An evaluation of Adler’s (2007) Paleo-Marxian challenge to “Core” Labour
Process Theory
Stephen Jaros
Southern University
Sjaros3@cox.net
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The adequacy of “core” Labour Process Theory (core LPT), as originally described by
Thompson (1990) and extended by others since (e.g., Elger, 2001; Smith & Thompson, 1999;
Thompson & Newsome, 2004; Thompson, 2009; Jaros, 2001), with regard to helping or
hindering the development of theoretical and empirical inquiry into the workings of labour
processes, their linkages with broader political economies, and the possibility of ‘emancipating’
employees from at least some of the harsher realities of life at work has been challenged by both
post-modernist (cf. O’Doherty, 2009) and Marxian (cf. Rowlinson & Hassard, 2001) authors . In
previous work in this area, Jaros (2005) provided a defense (and some critique) of core LPT in
the face of Marxian attacks on its usefulness. But since then, Adler (2007a & b) has offered
another Marxian challenge to core LPT, something he calls paleo-Marxism. This challenge was
debated by Adler and writers from both postmodernist and core LPT perspectives in a special
forum of Organization Studies (volume 28, number 9, September 2007). The contribution of this
paper is to briefly describe but then comprehensively extend this debate by picking up
elaborating on themes and issues left unresolved by that exchange.
While this paper may thus be seen as another example of “paradigm wars” among
Marxian and core-LPT perspectives, a trend that has been critiqued by some core LPT writers
(cf. Thompson, 2009) what I am trying to do is something different: Whereas the exchanges in
the Organization Studies forum focused primarily on the underlying and allegedly irreconcilable
differences between the Paleo-Marxist (PM) and core LPT perspectives, my goal will be to
search for common ground, bases for integration, and ways in which core LPT might benefit
from an infusion of some, though not all or even most, PM ideas, and thus enhance core LPT’s
ability to contribute to the resolution of key issues such as emancipation, the relative role of
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class, gender, and ethnicity in explaining workplace dynamics, and mutual influences between
workplace relations and the broader global capitalist political economy.
Core LPT and Paleo-Marxism
Core LPT has long been the target of criticism by Marxist writers who lament its
abandonment of key Marxian concepts such as the Labour Theory of Value and its lack of
fidelity to the dialectical method (see Jaros, 2005 for a review and evaluation). More recently,
however, Marxian criticism has taken the form of the “paleo” perspective put forward by Paul
Adler. This argument was originally made in a contribution to the Skills that Matter edited
volume (Adler, 2004), and then elaborated in a special forum of Organization Studies dedicated
to the Paleo view (Adler, 2007a & 2007b). While the forum was ostensibly billed as an
engagement between the Paleo view and the broad field of Critical Management Studies (CMS),
the primary target of Adler’s critique was LPT.
The Paleo Critique
Like other Marxian critiques, Adler’s argument is that Core LPT ignores an important
aspect of Marxian theory, but rather than focusing on the concepts mentioned above, Adler
argues that Core LPT’s crucial error is its lack of appreciation for the implications of the clash
between the progressive socialization of production and capitalist relations of production, which
fetter the development of the former. This lack of appreciation is manifest in a disregard for the
crucial role of technological change, an aspect of the socialization of production, in influencing
the capital-labor relationship:
Whereas more traditional readings of Marx …. give a key role to technological change as a driver of social change
and determinant of work organization, many labour process theorists, along with other social constructionists, have
been adamantly opposed to ‘technological determinism’. (Adler, 2007a: 1315).
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In this regard, Adler believes that core LPT throws out the baby with the bath-water: While core
LPT is correct insofar as technological change should not be viewed as the sole driver of social
change, it surely is a very important, central factor. By worrying too much about determinism,
core LPT misses this critical role that technology does play. Thus, core LPT’s refusal to
recognize the important causal role of technology leads Adler to adopt a paleo-Marxist
perspective, so-called because to his reading it harkens back to an earlier era of Marxist thought
before ‘distortions’ were introduced by later, Soviet-era theorizing. The paleo view emphasizes
the dialectical development of the forces and relations of production as the motor of global capitalist
workplace dynamics, as opposed to what Adler (2004) calls core LPT’s “neo-Marxist” perspective,
a “one-sided” reading of Marx which focuses on class struggle as the important factor of capitalist
development (cf. Jaros, 2006).
The paleo view proposes that an appreciation of the dialectical relationship between the
technical forces of production and the capitalist relations of production can resolve a couple of key
anomalies that characterize core LPT. The first is that contrary to Braverman’s (1974) de-skilling
thesis and core LPT’s contingency view of skills development (Smith & Thompson, 1999), worker
skills have increased in complexity over the course of the past century. Citing occupational statistics
and economic data showing increasing returns to worker investments in education, Adler argues that
a long-term upskilling trend has characterized the development of capitalist political-economy, a
trend that core LPT does not account for, but which is apprehendable from the paleo view, which
recognizes that as technology advances, the skills needed to interact with that technology increase as
well. In an instrumental sense, skills become more formal, less tacit, and more scientifically-based,
and in a social sense, skills require that workers acquire the ability to work interdependently in
complex production and service delivery processes.
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The second anomaly lies in what Adler calls LPT’s mistakenly-positive view of worker
autonomy. From a political perspective, core LPT celebrates increasing job autonomy as reflecting
freedom from managerial control and as indicative of psychological empowerment and agency (a
key aspect of the ‘missing subject’ dilemma in LPT – cf. Thompson, 1990), and thus from both core
(and postmodernist) perspectives, figuring out ways to increase worker autonomy is often seen as
part of the “emancipatory” project of LPT (cf. Thompson, 1990; Alvesson & Willmott, 2002).
Adler argues that under capitalism, autonomy has clearly declined over the long-run. From an LPT
perspective, this is purely a negative development, because it means that capitalists are winning the
class-struggle for control at the point of production. Developments in management control such as
Taylorism, Lean Production, and recent forms of cultural, team-based, and normative control are
thus viewed by core LPT in a uniformly negative light because of their reductive effect on worker
autonomy.
However, the paleo view proposes that the LPT perspective is myopic, failing to see the
forest for the trees. While individual workers may experience a loss of autonomy as personally
negative from both power (they have less of it) and subjectivity (they have less agency)
perspectives, from the long-run view declining autonomy is, on balance, a positive political
development, because it means that workers are becoming more interdependent, creating the
objective conditions for collective action. As interdependency, via new forms of team-work and
collaborative technology, increases, the formation of the “collective worker”, a collective identity
that can eventually result in cooperative action aimed at the overthrow of capitalism, becomes more
likely. Adler is thus emphasizing one of the primary contradictions of capitalist development
identified by Marx: the very work methods and management practices that the capitalist must
employ in order to stay competitive will, in the longer run, create the social conditions for the
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overthrow of capitalism. Thus, Adler argues that a consequence of not seeing the progressive
aspects of capitalism is that core LPT is politically ineffective: “ LPT appears one-sided, focused
only on capitalism’s destructive aspects, and as a result its critique of capitalism sounds like
shrill polemic.” (Adler, 2007b: 1388).
In the end, the paleo view resurrects a variant on the “gravedigger thesis”: While
acknowledging that the skills and autonomy trends described above are halting and uneven in the
short-run and at the level of the individual workplace, the macro, long-run movement is clear: As
the technical forces of production and social relations of production dialectically develop, the
latter, based on private property rights and ceaseless valorization processes, become a fetter to
the further development of the former. Concurrently, a “collective worker” develops with both
the technical skills and social ties necessary to dispossess the capitalist class and assume control
of society: the expropriators are expropriated, and socialism is inaugurated. As to why this hasn’t
actually happened yet, Adler argues that Marx’s error was “over-optimism concerning the time
horizon” something common among “dedicated activists” (2007b: 1390). Core LPT doesn’t
recognize this because its one-sided “reading” of Marx’s analysis has left it with empirically
mistaken views on skill development, resulting in theoretically mistaken notions of worker
subjectivity, autonomy, and the ultimately politically progressive nature of new managerial
control strategies and production methods.
Responses to the Paleo critique
The critics of the paleo view attack from many angles – core LPT (Thompson, 2007),
postmodernism (Knights & Willmott, 2007), American LPT (Vallas, 2007), and critical realism
(Delbridge, 2007). While each respondent to Adler in the Organisation Studies forum has quite
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a bit to say, in my view the criticisms can be boiled down to three main points. First, one
criticism they share in common is the perception that the paleo view is a totalizing, deterministic
account of the capital-labor dynamic, one that cannot account for the lived experiences of people
at work. As Vallas summarizes it:
Adler’s reading of Marx would have us retreat from those questions that most sorely need to be addressed (and which LPT has at
least begun to confront): issues of culture, class, and consent; of discourse and practice at work … We can quickly tote up the
casualties of (the Paleo) view: they include the concepts of race, gender, nationality, and organizational culture more generally,
all of which are robbed of their specific effects on production” (p. 1381).
And according to Knights and Willmott, the sole reliance on technology as the engine of the
forces/relations of production dialectic means that “it displaces any necessity to study the
mundane dynamics of the labour process, organization, or management, as these are viewed as
little more than a reflection of technology” (p. 1371). Additionally, while the paleo view
recognizes the importance of understanding worker subjectivity and agency, its view that a
worker identity develops with the dialectical forces/relations dynamic, from initially-fragmented
to ever- more collective, fails to consider the impact of other sources of identity and self-concept.
The paleo view, with its focus strictly on the capital-class relationship and an arguably
deterministic role for technology, thus fails to account for how other social spheres and
influences affect what happens at work. In contrast, the critics argue that a strength of LPT is its
attendance to the details of actual labour processes, its ability to, as Thompson (2007) puts it,
“focus on the class struggle at work … to open up the black box of production and to see the
contested terrain within” (p. 1361), to enter Marx’s hidden abode and apprehend how struggles
over production unfold on the ground in actual workplaces, contested by employees with active
agency rooted in multiple sources of identity, and how these daily struggles become a central
motor for workplace change and for how employees view themselves and the world.
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A second line of critique aims at the paleo claim that capitalist political economy is
characterized by a historically progressive trajectory. Thompson (2007) denigrates the economic
data that Adler (2007) marshals to support the long-run upskilling argument, saying that Adler
shows a “touching naivety” in accepting at face-value government and business-group statistics,
which Thompson says are produced by constituencies with an interest in painting a rosy picture.
Thompson also argues that a welter of LPT-inspired empirical research has validated the core
LPT concept of the “relative autonomy” of the labour process, which proposes that neither
social-level nor workplace-level class dynamics can be “read off” from each other in a
deterministic fashion. Rather, the ebb and flow of struggles for control at different workplaces
have an indeterminate, contingent effect on what happens at the social level, and vice-versa.
Delbridge (2007) echoes this critique, arguing that from a critical-realist perspective, Adler’s
account is itself too one-sided, favoring deterministic structural forces over the influence of the
active agency of people at work in reproducing social structure. Because the outcomes of agency
(struggles at work) are indeterminate, structural change is also indeterminate, with no natural
tendency towards any particular social outcome. And Knights and Willmott (2007), though
accepting Adler’s upskilling thesis, argue that this trend does not necessarily mean that
capitalism is progressing towards a socialistic upheaval. They argue that because the way the
intensification of the contradiction between forces and relations of production actually plays out
is “contingent on the embeddedness of production within particular cultural and political
traditions” this causes them to question whether the long-run development of class struggle is
determined by this contradiction alone.
Finally, a third critique of the Paleo view confronts its political implications. Both
Thompson and Knights/Willmott argue that the concept of a progressive trajectory towards
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socialsm is merely a refurbishment of the empirically-discredited Marxian “gravedigger thesis”,
but one in which the “intensification of contradiction” between the relations of production and
forces of production replaces the “immiseration” of workers as the driving force leading to the
overthrow of capitalism. In his rejoinder, Adler (2007b) admits as much, saying the Paleo view
embraces a version of the “inevitability of socialism” argument. However, to Thompson and
Knights and Willmott, the lack of empirical support for a progressive trajectory means that, like
the immiseration version, the Paleo account is not cogent and amounts to “wishful thinking”.
Worse yet, because the paleo view posits that managerial strategies such as Taylorism
and Lean Production aren’t inherently regressive, and in fact are in the long run politically
progressive, these critics argue that the implication is that workers have no grounds to struggle
against or resist them, nor is there a political role for the critical organizational scholar to play.
There is no “politics of production” per se, because if anything workers and critical scholars
should embrace new forms of control and subjugation at work, since these developments merely
hasten the day when the contradiction between the forces and relations of production reaches its
crisis point. Vallas (2007) notes that taken to its logical extreme, the paleo view can fairly be
interpreted to endorse practices such as sweatshops and child labor, because in the long-run, they
too are in this sense “progressive”. However, all of these critics argue that the paleo view is
mistaken, because empirical studies of actual labour processes show a highly contested terrain,
an active struggle for control characterized by worker resistance – strong evidence that workers
themselves do not perceive new forms of work organization, and reductions in their autonomy,
as being progressive, or even indeterminate to their interests, but instead are experienced as
negative to their interests. Once again, the paleo view, pitched at a high level of Marxist meta-
9
theoretical abstraction, cannot grasp this on-the-ground reality and therefore cannot help us solve
the core-LPT dilemma of developing a practical politics for worker emancipation.
An evaluation of the Paleo debate
So what are the implications of the paleo view for core LPT? Should core LPT be reformulated in a paleo image, or should paleo recommendations be dismissed as the critics
suggest? My view leans towards the latter perspective, though I do believe the paleo view
surfaces a couple of problematic aspects of core LPT. First, I agree with the paleo-critics that the
perspective is too technologically and structurally deterministic to be very useful in helping us
understand much about contemporary workplaces specifically and capitalism more generally.
While no one can reasonably doubt that technology and other productive forces play an
important role in how people experience work, and is characterized by a trajectory of
advancement in an instrumental sense, there’s little reason to believe that this means technology
alone, or even largely, shapes, has a critical “causal role”, in those experiences.
One reason for this is that technology is not purely instrumental, or scientific, in nature.
As Thompson (2007) and many other prior critical thinkers have noted (cf. Edwards, 1979;
Marcuse, 1964; E. Thompson, 1963), and which Adler is surely aware, “technology” is not a
politically neutral force. Technologies are often developed and implemented by capital to
enhance their control over workers and to extract more value out of their work, not because these
technologies represent some ‘natural’ cutting-edge status in a purely instrumental sense.
Technology thus is and always has been an object of struggle between capital and labor at work.
Therefore, any account of the development of technology within capitalist political economy
cannot analytically divorce the technical forces of production from the social relations of
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production, which the paleo view seemingly does when it argues in favor of a causal role for the
former. These aspects of production are “dialectically” related, not just in the long-run paleo
sense of the latter eventually becoming a fetter to the development of the former, but on a daily
basis at workplaces as well. The dialectic is one of overlapping processes of resistance, consent,
and accommodation between management and workers over the deployment of new
technologies, and these struggles help shape the instrumental nature of technologies.
The paleo view thus seemingly misses the trees for the forest, and so researchers
interested in the trees, the daily experiences of people at work, may have little to learn from it.
Adler (2007b) summarizes the import of his emphasis on the productive forces of production by
arguing that absent the assignment of an important causal role to a long-run advance of
productive forces in accounting for the long-run improvements in the conditions of working
people, we can only interpret that improvement as the result of “ (a) the sustained, successful
imposition of workers’ collective will against the capitalist class’s and/or (b) the benevolence of the capitalist class:
neither of these explanations fit what we know of reality or Marxist theory.” (p.1389).
But, while I think all
would agree that (b) is certainly not true, empirical findings from LPT research plausibly suggest
that worker resistance, workplace-level struggles over the introduction of new forces of
production, have significantly blunted their negative impact. No, workers have not succeeded in
imposing their collective will on capitalists. Capitalists have gotten the better of the fight.
Nevertheless, it may very well be true that worker resistance and struggle has forced enough
concessions from capital, both in the workplace and at the level of governmental policy, that
capital has been forced to share enough of the resulting wealth with workers to result in a net
improvement in their conditions of work.
Indeed, this position has been supported by many pro-capitalist writers. In explaining the
demise of General Motors, George Will (2005) argued that GM long ago stopped being a wealth11
creating entity for stockholders, instead having reached a state of being in the business of selling
cars to pay for health care benefits for its retirees, while as early as the late 1960s, Friedrich
Hayek called for governmental intervention to crack down on labor unions, on the grounds that
they had become too successful in winning wage increases from capital. The last 30 years of
Reagan-Thatcher inspired governmental labor policy in the West can plausibly be read as a
(largely successful) attempt by capital to roll back the post-WW2 “social compact” that allocated
a percentage of business’s revenue stream to worker’s wages and benefits that has proven to be
competitively unsustainable in the long run, and how else did this state of affairs arise other than
via successful resistance and struggle on the part of workers in both the shop-floor and electoralpolitical realms?
As for these explanations not comporting with Marxist theory, since Adler concedes that
theory has been wrong on some important points (e.g., over-optimism about the time horizon for
revolutionary social change, and the “immiseration” hypothesis), this should not be a reason for
rejecting alternative explanations.
This point highlights what I see as a second flaw in the paleo critique of LPT. Adler’s
reply to the critics (2007b) correctly argues that we must be sensitive to levels of structure and
causality in our work. He points out that paleo analysis is a long-run, deep-structure account of
capitalist political economy, and therefore his critics are off-base in complaining that it neglects
other causal factors such as race and gender, or that his theory does not account for all the
nuances of struggle that unfold in workplaces, because these are not within the proper sphere of
the theory. These more micro-level, short run analyses, the kind that characterize core LPT
empirical work, aren’t incompatible with the paleo perspective; they can be viewed as “useful
extensions” of it. But in my view, Adler’s critique of core LPT is itself vulnerable to the same
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objection. Core LPT is not a long-run, deep-structure theory. It is, as Elger (2001) notes, a
“regional theory” of the labour process. Its focus is investigating the class struggle at work
(Thompson, 2007), not from a broad political-economic perspective. Thus, a sensitivity to levels
of analysis could cause one to conclude that even if the Paleo view is correct, it doesn’t negate
core LPT, it is a useful extension of it, a meta-theoretical account of the deeper-structural forces
that shape what happens at work.
And for the most part, the paleo view does not seem to directly contradict core LPT
principles. The paleo view does not deny that the workplace is characterized by structured
antagonism, that there is a control imperative, or that a logic of accumulation compels capital to
revolutionize the forces of production. The only core principle it seems to challenge is that of
privileging the labour process for analysis. But as noted above, this can be dismissed as merely a
difference in theoretical focus. No theory, tries to explain everything; all theories have
boundaries that delimit their objects and processes of interest.
Challenging that dismissal seemingly requires that the paleo view explain how this focus
on the “hidden abode”, the labour process within the workplace, causes core LPT to fail to
apprehend aspects of work that it, core LPT, claims as part of its theoretical mission. And two
such claims are made: That because core LPT is inattentive to the implications of the long run
contradiction between forces and relations of production, in essence because its account of work
is dislocated from the broader political-economy, it cannot account for the “upskilling” trend;
and that it cannot account for changes in worker subjectivity and agency.
While the problem of explaining linkages between what happens at workplaces and the
broader political economy is a vexing one, and is recognized as such by core LPT adherents (cf.
Elger, 2001), the paleo perspective’s technologically-deterministic view does not seem to
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provide an adequate answer. And concerning upskilling, even if we dismiss Thompson’s
somewhat persuasive challenge to the data presented by Adler, and like Knights and Willmott
accept that a long-run upskilling trend has occurred, and even if we decide not to challenge
Adler’s sweeping claims about the development of skills within global capitalism based largely
on data drawn from the USA and Europe, why should core LPT researchers care? Adler
concedes that core LPT has moved on from Braverman’s (1974) de-skilling thesis and now
posits an “agnostic” view that workplace class-conflict has no determinate effect on the
trajectory of skills development (Thompson & Newsome, 2004), so to a large extent his critique
is aimed at an LPT that no longer exists. In the end, it’s not clear what aspects of core LPT
would need to be revised if it were to accept the upskilling thesis.
That said, the paleo view does make what I would call a rhetorical-political contribution.
Failure to recognize the empirical reality of upskilling, even in favor of a less-deterministic
“contingency” view as opposed to Braverman’s de-skilling thesis, can plausibly be considered
symptomatic of a broader left-wing failure to acknowledge the essentially long-run progressive
nature of capitalist development, and as long as that acknowledgment is unmade, left-wing
arguments against capitalism will lack credibility to the masses, who intuitively or empirically
grasp that progressive nature. There’s no question that over the past 30 years, the right-wing has
gotten the better of the argument over capitalism versus socialism in the political/ideological
realm, and perhaps a failure to face unconformable ‘facts’ about capitalism is one cause for this.
At least it is worth exploring.
On the second point, the paleo view about worker agency and subjectivity is, in a
nutshell, that upskilling and improvements in technology and the consequent loss of
autonomy/increase in job interdependence means that worker identity and consciousness has
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evolved from being “fragmented” to increasingly “collective” in nature - an important
development that core LPT has missed, thus largely accounting for the “missing subject”
problem (cf. Thompson, 1990). But again, this seems to neglect developments in LPT, both the
core and postmodernist versions, and, because of its meta-theoretical pitch, misses what is
happening at the workplace level. First, the issue of identity and subjectivity has been a focus of
both postmodernist and core-LPT researchers for at least a decade, and a wealth of empirical
material has been accumulated describing many kinds of identities, fragmented and collective, in
many different occupations (see Jaros, 2009, and Webb, 2006 for reviews). Also, as Vallas and
Delbridge note, unlike the paleo view, LPT has been attentive to other sources of identity at work
– issues of race, gender, age, skill level, and non-work sources of identity – and has studied how
these alternate sources of identity interact with economic/class interests to shape employee selfconcepts. While the “missing subject” issue has not been completely put to rest by this research,
the LPT account seems far more nuanced and empirically-justified than the paleo view that a
long-run tendency towards collective identity is evident.
Finally, concerning a politics of emancipation, the paleo view does not provide what I
believe to be persuasive evidence that all of these developments add up to the “inevitability of
socialism” claim (Adler, 2007b). In the end, I agree with Thompson and Knights and Willmott,
who characterize this belief as somewhat “wishful thinking”. Adler himself concedes that the
intensification of the contradiction between forces and relations of production will not, by itself,
result in the inauguration of the Socialist epoch. These developments will merely provide the
‘objective’ basis for socialism – workers will possess the collective identity needed to pull
together politically, and they will have the education and skills needed to govern. But, whether
they will have the motivation to act, to actually overthrow capitalism, is a different issue.
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Contrary to core LPT, which emphasizes a workplace-based “politics of production”, Adler
argues that the decisive political battles unfold at the societal level:
As I see it, the failure of socialist movements has its main sources in the spheres of politics and ideology. The
capitalist forces have outmanoeuvred socialist forces, weakening workers’ motivation for
radical change (Adler, 2007b: 1389).
But if so, this seemingly implies that our theories should be attentive to the “superstructural”
domain, the domain of race, gender, ideology and culture – precisely those “other causal factors”
that compete with class-based forms of identity, which core LPT has at least begun to grapple
with, but which the paleo view disregards as mere “useful extensions”, but beyond its analytical
boundaries. In the end, Adler seems to be conceding that the paleo perspective is no better than
core LPT at providing an account for how workers will emancipate themselves from capitalism.
Also, the paleo-expectations of a working class becoming increasingly more collective in
its orientation is not supported by at least some data: During the same long-run, essentially 20th
century, time frame that Adler argues support an increasingly collectivist mentality among the
working class, we see that union membership and union power has declined precipitously, which
is contrary to what the paleo perspective seems to imply – unless of course we factor in all those
super-structural political issues that it does not account for, and from which there is no empirical
basis for predicting cannot continue to hinder the onset of the socialist epoch indefinitely.
Nevertheless, Adler’s argument that struggles for control within the workplace are, or at
least have become, comparatively unimportant in determining the relative power of workers and
capital compared to what happens in the general political realm raises an important boundary
issue for core LPT. Thompson (2003), in discussing “disconnected capitalisms” and the
importance of financial market pressures in influencing management strategies towards labor,
seems to be presaging Adler’s point about where the real political action is when he says that
“Current trends are a reminder to mainstream and critical researchers that there are periods when
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work relations are not the focal point or at least the driver of change.” (p.8). This theme has been
developed more generally within the critical social sciences, where there is a growing
recognition that global institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, and WTO are having a
tremendous, and negative, impact on the experiences of lower-level employees, and the recent
financial and real-estate crises in the USA have highlighted the role of immense financial
institutions, and their close ties to the State, on people at work as well.
A frequent concern among core LPT writers has been the problem of developing an
account of the political-economy of the labour process, viewed as a pivotal task for core LPT.
Yet usually when this task is described, there is a one-sidedness to it. It is taken as given that
broad “macro” political-economic-global trends influence what happens at work (cf. Thompson,
2003), but on the other hand, little regard is given towards upward-influence, of what happens at
work influencing the broader political economy. If Adler’s argument about the politics of
production is correct and there really is no substantive upward influence, from the local to the
global, then it’s unclear what core LPT’s responsibilities are with regards to developing an
“account” of capitalist political economy, because that political economy is merely another
external factor, like gender or race, that can be “controlled for” when exploring workplace
dynamics.
Adler’s point thus highlights a tension in the core concept of “relative autonomy” (cf.
Edwards, 1990; Thompson, 1990): If core LPT is best described as a “regional” or “middlerange” theory (Thompson & Smith, 2001) focused on the workplace, is it overstepping its
bounds in trying to account for broader, non-workplace political-economic forces, just as it
would be if tried to provide a global account for other external influences, such as gender or race
relations? Finally, while I agree with Adler’s critics that the Paleo view is too deterministic, too
17
mono-causal in its emphasis on class-related issues such as the role of technology and the
contradiction forces/relations of production on what happens at workplaces, nevertheless, it is a
useful tonic in that some critics push the point too far in arguing that class issues are no more
important in determining workplace dynamics or a politics of production than are factors such as
race, gender, and culture. While all of the latter are putatively important aspects of social change
under capitalism (cf. Dean, 2009), class arguably merits a leading role in our analysis, since
ultimately, economic conflict appears to boil down to a battle between the “top 1%”, and
everyone else. Beyond this, Littler (2009) has recently argued that both Marxian-based notions
of identity based on class consciousness and LPT’s focus on this area during the 2000s,
characterized by an emphasis on factors such as gender, race and work experiences, have both
missed the boat: what might count most these days is the series of numbers, such as credit
ratings, that define our financial identity.
References
Ackroyd, S. 2009. ‘Labour process theory as normal science’. Employee Responsibilities and
Rights Journal, forthcoming.
Adler, P. 2004. Skill trends under capitalism and the socialization of production. In C. Warhurst,
I. Grugulis, I. & E. Keep, (eds.), The skills that matter, pp. 242-260. London: Palgrave.
Adler, P. 2007a. ‘The future of critical management studies: A paleo-Marxist critique of
labour process theory’. Organization Studies 28: 1313-1345.
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