Braverman has analysed the service sector despite many other studies focusing on the manufacturing sector. He referred to the intermediate categories of work such as clerical, technical and managerial labour as enjoying a ‘privileged market position’ (1974: 407).
These groups of workers cannot be categorised under senior managers who act as managers of capital or any other class whose labour they help “to control, command and organise”
(405). Echoing the Communist Manifesto, he argued that this intermediate group will ultimately join the mass of the working class because of the ‘degradation of work’ by the system of capitalist production through separation of the mind and the hand. He was the first to note the increasing tendency of Taylorisation towards white collar jobs and thus degradation of service work skills. He argued that “this generation of computers would revolutionise secretarial work, destroying social office, specialise and sub-divide tasks into word processing and administrative roles” (1974: 344). In essence this was the core of his
argument, as he saw ‘deskilling’ as inevitable as it benefits the capitalist class. This was further noted up the hierarchy of the organisation making even the managers vulnerable to the degradation of work. In essence, Braverman saw the manual and mental labour under the ‘curse’ of the capitalist ‘deskilling’ production processes. Braverman was answering the bourgeoisie work sociology of Elton Mayo and others who sought to understand the dissatisfaction of work in isolation from the social relation in the process of production.
It was the optimism about the information economy that led many to believe in the notion of ‘clean fulfilling jobs’ with less physical intensification. This was first predicted by Daniel Bell in his book The coming of the Post-Industrial society (1973) predicting the predominance of ‘information workers’. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (1996) made the same point when he argued that a whole new phase of
‘global informational capitalism’ is emerging, where bureaucratic principles of organising are being superseded by the flat and flexible networks. In this new information age the raw material is information hence the decline in the manufacturing jobs and rise in the service sector jobs.
Zuboff (1988) observed that ‘informated work’ would raise clerical labour to semi-professional status, drawing for example on knowledge and information management within the service jobs. On the other hand, predicting the disappearance of assembly line, Daniel Bell (1973) argued for the replacement of dirty and manufacturing jobs by clean information work. Though white collar jobs were celebrated as the new sanctuary of intellectual work, Gramsci (1971) criticised the division between ‘mental and manual’ work by arguing it diverted from real social functioning of life towards the ‘technicalities’ of work.
“In any physical work, even the most degrading and mechanical there exists a minimum of intellectual activity”. Simon Head (2003) has studied different sectors of the service economy and concluded that standardisation and control experienced in white collar work resembles what the factory workers had to live with for a century.
Du Gay (1996) argued that the separation between production and consumption has been blurred in the service work economy. Postmodern writers have sought to criticise LPT for its lack of ‘customer presence’ within the production process. “The central binary of worker
pressure on the frontline to change their work behaviour (MacDonald and Sirianni, 1996: 5).
Currently, meeting the needs of the ‘sovereign’ customer is the overriding institutional imperative. This ‘customer presence’ (Du Gay and Salaman, 1996) has been generalised under the term ‘sovereign customer’ who has become the moral centre of the enterprising universe and a sweeping force for restructuring organisations and changing employees’
behaviour, especially that of the front-line service worker (Bolton and Houlihan, 2005).
Bauman (2005) has also sought to shift the focus from production to consumption and argued that ‘the consumer society’ has decentred work and ‘identity’ is no longer derived from what we produce but from what we buy. Identity is therefore influenced by the changes within the organisation and is thus fluid, influenced by history and cultural conditions. He went further to say, if service quality is defined by the interaction between frontline worker and the customer, then it means work can no longer be explained by economic determinism but also by cultural relations. This means work has to be analysed by a new ‘identity’ rather than economic essentialism. Workers have to assimilate to a
‘customer’ identity at work as well as outside the workplace, as different departments within organisations are organised through market logic.
However, Warhurst, Thompson and Nickson (2008) have argued that the dominance of consumption within the service work does not mean changes in the capitalist production system, because principles from the manufacturing sector apply to the service sector too, though these can be manifested in different ways. Consumption is the end product of the production process rather than displacing production. LPT does not deal with consumption directly but it addresses the structure under which consumption is premised. The service economy still consists of the “old practices of the old economy” (Head, 2003: 10).
Programmers observe the workflows in detail, analyse time and motion of the workers and incorporate these details in the workflow software which will then govern the routines of the labour process. This is exactly what Taylor did in detailing his doctrine of scientific management. Taylor’s principles of speed, predictability, calculability, standardisation and efficiency with the least mental consultation of the workers have been perfected by the algorithms operating within the service sector. Head (2003) argued then that the same principles of control and drudgery of work are still operational, only been made better by the omnipresent power of the technology.
This routinisation of tasks in clerical and white collar jobs was the focal point of Braverman’s degradation thesis, which reduced worker control within the labour process that used to be the heavens of ‘conceptualisation’. This has resulted in many arguing for the neo-Taylorisation of the service work, all in the quest to ‘put the customer first’ (Thompson and Warhurst, 1998). Normative control is mainly induced by the customer expectations.
Through customer satisfaction surveys, customer service training and teamwork activities, management exerts control over employees (Du Gay and Salaman, 2000; Bolton and Houlihan, 2005). Putting themselves in the ‘shoes’ of the customer, operators are encouraged to understand customer behaviour. On the one hand, customers form the
‘management’s spy’ by collecting and compiling information about the worker behaviour and reporting those who do not abide by the management’s rules. So the customers join forces with the class of producers (management) to rule other producers (employees) (Rosenthal, Peccei and Hill, 2001: 27). This then instils a sense of constant surveillance not only through the algorithms but also through the customer. Striving to control the whole body of the worker, organisations through teamworking, corporate culture and customer care systems instill a new form of contested terrain within the service sector (emotional labour expenditure) mainly performed by female workers.