Labour Process

11 Key excerpts on "Labour Process"

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  eBook - ePub

  Patterns of Social Inequality

  Essays for Richard Brown

  • Huw Beynon, Pandeli Glavanis(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This being so, and looking to the future, it would be a welcome step forward were it to be accepted that ‘Labour Process’ is not a sexy phrase for ‘work organisation’, and that the study of the Labour Process should be related to that of a valorisation process (or what we might simply term a surplus producing process). 9 Whatever specific terms are used, questions to be asked about the Labour Process concern inter alia : how, and under what conditions, surplus is produced out of labour-power and how labour-power is consumed by capital, and with what consequences for capital and for those who labour, not least their health and collective strength. On this view, in short, the study of the Labour Process should be broadly conceived. Included should be the conditions for the production of surplus out of labour power, theoretically, and also historically and in particular societies, these conditions including the organisation and the consciousness of the people who labour. In the 1980s debates arose – for example, about skill, about whether managerial strategies exist – which became unduly narrow, not least as compared to the breadth, and historical perspective, of the early post-Braverman works in Britain (consider for example Friedman, 1977). Indeed, to go back to 1961 is to find that even the early structural-functionalist conception of a sociology of industry extended further than the more or less standard industrial sociology in work to which, as judged by ‘the Labour Process debate’, the political economy of the Labour Process has been in danger of being reduced (Smith, 1961: 72; Hyman, 1982). As a consequence, there remains a region that has been largely neglected from the standpoint of a Labour Process approach

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  Managing State Social Work

  Front-Line Management and the Labour Process Perspective

  • John Harris(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  2 The Labour Process perspective and management

  Introduction

  This chapter considers the distinguishing characteristics of the Labour Process perspective and debates within it. The chapter highlights key themes in the development of the perspective which have a bearing on the subsequent examination of the social work Labour Process and front-line management. It begins with the legacy of Marx, moves on to Braverman's 'rediscovery' of the Labour Process and then discusses the post-Braverman debate in relation to four themes: managerial control strategies; the indeterminacy of labour power; worker consent; and monolithic management. The chapter's exploration of these themes provides a baseline for evaluating, in the following chapter, the work of radical social work writers in advocating the application of the Labour Process perspective to social work, based on an industrial model.

  The legacy of Marx

  In Capital Volume One , Marx analyses changes in the nature of work under the capitalist mode of production. To begin with, Marx describes the features of the Labour Process in any social formation as purposeful activity combined with the deployment of instruments in order to produce use values from the object of labour. He sets out these three components of the Labour Process as follows:

  Purposeful activity: Labour is, first of all, a process between man (sic ) and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature...He acts upon external nature and changes it (Marx, 1974, p. 169).

  Instruments:

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  Understanding Industrial Organizations

  Theoretical Perspectives in Industrial Sociology

  • Prof Richard Brown, Richard Brown(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The late 1960s and the 1970s were a period of considerable industrial unrest (see Crouch and Pizzorno 1977; Crouch 1977). Though in most analyses it would only be one factor, the nature of the work manual and routine white collar employees were required to do came to be seen as both contributing to this dissatisfaction and something which could, in principle, be improved by drawing on the lessons of social science research. The ways in which work was organised, and the assumptions which underlay the design of many jobs, were seen as issues of practical importance as well as of theoretical interest. (‘Industrial democracy’ and greater opportunities for worker participation in decision making were also advocated as solutions to the ‘crisis’ during this period – see Ramsay 1977.) In both areas further research tended to show both that the actual changes which could be observed were fewer and less radical than had sometimes been believed and that their consequences for the degree of ‘alienation’, worker satisfaction, or whatever were somewhat less than had been hoped for. An emphasis on the Labour Process was congruent with these developments in that it too focused attention on the organisation of work at the point of production; the analysis offered by Braverman, however, had the advantage in this context of appearing also to offer an explanation of why changes in work organisation in capitalist industrial societies were always likely to be limited in scope and in their effects.

  Marx

  Marx defined the Labour Process ‘in its simple and abstract elements’ as ‘purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-values’ (Marx 1976, 290). Considered in its most general sense, that is ‘independently of any specific social formation’, the Labour Process refers to man’s (sic)

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  Working Life

  Renewing Labour Process Analysis

  • Paul Thompson, Chris Smith(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  But – even if we leave aside issues as to the weight of evi-dence here and how far this practice is generic to all firms or is in some way distinctive to the context studied – it is not clear how this linkage between management and sexuality is viewed. Other aspects of behaviour may have no implications for how workers relate to managers. Perhaps most strikingly, post-structural discussion shows little interest in causal analysis in the senses of either tracing some feature of the workplace to context or explaining variation between workplaces. Fleming and Spicer do not say why freedom and fun characterized the workplace studied or consider how this workplace might differ from others in terms of the organ-ization of work. The rest of this chapter attempts to say what such analysis should look like. Boundary of the Labour Process We need a way to demarcate the object of inquiry of Labour Process analysis. The solution is to treat the employment relationship as to do with the means by which labour power is translated into labour. Braverman (1974) and those who debated his work initially were clear that the Labour Process is that part of the mode of production in which workers’ productive capacity is deployed in order to produce use-values and at the same time surplus value; there was an interest in the nature of the valorization process and in the dynamics of struggle. Without some delimitation of this kind, analysis becomes exces-sively broad. To avoid covering everything, the Labour Process needs to be seen as that activity in which the capacity to work is turned into concrete labour, together with the relevant relations between managers and work-ers. It thus embraces the effort-reward bargain of industrial sociology, with this bargain being seen as part of a struggle over the terms of exploitation.

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  Comparative Political Economy of Work

  • Marco Hauptmeier, Matt Vidal(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  We begin with an overview of the comparative political economy literature, focusing on its roots in research on neo-corporatism in Europe, debates over national models of capitalism, and more recent engagement with the themes of institutional change and within-country variation. We then provide a similar overview of Labour Process research, focusing on the problem of managerial strategy and workforce reactions, the diversity of Labour Processes, and attempts to understand connections between the Labour Process and the wider competitive and institutional environment. Our overviews are followed by a more critical assessment of each literature in light of the other, suggesting further areas of potential synthesis for future research.

  We argue that comparative political economy has focused on institutional difference to the neglect of systemic capitalist processes, and on macro- and meso-level institutions to the neglect of the micro level, including Labour Process dynamics. Labour Process theory can contribute to comparative political economy, we contend, with its analyses of how managerial strategy regarding work organization is often inconsistent and incoherent, and must be implemented in the context of deeply entrenched workplace politics and culture. The struggles between managers and workers over the extraction of labour effort – and how to interpret and respond to competitive (and institutional) pressures in order to survive and make a profit – feed back into the wider political economy. Even if managers could form consistent, coherent strategies, within the politics of production they must negotiate outcomes with workers, generating a fundamental source of variation at the organizational level. For its part, Labour Process theory has developed a systematic understanding neither of how institutions may shape and alter competitive pressures and accumulation dynamics, nor of the institutional distinctiveness of national contexts. National institutions provide a basic source of variation in the structure of employment relations systems, the latter being the most immediate context within which workplace dynamics unfold. Formal national and regional institutions moderate and give distinctive flavour to systemic capitalist pressures. In addition, systemic capitalist pressures as such – the need to survive the competitive struggle between firms, negotiate outcomes in the workplace and make a profit – are understood by owners, managers and workers on the ground through formal and informal cultural institutions, including ideologies of shareholder value and antiunionism, as well as various logics of management such as taylorism and employee involvement.

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  Stress at Work

  A Sociological Perspective

  • Chris Peterson(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 ) when he revived some labor process concepts from Marx’s writings. The labor process is a system of economic relationships, a framework in which social and economic activity takes place. Its relevance for occupational stress is that it describes the broader extent of the nature of work relationships within which work is carried out in capitalist societies. It shows clearly the relationships of subordination, domination, and control that exist between owners and managers, and those who have their labor to sell. For Marx, the defining point of capitalist society was the relationship between capital and labor.

  The Labor Process as Seen by Marx

  According to Marx, the capitalist mode of production involves the production of value, of surplus value, and of capital, and the reproduction of conflicting relations between the classes. Marx identified two distinct elements of the capitalist labor process (237, pp. 291–292):

  the Labour Process, when it is the process by which the capitalist consumes labour power, exhibits two characteristic phenomena. First, the worker works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs…. Secondly, the product is the property of the capitalist—not that of the worker, its immediate producer.

  The capitalist owns labor power through purchasing it with the intent of creating profitability. This according to Marx, translates into two objectives of the capitalist (237 , p. 293):

  in the first place he wants to produce a use-value which has exchange-value, ie. an article designed to be sold, a commodity; and second he wants to produce a commodity greater in value than the sum of the values of the commodities used to produce it, namely the means of production and the labour power he purchased with his good money on the open market. His aim is to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity; not only use-value, but value; and not just value, but also surplus value.

  He identifies issues of ownership and control of the labor process as central to an understanding of capitalist society. According to Marx there are three elements of the labor process: “(1 ) purposeful activity, that is work itself, (2 ) the object on which that work is performed, and (3 ) the instruments of that work” (237

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  Teachers' Work in a Globalizing Economy

  • Alistair Dow, Robert Hattam, Alan Reid, Geoffrey Shacklock, John Smyth(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Now, at this point, the thing to do would be to refer to the Labour Process literature in education, and to build from that. Unfortunately, such literature is very thin on the ground. After a brief flurry in the early to mid 1980s, Labour Process theory in relation to teachers’ work appears to have run into a cul-de-sac, not least because some unresolved theoretical and methodological issues left it exposed as an archetype of the modernist project. It made easy pickings for post-structuralist critique, redolent as it was of grand narratives and the construction of people as passive bearers of structure. As a consequence, Labour Process theory was abandoned as interest turned to the micro-politics of institutions, and away from macro-analyses. All that remains in the education literature are remnants of its language—concepts such as ‘deskilling’ and ‘intensification’ are examples here—usually employed without reference to, or understanding of, the theoretical tradition from which they derived. Even the term ‘Labour Process’ has come to represent little more than a fancy way of saying ‘work’.

  Given all of this, is a Labour Process lens capable of offering the sorts of insights necessary to the task we have set ourselves in this book? In this chapter we will argue that not only is a Labour Process perspective useful, it is central to a more complete understanding of what is happening to teachers’ work. Labour Process theory has been consigned to a premature grave in education, and its body needs to be exhumed to allow for an exami nation of the causes of its demise. It will be argued that one of the contributing factors has been an all too unproblematic transfer from the industrial sociology literature which was its original home. There, a Labour Process research programme has been building and refining Labour Process theory over the past 20 years. The challenge for this chapter will be to engage in a task of theoretical renewal by returning to the mainstream Labour Process debates, identifying the core characteristics of Labour Process theory, and adapting these to the special contexts and circumstances of education. We start this process of theoretical renewal by returning to the source of contemporary interest in Labour Process theory.

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  The Political Economy of Work in the Global South

  • Anita Hammer, Adam Fishwick, Anita Hammer, Adam Fishwick(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The core argument of this volume, therefore, is that engagement with the realities of work in the Global South provides an opportunity for LPT to expand beyond the formal space it originated in, that is, to move beyond limited definitions of the (waged) workplace to consider how the realm of reproduction, family and community relations, and the state are central to labour exploitation and class formation. The engagement between LPT and the South can help widen Labour Process analysis towards better theorising the ‘new’ realities of work, and help scholarship on the South to better appreciate the dynamics of value extraction in the Labour Process. Contributions to this volume attempt to privilege a materialist analysis, by offering concrete and situated examinations of working lives in the South, and to avoid reifying the Global South.

  		Debates in Labour Process Theory: Links with the Global South

  LPT, while stretching back to the 1970s, remains a central and coherent approach to the study of work and employment and is rooted in radical and Marxist political economy. The Labour Process is defined as that part of the mode of production in which workers’ productive capacity is deployed in order to produce use values and at the same time surplus value. Thereby, LPT has a key interest in the nature of the valorisation process and in the dynamics of struggle and exploitation (Braverman, 1974; Friedman, 1977; Edwards, 2007). In a more recent positing of the core principles of LPT, Thompson (2010) states that at heart LPT is concerned with how labour power as a commodity is converted to labour under the exigencies of capital accumulation. Following from this, four core principles necessary for LPT have been identified as: (1) the necessity of Labour Process for economic and human reproduction and hence the emphasis on labour and capital-labour relations; (2) the logic of accumulation or the economic imperatives that put pressure on capital to continually transform the production process; (3) the control imperative that leads capital to reduce the indeterminacy gap between labour power and labour; (4) the structured antagonism between capital and labour that underpins conflict and cooperation in the workplace (Thompson and Newsome, 2004, pp. 134–5; Thompson, 2010, p. 10).

  Acknowledgement of this core framework, however, does not designate the outer boundaries of LPT. In fact, a number of long-standing debates on the analytical power of LPT echo important concerns that are central in scholarship on work in the Global South. First, there is increasing recognition within LPT of the neglect of ‘the larger political economy picture’ (Thompson, 2010, p. 8) and how it relates to the Labour Process, resulting in calls for a stronger emphasis on the analysis of capital-labour relations beyond the workplace (Thompson and Smith, 2010; Newsome et al. 2015). Rather than pointing to the interrelations and competition between finance and productive capital, or across the spatial and functional division of labour, ‘beyond the workplace’ in this volume constitutes a shorthand for analysing a range of relations of production as well as social relations that are mobilised in the Labour Process. At its core, however, the issue is not one of divergence between North and South. Many Labour Process studies have, in fact, gone beyond the workplace and emphasised the role of worker communities being located close to factories, or the way new greenfield sites allow the development of different Labour Processes that draw on different workforces. What the authors in this volume attempt is to theorise these relations with regard to the Labour Process, rather than treating them as just significant contextual factors. This is important, we argue, in order to situate established LPT in its particular historical and spatial context, and to highlight its relevance across the global political economy.

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  Contested Learning in Welfare Work

  A Study of Mind, Political Economy, and the Labour Process

  • Peter H. Sawchuk(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  These examples of research directly traced different dimensions and Mind in Political Economy and the Labour Process 289 movements of contradiction at different levels of generality. The dynamics they addressed included the following: the relations between the socialization of the forces of production and capitalist relations of production, their repressive, exploitative, as well as emancipatory potential in terms of workers’ knowl- edge (e.g., Adler 2005, 2006, 2007a); the importance of the way domi- nant notions of skill are constructed in vocational training and the Labour Process through the de-humanization of the knowing/acting subject as well as the persistent disturbance and disorganization of the lives of workers (e.g., Jackson 1994; Seddon, Henriksson, and Niemeyer 2010); and, the mutual constitution of labour-power and personhood (e.g., Rikowski 2002a, 2002b). My approach in the book made a direct resource of these observations in order to effectively support the more general aspirations of analysis. Likewise, I drew on the traditions of LPT research on skill, the argument initiated by Vygotsky, Leontiev, and the CHAT tradition (vis-à-vis Marx and Engels), and, the recovery of the language of dialectical contradiction from Engeström through to the critical refinements offered by Avis and others. Indeed, linked inherently to my approach was the concept of col- laborative transformative practice as emphasized by Stetsenko (e.g., 2010) in Chapter 2 as well. I claim it is through the application of these types of resources primarily, that a Use-Value Thesis on occupational learning can be realized. Through it, I argue, several new opportunities for understand- ing skill, learning and the Labour Process come into view. Each resource this Use-Value Thesis draws on contributes to the substance of some- thing that might reasonably be called a mind in political economy approach to the Labour Process.

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  The New Digital Workplace

  How New Technologies Revolutionise Work

  • Kendra Briken, Shiona Chillas, Martin Krzywdzinski, Abigail Marks(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  These contributions were selected from papers presented at the 2015 (Athens) and 2016 (Berlin) International Labour Process Conferences. Themes familiar to Labour Process researchers emerge in the chapters. Chief among these are issues such as how technology facilitates job loss via substitution and the potential of technology to deskill existing workers. An overarching theme is cost-cutting strategies as the driver for new technologies at work. Part 1 : Robots and Virtualities – The Changing Face of Manufacturing Work Terms like ‘digital manufacturing techniques’, ‘advanced manufactur-ing techniques’, ‘cyber-physical systems’, ‘smart factory’ or – particularly in Germany – Industrie 4.0 frame public debate on the transformation of manufacturing work through new automation concepts. The core Labour Process Theory and the New Digital Workplace 3 elements of these concepts include the spread of the Internet of Things in factories, which is discussed under the heading ‘cyber-physical sys-tems’. German labour-studies scholar Dieter Spath understands this term as referring to ‘objects [machines and components] equipped with their own decentralised steering mechanisms, which are interconnected via an internet of data and services and are independently self-steering’ (Spath and Ganschar, 2013, p. 23). Another key feature is the spread of flexible robots, who, in line with the slogan that ‘the robots are leav-ing their cages’, can now directly interact with people. Finally, the use of assistance systems in manufacturing work is considered crucial for the new era: for example, smart eyeglasses or watches. With regard to the social consequences of this development, there are diametrically oppositional scenarios.

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  Exploring Social Change

  Process and Context

  • Bridgette Wessels(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  They argue that this conflict is structural and is located in the relationship between the few who own the means of production and the masses who do not and who are, therefore, forced to sell their labor. The private owners of the means of production want to maximize profits, and part of ensuring good returns from their investments entails controlling the workers and their lev-els of productivity. This means that the main role of management is to have ‘control over the Labour Process’ (Braverman, 1974, p.63). Labor process theorists argue that, given the need to control labor within the capitalist process, relations between labor and management have not fundamentally altered in the new organization of work in the information soci-ety (McLoughlin, 1999). They suggest that the process of relabelling jobs into an expanding stratum of information and knowledge workers merely hides continuity within labor and managerial relations. Therefore, although economists such as Porat (1977) produce statistics based on changing job titles, labor process theorists address the ways in which work continues to be controlled through conventional means such as deskilling (in which work is fragmented so that workers lose the integrated skills and comprehensive knowledge of craftspersons) – noting that modern skilled job titles actually mask deskilled jobs. Labor process theory posits that ICT is being used to enhance ways of con-trolling the workforce. In industrial contexts, control of the workforce was achieved through the scientific management techniques of Taylorism 6 and Work, Production and Social Change 99 Fordism 7 . These techniques were based on the separation of ‘conception’ – the mental labor of planning and decision making, from ‘execution’ – the exercise of manual labor. Those systems required direct personal supervision of workers. However, the use of ICT can eliminate the need for such super-vision.

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