Manufacturing Consent

Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism

Michael Burawoy

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780226217710
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Since the 1930s, industrial sociologists have tried to answer the question, Why do workers not work harder? Michael Burawoy spent ten months as a machine operator in a Chicago factory trying to answer different but equally important questions: Why do workers work as hard as they do? Why do workers routinely consent to their own exploitation? Manufacturing Consent, the result of Burawoy's research, combines rich ethnographical description with an original Marxist theory of the capitalist labor process. Manufacturing Consent is unique among studies of this kind because Burawoy has been able to analyze his own experiences in relation to those of Donald Roy, who studied the same factory thirty years earlier. Burawoy traces the technical, political, and ideological changes in factory life to the transformations of the market relations of the plant (it is now part of a multinational corporation) and to broader movements, since World War II, in industrial relations.

Notes

Preface

1. See Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production (London: New Left Books, forthcoming).

Chapter One

1. Arthur Ross and Paul Hartman, Changing Patterns of Industrial Conflict (New York: John Wiley, 1960); Clark Kerr and Abraham Siegal, “The Interindustry Propensity to Strike—An International Comparison,” in Industrial Conflict, ed. Arthur Kornhauser, Robert Dubin, and Arthur M. Ross (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954).

2. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1959), chap. 4; Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Free Press, 1960), chap. 10.

3. Interest in the blue-collar worker has been revived to some degree in the seventies. See, for example, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Random House, 1972); Harold Sheppard and Neal Herrick, Where Have All the Robots Gone? (New York: Free Press, 1972); and William Kornblum, Blue Collar Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

4. See, for example, Leon Baritz, The Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in American Industry (New York: John Wiley, 1965); Alex Carey, “The Hawthorne Studies: A Radical Criticism,” American Sociological Review 32 (1967): 403–16; John Goldthorpe et al., The Affluent Worker: Industrial Attitudes and Behaviour (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Clark Kerr and Lloyd Fisher, “Plant Sociology: The Elite and the Aborigines,” in Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences, ed. Mirra Komarovsky (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957); Henry Landsberger, Hawthorne Revisited (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1958); Donald Roy, “Efficiency and the Fix: Informal Intergroup Relations in a Piecework Machine Shop,” American Journal of Sociology 60 (1954): 255–66; Harold Wilensky, “Human Relations in the Work Place: An Appraisal of Some Recent Research,” in Research in Industrial Human Relations, ed. Conrad Arensberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), pp. 25–59.

5. See, for example, Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968), chap. 8; Alvin Gouldner, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (New York: Free Press, 1954); Peter Blau, The Dynamics of Bureaucracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955); and, more recently, Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).

6. James March and Herbert Simon, Organizations (New York: Wiley, 1958), is typical of this approach.

7. See, for example, Goldthorpe et al., The Affluent Worker; James Thompson, Organizations in Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967); and Clark Kerr et al., Industrialism and Industrial Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960). In addition, there is, of course, the classic by Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization (New York: John Wiley, 1956).

8. Many of these studies are heavily influenced by Max Weber and Robert Michels. See, for example, Philip Selznick, Law, Society, and Industrial Justice (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1969).

9. Thus, for example, Morris Janowitz compiles a series of factors contributing to changes in the military over a period of fifty years but never comes to grips with the problem of explaining those changes. He vacillates between a form of technological determinism and claims of the following nature: “Popular demand for equality of treatment grows with industrialization. As the standard of living rises, tolerance for the discomforts of military life decreases. The skepticism of urban life carries over into the military to a greater degree than in previous generations, so that men will no longer act blindly, but demand some sort of explanation from their commanders” (The Professional Soldier [New York: Free Press, 1960], p. 40).

10. Arthur Stinchcombe, “Social Structure and Organizations,” in Handbook of Organizations, ed. James March (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965); Robert Blauner, Alienation and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).

11. Arnold Tannenbaum, Control in Organizations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 3.

12. Ibid., p. 46.

13. Amitai Etzioni, A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations (New York: Free Press, 1961).

14. Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 116.

15. Rensis Likert, New Patterns of Management (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961); Chris Argyris, Integrating the Individual and the Organization (New York: John Wiley, 1964).

16. Blauner, Alienation and Freedom. But see also Theo Nichols and Huw Beynon, Living with Capitalism: Class Relations and the Modern Factory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977) for a convincing refutation of Blauner’s thesis.

17. See, for example, E. L. Trist, G. W. Higgin, H. Murray, and A. B. Pollock, Organizational Choice (London: Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, 1963).

18. Roy, “Efficiency and the Fix.” Tom Lupton, On the Shop Floor (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1963), makes the same point forcefully, although not from the perspective of any harmony theory.

19. See, particularly, Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon.

20. See, for example, Alan Fox, Beyond Contract: Work, Power, and Trust Relations (London: Faber & Faber, 1974); but see also Clark Kerr, Labor and Management in Industrial Society (New York: Doubleday, 1964).

21. William Baldamus, Efficiency and Effort (London: Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, 1961), p. 1.

22. Ibid., p. 8.

23. Ibid., chap. 8. See also, Hilda Behrend, “A Fair Day’s Work,” Scottish Journal of Political Economy 8 (1961): 102–18.

Chapter Two

1. The formulations in this chapter are heavily influenced by the writings of a group of French Marxists: Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Allen Lane, 1969); Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973); and, above all, Etienne Balibar, “The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism,” in Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (New York: Pantheon, 1970) pp. 201–308. Like many contemporary Marxists, these French theorists try to move away from a teleological view of history, in which the succession of modes of production follow a fixed and inevitable pattern in accordance with the expansion of the “forces of production.” The indeterminacy which they introduce is developed in an extreme form by Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).

2. Karl Marx, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 48.

3. A mode of production is more usually seen as a combination of relations of production and forces of production. I have avoided using the concept of forces of production for two reasons. First, it is often presented as a set of things—raw materials, machinery, technique, etc.—that are themselves neutral with respect to exploitation and domination. Here I want to suggest the way in which the relations of production indelibly imprint themselves on the mode of appropriating nature. Second, the notion of forces of production is usually associated with a teleological view of history, in which the expansion of the productive forces makes necessary the overthrow of capitalism and also lays the basis for socialism. In this study I try to dispel such historically unwarranted optimism. For a more detailed critique of the concept of forces of production see Michael Burawoy, “The Politics of Production and the Production of Politics: A Comparative Analysis of Machine Shops in the United States and Hungary,” Political Power and Social Theory 1 (1979).

4. The distinction between relations and activities is at the basis of the concept of social structure used here. The social structure is a pattern of relations among “empty places” that individuals occupy as they engage in activities, that is, as they transform something into something else. Social relations are viewed as existing prior to individuals who “support” them and who act within constraints determined by those relations. Just as social relations shape practices, so practices set limits on social relations. Sociology, by contrast, collapses the distinction between relations and activities into such notions as “role expectations.” Social structure becomes the relationships among concrete individuals executing values they have internalized. In part 4 I examine the relative merits of these two views of social structure.

5. This implies that there are two essential forms of politics: that linked to the relations in production—the politics of production—and that linked to the relations of production—global politics.

6. Karl Marx, Capital, 3 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 3:791.

7. Althusser, For Marx, p. 233.

8. Karl Marx, Capital, 1:72.

9. Ibid., p. 74. “For Marx, a determined mode of appearance corresponds to each determined structure of the real, and this mode of appearance is the starting-point for a kind of spontaneous consciousness of the structure for which neither consciousness nor the individual is responsible. It follows that the scientific understanding of a structure does not abolish the spontaneous consciousness of that structure. It modifies its role and its effects, but it does not suppress it” (Maurice Godelier, “Structure and Contradiction in Capital,” in Ideology in Social Science, ed. Robin Blackburn [New York: Vintage Books, 1973], p. 338).

10. On the one hand, Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism sees ideology as inscribed in the very production of commodities. On the other hand, Marx accords the dominant class the capacity to ...