Worker-Manager Conflicts

The conflict of interest between labour and capitalism implies that relations at the workplace are fundamentally contradictory, with each group pulling in the opposite direction (Thompson and McHugh, 2009). Labour process research shows the existence of various control mechanisms used by employers to discipline workers. In some cases, workers and capital reach a degree of consent; however, they often remain in conflict and workers show signs of resistance, either as organised groups in the form of trade union strikes and/or individually within the workplace, a practice referred to as ‘organisational misbehaviour’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999). The dialectics of control, resistance and consent occupy a large part in the development of the LPT.

3.2.5.1 Control and Resistance

Control can be broadly seen as ‘a term summarising a set of mechanisms and practices that regulate the terms of the labour process’ (Edwards, 1990: 143). In the pursuit of profitable production, capitalists need to unite the labour process and the process of creating surplus- value (i.e. valorisation) in what Marx ([1867] 1990: 304) called ‘the capitalist process of production’. In order to maintain this unity, the capitalists tightly control the whole of the production process to ensure that there is no waste of the two purchased kinds of commodities (the means of production and labour power), since profit generation requires that the production of a given commodity should not require more than the socially necessary labour-time under the given social conditions. Labourers, however, as Thompson and McHugh (2009: 105) note, ‘pursue their own interests for job security, higher rewards and satisfying work, developing their own counter-organisation through informal job controls, restriction of output, and the like’. This antagonistic relation between capital and labour has always been central to capitalism (Thompson, 1990; Mumby, 2005; Vidal and Hauptmiere, 2014; Smith, 2016).

In contemporary firms, employees often work within environments that have policies and procedures set by the owners of the means of production. Their behaviour is often monitored by agents of the capitalists (managers), who define what is acceptable behaviour and what is not. Disciplinary tools, such as salary cuts, missed promotions and dismissal, are used to control workers and direct their behaviour towards serving the interests of the firm (Thompson, 1990).

New techniques of extracting surplus value from labour power have evolved as capitalism has evolved (Thompson and McHugh, 2009: 107–10). Marx confirmed that capitalism works with the concept of ‘moments are the elements of profits’ (Marx, [1867] 1990: 352). Competition between firms creates a constant pressure to capture more of those moments and to make sure that they are utilised; therefore, revolutionising technology in both its hard and soft forms is equally constantly pursued (Thompson, 2010; Smith, 2016). As David Harvey (2017: 9) wrote:

Technology does not only refer to the machines and tools and energy systems put in motion (the hardware as it were). It also includes organisational forms (divisions of labour, structures of cooperation, corporate forms etc.) and the software of control systems, artificial intelligence and the like.

By examining the development of industrial capitalism in twentieth-century America, Braverman (1974) observed that workers were becoming progressively deskilled, as firms applied scientific management principles (i.e. Taylorism)12 _{to enhance production outputs}

for the pursuit of capital expansion. He saw the ‘degradation of work’ and the ‘deskilling of labour’ as the outcomes of the monopoly hold that employers and their agents (managers) had on the process of production. Employing workers with basic skills gave firms more control over them, especially because they could replace them easily, which in itself afforded more control over wage negotiations. In fact, the work of Braverman proves, what Marx and Engels ([1848] 2015: 12) stated more than a century earlier in their Communist Manifesto, that the worker ‘became an appendage of the machine’. Nevertheless, Braverman was widely criticised for overstressing control and deskilling, while underestimating workers’

12 _{Taylorism refers to the simplification and standardisation of production processes by engineers and} managers to ensure that workers produce sufficient output (Vidal and Hauptmeier, 2014: 10)

resistance, consent and upskilling (see for example, Grint, 2005: 180–5; Edgell, 2006: 48– 60).

3.2.5.2 Forms of Control

After Braverman’s (1974) contribution, the ‘second-wave’ of labour process research emerged on both sides of the Atlantic (notably Friedman, 1977; Burawoy, 1979; Edwards, 1979), advocating that there are various systems of control in different typologies of workplace regimes, as workers gradually proved that they are not passive recipients of control, continually seeking new ways to evade it. The emphasis of the second wave is on the dialectic of control-consent and resistance, ‘whereby managerial controls produce resistance from workers that then lead on to new control regimes in a cyclical manner’ (Smith, 2016: 216).

The works of Friedman (1977) and Edwards (1979) were described by Thompson (2016, p. 4) as ‘the best known empirical illustrations of the control-resistance paradigm’. Friedman (1977) drew on labour movements in the UK and observed that trade unions in large firms were able to resist the form of direct control (i.e. close supervision and reduced responsibilities) and replace it with a cleverer control strategy, which he termed responsible autonomy. He argues that under the responsible autonomy type, workers (especially skilled) are given ‘responsibilities, status, light supervision, and their loyalty towards the firm is solicited by encouraging venom against competitors, by fancy sports facilities, by co-opting trade union leaders, and so on’ (Friedman, 1990: 178). Edwards (1979) in the USA emphasised the concept of ‘contested terrain’ since the dialectics between workers’ resistance and management control continuously shape the way work is organised. While employers apply control practices, workers learn how to resist them, which results in managers refining their control systems. Edwards recognises two main control structures that are linked to the size of the organisation: 1) simple control represents the direct relations between the capitalist and his/her workers in small firms; 2) structural control appears in large firms and comprises a) technical and b) bureaucratic forms of control. The former refers to the submission of workers to the technological procedures of production, while the latter refers to the institutionalisation of work organisation (e.g. job description, wage systems and promotions). Both forms of structural control result in depersonalised control.

Even though various control strategies might co-exist in a single firm and workers might resist them in different capacities, ‘there is within this conflict, a requirement for consent, as capitalism requires free exchange between workers and capitalists’ (Smith, 2016: 210). Managerial approaches of upskilling, team working and knowledge management are all strategies in which labour can become more engaged (Thompson, 2010).

3.2.5.3 Consent

Michael Burawoy,13 _{in his major work, Manufacturing Consent (1979) turned the focus from}

control and contest to the production of consent. Based on a single ethnographic case-study of a unionised Chicago machine shop, he found that labourers do not always need to be coerced since they actively, and sometimes ‘unintentionally’, consent to work hard for their employer. More importantly, he found that workers consented to the management because they were able to resist to some degree. Therefore, Burawoy argues that allowing minor resistance can maintain the domination of management because it undermines more meaningful methods of resistance. Engaging with employees does not mean that coercive and bureaucratic forms of control have diminished; rather, softer and more creative ways of control have emerged in contemporary workplaces: ‘whatever the means, there is always a control imperative in the labour process’ (Smith, 2016: 208).

Furthermore, there is a body of work showing that contemporary management does not only rely on Taylorist control strategies, as proposed by Braverman, but also engages with workers (especially non-manual workers) (Williams and Connell, 2010). Sturdy, Fleming and Delbridge (2010) proposed the concept of neo-normative control. They argue that the management, which adopts this control strategy, considers the emotional and personal features of workers to a great extent. Unlike bureaucratic control, it focusses on the ideology of ‘just be yourself’. Employees are given a high degree of autonomy and encouraged to have fun at work, since this is believed to increase their productivity and loyalty to the firm; however, this ‘comes at a price in terms of workload and effort bargain’ (Thompson, 2010: 10). Therefore, despite the stark difference in how employees are being controlled (e.g. bureaucratic vs neo-normative), the purpose of all these approaches used by capitalists

13 _{Burawoy, as described by Smith (2016: 11), ‘is the most significant Marxist sociologist of the labour} process’.

remains to extract extra labour effort, which results in the production of ‘organisational misbehaviour’.