Confounded Subjectivities: the Psychic Prison in ‘Labour
Process Theory’.
by
Peter Armstrong
Emeritus Professor
University of Leicester Management School
Paper for Presentation at the 29th International Labour Process
Conference:
University of Leeds, 5th to 7th April 2011
Contact Information:
E-mail p.armstrong@le.ac.uk
1
Abstract
Much of the labour process debate in the 35 years following the publication of Labor and
Monopoly Capital has been preoccupied with its subjective dimension, an aspect deliberately
neglected by Braverman since his priority was to clarify the objective situation of labour to
which subjectivity might respond. In what is still the only volume carrying the title ‘Labour
Process Theory’, David Knights and Hugh Willmott (both 1990) responded to this challenge
by proposing a quasi-existential treatment of subjectivities which has proved of enduring
influence, not only in the labour process debate itself but also in its offshoot sub-discipline of
Critical Management Studies (Hassard, Hogan and Rowlinson, 2001). This paper argues that
these interventions were not soundly based either in respect of the theoretical sources on
which they drew or in the interpretations of empirical research which were adduced in their
support. It is further argued that progress in understanding the subjective dimension of
labour will depend not on the production of more sophisticated ‘externalising’ theories of
subjectivity but on a reversion to an earlier tradition of industrial sociology which pays
attention to, and respects, the interpretations of their own position in the social order by the
workers themselves.
In essence both Knights and Willmott attribute an individualizing tendency to the capitalist
social relations of production. This tendency, they maintain, sets in motion a quest for
satisfactory and stable identities. In Knights’ version, this search in the case of ‘subordinate
workers’ ends either in an a-political privatization or in a passive-aggressive machismo
which, because of its inability to accept the legitimacy of ‘effeminate’ white collar and
managerial work, is incapable either of an ‘attack’ on capitalism or of constructive cooperation within the labour process. For Willmott the individualizing tendencies of
capitalism are held to react with an already-present ontological openness to produce an
existential anxiety, the response to which is a ‘fetishism of identity’ founded on the illusions
of psychological continuity and stability. In an attempt to shore up these illusions,
individuals are said to seek out interpersonal and institutional setting which will confirm the
identities in question. In the case of ‘subordinate workers’ the inadvertent result is to
perpetuate the conditions of their own subordination.
The paper shows that this portrayal of the working class as locked in a psychic prison of its
own making largely follows from certain choices of method rather than from anything in the
matters to which these are applied. The first of these is a thoroughgoing methodological
individualism, manifest in the dubious attribution of individualizing tendencies to capitalism
and in the posit of an individualized response to the aforesaid openness of the human
condition. The second is a radical social constructionism in which the subjective response to
power is seen as somehow complicit in the constitution of power itself. The third is a
persistent tendency to depict the possible responses to wage labour in terms of mutually
exclusive alternatives: to suppose, for example, that pride in the identity of labourer is
incompatible with a determination to challenge the conditions under which labour is
performed.
The paper also examines the manner in which both authors have sought empirical support for
these theorizations of subjectivity from some of the major ethnographic studies of the 20th
century. Extending over several decades, these attempts, it is shown, feature misreadings of
the case material and the straw-manning of the authors’ own interpretations of their data on a
scale which entirely nullifies the claimed empirical confirmation.
The paper ends with the suggestion that a more constructive approach to the ‘missing
subject’ of the labour process requires a return to - and updating of - an earlier and more
2
reflexive tradition, in which workers are treated, not as the disoriented victims of some
hypostasised individualization, but as industrial sociologists in their own right, with their
own theories of the social order and of the potentials attached to their own place within it.
These theories need to be treated not as static and individual ‘images of society’, but as
culturally-produced framings which make sense of, and are modified by, the immediate
experience of the labour process as it is acted upon by managers.
1. Making Space for ‘Subjectivity’
On a number of occasions, both Knights and Willmott have represented their deliberations
on subjectivity as a response to a consensus within the labour process debate that it stands in
need of just such a theory. In furtherance of this impression, they have frequently quoted
Thompson’s observation that ‘a full theory of the missing subject is probably the greatest
task facing labour process theory’ (Thompson, 1990, p. 114, italics in original; Knights,
1990, p. 207); Willmott, 1990 p. 337, 1997, p. 1344). On this, there seems to be some
misunderstanding. Thompson’s interest in the ‘missing subject’, like Braverman’s (1974: 27)
albeit with less optimism, concerns the prospects for some challenge to labour process
controls on the part of workers, not their capacity for introspection on their being-in-theworld. To be sure, there is a sense in which identity is involved in the process of becoming
an active subject, but that is identity as it relates to the social being of others and as that
relationship implies an ability to act within and upon the social order. This is a different and
larger sense of subjectivity than the individualized ruminations on the self which figure so
prominently in the writings of Knights and Willmott (e.g. Willmott, 1997, p. 1346). It could
be argued, in fact, that these authors’ over-arching assumption that subjectivities are
dominated by an individualized search for satisfactory and stable identities is to write
political quiescence and social ineffectuality into the analysis from the outset.
Once the identity of the worker is understood as a potentially dynamic consciousness of self
in relation to the social order, the political stakes become clear, and it also becomes clear
why it was a question which received a great deal of attention from British industrial
sociologists from the 1950s onwards. The research in question ranged from theorisations of
the relationship between social imagery and structural location (Lockwood, 1966) to
questionnaire studies of attitudes towards work and the social order (Goldthorpe, Lockwood,
Bechhofer, and Platt, 1969) to ethnographic studies of the social theories produced by the
workers themselves (Nichols and Armstrong, 1976). Perhaps because this considerable body
of work appeared under such rubrics as ‘images of society’ (Lockwood, 1966) or
‘consciousness’ (Mann, 1973), Knights and Willmott’s preference for a quasi-existentialist
terminology may have led them to underestimate its relevance1. On the other hand, there
seems to have been an element of intentionality in the omission. According to Knights, the
work in question has the common feature of reducing the subjective dimension to an analysis
of labour resistance, thereby ‘replacing Braverman’s determinism with a control-resistance
dualism’ (Knights, 1990, p. 305 italics in original). By this Knights seems to mean a
theorization in which essentially agentic subjects are seen as oppressed by outside forces. It
is clear from Knights’ general antipathy towards dualisms that he objects to such a view of
things, but it may not be not immediately obvious why. Perhaps he thinks that it is wrong to
suppose that people might be oppressed by forces external to themselves, or perhaps that
they are deluding themselves in thinking that they might otherwise enjoy a certain freedom.
1
As Thompson and Ackroyd (1995) have remarked of these and other Foucault-inspired contributions to the
labour process debate, ‘New languages to describe old realities are always attractive to academics, in this case
despite, or perhaps because of, the obscure terminology.’
3
As will presently appear, Knights’ anti-dualism, in combination with a radical social
constructionism, does indeed imply something of the sort (page 8).
Meanwhile, Knights (1990, p. 305) provides us with a roll-call of previous work in which he
believes that the treatment of subjectivity is fatally flawed by a dualistic preoccupation with
resistance. This index expurgatorius includes Aronowitz, (1978) , Palmer, (1975), Elger
(1979) and Littler and Salaman (1982), Gorz (1976), Ramsey (1977, 1985), Edwards,
(1979), Zimbalist, (1979), Stark, (1980) and Storey (1983). Knights’ list also includes
Knights and Collinson (1985) but presumably that is for detective-work on the case for the
prosecution rather than as defendants. It also includes Nichols and Beynon (1977) whose
work is actually the subject of extended discussion, but that is because it contains
ethnographic data which Knights believes can be detached from the authors’ own
commentary and reworked so as to provide support for his thinking on subjectivities.
The accusations are wild and inaccurate of course. To take only the case which both Knights
(1990) and this paper consider in more detail: Nichols and Beynon (1977) do not reduce the
subjective dimension of the labour process to a consideration of resistance. Much of Living
with Capitalism, indeed, is concerned with the absence of resistance, as should have been
evident even from the title. No is there much discussion of resistance to be found in
Goldthorpe et al. (1969) though in their case Knights finds alternative and additional grounds
for dismissing their work. In the process of operationalising their concepts for the purpose of
conducting a questionnaire survey, he tells us, they ‘reduce subjectivity to attitudes or
orientations to work’ (Knights, 1990, p. 310 italics in original). What Knights’ ‘subjectivity’
includes which Goldthorpe et al’s ‘reduction’ excludes is not explained, a particularly
culpable omission since their construct of instrumental privatization would seem to be
exactly replicated in Knights’ own concept of self-interested individualization. Nor does
Knights explain how he would go about operationalising – or even defining - his own
concepts of subjectivity and identity. From Knights and Murray (1994, p 42), we learn that
the two terms are to be regarded as interchangeable, but not much else2.
Finally, even if Knights’ objections to the aforementioned previous work were well-founded,
it is an ungenerous and not particularly fruitful approach to the literature to insist that it must
pass some test of affinity with one’s own thinking before there is even the possibility of its
relevance.
2. The Premise: Capitalism and Individualization
One of the difficulties in approaching the writings of Knights and Willmott is that they
expend so much of their energy in upbraiding other writers for their neglect of subjectivity,
or their failure to theorize it in terms which they find acceptable, that it is not always easy to
see what they are proposing as a positive alternative. The nearest thing to formal expositions
of their thinking on the subjectivities or identities of the working class, however, appear to
be those in the 1990 volume Labour Process Theory (Knights, 1990, Willmott, 1990). This
source possesses the additional advantage that the views expressed are unadulterated Knights
and Willmott, so to speak, since the volume was edited by themselves.
‘By subjectivity we mean what it is to be a particular sort or category of person from the inside as well as in
relation to others. Subjectivity concerns our sense of identity and belonging; it is the way in which we identify
with a particular set of symbols and significations or meanings surrounding a function, specialism or
occupation, for example.’ (Knights and Murray, 1994, p. 42)
2
4
For both Knights and Willmott the primary characteristic of capitalist society lies not in the
exploitation of labour power or the formation of social classes which follows from that, but
in its individualizing tendencies. This is fundamental to their insistence on the importance of
identity because it is this hypothesised individualization which is held to produce a state of
existential anxiety and it is this, in turn, which precipitates a search for ‘stable and
satisfactory identities’.
Knights (1990, p. 311-2) first introduces this theme through an exposition of the managerial
commonsense on incentive payment systems. ‘Targets and bonus schemes, wage
differentials and career systems’, he tells us, ‘all have the effect of separating individuals off
from one another and turning them back in on themselves.’ This is an attractively
straightforward thesis but it suffers from the unfortunate defect that it is untrue, and has been
known not to be true for many decades. Even the isolated and closely-monitored group in the
bank-wiring room of the Hawthorne Electrical Company reacted to their group incentive
scheme not by pressurising one another to maintain production but according to a ‘logic of
sentiments’ which prioritized the integrity of the group (Rose, 1988 p. 111). That was
American manual workers in 1933. In the late 1950s, Crozier (1964) encountered a similar
ésprit de corps amongst white collar workers in the French financial services sector who
were supposedly incentivized by the machinery of bureaucratic career progression. And so
the picture accumulates. This is not to deny that some individuals might react as Knights
thinks, but the weight of evidence over the years indicates that it is not the general pattern.
Later in the same chapter, Knights supplements his case by arguing both individualization,
and the existential anxiety supposedly associated with, it from an extrapolation of Foucault
on disciplinary surveillance (Foucault, 1971; Knights, 1990, p. 321 ff.). In Knights’ version,
the anxiety is a consequence of the subjects’ uncertainty as to whether or not they are
meeting the standards of a normalizing gaze whilst the individualization arises from a
competition between them to achieve the ‘very best standards of behaviour and performance
deemed to be required by those exercising power’.
It is entirely reasonable, of course, to suppose that surveillance engenders anxiety. There is a
question mark, though, concerning the kind of anxiety. That which attends an uncertainty
over whether or not one has succeeded in conforming to an oppressively-enforced norm is
not the same as the anomic anxiety which might precipitate reflection on one’s identity. The
supposition that Foucaultian regimes of discipline might precipitate competition between
those subject to them is even more doubtful. Aside from the fact that no such response is
mentioned by Foucault himself, how does so resolute a theorist of anti-essentialism as
Knights explain a competitive response to a regime whose entire rationale is the production
of uniform and docile bodies? And how, if a competitive response exists, does it co-exist
with an anxiety over whether or not one has succeeded in conforming?
In Willmott’s exposition the attribution of individualizing tendencies to capitalism is
justified by a quotation from Marx. In the 1973 Penguin Edition of Grundrisse there is just
one passage which is indexed under the heading ‘individuals’ and that is the one which
Willmott quotes. That it is the only passage so indexed should perhaps have served as a
warning. It reads thus:
The more deeply we go back into our history, the more does the individual, and hence
also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole:
in a still quite natural way in the family and in the forms of the family expanded into
the clan; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the
antithesis and fusions of the clans. Only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’,
5
do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means
towards his private purposes. But the epoch, which produces this standpoint, that of
the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social
(from this standpoint) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a
political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate
itself only in the midst of society. (Marx, [1857] 1973, p. 84. quoted in Willmott
(1990, p. 353)
When searching for a passage from an author which will fairly represent their views, it is as
well to scan the surrounding text so as to ensure that the writer is not being ironical or
voicing a point of view with which they disagree. The foregoing passage is a case in point. It
occurs in the introduction to Marx’s discussion of the social character of production – a
context which might have served as a second warning. The passage continues:
Production by an isolated individual outside society – a rare exception which may
well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are dynamically present
is cast by accident into the wilderness – is as much of an absurdity as is the
development of language without individuals living together and talking to each
other. There is no point in dwelling on this any longer. The point could go entirely
unmentioned if this twaddle, which had sense and reason for the eighteenth-century
characters, had not been earnestly pulled back into the centre of the most modern
economics . . . (Marx, ibid. Italics in original)
It must be allowed that Marx’s meaning in the Grundrisse is ambiguous at points, and the
translator’s foreword duly issues a third warning: that the decision to minimise the editorial
re-working of his notebooks has resulted in ‘a demanding text to read and a hazardous one to
quote’ (ibid p. 24-5). On this occasion, nevertheless, Marx’s recourse to the forthright
‘twaddle’ does rather suggest that he was writing of individualization as an illusion or
ideology, one which exists only in the minds of bourgeois social scientists. It is economists
which are named in Marx’s text, but the observation is also true of those lawyers whose
collective capacity for conjecture has bequeathed us the legal fiction of the individual
employment contract. If there is individualization to be extracted from Marx’s text, it is one
which exists only in this imaginary world, one in which in which the physical person of the
worker and the fictitious one of the company agree uncoerced terms on which labour power
will be exchanged for a wage. In contrast to this illusion, Marx’s actual view on the social
consequences of capitalism are set out in Ch. 2 of The Poverty of Philosophy:
Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into
workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation,
common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for
itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes
united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends becomes class
interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle’ (quoted in
Bottomore et. al. 1991, p. 85)
Perhaps, though, this chewing over Marx’s texts misses the main point – that the distinctive
feature of capitalist societies is not individualization at all, but the formation of social
classes, a process which is recognised not just by Marxists, but by all social historians of any
substance (e.g. Thompson, 1968). When, therefore, we are confronted with the bald assertion
that, ‘labour processes fragment, atomise and turn workers into individuals rather than
members of a class’ (Knights 1990, p. 311), it is mightily tempting to respond with Marx’s
‘twaddle’.
6
3. The Argument: the Entrapments of Subjectivity
It is a temptation which must be resisted, however. Just because Knights and Willmott err in
attributing individualizing tendencies to capitalism per se does not rule out the possibility
that such tendencies might co-exist with the processes of class formation. According to
Weber, the ‘this-worldly asceticism’ which he regarded as the moral foundation of
capitalism and an ‘unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual’ were both
historical legacies of Calvinism (Weber, 1930 Ch IV). Let us suppose for a moment that
individualizing tendencies came into existence roughly when Knights and Willmott say they
did and pick up the argument from that point.
3.1. Knights: Privatization and Sexist Reaction
In circumstances of ‘comparative social isolation’, Knights tells us, ‘subjects become more
vulnerable to external threats to their own symbolic if not actual material survival’ (Knights
1990, p. 312). In response they ‘become wholly preoccupied with accumulating material and
symbolic supports for their own individual existence. The pursuit of economic wealth/power
and both institutional and interpersonal confirmation of identity begin to dominate social life
and especially the labour process, since that is where the competition over material and
symbolic resources is most prevalent’. For those on the shop floor, this pursuit is most often
futile since, ‘there are few opportunities to secure wealth and/or an elevated identity, and
subordination erodes the very dignity of what it is to be an independent subject with
individual rights and responsibilities’. ‘A common response of subordinate workers’, he
continues, ‘is to distance themselves mentally from those conditions of domination that
contradict the sense of their own independence and self-worth’ by ‘elevating the meaning
and significance of their private lives’ (ibid, p. 312). By this circuitous route – by way of
what is essentially a rational action theory of self-formation - we arrive at the familiar
concept of instrumental privatization.
Psychological disinvestment in the workplace (Dubin, 1958), however, is only one possible
outcome of the workers’ quest for ‘wealth and/or elevated identity’. For Knights, Burawoy’s
ethnography of ‘making out’ in a machine-shop (1979) illustrates another possibility: that
‘workers are able to retain dignity and elevate their own identity and self-worth through a
competent performance in successfully achieving targets’ (Knights 1990, p. 312). What
Burawoy failed to appreciate, unfortunately, was that the identity thus achieved ‘is readily
identified with the ideology of masculine prowess and the macho sense of being in control of
the external world’.
‘Readily identified’ by whom? There is nothing to warrant such an identification either in
Burawoy’s ethnography3 or in the abstracted concept of competence in the achievement of
targets. This is an aspect of task performance which can only be made to yield Knights’
interpretation by infusing it with the crudest and most prejudicial of gender stereotypes: if
3
As Knights himself notes (1990, p. 312), Burawoy specifically disqualified himself from commenting on the
gendered aspects of the labour process on the grounds that there were only two women employed in the factory.
That is not good enough for Knights, however, who accuses him of ‘perceiv[ing] no labour process significance
in the fact that women were comparatively absent . .’ (ibid, p. 313). Unlike Burawoy, Knights permits himself
to speculate on this significance at some length (ibid, p. 314), neatly illustrating, in the process, the difference
between the ethnographer and the social theorist. One of the problems with participant observation, strictly
interpreted (Burawoy’s method), is that it only permits one to observe what comes the way of the participant.
For Burawoy to have investigated the significance of the fact that no women were employed in machine shop,
he would have had to confront his co-workers with the issue by conducting interviews or some less formal
equivalent, thereby stepping outside the role of participant.
7
Knights ‘readily identifies’ competence in the achievement of targets with machismo, for
example, what does that say for his view of women workers?
Knights continues: the ideology of masculine prowess etc. implies ‘precisely the kind of
subjectivities or identities that lead men to seek out or be happily resigned to accepting
manual working jobs in the first place’, on which tendency he cites Willis (1977). The
resulting mode of subjectivity ‘contributes to the reproduction of the conditions of both
gender and class inequality, for it is a subjectivity that depends on negating its polar opposite
in femininity and non-manual work as ephemeral, impractical or superfluous and parasitical’.
It is hostility of this kind, Knights contends, which leads industrial workers into
‘aggressively defending their own class and gendered subjectivity’ instead of using their
energies to ‘attack capitalism’ (Knights 1990, p. 313).
What is astonishing about this exposition, especially from a future editor of Gender, Work
and Organization, is the unthinking way in which Knights slips into the assumption that
‘industrial workers’ (his phrase) are male manual workers, for nothing of what he says about
the diversion of resistance into the futility of sexist reaction and prejudice against nonmanual labour makes sense otherwise. It may reflect the fact that his exposition was
developed through a critique of Burawoy’s study of an all-male machine shop, but it still
leaves a host of questions unanswered concerning the subjective correlates of resistance by
white collar and female workers.
Notice too that that the macho subjectivities of male manual workers are held to reproduce
not just gender and class inequality as such, but the conditions of these inequalities. In
isolation one would probably dismiss this phrasing as a slip of the pen, but the idea which it
expresses is one which recurs with some regularity in the writings of Knights and Willmott.
By some mechanism which is never explicated – and in all probability never could be – it is
claimed that the subjectivities of working people somehow create the structures of power and
inequality in which they find themselves enmeshed. On a single page of Knights and
Willmott (1985, p. 35), for example, Nichols and Beynon (1977) are chided for their failure
to appreciate that, ‘through the problematic of identity formation and maintenance, labour is
a perpetrator as well as a victim of the capitalist organisation of the labour process.’ and that,
‘the identity securing strategies of labour contribute in unintended ways to reproducing the
class structure of power relations’. In Knights and Willmott (1989), the idea that those over
whom power is exercised are somehow complicit in that exercise appears to trace back to
certain of Foucault’s declarations: namely that power only exists as a practice (the ‘exercise
fallacy’ as Lukes, 2005, p. 109 aptly dubs it)4 and that subjectivities are constituted by
regimes of power (Foucault, 1982, p. 208ff.). In combination, and in Knights and Willmott’s
hands, these already suspect ideas twist out of shape and reassemble themselves as an
idealist fantasy in which the constitution of subjectivities by power is reversed, with the
result that power appears to be constituted by the very subjectivities which it constitutes.
Thus; ‘although power is exercised over others, it is necessary to appreciate and theorise how
those subject to (and by) its truth-effects are themselves active participants in the process
through which power relations are reproduced. (Knights and Willmott, 1989, p. 541). Try
reading that whilst holding in mind images from the Gulag and Guantanamo Bay! When
Foucault’s supplementary dictum that power is only ever exercised over free subjects is also
stirred into the mix (1982, p. 221), the result is one of the silliest and most unthinkingly
4
For Giddens, in contrast, power does not come into being only when exercised (Cassell ed., 1993, p. 110).
Rather, it is a potential which carries the kind of tactical possibilities of threat and feint which can be routinely
observed in a game of chess.
8
brutal pronouncements in the whole of social science, ‘It is precisely because human actions
are free that power is exercised as a means of persuading others to use their freedom in a
particular way. In short, power does not deny freedom; it simply directs it along distinct
channels’5 (Knights, 1990, p. 325; Knights and Willmott, 1989, p 552-3)
Even setting aside the aforesaid message of good cheer, Knights’ (1990) exposition
articulates some decidedly heterodox notions by the standards of most of the contributions to
the labour process debate. The first is that hostility towards management is collapsed into a
more general hostility towards non-manual work whilst that, in turn, is collapsed into a
hostility towards all things feminine. Facile identifications of this kind are obviously
prejudicial in that they create a frame of reference in which the analyst can write off any
hostility towards management, whatever its motive and occasion, as tainted with sexist
reaction. Unusual too is the fact that class consciousness as a possibility is either written out
of the theory altogether or assumed to consist of nothing more than a static and aggressive
defence of a subjectivity. Such a defence would indeed be a distraction from any challenge to
capitalist priorities, as Knights maintains. What class consciousness actually means,
however, is a ‘subjectivity’ in which all workers, manual, white collar male and female are
seen as possessing common interests in actively challenging those management controls and
policies which prioritize capital accumulation at their expense. Far from constituting a
distraction from the ‘attack’ on capitalism, as Knights maintains, hostility towards
management of that kind would be its natural local expression.
In addition to all this, and notwithstanding Knights’ strident disavowals of essentialism6,
there is surely more than an echo of Maslow’s ‘status needs’ in his posited search for
‘elevated identity’ and also arguable that he is projecting middle-class preoccupations with
status onto working class subjects. Lockwood (1966), for example, argues that the structural
situation of working class people encourages the core values of solidarity and conformity
It is a moot point whether this is actually sillier than Foucault’s own observations on the matter. Having
defined power ‘as a mode of action upon the actions of others’, he has no difficulty in deducing that, ‘Slavery is
not a power relationship when man is in chains’ (Foucault, 1982, p. 221). Whilst the deduction from Foucault’s
premise is impeccable, most thinkers would treat it as the reductio ad absurdum it so evidently is, and proceed
to rethink their definition of power. Instead, Foucault’s failure to do so has bequesthed us a generation of
theororists for whom it is an incontestible truth. As Marx might have put it, ‘There is no point in dwelling on
this twaddle any longer’.
5
6
Having berated a number of other writers for the theory-crime of essentialism, Knights adds the following
footnote, ‘It is very difficult to image how any analysis of social life could be conducted in the absence of
assumptions about human nature, however inexplicit.’ (Knights, 1990, p. 330, footnote 4). In a later footnote to
his posit of existential anxiety (ibid, p. 322, p. 331, footnote 13), Knights acknowledges the concerns of Stewart
Clegg and Tony Tinker that such an assumption smuggles essentialism into the analysis by the backdoor –
acknowledges those concerns, but without answering them! There is something disarming about this, and also
about the frequency with which both Knights and Willmott approvingly cite the work of Erich Fromm who has
this to say on the subject of anti-essentialism:
‘[This book] disagrees emphatically with those theories which neglect the role of the human factor as one of the
dynamic elements in the social process. This criticism is directed not only against sociological theories which
explicitly wish to eliminate psychological problems from sociology (like those of Durkheim and his school),
but also against those theories that are more or less tinged with behaviourist psychology. Common to all these
theories is the assumption that human nature has no dynamism of its own and that psychological changes are to
be understood in the development of new “habits” as an adaptation to cultural patterns. These theories, though
speaking of the psychological factor, at the same time reduce it to a shadow of cultural patterns. . Though there
is no fixed human nature, we cannot regard human nature as being infinitely malleable and able to adapt itself
to any kind of conditions without developing a psychological dynamism of its own. Human nature, though
being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the
task of psychology.’ (Fromm, 1942, p. 11).
9
rather than individualistic status-seeking and there is considerable ethnographic evidence to
back this up (e.g. Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter, 1969).
3.2. Willmott: Fetishism and Illusion
Willmott’s approach to these issues bears the terminological scars of a struggle with Marx’s
philosophical anthropology. Marx’s offence, it is alleged, consisted of a ‘neglect of labour’s
symbolic existence or identity’ (Willmott, 1990 p. 355), in support of which allegation
Willmott quotes a passage on alienated labour (ibid, p. 354). Since Marx’s whole point was
that the alienation of labour strips away its significance as an expression of the workers’
species-being, Willmott’s own point must depend on a belief that it retains some symbolic
significance, even so. If that is indeed the argument, it needs a lot more elaboration than
Willmott provides.
However that may be, Willmott, like Knights, ascribes an individualizing tendency to
capitalism. Unlike Knights, however, he additionally portrays it as an amplification of
processes rooted in the human condition as such. Variously describing this condition as a
‘contradictory relation to nature’ (ibid, 341, 358, 371), an ‘experience of separation’ (ibid,
358) and ‘stand[ing] both within and outside of nature’ (ibid, 352, 360), Willmott asserts,
with no discernible supporting argument, that our response to the ‘open, dialectical ontology
of human beings’ is an individualized one (e.g. ibid, p. 337-8, 341, 353-4)7. In a typical
formulation, he baldly asserts that ‘the process of individualization promotes and feeds upon
the ontological insecurity associated with the separation of human beings and nature’ (ibid,
338). It may be that the argumentative lacuna is a consequence of his tendency to discuss
the ontological question only in relation to the specific individualizing pressures which he
believes himself to have already discovered in capitalism (e.g. ibid, p. 371). The fact remains
that an assumption of ontological insecurity at the level of the individual is at variance with
almost the entire corpus of sociology and anthropology. Within these fields of study it is
regarded as elementary that human ontology is indeterminate at the level of culture not that
of the individual. Berger and Luckman’s discussion of ‘world-openness’ is typical (1967, p.
65 ff. and quoted in Willmott, 1985, p. 343), making it clear that ‘Man’s [sic] self-production
is always and of necessity, a social enterprise’ and pointing out that ‘world-openness, while
intrinsic to man’s biological make-up, is always pre-empted by social order’ (Berger and
Luckman, 1967, p. 69). The irony is that Willmott, having thoroughly misunderstood Berger
and Luckman, feels himself entitled to castigate Storey (1983) for his failure to make the
same mistake and to deduce from it the implication that ‘the reproduction of forms of control
is mediated by “open” subjectivities’ (pp. 343-4).
Having convinced himself that ontological openness is not a realm of anthropological
possibility but a state of being directly experienced by individuals, Willmott proceeds to an
exploration of its consequences. A first response to the resulting sense of too much
possibility is what he calls ‘identity fetishism’ (Willmott, 1990, p. 355, see also Knights and
Willmott, 1989, pp. 543-4). By this Willmott means the tendency to think of the self as a
reasonably stable and durable entity, persisting through time and recognizably the same in
different settings. This commonsense view of the self, it is as well to note, is one shared by
all those social scientists for whom the individual is engaged as a strategic actor in
predefined fields of practice (e.g. Goffman, 1969; Bourdieu, 1990, p. 16 ff.), not to mention
Willmott does refer at one point to the possibility of ‘transforming the conditions of our collective selfformation’, but even here it is not clear that ‘collective’ means anything more than the aggregate of individual
processes of self-formation. (Willmott, 1990, p. 339)
7
10
the many others for whom character is formed and eventually stabilized by the sedimentation
of social experience (Mead, 1934, pp. 154-164) . Reismann (1950), indeed, classified
changes in the American character structure according to the durability of that sedimentation.
Willmott, though, stands apart from this distinguished company in his belief that identity
fetishism is a ‘self-deception’ (Willmott, 1990, p. 356), his reason being that it ‘disregards
the continuous process of its constitution.’ This is to make a straw man of commonsense:
most people, surely, would accept that their sense of themselves may change over the long
run or even in the short run in the face of what are significantly called ‘life-changing
experiences’. Equally, however, they find sufficient stability within their conceptions of
themselves to pursue projects of self expression over significant periods of their lives.
Identity fetishism, to accept Willmott’s inelegant term for a moment, is not a self-deception;
it is at most an exaggeration and it may not even be that.
In fact the next step (and next sentence) in Willmott’s argument contradicts his depiction of
‘identity fetishism’. Despite the illusion of socially independent identity which he thinks it
provides, he also believes that those of us in the grip of that illusion ‘desire to preserve our
symbolic (and physical) existence’ by seeking to ‘reproduce the institutions that provide this
security, as well as (the) desire to change the institutions which are perceived to undermine
it’ (ibid, p. 356, Italics in original). This does not make sense. People who think their
identities are independent of the social setting, however deluded they may be, have no reason
to seek institutional confirmation of those identities, nor have they reason to fear that
uncongenial institutional pressures of might undermine them. They might seek out
institutions within which they feel comfortable and challenge others which deny them the
recognition which they feel to be their due, but that is a different matter and one, moreover,
which suggests that their sense of a stable self is not an illusion at all.
As it happens, Willmott believes that the search for coherent identities through the choice
and manipulation of social settings is also ‘self-defeating’ (ibid, p. 358). This is partly
because individuals occupy multiple roles, partly because they seek security in those most
familiar to them, but most importantly because identity fetishism is blind to the ‘inescapable
openness of subjectivity’. With this step of the argument, we are back to the starting-point:
the bemused and malleable individual confronted by an ocean of possibility. Willmott thinks
we should give in: ‘Instead of seeking to maintain the social conditions required for the
confirmation of fetishised identity we should see through (‘penetrate’) the whole sorry
business, thus ‘releasing ourselves from the unequal and unwinnable struggle of securing
subjectivity in social identity’ (ibid, 369).
In summary, Willmott believes that people are plagued with anxiety concerning who they are
and prey to illusion when they think they have found out. Along the way they unwittingly
endorse and to that extent perpetuate the very institutions which he thinks amplify their
anxieties.
4. Constructive Thinking on Power, Co-Operation and
Interdependence
We left Knights’ in the process of chastising the manual working class for prioritising a
defence of ‘their own class and gendered subjectivity’ over the ‘attack’ on capitalism
(Knights, 1990, p. 313). For Knights, it seems, hostility towards management of any kind
symptomises forms of worker subjectivity which are simply self-defeating and destructive.
The reasoning behind that view of things is set out in an earlier theory of power-dependence
relationships (Knights and Willmott, 1985, especially pp. 24-26). This too is unusual. Where
11
most power-dependency theories seek to explain or locate power (e.g. Emerson, 1962;
Hickson, Hinings, Lee, Schneck and Pennings, 1971), Knights and Willmott set out to
prescribe the manner in which it ought to be exercised (co-operatively) and explain why this
doesn’t usually happen (because the underlying mutual dependence is not properly
understood). Whatever the other demerits of this theory, lack of originality is not one of
them.
Conventionally enough, they begin by linking power to the control of scarce resources,
thereby reproducing the circularity of other power-dependence theories: that of deducing
power from the power to control resources. From that point, they go considerably off-piste,
as it were. The control of resources, they say, has implications for identity because it confers
a sense of independence and security upon those who exert it. They believe this sense of
security to be an illusion, however, since it depends on a suppression of the awareness that
the resources so controlled depend on the compliance of the (different) people who produce
them8. Those excluded from control, for their part, have interests in avoiding a challenge to
the exercise of power. In the case of relatively privileged subordinates, this compliance
stems from sectional interests in the status quo, but more generally it is a means of avoiding
‘identity-damaging disciplinary controls’ (italics in original). Because both of these are
reasons of self interest, it follows that ‘the relationship between the powerful and
subordinates is a set of self-interested reciprocal exchanges’ (Knights and Willmott, 1985 p.
25)
For Knights and Willmott, a major consequence of the resulting instrumentalization of social
relationships is to undermine the productive potential of what could otherwise be a cooperative system of production, partly because instrumentality places limits on co-operation
and partly because the resources needed to satisfy sectional interests fall short of what they
describe as ‘the demand’. For Knights and Willmott there follows something very like the
moral condemnation of ‘excessive wage claims’ which we hear from Tory politicians:
‘Within an expanding economy, such individualistic exploitation of interdependence fuels an
inflationary spiral; in recession it augments unemployment and results in further deprivation
for the poor’. (ibid, 1985 pp. 25-26)
This startling irruption of right-wing rhetoric (the ‘larger cake’, the destructive effects of
‘sectional interests’ and, as already pointed out, the ‘inflationary wage-claim’) into what
purports to be a sociological theory of power, not to mention the presumed psychological
effects of power (that its exercise confers a sense of security, that this is illusory, that it
creates a society of self-interested utility maximisers) seem to cry out for amplification.
Fortunately, some explanation is available in a still earlier paper by Knights and Roberts
(1982). Written in more accessible language than Knights and Willmott (1985), the ethical
and prescriptive overtones which are partially concealed behind the abstract language of the
later paper are out in the open.
According to Knights and Roberts (1982) power is widely misunderstood, not only by social
analysts but also by most of the managers who exercise it. As Knights and Roberts represent
it, the conventional view - and one they believe to be mistaken - is that power is a personal
possession rather than a relationship. Such a view of power, they say, encourages those who
see themselves as possessing it to exercise power in a coercive manner. Coercion, they
continue, has individualising consequences because both the exercise of power and
8
Despite the abstraction of their language, Knights and Willmott seem to be thinking here of the capitalist
social relations of production or some other system of exploitation, since their argument would not apply to a
Jeffersonian society of independent yeoman farmers..
12
compliance with it occur through a calculation of self-interest, a state of affairs which is only
exacerbated when coercion is met with counter-coercion. For Knights and Roberts, the
consequence of individualization is a destruction of the trust and co-operation on which the
productive potential of organization depends. That productive potential might be realised if
both managers and workers could be brought to take on board the ‘more adequate’ view of
power proposed by the authors, one in which the dependence of the powerful on those over
whom power is exercised is acknowledged. Power exercised on the basis of this recognition
of mutual dependence, they believe, would create the potential for a productive co-operation
in which, ‘individuals, rather than opposing and trying to avoid attempts to supervise their
actions, voluntarily accept the advice and direction of others’ (Knights and Roberts, 1982, p.
50). This conclusions finds its echo in Willmott’s otherwise oddly decontextualised
advocacy of ‘a communal strategy of compassion and the productive power of more
symmetrical relations of interdependence’ (Willmott, 1990, p. 358)
Virtually every step of Knights and Roberts’ argument is open to question. Is it true that
most people do not think of power as a relationship? Why should a view of power as a
personal possession encourage coercion? Is it true that the exercise of, and response to,
coercion is always self-interested? Why should self-interest preclude collective strategies?
And why should a recognition by the powerful of their dependence on others lead to a more
co-operative relationship? Might it not lead instead to an increased determination to hang
onto their powers and to the forcible suppression of any resistance?
These uncertainties apart, the politics of the theorization are overtly unitarist, the assumption
being that all would benefit if only the workers could be persuaded to accept the ‘advice and
direction’ of their managers. That is precisely the apolitical and technicist representation of
management which the scholars of Critical Management Studies have set out contest. As
such, it has no place for the thought that (some of) management might be there simply to
ensure that the ‘productive potential’ of the workers, rather than of co-operation, might be
maximised and that the proceeds might be entirely appropriated by the system of control to
which they are subjected.
5. The Evidence
Given the contestable nature of the premise – that capitalism individualizes – and the
tortuous logic connecting it to the conclusion – that resistance to managerial controls on the
part of workers is either self-negating or is complicit in the constitution of those controls – it
is not surprising that Knights, Willmott and their co-authors have sought to provide
empirical support for various elements of their theory. In most cases they have done so by reinterpretations of the ethnographic work of other authors, but there are occasions on which
the fieldwork has been carried out by themselves. Knights and Roberts (1982) is a case in
point and Knights and Collinson (1987), based on fieldwork carried out by Collinson (1981)
is another.
5.1. Accounting Trumps Machismo
Collinson’s study was by participant observation and interview of an exclusively male
manual workforce engaged in the manufacture of heavy motor vehicles. As with Knights’
later theorization, the main argument drawn from this study is that the subjectivities of these
workers were gendered in such a way as to negate any possibility of effective resistance to
their company’s demand for redundancies. The authors explain this ineffectuality partly in
terms of the men’s ‘masculine’ self-image of independence. This self-image, they argue,
prevented any resistance to the redundancies because doing so would have admitted the
13
men’s dependence on the company (Knights and Collinson, 1987, pp. 461, 472). Masculine
subjectivities were also responsible, they contend, for the men’s inability to contest the
‘hard’ financial data with which the company backed up its case for redundancies. The
apparent concreteness of this data, they claim, resonated with the masculine ethos of hardnosed practicality and also with their experience of waste and inefficiency on the shopfloor
(ibid, pp. 466-7, 473). The efficacy of accounting data in overcoming resistance contrasted
with an earlier ‘human relations’ initiative in which a ‘glossy in-house magazine’ was
produced with the intent of securing greater co-operation. This proved almost entirely
counter-productive, being received by the men with unremitting suspicion and some ribaldry
(ibid, pp. 461, 465).
Little of this argument is actually supported by the data. The exceptions are the sexist nature
of the shopfloor culture (nude posters, dirty jokes about secretaries and office workers) and
the men’s disbelief in managerial declarations of good intentions, as evidenced by their
comments on the glossy magazine. No evidence is presented that a self-image of
independence played any part in the men’s failure to resist redundancies or that this selfimage was connected in any with a gendered subjectivity, or that it even existed. These
connections exist not in the data as presented but only in the stereotype of masculinity
through which the authors apprehend it. In addition, they ignore the very obvious point that
it is virtually impossible for a workforce to find some way of resisting a management which
is determined to get rid of it – as had been demonstrated by the failure of a number of highprofile workplace occupations and work-ins in the decade preceding the fieldwork.
Concerning the supposed persuasive effect of the financial accounting data, moreover, the
paper presents quite a detailed account and critique of the information presented but no
evidence whatsoever that its contents even registered with the workforce.
What might be called the first-order interpretation of the data as sketched above is
additionally wrapped in a second-order commentary which is presented as ‘part of a
continuing concern to develop a theory of power and identity’ (Knights and Collinson, 1987,
p. 458). Anticipating the theory of subjectivity presented in Knights (1990), this commentary
features the individualizing effects of managerial power, the searches for identity which end
in masculinist subjectivities (ibid, pp. 459, 474-5) and the men’s consequent tendency to
‘distance themselves from relations which contradict that image – management and women’
(ibid, p. 459). Where the first-order interpretation makes at least sporadic contact with the
evidence, the second-order commentary floats more-or-less free of it altogether. For
example, the paper quotes quite a few disparaging shopfloor opinions on the company’s
management, but none of them show any trace of an attribution of femininity, impracticality,
or superfluity (ibid, p. 461-6). Nor is there any evidence of the supposed individualizing
effects of managerial power, nor of a search for identity, let alone of some connection
between the two. At one point, indeed the authors mention that the macho discourse is
‘reproduced within shopfloor culture’ (authors’ italics) without any recognition that the
production of a subjectivity through enculturation is a very different - and far more plausible
- social mechanism than a personal search for meaning and identity set off by the experience
of individualization. Thompson and Findlay (1999) have remarked previously on the
tendency of these authors and their associates to make strong claims on the basis of weak
data, but here it is more a question of forcing alien interpretations onto an otherwise
perfectly adequate ethnography.
What comes across from Collinson’s ethnography, in fact, is a well-defined shopfloor
culture. It was sexist and anti-management to be sure, but it was not one in which
individuals seem to have been noticeably troubled by an absence of meaning and identity.
14
Cultures of this kind have been produced time and again by the massed workforces
assembled by the managers of industrial capital (e.g. Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter,
1969). Through the vectors of trade unionism and left politics, moreover, they have been
reproduced in variously attenuated and miniaturised forms in smaller enclaves of industrial
and commercial employment, to such an extent that the employer strategies of re-locating
employment onto ‘greenfield sites’ and producing artificial company-friendly cultures have
met with only limited success.
The fact is that the core premise of Knights/Willmott theorization of worker subjectivities is
very doubtful. Capitalism only ‘individualizes’ in the formal and legalistic sense in which
the worker can be said to confront the employer in the market-place. In the concrete, it
creates conditions to which people respond as they respond to any other material and
discursive challenge - by producing a culture. Just as questionable is the idea that worker
subjectivities are routinely complicit in reproducing the conditions of their own subjugation.
As presented in Knights and Collinson (1987), this claim, as Wray-Bliss has remarked, rests
on no more secure a basis than the authors’ belief in their own ability to divine when
people’s identity constructs are tying them into self subordination and to determine what
forms of resistance are and are not effective (Wray-Bliss, 2005, p. 403). From the privileged
standpoint of academic researchers, the institutions produced by such cultures – for instance
the National Union of Mineworkers - can be accused many things besides sexism and
workerism, but not, without a great deal more explanation and justification than Knights and
Willmott provide, of ‘reproducing the conditions of their own subjugation’.
5.2. Living with Living with Capitalism
Perhaps conscious of the credibility deficit left by the kind of evidence discussed above,
Knights, Willmott and their co-authors have persistently sought to support their theorization
of subjectivity by re-reading ethnographic studies produced by other authors. It is no
accident that Burawoy (1979, 1985) has been a particular recipient of these attentions, being
cited in 18 papers by Knights, Willmott and their co-authors. In comparison, Willis (1977)
and Nichols and Beynon (1977), cited in 8 and 6 papers respectively have escaped
comparatively lightly. Only a few of these citations refer to extended discussions, but where
they do, the authors’ own interpretations of their data are contested in every case. In other
words, none of the well-known ethnographies selected by Knights and Willmott themselves
to provide support for their theory of subjectivity do so in their own terms. They can only be
made to do so on the basis of Knights and Willmott’s own re-readings, or even less credibly,
on the basis of Knights and Willmott’s admonishments of their authors.
The attraction of Burawoy is that he is believed to stand apart from other ethnographers in
his recognition of the subjective aspects of work. It is a feature of his work which always
earns him a few kindly words before the beatings start (e.g. Knights, 1990, p. 309).
Untypical only in its unremitting persistence are two pages by Knights (1990, pp. 310-311),
over the course of which the reader learns that, ‘Burawoy’s analysis of subjectivity . . does
not indicate what constitutes the failure of workers to penetrate some of the contradictions of
their own self-discipline. He ‘fails to theorise subjectivity or identity sufficiently to account
for workers’ preoccupation with production output’. ‘His analysis of the game of making-out
. . is incomplete in that while refusing to impute a given (class conscious) set of interests to
labour . .[he] does not apply the same caution to theorising management’. ‘Attributing
[managers] with an interest in obscuring the production of surplus value is tantamount to
proffering a conspiratorial theory of capitalist organisation’. ‘A more serious weakness . . is
a tendency to fall back upon an essentialist theory of human nature’. By interpreting game15
playing ‘as providing compensation for a deprived human nature . . he simply sustains a
major weakness in labour process theory: precisely this failure to investigate the
subjectivity’. ‘It is not that Burawoy completely neglects what is involved; he just fails to
develop his account of how labour processes fragment, atomise and turn workers into
individuals rather than members of a class’.
So it goes on, scarcely drawing breath, for a further two pages. What is striking about this
inquisition in absentia – and about all the other Knights/Willmott treatments of Burawoy,
and, for that matter, about all their treatments of other ethnographers – is the unexamined
assumption that searches for identity must have been going on in the workplaces concerned,
and that these have either been missed or misunderstood by the researchers themselves.
By these standards, the treatment of Nichols and Beynon (1977) in Knights and Willmott
(1985, pp. 32-35) is almost generous. It is one of two ‘empirical illustrations’ chosen to lend
substance to one of Knights and Willmott’s key points: that workers’ subjectivities are such
as to perpetuate the conditions of their own subordination. Since Nichols and Beynon
themselves say no such thing, their work can only be made to ‘illustrate’ Knights and
Willmott’s point if the authors’ own interpretations their own data are shown to be
inadequate.
Knights and Willmott (1985) begin the task of demonstrating that this is the case by quoting
a passage from Living with Capitalism (1977 p. 122). It seems to be one which has intrigued
Willmott throughout his career. He first discussed it in a paper presented at the First Labour
Process Conference in 1983 and has also done so in Knights and Willmott (1985), and
Willmott (1987) with the latter discussion also replicated in Willmott (2005) where it
presumably represents his mature thoughts on the text in question. Living with Living with
Capitalism, as one might put it. This is the passage:
Every man is born to do something and my function in life is to manage and I’ve just
got to manage. I think this is a problem that most managers have failed to get to grips
with. Now take an example. As far as I can see any man who takes on the job of shop
steward wants his ego boosting. But you’ve got to boost his ego in the proper manner.
Now if I get a bit of trouble – now take an example, perhaps, of a serious case of a
man who has been perpetually late. Now, I’m the manager, and it’s my function to
manage. It’s my function to discipline this particular man. But I have to deal with the
steward. So, what do I do? I take the shop steward aside and tell him that in half an
hour’s time this man Smith is going to walk into this room. That I’m going to stamp
and bang the table and tell him I’m going to put him on the road.
Then I’ll say to the steward, “and what you can do will be to intervene at this time.
Make a case for the man. And we’ll agree to let the man off with a caution.”
Now the man comes in and I bang the table and the steward says, “Come on Mr.
Brown. Couldn’t you give him one more chance?” I relent. the shop steward gets out
of the meeting with the man and says to him, “I’ve got you off this bloody time but
don’t expect me to do it again.” You see, the shop steward gets his ego boosted. He
gets what he wants and I get what I want. That’s what good management is about.’
Nichols and Beynon (1977, p. 122)
In Knights and Willmott (1985), this passage is discussed as an episode in a wider strategy of
incorporation, in which workplace representatives are flattered into collaboration with
managerial controls by allowing them a make-believe involvement in the decision-making
process. Since Nichols and Beynon (1977) interpret the passage in precisely the same
manner, and do so without finding it necessary to reflect on subjectivities or identities, and
16
since they additionally connect such manipulations ‘to the structural conditions of workers’
alienation’ as recommended by Knights and Willmott, their failure, it appears, lies at a rather
more recondite level. For Knights and Willmott (1985) this consists in the fact that these
conditions and dynamics are not ‘directly and systematically theorised in relation to the
immediate existential concerns of both managers and workers to create and sustain a sense of
order in which identity is “secure”’ (Knights and Willmott, 1985, p. 33, italics in original). In
other words, our critics have somehow intuited that the security of identities would
necessarily have been at stake in such an instance of managerial manipulation, even though it
was not a real incident but an illustrative one concocted by its supposed principal player
thirteen years before the publication of Knights and Willmott’s paper and even though the
nearest thing to confirmation that identities would have been at stake was the raconteur’s
reference to the shop stewards’ ‘boosted ego’9.
Having established on this slender basis, but to their own satisfaction, that identities were
indeed in play at ChemCo in a general sort of way, Knights and Willmott, proceed to take
Nichols and Beynon to task for overlooking what they claim to be the most important
conditions of the workers’ incorporation: their indifference to the work situation consequent
upon a search for meaning and identity outside the workplace. Though Nichols and Beynon
are said to provide a ‘lucid description’ of a ‘vicious cycle’ in which the workers’
indifference to the actual content of work fuels a business unionism which concedes further
extensions of managerial control in return for higher wages, they do not, as Knights and
Willmott put it, ‘fully reflect’ on the implications. To be more precise, Nichols and Beynon’s
lack of ‘a developed theory of identity’ (Knights and Willmott, 1985, p. 34, italics in
original) prevents them from ‘fully appreciating’ how a displacement of the search for
meaning and identity from the workplace itself is both a response to managerial controls and
permits further extensions of that control. As a result of these omissions, Nichols and
Beynon fail to see that ‘labour is a perpetrator as well as a victim of the capitalist
organization of the labour process.’ Instead, ‘every manifestation of the underlying malaise
at ChemCo is readily attributed to the increasing demands that capital enforces upon labour.’
(Knights and Willmott, 1985, p. 35).
[Labour perpetrates the capitalist organization of the labour process? How is that
supposed to work? Workers invent scientific management? Management accounting?
Human resource management?]
It will be evident, surely, that Knights and Willmott’s chain of reasoning leads rather more
naturally to Nichols and Beynon’s conclusion than their own: that if, as Knights and
Willmott say, the worker’s psychological disinvestment is an effect of managerial controls
(aka the ‘increasing demands [of] capital’), those controls are the immediately responsible
element, not the workers’ response to them. It will be equally apparent that the venerable
debate on whether and why work is not a ‘central life interest’ (Dubin, 1958) can be
conducted quite well in the absence of a theory of identity, ‘developed’ or otherwise. The
fact is that the data presented in Living with Capitalism are not at all the claimed ‘empirical
illustration’ of Knights and Willmott’s theorization of power and identity (Knights and
In fact it is quite likely that the massaging of the shop stewards’ identity would not have been involved in the
Chemco story. Six years after that fieldwork, the present writer observed a similar exchange between a manager
and a shop steward in an electrical components factory. Far from being flattered, the steward regarded the
ensuing pas de deux as trade union routine in the case of an unsatisfactory worker (Armstrong, Goodman and
Hyman, 1981, p. 113). As was stressed at the time in the Trades Union Congress courses for shop stewards, the
object in such cases is to defend the procedure, not to incur the informal obligations to management which
would be the price of arguing for concessions.
9
17
Willmott, 1985, p. 32). They can only be presented as such by injecting entirely conjectural
meanings and processes into the data, by taking the original authors to task for failing to
notice them or appreciating their significance and then showing how Knights and Willmott’s
own theoretical constructions would have made sense of them. So it is that the complete lack
of evidence of anything resembling a pre-occupation with identity anywhere in Nichols and
Beynon’s ethnography is turned into evidence of these authors’ ‘failure to appreciate’ the
significance of these processes to the detriment of their understanding of their own
fieldwork. This being the case, it is fortunate that help is at hand:
To be clear, in advancing a theory that discloses how labour contributes to the
reproduction of the conditions of its own subordination, we do not seek to question
the value of structural analysis. Rather we seek to provide a theoretical framework for
explicating Nichols and Beynon’s own expressed concern to render existential
experience intelligible in relation to the structure of social relationships which can
thereby ‘destroy the gap between the abstract and the concrete’ (ibid: viii). When
viewed in the light of this framework, their analysis is seen to be distorted by a failure
to appreciate how workers’ (and managements’) preoccupation with securing or
defending a particular sense of identity has the effect of undermining the productive
potential of interdependence and of ultimately reinforcing the dominant structures of
control.
Knights and Willmott, 1985, p. 35
As a parting shot, and just in case there was any doubt of the politics behind their re-reading,
Knights and Willmott’s conclusion also adds that Nichols and Beynon’s lack of ‘a
theoretically articulated awareness of how the individualistic concern with securing identity
leaves labour vulnerable to manipulation by the agents of Labour as well as Capital’ (ibid, p.
39). Manipulation of labour by agents of labour? Can it be that we have here a resurrection
of the primitive and discredited agitator theory of strikes (Hyman, 1984)
5.3. Learning to Labour: an Ear ‘Oles’ View
Using material from Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour (1977), Knights and Willmott (1985, p.
36) proceed to manufacture a second ‘empirical illustration’ of the manner in which the
subjectivities of the working class ‘facilitate a reproduction of the structural conditions
against which the working class rebel’. Readers familiar with Willis’ well-known
ethnography are invited to skip the summary offered in the next two paragraphs and pick up
the argument as it proceeds to a consideration of Knights and Willmott’s re-interpretation.
As against the left functionalism exemplified by the work of Bowles and Gintis (1976) – or
better, in supplementation of it - Willis set out to investigate the actual processes by which
the UK educational system, notwithstanding its institutional rhetoric of opportunity-for-all,
delivers a supply of individuals onto the labour market who are willing to take on the
unskilled manual jobs which occupy, and on some accounts define, the lowest positions in
the class structure. He found his answers in an ethnographic study of the counter-culture
within their school created by 12 disaffected pupils (the ‘lads’, as they styled themselves),
supplemented by interviews with their parents, their teachers and other pupils.
The lads’ culture, it has to be said, was most of the things that provoke the liberal and openminded social scientist into the symbolic violence of pejorative description. It was sexist,
racist, violent and openly contemptuous of the ‘ear ‘oles’ who paid attention to their lessons,
some of whom may well have been headed for careers as social scientists in later life.
Notwithstanding its reactionary aspects, however, Willis found creative moments in the lads’
18
culture. As against the ear ‘oles’ more-or-less passive assimilation of the educational ethos,
theirs was a view of the social order which challenged many of its core presuppositions. It
did so partly by rejecting school learning as irrelevant to the futures which they foresaw for
themselves (‘impractical’), partly by inverting its relative valuations of mental and manual
labour and partly through a critical ‘penetration’ (to use Willis’ idiosyncratic term) of the
tacit bargain offered by the school – behave yourself, pay attention to your lessons and a
career as a non-manual worker will be yours. Among the assumptions behind this ‘teaching
paradigm’ are the egalitarian myth that education offers everyone the opportunity of social
mobility irrespective of the cultural capital which they bring to it, the vocationalist myth
which ignores the manner in which qualifications work as a mechanism of social exclusion
and the individualist myth that mass social mobility is possible through the attainment of
qualifications, as if that alone could create the jobs for which they are demanded. Though
never fully articulated, the penetrations of these myths achieved by the lad’s culture were
nevertheless real. They were, however, politically disabled by a number of ‘limitations’, the
most important of which stemmed from the manner in which their inversion of the
conventional valuations of mental and manual labour was achieved. For the lads, hard
manual labour signified masculinity, the denigrated ‘other’ of which was the ‘femininity’ of
office work. In their scheme of things, those men who perform non-manual labour of this
kind were residual types who fell short of the masculine ideal: the ‘poufs’, ‘cissies’ and
‘wankers’ which they saw prefigured in the attitudes and behaviour of the ear ‘oles (Willis,
1977, p. 149). Although this element of the lads’ culture succeeded in attaching the high
status of masculinity to the manual labour which they expected to perform for the rest of
their working lives, it did so at the cost of introducing a dead-end fatalism into their worldview. For they also accepted not only that it is the ‘ear ‘oles’ who run things but that this
would always and inevitably be the case (Willis, 1977, p. 167). This left them in much the
same position as the ‘bloody-minded’ individuals described by Nichols and Armstrong
(1976, pp. 60-73): they recognised the inevitability of their subordination to the despised ‘ear
‘oles, but continued to take pride in their capacity for hard labour and from time to time
salvaged a little more from otherwise pointless gestures of sabotage and rebellion.
It will be evident that Willis’ intention was to produce a theory of occupational choice rather
than the labour process and that, even as such, his study could never have shed light upon the
passage of young women into unskilled manual work. Even apart from these limitations, his
work can speak to the subjective dimension of the manual labour process only on the basis of
two further assumptions. The first is that active rebellion is typical of the manual worker’s
experience of education, rather than (say) the passive misery of a constantly reinforced sense
of inadequacy. The second is that this contrarian mindset is carried largely unmodified into
the very different environment of the workplace, more particularly in respect of its
contemptuous stereotyping of non-manual work as incompatible with authentic masculinity.
Both are large assumptions but they do not seem to have troubled Knights and Willmott
(1985). In fact Knights (1990, p. 313) later cites Willis (1979) as the sole justification for his
otherwise gratuitous attribution of a gendered significance to the norm of ‘making out’ in the
North American machine shop studied by Burawoy (1979).
Having registered these doubts over the relevance of Willis’ ethnography, let us
provisionally follow Knights and Willmott (1985) in treating it as a theory of the subjective
dimension of the labour process. Considered as such, it is already well-developed and
nuanced, and this may be why Knights and Willmott prepare the ground for their own
reinterpretation by paying it a somewhat back-handed compliment. Willis’ work, they say
‘represents a significant contribution to the empirical analysis of contemporary class
19
relations’ (Knights and Willmott, 1985 p 36, italics added). ‘Empirical analysis’ is an
unusual form of words, some would say an oxymoron, and it seems to carry the implication
that Willis’ five chapters on the significance of his ethnography have no theoretical status.
Sure enough, Knights and Willmott tell us that Willis ‘describes, but does not theorise, the
significance of identity and interdependence for understanding the reproduction of the class
structure of power relations’ (Knights and Willmott, 1985, p. 38). What, then, do our critics
bring to Willis’ work by way of theoretical supplementation? Itemised, and with a
commentary on each, their specific suggestions are:
Allegation 1: Willis, they say, is on shaky ground in attributing the political impotence of
the lads’ cultural resistance to an anti-intellectualism which ‘effectively blocks their access
to alternative ideologies, such as Marxism, that could translate cultural resistance into
political practice’ (Knights and Willmott, 1985, p. 36). In its place they propose that the lads’
‘rebellious antics’ are ‘a macho response to the immediacy of their experience, and not (as) a
product of any rational debunking of the myths of equal opportunity etc.’ (ibid, p. 36).
Comment 1: Willis does not claim that the lads’ anti-intellectualism leads to political
impotence by preventing their access to social theory, still less to Marxism specifically.
Such a notion, indeed, would be contrary to his general view of how cultural ‘penetrations’
are achieved. On this point he prefaces his final chapter with a quotation from Gramsci’s
Prison Notebooks, ‘ . . it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of
thought into everyone’s individual life, but of renovating and making “critical” an already
existing activity.’ (Willis, 1977, p. 185). As Willis makes clear, though apparently not clear
enough for Knights and Willmott, the linkage between the lads’ anti-intellectualism and their
fatalism is not through a disdain for social theory but through their acceptance that the world
is necessarily run by intellectual labour.
Nor is it true that Willis neglects the macho aspects of the lads’ rebellion. Where he differs
from Knights and Willmott is in linking their aggressive displays of masculinity to their
stigmatization of intellectual labour as feminine, and through that, to their fatalism. Nor need
the lads’ ‘penetration’ of the educational ethos take the form of ‘rational debunking’ as
Knights and Willmott gratuitously assume. What they reject is the terms of trade offered by
the educational system: learning of doubtful practical value in exchange for conformity to
the ear ‘ole way of life.
A particularly objectionable feature of Knights and Willmott’s failure of comprehension – it
is not too strong a term – is that the linkage of machismo and anti intellectualism which they
miss in their 1985 reading of Willis is actually presented by Knights (1990, p. 313) as if it
were an original insight10.
Allegation 2: Knights and Willmott (1985, p. 36-7) accuse Willis of missing another
important reason for the ‘incompleteness of the lads’ demystification of established
authority.’ This, say Knights and Willmott is ‘more plausibly attributable to an experience of
failure and impotence in respect of any effort to succeed within, or change, the institutional
structure of the school.’
Comment 2: The last of these objections to Willis’ interpretations does not make sense. In
what universe of improbability might a group of teenage schoolboys set out to change the
institutional structure of their school? And as for the ‘failure . . . of any effort to succeed’,
The practice of appropriating an element of an author’s work and presenting it as one’s own correction of
that author was first identified by Friedman (2004) in his discussion of an attack on the work of Sosteric (1996)
by O’Doherty and Willmott (2001). He called it ‘boomerang misprepresentation’.
10
20
that is simply the ear ‘ole mentality reading its own values into the ethnography. To the ear
‘ole, any disparagement of academic success is simply envy. Against this, Willis’ interviews
with their teachers make it clear that both Joey and Spanksy were promising pupils before
their disengagement from the opportunity structure of the school (Willis, 1977, p. 61).
Allegation 3: Knights and Willmott further suggest that the experience of failure and
impotence ‘is not only a condition but also a consequence of relating to the counter-school
culture principally and instrumentally for the purpose of securing a ‘real’ sense of their own
significance in an alternative identity.’ (Italics added). In general, say Knights and Willmott,
Willis’ interpretation of the counter culture as a partial form of class consciousness misses
its role in ‘providing an alternative existential meaning and identity to that available from
following the formal expectations and requirements of the school.’
Comment 3: Knights and Willmott’s last sentence is something to savour, expressing as it
does the institutionally-approved world-view of the model pupil now attained to adulthood
and academic success and having, in the process, lost the capacity to see the psychological
condition of the working class as anything other than a mixture of sour grapes and selfinflicted harm. The allegation that Willis fails to see the counter cultural group as a source of
alternative identity is simply amazing, and by what right, other than a desire to support their
own theory of identity formation, do Knights and Willmott presume to describe the
friendships of these schoolboys as instrumentally motivated? And what is the justification
for the supposition that identities grounded in group affiliations are alternatives to a partial
form of class consciousness? As Lockwood (1966) has persuasively argued, it is only the
experience of a common situation with one’s fellows which lends urgency and resonance to
class consciousness as a view of the larger social order. This last observation is especially
pertinent in view of the extensive literature on the role of secondary education in
perpetuating the class structure in its cultural aspects (e.g. Jackson and Marsden, 1962)
Allegation 4: With the mention of identity Knights and Willmott reconnect with their main
preoccupation. As what they describe as ‘confirmation of our thesis on the significance of
identity in the lads’ rebellion against authority’, they quote the following passage from one
of Willis’ interviews with ‘Joey’, the informal leader of the disaffected group:
in the second year, I thought, ‘This is a fucking dead loss’ ‘cos I’d got no real mates. I
saw all the other kids palling up with each other, and I thought. ‘It’s a fucking dead
loss, you’ve got to have someone to knock about with’. So I cracked eyes on Noah
and Benson . . . we always used to sit together, we used to start playing up wild, like,
‘cos playing up in them days was fucking hitting each other with rulers . . . and it just
stemmed from there’
Knights and Willmott (1985 p. 37), quoting Willis (1977, p. 60-1).
Comment 4: Willis does not miss what Knights and Willmott are pleased to describe as ‘our
thesis’. What he proposes is that the formation of identity and the primary group are coexistent processes and that identity has its micro and macro aspects in the sense that one’s
view of the immediate social group and one’s place in it interacts with one’s sense of the
wider social order. Thus: ‘I suggest that the smallest, discrete unit which acts as the basis for
cultural penetrations is the informal group’ (Willis, 1977, p. 123) and ‘I suggest that cultural
forms provide the materials towards, and the immediate context of, the construction of
subjectivities and the confirmation of identity’ . . (ibid, p. 173 emphasis added). To oversimplify for the purposes of exposition, for Willis the wider social order enters identity
through the medium of ‘cultural forms’ whilst the primary group provides the social
anchorage from which these might be questioned and, sometimes, ‘penetrated’.
21
Brief though they are, Willis’ remarks about subjectivity and identity expose the crudity of
Knights and Willmott’s view of identity formation. In effect this is a rational action theory,
albeit not acknowledged as such. Positing a self-conscious search in which instrumentally
motivated individuals ‘use one another as a resource to secure self’ (Knights and Willmott,
1985, p.37), it is surely only ‘the omnipresent ideology of individualism.’ (Willis, p. 187)
which could read the calculative attitude assumed in this theory into the lonely schoolboy’s
‘you’ve got to have someone to knock about with’.
Allegation 5: Having thus discovered the maggot of instrumentality within the apparent
spontaneity of schoolboy friendships, Knights and Willmott have no hesitation in building on
their insight to produce a theory of working-class fragmentation . Combined with an internal
competition for status within the counter-cultural group, they say, the instrumentality of the
relationships of its constituent individuals ‘undermines the possibility of acting collectively’.
It is this and not an anti-intellectual rejection of Marxism (see comment 1), they conclude,
which reduces the world-view of the group to an a-political impotence.
Comment 5: Again this makes little sense. If ‘the lads’ do not ‘recognise how they can use
one another’, how can they be said to be acting instrumentally? Nor, in any case, does
instrumental attachment to group preclude collective action (Goldthorpe, Lockwood,
Bechhofer and Platt (1968, e.g. pp. 106). And as for any internal status competition within
the group, do Knights and Willmott really believe that people who compete in one respect
are incapable of co-operation in others?
In summary, Knights and Willmott’s claimed improvements on Willis’s theorisation of his
field data only hold water when they replicate Willis’ own. When they depart from it, they
are at best unsupported by anything in the data, at worst are flatly contradicted by it and
sometimes make no sense at all.
Nor do their readings of Willis’ data substantiate their claim that the subjectivities of
working-class youth – even of that borderline delinquent minority represented in Willis’
study – are such as to reproduce the conditions of their own subordination. On this point too,
it is clear that Knights and Willmott have not grasped Willis’ argument. As they present the
case, he ‘describes, but does not theorise, the significance of identity and interdependence for
understanding the reproduction of the class structure of power relations’ (1985, p. 38). In
fact what Willis describes (and theorises) is how a gendered identity which expresses itself
in a ‘penetration’ of the practical irrelevance of much of the school curriculum interacts with
a social order which values and rewards educational credentials, no matter how irrelevant
they may be to the technical-administrative work for which they are required, far more
highly than hard manual labour (Willis, 1977, p. 57). ‘Working-class kids get working class
jobs’, to quote the sub-title of his book, because they see manual labour as a confirmation of
their masculinity and because manual labour is performed within a social order which
consigns it to the lower reaches of the class structure. It is doubtful that the lads’ tacit
decision to accept the costs of their chosen path in life can be held responsible either for the
existence of those costs or for the nature of the choice which they are forced to make – the
‘conditions of their own subjugation’ as Knights and Willmott put it. Notwithstanding the
1990s talk of ‘single status employment’, employers have not found it necessary to concede
improvements in pay and conditions which might put unskilled manual labour on a par with
other forms of work, still less to offer security of employment and some sort of career
structure.
22
Conclusions
The debate on the ‘missing subject’ of the labour process continues to be an important one,
notwithstanding a tendency amongst some of the protagonists to switch their attention to its
management. This paper has examined the core texts of Knights and Willmott’s influential
contributions in some detail and has found them to be flawed, both theoretically and
empirically11.
Both authors take it as a fundamental truth, albeit one not universally acknowledged, that
human subjectivities are dominated by a search for stable and satisfactory identity. This
search, they believe, is set in motion by an existential anxiety created by a condition of
individualization. Both authors believe that individualization is a particular consequence of
the capitalist social order, but Willmott additionally believes it to inhere in the ontological
openness of human existence itself. The grounds offered for these beliefs do not stand up to
even the most cursory examination
In the case of ‘subordinate workers’, Knights and Willmott argue that the search for stable
and satisfactory identity may lead in one of two directions, both of which provide at most the
illusion of existential security (Willmott, particularly), and both of which end up
perpetuating the conditions of the workers’ subordination. The first is a psychological
disinvestment in the workplace so that an identity can be constructed at some distance from
its humiliations, in the privatized sphere of family life and consumption. The second
(particular to Knights) is an inversion of values in which prowess in the performance of
some manual task is taken to be an index of manliness. The first condition – instrumental
privatization to most sociologists – results in an indifference to the content of work which
allows – or invites - managers to intensify controls of the labour process. The second –
masculinist reaction – perpetuates the conditions of the workers’ subordination by locking
them into the kind of work which validates their own masculinity and simultaneously ruling
out the possibility of a mutually advantageous co-operation (the nature of which is not made
clear) with those (managers?) who offer ‘advice and direction’.
Clearly these are not very attractive alternatives. Fortunately for the working class, they do
not actually follow from the identity-outcomes postulated by Knights and Willmott, but
from their persistent tendency to think in terms of binary oppositions: either workers invest
in their private lives or they resist controls of the labour process; either they invest their egos
in ‘men’s work’ or they ‘attack capitalism’ (Knights’ phrase, 1990 p. 313). The fact is that
people’s consciousness – and identities – are simply not as one-dimensional as this. As
Armstrong and Nichols (1976) have shown, they are continuously-created construals of the
social world (Sayer, 2004, p. 7), containing elements of contradiction, such as the
incompatible domain assumptions described by Gouldner, 1971) which allow for
improvisation in their responses to concrete situations and experimentation in the attitudes
which they take up.
Beyond that, Knights and Willmott’s antipathy towards structuralist vocabularies leads them
into a psychological reduction in which the validations of identity which people manage to
draw from their existing situation somehow becomes responsible for perpetuating that
situation. It also leads them into a denial (as a dualism) of the possibility of distinguishing
between a construal of, and response to, external structures and the structures themselves.
The imploded control-response dualism is then re-inflated into a social construction of
11
The alert reader may be inclined to wonder how it is that a body of work can be both flawed and influential at
the same time. The indefatigable author has noticed this too and is working on the problem.
23
structure by the response to structure itself. It is in this manner that Knights and Willmott
argue their way to the conclusion that the occupancy of a position within the unskilled
working class amounts to a perpetuation of the conditions of its subordination, rather
forgetting that other sections of society are also involved in the construction of that
subordination.
In fact the whole theoretical enterprise is flawed at the outset by a thoroughgoing
methodological individualism. Contra Knights (1990, p. 311) capitalism in the concrete does
not individualize; it creates social classes defined in the first instance by the exchange of
labour power against capital. It only individualizes in that abstract and ideological
conceptual space wherein the individual worker meets the persona of the individual capital,
there to agree an individual contract of employment. Back in the concrete, workforces – and
human groupings in general for that matter - create cultures of which the individual’s first
experience may be antipathy or even alarm, but rarely or never, existential openness. It is
true that individuals may subsequently come to question or reject the identities with which
they find themselves saddled and thence cast themselves adrift, psychologically speaking, in
a quest for their true selves. It is frankly absurd, however, to suggest that this is the core
mechanism by which the entire class structure is perpetuated.
Nor is there significant evidence of such a pursuit of identity to be found in any of the
ethnographic studies of the workplace reviewed by Knights and Willmott. Their response to
this unfortunate recalcitrance on the part of empirical research is to inject their own
preoccupations with identity-formation into the data, read it out again and then lecture the
researchers concerned for their failure to take note of it. There is no point in rehearsing
examples of this process: more than enough are provided in the body of this paper.
What lends these intellectual practices their piquancy, though, is the contrast between the
presumption with which Knights and Willmott take it upon themselves to re-interpret the
work of empirical researchers and the petulance of their response when empirical researchers
have the temerity to produce findings which contradict their theoretical presuppositions. As
Friedman (2004, p. 579) has pointed out, an instance of this occurred when Sosteric (1996,
p. 305-6) found that the reaction of night-club hostesses to the imposition of rigid
performance criteria by their managers was both collective and effective, in contradiction to
the core Knights/Willmott assumption that the effect of managerial controls (or capitalism
more generally) is to ‘individualize’ and thence to produce subjectivities which render
resistance ineffective. The response of O’Doherty and Willmott (2001) to this finding was to
lecture Sosteric for a ‘limited and cursory reading of Foucault’ in consequence of which he
had failed to appreciate that individualization had already occurred before the imposition of
the managerial controls and for a further failure to appreciate that individualization might not
actually mean individualization. So it is that high theory reveals the bloomers of low comedy
when it picks up its skirts to lash out at its critics – or so one might think, were it not for the
thoroughly objectionable hauteur with which O’Doherty and Willmott’s judgments were
delivered (see Friedman, 2004 for further details).
A more constructive approach to the ‘missing subject’ of the labour process would appear to
call for rather more respect for these subjects than has been in evidence in the work reviewed
in this paper. Instead of approaching workers as instantiations of some prefabricated theory
of individuation concocted in the thought-laboratories of academe, it might be better to adopt
an hermeneutic approach in which they are treated as industrial sociologists in their own
right, with their own theories of the social order and of the potentials attached to their own
place within it. ‘Practitioner theories’ of this kind are not – or are not necessarily - static and
decontextualised ‘images of society’ (in which respect some of the products of an earlier
24
tradition of industrial sociology were at fault), but framings which make sense of, and are
modified by, the lived experience of the labour process and the conditions of employment
attached to it. Though they exist only in individual heads, moreover, these theories are not –
or are not ordinarily - the products of individual deliberation, but of exchanges with friends,
immediate colleagues and others encountered in the course of a day’s work. And always they
are in motion and provisional. Given the competitive dynamic which drives the capitalist
organization of the labour process, there is always plenty to destabilize the interpretations of
their experience produced by those who perform that labour process. Even in monopolized
or otherwise stable product markets, managers are not paid to keep things ticking over but to
find ways of increasing the yield of surplus value.
This may not sound like much of a theory, and nor is it intended to be. It is a method, and
one based on the supposition that the subjective dimension of the labour process already
consists of social theories. Fieldwork carried out on this basis becomes a conversation
between different provisional interpretations of the workplace in relation to the wider social
order, with the advantage in concrete illustration on the side of the practitioner, but that of
the last say, of producing the final report, ordinarily remaining with the researcher. This last
phase of the process has caused a great deal of soul- searching in recent years (e.g. Van
Maanen, 1988; Wray-Bliss, 2005), but there has been much less interrogation, curiously
enough, of the conditions under which there might be some point in making reports of any
kind to university intellectuals on the state of mind of the working class.
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