extent worker resistance/accommodation (Smith and Thompson 2016). It has also produced a theoretical framework linking labor process issues to a broader political economy.
The “core theory” (Thompson 2010) starts from the indeterminacy at the heart of the labor process, i.e., the difference between what the employer pays for (labor power) and what the employer wants (labor, or work done.) Four principles make up the core theory:
1 The labor process has a privileged position in political economy because it is where surplus value is produced and is a central part of human experience;
2 Competition impels capitalists to constantly revolutionize production;
3 Some system of managerial control is necessary because market mechanisms alone do not regulate the labor process;
4 Social relations between labor and capital in the workplace can be characterized as “structured antagonism.”
In both the core theory and in Burawoy’s work there is an initial move away from simplistic Marxist notions of this structured antagonism. Burawoy’s influential participant-observer studies suggested strongly that capital-labor relations in the workplace do not dictate those in society, nor can they be derived from those in society. Core theory indicated the same.
Some of the initial debate over the labor process had attempted to reinsert worker resistance, often seeing class-consciousness as the norm and seeking to explain why it did not arise in particular cases. A dialectic of control and resistance became a principal feature of labor process writing in the work of Richard Edwards (1979), Andrew Friedman (1977), and Burawoy’s earlier book, Manufacturing Consent (1979). Burawoy (1985) went beyond the simple presumption of resistance as the norm and, following Gramsci, focused on the production of consent in what he called factory regimes. Burawoy developed a politics of production through identification of different regimes, which he viewed as internal states with their own rules of citizenship.
The characteristic regime studied by Marx was market despotism, in which inter-firm competition was fierce, the state stood outside the wage labor relationship, labor was subordinate to capital and completely separated from the means of production, and the normal condition of the labor market was one of surplus labor. The relaxation of any of these assumptions produced a wide variety of factory regimes—paternalism, patriarchy, the company state, bureaucratic despotisms, collective self-management, hegemonic regimes, etc. (Burawoy 1985, 12, 91).
The contrast between market despotisms and hegemonic regimes is of most interest. Burawoy noted that with the advent of social insurance and labor law the worker was no longer completely dependent on the employer for his survival and no longer completely powerless in the workplace. This meant that employers needed to achieve worker consent to produce surplus labor, primarily by identifying the interests of the worker with those of the enterprise, and the interests of the capitalist class as those of society as a whole. In the American case this helps us make sense of the agency of the capitalist class in resisting those aspects of the New Deal that promoted social security and worker rights (McIntyre and Hillard 2013; McIntyre 2013).
The UK labor process group paralleled Burawoy to some extent in creating a control-resistance-consent model while reasserting the lack of necessary connection between workplace struggles and class struggles in society. Employers’ need to control the labor process would give rise to various forms of resistance on the part of workers. Both groups would engage in bargaining and negotiation, eventually leading to some form of consent. Initially there was a lingering sense in some of this work that collective worker organization and action was the norm and the absence of it required explanation. Simultaneously, though, historically informed labor sociologists were discovering that all national cases are exceptional: there is no typical pattern of working class formation (Zolberg 1986).
The desire not to read off society-wide politics from workplace politics was historically accurate, but it left labor process theory with no way to theorize the normative basis for worker consent4 and the primarily national context for the vast majority of case studies “largely failed to capture the complexities of relations between capital, labor, and the state within the international division of labor” (Thompson and Newsome 2004, 143). These remain active areas of research.
On the other hand, labor process research did provide a position from which to criticize theories of flexible specialization and lean management. In the 1990s a “mutual gains enterprise” was thought to be emerging from new strategies of teamwork, flexibility and responsibility (Kochan and Osterman 1994). Labor process scholars produced many case studies showing that these new strategies actually created an “invisible iron cage” of control. Lean production does not do much to alleviate the “mind-numbing stress” of mass production; it simply removes obstacles to the extraction of effort. Power in the enterprise moves upward while accountability and increased effort moves down (Thompson and Newsome 2004, 147; Hillard and McIntyre 1998). Workers are expected to contribute to continuous improvement while accepting that they will be policed more closely. In lean production the ideological dimension of management expands so that management works more actively to align worker attitudes with corporate goals.
What this all means for worker resistance and collective action is not clear. Lean or high performance production exists alongside strategies of bureaucratic rationalization, work intensification and scientific management. Whereas Foucauldians and human resources scholars emphasized the hegemony of cultural control and electronic surveillance, writers in the labor process tradition began to examine worker resistance, misbehavior and disengagement outside of traditional trade union activity. This misbehavior is seen as flowing partly from identity politics but as yet remains unconnected to collective resistance or politics outside the workplace, although some authors see the existence of such behavior as a sign that labor’s capacity to resist is not now as weak as low levels of strike activity appear to indicate (Barnes and Taksa 2012).
Lean and high performance work systems have not fulfilled the promise of their advocates. Stress at work has increased alongside growing contingency and insecurity. Effort has been collectivized while risk has been de-collectivized. Some recent work points to the dominance of finance capital and financial markets or merchant capital rather than anything cooked up in the HR department as the primary cause of these developments (Lazonick and Sullivan 2000; Lichtenstein 2013).
Marx argued that capitalists’ insatiable quest to appropriate surplus value revolutionizes the productive forces, but these revolutions create conditions inconsistent with further accumulation and reproduction of class relations, making capitalism inherently unstable and crisis prone. Inside the enterprise the dilemma for the capitalist is to mobilize the positive powers of cooperation through mechanisms that may often in fact be coercive.5 Job enrichment, labor management cooperation, worker-management integration, etc. seem specifically designed to mask the basic relation of domination and subordination that necessarily prevails in the labor process.
Routinization of tasks requires sophisticated managerial, technical and conceptual skills, and powers of adaptability, which counter the tendency to the degradation of labor. Thus, as Marx notes in section 9 of Chapter 15 of Capital volume 1, destruction of individual trades also helps develop many-sided abilities, fluidity and adaptability. As Harvey puts it:
Herein lies a deep contradiction: on the one hand, capital wants degraded labor, unintelligent labor, the equivalent of a trained gorilla to do capital’s bidding without question, at the same time as it needs this other kind of flexible, adaptable and educated labor, too.
(Harvey 2010, 231)
One answer was the educational clauses of the factory acts. “Capital needs fluidity of labor and therefore has to educate the laborers while breaking down old paternalistic, patriarchal rigidities” (Harvey 2010, 233).
It is not skill that is abhorrent to Capital, just those skills that cannot be monopolized by employers. Capitalists individually and as a class seek to eliminate or find substitutes for such skills. Today this would include skills of the engineers, scientists, managers, designers, etc. Much hangs on whether such skills are totally incorporated as a power of capital “through the formation of a distinctive fraction of the bourgeoisie … or whether they can be captured as part of the collective powers of labor” (Harvey 1982, 109).
Based largely on the European survey of working conditions, close observers argue that recently there has been an overall rise in skill requirements together with a general intensification of work effort (McGovern 2013). But certainly the degradation of work in many occupations continues. Whatever one thinks about the value of such surveys, a rise in the mean of a survey-based variable does not imply that capitalism has suddenly stopped chewing up (some) people’s lives. And around this rising mean there is much variation. Recent analysis of the American labor market turns up little evidence of the popularly imagined mismatch between skills and available jobs (Cappelli 2015; Abraham 2015).
Work effort has increased partly due to advances in computerized monitoring, especially for mid- and low-level jobs. What this all means for job satisfaction is not clear, though making people work harder and reducing their independence is generally not popular. Labor process theory was and is a useful corrective to the more optimistic theories of post-industrialism, knowledge economy and informational society that became popular in the 1980s and 90s, as well as contemporary claims about skills shortages. The persistence of claims of a skills gap in manufacturing is belied by even casual analysis of the data. The reading, writing and math skills that American manufacturers demand are at the community college level or lower (Osterman and Weaver 2014). Employment problems in manufacturing in the U.S. are much more likely due to inadequate demand than to inadequate skills. This is as true today as it was 25 years ago when I was part of a research team examining skills mismatch at the end of the 80s boom. Why this myth persists is an interesting question but beyond my scope here. As Paul Krugman wrote in a recent column:
the belief that America suffers from a severe “skills gap” is one of those things that everyone important knows must be true, because everyone they know says it’s true. It’s a prime example of a zombie idea—an idea that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die.
(Krugman 2014).6
There are definitely places where both Marx and Braverman imply a one-way trend of degradation of the worker and work, however inconsistent this may be with their dialectical method. Core labor process theory and Burawoy have corrected this one-sidedness and recreated the possibility for a more dialectical treatment of skill.
The end of the post-World War II boom in the 1970s led to increasing international competition, threatening both the social state and the internal rules governing the hegemonic factory regime. Burawoy’s concept of hegemonic despotism is helpful here. Whereas workers could expect to share in productivity gains under the hegemonic regime, increasingly those gains were used to lower prices or pay stockholders and top executives. As communications and transportation technologies advanced, capitalists found it possible to relocate production to poor countries in which wages were significantly lower while productivity was not. Free trade agreements and laws created in those countries secured these new investments.
Employers continued to encourage the identification of the interests of workers with those of the enterprise but increasingly did so to push for concessions bargaining and de-unionization. Employment policy and labor economics shifted their focus from workforce development and labor demand to education, human capital theory and labor supply.
This response broke with the Fordist connection between productivity and wages but not the Taylorist tendency to decompose the labor process. The response by capital to slowing and unstable demand was a series of innovations all gathered under the sign of “flexibility”—subcontracting, outsourcing, use of temporary workers, casualization, segmentation, declining social and legal protection on the job, increase in work intensity, privatization of the costs of workforce preparation and maintenance, multitasking, etc. What this was NOT was a decline in the influence of large enterprises and enterprise groups, or in the separation of conception and execution.
The description of this shift as a return to the market is wrong. Boltanski and Chiapello (2007, 223) capture this shift nicely: “groups, composed of a large number of small units, resorting to sub-contractors who are not necessarily more numerous in each instance, but are more integrated into the running of the head firm…”.7 This has been accompanied by an increase in various automatic forms of workplace monitoring and monitoring from a distance, so it might be better to describe this as the recasting rather than the revolt against Taylorism: reduced unplanned break time, individualized work situations and remuneration, and a transference of the costs of activating the labor force from companies to individuals or, in those countries practicing active labor market policies, to the state. “… the costs of the change in strategy by firms have been paid for largely by the community—something which those in revolt against the rates of compulsory tax levies fail to mention” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007, 254).
A necessary condition for this recasting of Taylorism was the end of even a rhetoric of full employment. Whereas Keynes and his allies struggled for a firm commitment to full employment at Bretton Woods and after, American negotiators and the dominant political coalition in the U.S. post-1938 saw free trade with a moderate commitment to domestic employment policies as sufficient, and this group won the day. Thus, although effective full employment was won between 1955 and 1965 in much of the developed world, institutions to maintain it were never created. The pushback against full employment during the crisis of the 1970s was against a weak institutional wall.
That pushback, in the form of class war from above and its ideological expression, neo-liberalism, was enormously effective. It has certainly produced a change in employment relations, but to the extent that labor process theory was grounded in a basically Marxist method of understanding those relations, it has not discredited that theory.
Braverman emphasized the separation of planning and labor process design from its execution. This separation affects the structure of the firm, as embodied in the production/nonproduction distinction, and also the location decisions of the firm (corporate headquarters vs. manufacturing plants). Certain developments central to globalization can be understood through this lens. The computing and electronics industries in particular can be understood as examples of a sort of “Bravermanian product cycle.”8
It is well known that East Asia has become a center for cross-border activity by transnational corporations (Hart-Landsberg 2013). The ratio of exports to GDP in the region grew from 15% in 1982 to 45% in 2006, much faster than the ratio for low- or middle-income countries in general or for the world as a whole. The region’s share of manufactured exports also rose dramatically with an increased focus on information and communications technology (ICT) and electrical components. ICT and electrical exports made up 75% of the region’s exports by 2007. The growing importance of parts and components highlights the central role of cross-border production networks. More than half of all East Asian trade was intraregional in 2007, as against a third for NAFTA and a fifth for the EU15.
China plays a key role. Essentially the rest of East Asia exports to China and China exports to the U.S. and EU. While China’s rise has been dramatic, it is generally misinterpreted as establishing China as a rival to American and European capitalisms and as the predominant player in East Asia. But in Braverman’s conception-execution dyad China works but does not think. This can be illustrated by looking at the share of value-added that China captures in ICT.
In addition to Braverman this example draws on the “appropriability” framework developed by Berkeley Business School professor David Teece.9 The classic example for Teece is the IBM PC, in which Intel and Microsoft rather than IBM increasingly captured profits. The latter lost control of key interfaces by the late 1980s. The focal point in the Teece model is who is able to “appropriate” profits by developing and retaining control of products that are complementary to an initial innovation. While IBM developed the personal computer, Intel controlled chip production and Microsoft controlled the operating system, and thus they were able to appropriate profits.
Power to appropriate can be almost anywhere in the value chain. In electronics there is fierce competition between Original Design Manufacturers (Foxconn, etc.). Brand-name vendors do conceptualization, branding and marketing, distribution is done by global wholesalers, and sales by specialized and general retailers, as well as own-store networks such as Apple.
Kraemer, Linder and Dedrick (2011) have shown that, with the iPod and iPad, Apple introduced a dominant design and thus had great latitude in introducing complementary products and controlling interfaces. Unlike IBM, Apple maintained competition among suppliers and secrecy and quality control in design.10
Apple continues to capture the largest share of value from these innovations. While most of the components are manufactured in China, the primary benefits go to Apple, as it continues to keep most of its product design, software development, product management, marketing and other high-wage functions in the U.S. China’s role is different from what most casual observers would think. With its control over the supply chain, Apple has the power to make and break the fortunes of many of its suppliers. There is little surplus value appropriated in electronics assembly. This has consequences for understanding China’s rise as well as arguments in the U.S. that bringing high-volume electronics assembly back to the U.S. is the path to “good jobs” or economic growth.
We can think about this in terms of Braverman’s concept of the decoupling of conception and execution and Marx’s idea in Capital volume 3 that in the process of capitalist development the functions of the capitalist are broken up and performed by a variety of social actors. The popularly imagined figure of the capitalist as Mister Moneybags disappears in favor of an array of people in different social and geographical locations all seeking to occupy the most desirable and protectable place in the (surplus) value chain.
This means that labor processes are increasingly unlikely to exist in close proximity to processes of the receipt and distribution of surplus value. Production, receipt, and distribution of surplus value happen in different locations and are often unconnected in social analysis because of that. If workers are enraged by workplace conditions they can be told that their direct employer has nothing to do with it, as the rules of the game are set in Cupertino, Portland or Seattle (McIntyre 2008.)
What does this mean for resistance and working class formation? There is no consensus in contemporary working class studies. There is no justifiable belief that any general process of class formation flows from capitalist development itself. The optimistic perspective is that capitalist industrialization in China and elsewhere is re-creating the kinds of conditions that spawned radical working class organizing in nineteenth-century Western Europe and the USA. For instance, Beverly Silver demonstrates that the movement of the auto industry to greenfield sites in Europe, Europe’s periphery and then to South Africa, South America and Korea, led to a typical cycle of unrest, class formation and resistance (Silver 2003). Even more optimistically, Hardt and Negri see the growth of a “multitude,” something like the old picture of the unified working class, now produced by changes in the labor process breaking down differences between industrial worker, service worker and peasant, and globalization creating a kind of unity against empire (Hardt and Negri 2000). Yet one of the originators of modern labor process theory, Michael Burawoy, is pessimistic that this all adds up to very much (Burawoy 2010).
The labor process has changed in certain definite ways, both in its material conditions and its geography. Much of the observable resistance is overdetermined by local conditions and by the different kinds of capitalisms prevailing across the industrial, post-industrial, and industrializing nation-scape.11 Labor process theory continues to help us to understand the shifting international division of labor that provokes these resistances.
1 I thank participants at the 32nd annual International Labor Process Conference in London, April 2014 for their critical and helpful comments. This is the second of two parts.
2 Surveys of this literature at different points and from various perspectives include Littler and Salaman (1982), Spencer (2000), Baldoz, Koeber and Kraft (2001) and O’Doherty and Wilmott (2009).
3 Another key work is Bowles (1985). Bowles presents a precise model of the importance of command in the workplace for the extraction of labor from labor power. He relates this to technological change, the functioning of the reserve army of labor, and management strategies such as divide and rule. He does not address forms of resistance.
4 One way to theorize the normative basis of consent is through the work of Michel Foucault. Some labor process theorists turned to Foucault to explain how corporate values and surveillance and a culture of self-discipline combined to transform worker identities. Capitalist work and employment relations tend to individualize workers and undermine their search for a stable and secure identity. Surveillance replaced resistance as the central theoretical category and collective resistance, both formal and informal, came to be seen as impossible. There is a similarity with mainstream management arguments that control and bureaucracy have been displaced by a culture of commitment. This tendency seems less popular in labor process theory circles today, perhaps because it has moved more thoroughly into management theory (see for instance O’Doherty and Wilmott 2009). For an attempt to bring Foucault and Marx together in labor process analysis see Sakolsky (1992). An interesting attempt to build a theory of worker consent on the work of Spinoza is Lordon (2014).
5 This fellow “the capitalist” is an elusive figure. In Capital volume 3 Marx demonstrates that the capitalist disappears in the course of the development of capitalism even as the capitalist class process of the appropriation of surplus value continues. Capitalism literally becomes a process without a subject. This is a problem for socialist strategy, which very definitely requires a target, and perhaps partly explains the failure of the labor process literature to develop a robust theory of collective action.
6 See also Head (2014).
7 Although they are generalizing from the French experience, this pattern seems close to being a general development.
8 Thanks to Erik Olsen for this formulation.
9 Core labor process theory has begun to include geography and comparative work (McGrath-Clamp, Herod and Rainnie 2010; Hauptmeier and Vidal 2014) as have American labor sociologists, who concentrate on how globalization affects the structure of antagonism in the workplace (Baldoz et al. 2001). Still, the Teece approach (Teece 1986) stands out for its link between the restructuring of the capitalist enterprise along “volume 3” lines and the location of surplus value appropriation. In Marxian terms “appropriability” is actually the ability to receive rather than appropriate surplus value. Disentangling these terms is beyond our scope here. Smith (2016) provides a good starting point for addressing how surplus flows have changed with globalized capitalism.
10 This would not have been possible without access to the vast reserves of army in China. The creation of these reserves, a fundamentally political process, is beyond our scope here but see Cantin and Taylor (2008).
11 Examining these different resistances and struggles is beyond my scope. For the important case of China see Friedman (2014).
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