Questions related to resistance among employees and informal behaviour in general have always been an important part of organisation studies. The Norwegian sociologist Sverre Lysgaard published a remarkable contribution to this debate in 1961 with a book bearing (in translation) the title The Worker Collectivity, building on an ethnographic study of a pulp- and paper factory during the second half of the 1950sâthe subtitle being A Study in the Sociology of Subordinates . (We translate the Norwegian Arbeiderkollektivet to Worker Collectivity as the latter term already is established in English through Alan Foxâs [1971] analysis of the âemployee collectivity â.) The book reached eventually the status of a classic in the Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and it still enjoys this position there. Although it has been briefly mentioned now and then in texts in English over the years (for example Forsberg and Stockenstrand 2014; FurĂĽker 2005, pp. 87â88; Johnsen and Joynt 1989; Korpi 1978; Lilja 1987), it is generally unknown outside Scandinavia since it was never translated into English or any other wide-ranging language. Can a more than fifty years old theory of a worker collectivity, unknown outside a small community of social scientists who are able to read an obscure Scandinavian language, be of interest to international scholars of the field of working life? We think so, which is why we present, discuss and develop the distinctive features of Lysgaardâs theory of the worker collectivity.
It is therefore not nostalgia that makes us write this book about Lysgaardâs theory, but a conviction that it can contribute to contemporary international work life research. There are at least three important strands to which it can contribute: The importance of studying informal work organisation when considering conditions of wage labour ; the importance of workerâand other employeeâresistance for both working conditions and the efficiency of the labour process ; and questions of collective mobilisation of workers to protect their common interests versus vertical integration in the firm. Those are well-known and sometimes contested and controversial themes in international work life research. Still, the theory of the worker collectivity contributes important insights, as we will show in this book.
Contexts of the Theory
Lysgaardâs study at the pulp- and paper mill Peterson & Son in Norway resulted in a theory of the worker collectivityâan informal organisation among the subordinate employees as protection against the demands of the company and a basis for collective resistance against those demands . In order to position the theory in its field of research, we discuss three basic strands of analysis in which it is involved. The first one is informal organisation, the second resistance at workplaces and the third research on social (dis)integration performed in the process industry .
Informal Organisation
The point of departure of the theory of the worker collectivity is the idea that wage labour workplaces always consist of a technical/economic system of the companyâs goal of maximising profit and a hierarchy of occupational positions to help reach that goal. Then there are, of course, employees filling these positions. Under specific circumstances a second system can emerge , a collectivity system in the form of a worker collectivity. This is a defence organisation for the workersâ humanityâwhat Lysgaard calls their âhonour â and which is today analysed as employeesâ dignity (for example Bolton 2007; Hodson 2001; Karlsson 2012, Ch. 1). Finally, there is the human system, emanating from outside the workplace and being made up of ideas and rules about what good working conditions are. In this constellation of systems, the technical/economic system is a formal organisation while the worker collectivity is an informal organisation. Further, the technical/economic system is the primary one in that the workplace would not exist without it, while the collectivity system is secondaryâits existence is not necessary for the workplace to exist and empirically there are workplaces in which no worker collectivity can be found.
But oftenâin Lysgaardâs Norway close to alwaysâthere is a second type of formal organisation at the workplace, trade unions . In Lysgaardâs perspective, the informal worker collectivity is the historical mechanism behind the establishment of the formal union, but as soon as the latter has emerged they are two different kinds of organisation which can find themselves in opposition to each other in concrete matters. Still, he takes for granted that the leaders of the worker union also are the leaders of the worker collectivity (if one exists at the workplace).
The idea of the existence of an informal organisation has a long history in organisation theory and was first expressed by Chester Barnard (1968 [1938], Ch. IX), although perhaps known mostly through the analyses of the Hawthorn studies (Roethlisberger and Dickson 1964 [1939]). In a classic book on industrial sociology , Delbert C. Miller and William H. Form (1951, p. 274, emphasis removed) define informal organisation as
that network of personal and social relations which are not defined or prescribed by formal organization. It may be thought of in a residual sense, as including every aspect of social life that is not anticipated by technological and formal relations.
This formulation is still valid as it asks a variant of a basic social science question: âWhat cannot be removed without informal organisation stops existing?â (Danermark et al. 2019, p. 43). And the answer given is formal organisation. Miller and Form also claim that informal organisation has often gone unnoticed by researchers as it cannot be seen; it takes a trained eye to notice it. It can therefore be said that Lysgaard, being a trained sociologist, discovered the worker collectivity and thereby disclosed the informal organisation at the plant he studied. It is unfortunate that so many modern textbooks in the sociology of work and organisation seem to have forgotten the importance of informal organisation for understanding work and organisation todayâfor an exception, see Thompson and McHugh (2009, p. 173) who writes about âthe powerful informal group norms that are the bedrock of organisational lifeâ.
Miller and Form (1951, p. 277) also provide sociologists of work with a methodological list of rules to study informal social life at a workplace:
- 1.
Keep your eye primarily on people, and secondarily on what they are producing or servicing.- 2.
Observe how they react to each other.- 3.
Listen to what they say and donât say; observe what they do and donât do in reference to each other.- 4.
Note the degree to which saying and doing jibe with each other.- 5.
Find the ideas, beliefs, and attitudes on which they generally agree or disagree.- 6.
Appraise how stable or unstable your findings are as situations change.- 7.
Do not become a factor in the situation you are observing. If this is impossible, try to analyse your relations to the group as you would analyse any other personâs .
We have no way of knowing whether Lysgaard had taken part of Miller and Formâs advice when he started his investigation, but it is obvious when reading his book that he followed all of those rules. For example, it is clear that he cared much less about what the workers did in their work than on relations between them and with management . There are hardly any descriptions of the work as such or the technology , but many accounts of employee interactions and relations to foremen. (What we know about work itself in the pulp- and paper mill at that time is therefore due to our interviews in the 1980s with people who were employed in those days.)
In the literature there has developed two main ways of analysing informal organisation: Formal vs informal aspects of an organisation or formal vs informal organisations. The first one belongs to the Organisational Behaviour (OB) tradition, in which it is regarded as relations within the formal organisation , functioning as a support for it. When acknowledged at all, it is mostly as networks as âan important device for promoting communication , integration, flexibility, and novelty within and between organisationsâ (Jones et al. 2001, p. 82). Informal organisation develops in the pores of the formal organisation, as it were, to make it work smoothly. Apart from that, it seems not to ...