Inserting individual resistance and subjectivity into the labour process by Braverman was the work of Andrew Friedman, Michael Burawoy, Richard Edwards and Paul Thompson.
Influenced by Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man, 1964 reprinted in 2002) these authors thought they were reconciling control with consent, inserting the neglected informal nature of workplace relations on the shop floor, but this created a ‘value-less’
debate around Labour and Monopoly Capital (LMC) (Spencer, 2000: 229). Adesina (1988) has argued for the misinterpretation of labour and work by the labour processes scholars engaging in the debate. He argued that “Cressey and MacInnes (1980) misinterpreted Real and Formal Subsumption of Labour as the total subordination of worker” (1988: 89). This substitution of ‘labour by worker’ meant that labour process debates focused on the latter rather than work in itself, as Braverman focused on these objective work structures changing the forms of work. This focus on the individual worker rather than ‘work’ was to appear later in the labour process debates as the ‘missing subject’ which was embraced by the then Left radicals who sought to emphasise Marcuse’s (2002: xxvii) notion of “free and creative subject … who stands in opposition to an object-world”. The emphasis on resistance comes from this lost sense of individuality and self-determination by structures and the objective world. These conceptions of LMC paved the way to a misunderstanding of Braverman’s (1974) focus which was the study of work and changing forms of occupation in 21st century American production system. The focus of the ‘worker’ rather than ‘objective conditions of work’ twisted the debate from onset (Thompson, 1989). In his introduction Braverman (1974: 27) addressed this issue:
There are those who hope to discover, in some quick and simple manner, a replacement for the ‘blue-collar workers’ as an ‘agency for social change,’ to use the popular phrases. It is my feeling, to put it bluntly, that this constitutes an attempt to derive the ‘science before science’ and I have tried to dismiss such preoccupations from my mind on the theory that what is needed first of all is a picture of the working class as it exists, as the shape given to the working population by the capital accumulation process.
The failure to understand the collective resistance of work by Thompson and Ackroyd (1995) considered this perpetual endorsement of ‘individual subject’ at the centre of the debate. In dealing with alienation and exploitation, workers were now “using individualised forms of resistance-misbehaviour” (Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995) which reduces alienation to dissatisfaction with work.
Ackroyd and Thompson (1999: 47) came from the understanding that “control can never be absolute and in the space provided by the indeterminacy of labour, employees will constantly find ways of evading and subverting managerial organisation and direction of work. This tendency is the major source of dynamism within the workplace”. This persistent message about the worker ‘agency’ in the shopfloor contributed to the limited understanding of Braverman’s thesis. The focus on control, resistance, and consent was at the heart of first response to LMC by Friedman, Edwards and Burrawoy.
Andrew Friedman’s Industry and Labour: Class Struggle at Work and Monopoly Capitalism (1977) elaborated on the labour process and went beyond the coercive nature of control to exploring the indirect forms of control. He argued for the concrete micro analysis of labour process which illustrated different forms of worker resistance. He differentiated between direct (coercive) control and ‘responsible autonomy’. The two are differentiated according to the central and periphery approach of dividing workers where managers give discretion and job security to the white collar workers. The latter enjoy the ‘responsible autonomy’
rather than periphery workers (unskilled and semi-skilled manual workers) who submit to direct forms of control. These systematic divisions amongst the working class are a major method to cope with uncertainties of capitalist mode of production. However, Friedman
the capitalist production”. Friedman contributed to the understanding of the micro and subjective understandings of labour process within the LPT debates.
Richard Edwards’ Contested Terrain: The transformation of the workplace in the Twentieth Century (1979) also centred an approach around ‘active subjects’ as he argued for the
‘contested’ nature of workplace control. He criticised Braverman’s lack of acknowledgement of the union’s role in the labour process and thus class struggle. Edwards believed that worker resistance had been omitted and resulted in the elevation of managerial perspective in determining the workplace politics. Defining control as the “ability of capitalist/managers to obtain desired work behaviour from workers” (1979: 17), Edwards saw the workplace as the site of class struggle with the dialectical conflict at the centre of the accumulation of capital. His understanding of the individual subject contributed to his discussion on different forms of control based on “immediate work processes and detailed control” (see Spencer, 2000).
Through class conflict at work and resistance from the workers, managers sought to revolutionise the labour process through different forms of control (Simple, Technical and Bureaucratic control). Edwards argued that every stage of capital accumulation produces (sometimes in combination) a certain form of control. For example, when firms are small, employers tend to enforce the direct forms of control – simple control. The second one emerges when the machines directly control the pace of work with supervisors ensuring that everyone works. Technical control ensures that power is vested in the machine rather than the supervisor and “the power relations are more invisible” (Edwards in Fischer and Sirriani, 1994: 103). The last form of control is bureaucratic control which is based on the job rules, requirements, criteria and work procedures. This form of institutionalised power ensured that top managers determined the rules, criteria and procedures and thus control over the whole enterprise. According to Edwards this form of control exists alongside the simple and sometimes technical control. He argued that Braverman’s focus on ‘technical’
processes of work undermines the power of social relations which shape the workplace processes which are in turn shaped not only by technology but also by “imperatives of appropriating surplus labour”. This individualised understanding of LMC was continued by Michael Burawoy in 1979 and 1985.
Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labour Process under Monopoly Capitalism) (1979) argued for the focus on individual subjective experiences of work at the point of production. His outright insertion of the subjective worker in Braverman’s LMC claimed to challenge Marx and Braverman’s shortcomings through the study of a single case of a large unionised modern corporation. He focused on consent rather than coercion as a means of control. His central argument was on the ‘negotiated outcome’ rather than direct control which shapes the social relations at work thus locking the workers in the capitalist mode of production. The most important way of manufacturing consent according to Burawoy was through shopfloor activities termed as ‘games’ especially that of ‘making out’.
These games insert the worker as an individual in the labour process rather than as a member of a class. In Burawoy’s The Politics of Production (1985) he went further to highlight conditions during which consent is gained in a unionised large cooperation like Allied Corporation. Arguing that Marx “never conceptualised the ‘political apparatuses of the production process”, he was describing the “particular type of regime – market despotism” (Burawoy, 1983: 588). The latter is controlled by the market conditions where worker dependence on wages leads to subordination. According to Burawoy (1983) Marx failed to realise different conditions in which different forms of despotisms prevailed.
Differentiating between ‘hegemonic factory regimes and despotic regimes’ Burawoy argued that the latter was produced in a condition where unions, welfare and internal labour markets were absent resulting in workers being dependent on wage and market competition. These forms of regimes were most relevant in early capitalism where coercion was dominant. In the quest for profit, capital intensified work which gave rise to under consumption and considerable resistance from workers and resulted in state regulation of the employment relationship. These despotic regimes are characterised by consent over coercion; they “must be replaced by hegemonic regimes in which consent prevails, although never to the exclusion of coercion” (Burawoy, 1983: 590). These regimes vary from country to country and depend on the state regulation and welfare system. These variations are evident within advanced capitalism too, as each sector differs according to market competition in order to balance coercion and consent. Despite the original and insightful nature of his work, Burawoy was criticised for his non-dialectic and less contradictory
theory, in which all events strengthen the control of capital”; this then incorporates workers into the system of capitalist exploitation. Clawson and Fantasia further argued that Burawoy neglected the external coercion necessary to preserve control and its limits. In his last paragraph on the habituation of the worker, Braverman argued that
… manipulation is primary and coercion is held in reserve – except that this manipulation is the product of powerful economic forces, major corporate employment and bargaining policies, and the inner workings and evolution of the system of capitalism itself and, not primarily of the clever schemes of labour relations experts. (1974: 104)
It is this broad understanding of the labour relations background that seeks to manipulate the worker rather than ‘consent’ as Burawoy (1979) would like to believe. Despite his emphasis on the subjective nature of the labour process though under (objective) oppression, Burawoy and other labour process writers failed to recognise the initial purpose and objective prompted by Braverman (1974). The insertion of subjectivity in Braverman’s thesis distorted his argument in trying to explain the ‘objective conditions of work’ which give rise to subjective consequences of work.
Braverman’s focus on the ‘objective conditions of work’ mentioned the subjective experiences of work which were never opposed to each other, despite beliefs to the contrary by some. “Structure is no longer opposed to agency” (O’Doherty and Willmott, 2009: 947); this is a reflection of browsing through LMC without an in-depth understanding of Braverman’s entire thesis. Braverman (1974: 27) foresaw this so-called neglect of subjectivity as a ‘self-imposed limitation’ which sought to go beyond the ‘dissatisfaction’ at work but studied the content of the capitalist production system in order to understand
‘work itself’, not the effects of capitalism on the subjective experience of workers.
This self-imposed limitation to the ‘objective’ content of class and the omission of the ‘subjective’ will, I fear, hopelessly compromise this study in the eyes of some of those who float in the conventional stream of social science. For them, by long habit and insistent theory, class does not really exist outside its subjective manifestations.
(Braverman, 1974: 27)
When Burawory (1985) argued that “we must investigate the conditions under which the interests of labour and capital actually become antagonistic. In short we must go beyond Marx” (29), it opened a niche for the post-structuralist criticism of Braverman, where subjectivity and identity became the centre of struggle. This group emphasised the
‘indeterminacy of subjectivity’ as opposed to ‘indeterminacy of labour’ where identity becomes a new centre of struggle within the workplace. This analyses the workplace as individualised and consumption based rather than as associated with class and collective forms. This cultural turn on the study of work was mainly endorsed by the postmodern thinkers influenced by Foucault (David Knights and Hugh Willmott).
Criticised further for overemphasising degradation of labour without acknowledging the re-skilling of other occupations, this seems to be a two-way direction of looking at capital accumulation. This linear and deterministic model of the degradation process, without allowing a process where workers were challenged to improve their skills and recapture conception and execution of work, was the cornerstone of the second wave of the debates (Burawoy, 1979; Knights, 1990). This ‘unilinear’ movement was challenged by Gartman (1999: 95) who argued this process within the manufacturing industry was fraught with
“contradictions between economic imperative of production and cultural imperatives of consumption”.
This perceived ‘one dimensional and objectivist economism’ according to Isaac and Christiansen (2012) is an unfair criticism of Braverman (1974) who stated from the first chapter that his intentions were not to capture the subjective experience of workers but the objective roots of such experiences. Braverman did not render the workers as ‘powerless subjects and gave everything to monopoly capital’ as some have suggested (Isaac and Christiansen, 2012: 115). Braverman believed in the revolutionary potential of the working class as evidenced in his response to such criticism below.
Some readers have concluded, chiefly on the evidence of my description of a process of ‘degradation of labour’, that I myself am pessimistic about the future of working class consciousness. But if readers will take trouble to compare, they will find that wording which I have used to describe the effects of capitalist mode of production
from the Marx’s only in being milder … But neither Marx nor Engels considered themselves pessimists on that account; on the contrary, they found in this unremitting assault of capital upon the humanity of labour the precondition for revolt … I have every confidence in the revolutionary potential of working class.
(Braverman, [1976 in] 1998: 315)
Critics have also highlighted the issue of ‘time’ as the major flaw in Braverman’s thesis. They argued that Braverman was fixated with “teleological conception of time, where scientific management is seen as the decisive moment which changed the capitalist production forever” (Isaac and Christiansen, 2012: 116). This also tends to define time inaccurately as Braverman (1974 [1998]) himself referred to time as a “social, historical concept not a purely chronological one” (315, Appendix 1). This means time was presented as a more
“complex, involving frequent shifts, setbacks and transformations” rather than as linear and chronological as critics seem to suggest (Spencer, 2000: 227).
Finally, one enduring critique was the portrayal of the labour process as one form without taking into account the issues of race and gender in affecting the production processes. In supplementing Braverman’s thesis, Adesina (1991) argued that the context specific labour process theory provides more relevance in understanding variation of work organisation especially in peripheral contexts. This seems to extend the understanding of degradation of work through the peripheral contexts. In his defence of Marx’s ‘wage theory’ Braverman (1958: 3) argued that “to defend Marx’s description of conditions which brought this law brought about in his own day as true description of present conditions would be nothing less than dogmatism raised to frenzy”. Braverman (1958) went further to argue that the trouble is not “original error but uncorrected obsolescence”. This spoke directly to Altmann, Kohler and Meil’s (1992) notion of the socio-cultural embedded nature of labour process in which different nations organise work differently, hence there is no ‘universal labour process’. With an emphasis on an advanced economies labour process, Braverman never suggested the universalised notion of labour process. This is why Smith and Thompson (1998: 566) later cautioned against overstating national differences “where structural essentials, such as wage labour, unemployment, wage-effort bargaining and conflicts inscribe a limited repertoire of roles and parts for those on this particular stage”. Finally they argued that both micro and macro analysis of work are dependent on the particular
researcher to make sure that international structural and localised specific forms of work organisation are coherent. Acknowledging the limitations of using the LPT only to study the current forms of work, Thompson and Smith (2009: 926) argued that this theoretical framework remains resilient in unpacking the capitalist labour dynamics and further welcomed the economic sociology perspectives to understand the multi-layered nature of work and employment relationships. LPT proves to be resilient in explaining the changes in the service and knowledge work (Warhurst, Thompson and Nickson, 2008; Thompson and Smith, 2009) but also requires corrections and additions to suit current working conditions.
Braverman (1958: 5) has suggested the same to the critics of Marx’s theory of wage by arguing “if the thought is right then the trouble lies not in original error but uncorrected obsolescence, then the job is not to see where Marx was wrong so much as to make fresh application of his theory to the world around us, as it is once was”. This resonates with the understanding of the service work labour process which needs to be based on the movement of capitalist economy rather than re-emphasising the ‘agency centred’ labour process.