Labour Power and Labour Process: Contesting the Marginality of the
Sociology of Work
Paul Thompson and Chris Smith
Sociology, Volume 43(5): 913–930, 2009
DOI: 10.1177/0038038509340728
Abstract
This paper opens by suggesting that the decline in the sociology of work in the UK
has been over-stated; research continues, but in locations such as business schools.
The continued vitality of the field corresponds with material changes in an
increasingly globalised capitalism, with more workers in the world, higher
employment participation rates of women, transnational shifts in manufacturing,
global expansion of services and temporal and spatial stretching of work with
advanced information communication technologies. The paper demonstrates that
Labour Process Theory (LPT) has been a crucial resource in the sociology of work,
especially in the UK; core propositions of LPT provide it with resources for resilience
(to counter claims of rival perspectives) and innovation (to expand the scope and
explanatory power of the sociology of work). The paper argues that the concept of the
labour power has been critical to underpinning the sustained influence of labour
process analysis.
Key words: labour process; labour power; labour process theory; sociology of work
Crisis, What Crisis?
The central rationale contained in the Call for Papers for this Special Issue is that ‘the
study of work may have become progressively marginal to mainstream sociology’. It
would be difficult to disagree with that judgement. The sociology of work has a long
and distinguished history in Britain. Yet as a thoughtful and wide-ranging paper
from Strangleman (2005) sets out, at the beginning of a new century the situation,
on the surface at least, does not look good. Few sociology departments have any
expertise in the area, the bookshelves are full of studies of culture and consumption
rather than production and work, and the British Sociological Association has not
had work and employment as a theme for its annual conference since 1984. Yet our
view is that a marginalisation thesis needs to be underpinned by a very careful
examination of the intellectual and institutional trends that shape the means of
production of research on work and the workplace.
What exactly has become marginalised? It’s difficult to maintain that it’s work itself.
Despite gloomy predictions, employment and job creation rates have continued to
rise, albeit unevenly across the industrialised world, fuelled, in part by significant
increases in the participation of women in the labour force. Moreover, whatever the
reason – the work itself, the material rewards, the sense of identity and self-respect –
authoritative surveys show high levels of positive association with work (European
Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (2007). That is
not to say that all is sweetness and light. Books such as Polly Toynbee’s Hard Work
(2003), Madeline Bunting’s Willing Slaves (2004) and Richard Sennett’s The
Corrosion of Character (1998) have been at the forefront of extensive debate in
popular discourse on issues such as the provision of decent and dignified work, the
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long hours culture and work-life balance. One could repeat a similar story in
Australia, the USA and other societies.
Yet a different narrative dominates broader social theory. Leading contributors have
tended to proclaim the end or at least decentring of work or work society (Lash and
Urry, 1994; Bauman, 1998). Post-Fordist or post-modern variants of a ‘new
economy’ are based on individualised, consumption-oriented actors rather than
collectivities with interests and identities rooted in the employment relationship.
Two strands are inter-meshing here. On the one hand, post-modernists following the
cultural turn are asserting the centrality of identity and consumption (Pakulski and
Waters, 1996). On the other, social theorists such as Beck (2000) are rehearsing new
versions of ‘end of class’ or end of capital-labour conflict arguments (Gorz, 1999).
The other influential new economy narrative is based on the centrality of knowledge.
In the informational or knowledge economy the traditional factors of production are
displaced by weightless or immaterial sources of competitive advantage (Castells,
1996). Rather than the accumulation of capital, socio-economic life is characterised
by the flow or circulation of ideas and information.
This is not the place for a critique of new economy narratives (see Bradley, 2000;
Henwood, 2005; Thompson, 2003), but to make three observations with important
implications for a sociology of work. First, given that, as Crompton (2008) notes,
classical sociology has strongly linked class and work, the latter has been a
conceptual casualty of the perceived decline of the former. Second, marginalisation
is a consequence of misrepresentation. Dominant social theory retains a sociology of
the economy, but without a substantive sociology of work. New economies are
conceived either as not centred on work relations, or having largely benign
consequences for the people at work. The combined effect of these two strands of
social theory has been to render large sections of the economy, workforce and work
relations invisible.
It is our contention that these trends are not analogues of objective developments in
the contemporary economy and workplace, but largely outcomes of the intellectual
choices and orientations of social theory. However, social theory and social science
are not identical. Large numbers of social scientists in the UK and other countries
have continued to research and write about this supposedly marginalised realm.
Interestingly, of the t0p 20 most cited articles in Sociology, 12 are about work and/or
class. Moreover, a specialist journal – Work, Employment and Society – also
published by the British Sociological Association under the initial auspices of
Richard Brown, is now in its 22nd year. It is exceedingly odd that no mention is made
in the Call for Papers of Sociology’s sister journal. The most logical inference would
appear to be that WES is not seen as contributing enough or effectively to rediscovery
and innovation. Yet, as a review by the outgoing editors outlines (Rainbird and Rose,
2008), it has been a remarkable success story since its launch in terms of the
breadth, number and quality of its submissions. The recurrent themes identified by
Rainbird and Rose – employer control and new forms of work, new divisions of
labour, privatisation and commercialisation of the public sector, the nature of service
encounter, self-employment, informal work and employee relations in small firms,
the articulation of home and work etc – are surely conceptually and empirically
innovative enough to satisfy any reasonable criteria of variety and innovation.
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Though methodologically and theoretically pluralist, a number of the editors of WES
– Theo Nichols, Paul Edwards, Paul Stewart and the current Strathclyde team – have
been strongly associated with labour process debates and perspectives. It is our view
that the association between the sociology of work and Labour Process Theory (LPT)
has been a source of strength not weakness. This positive view appears to be shared
by many of the readers of Sociology. Of the twelve previously-mentioned most-cited
articles, half concerned labour process debates.
Labour Process Theory and British Industrial Sociology
In June 1978 many of Britain’s leading industrial sociologists met to debate
Braverman’s (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital. This was the beginning of a
development in which, ‘During the late 1970s, studies of the “labour process”,
inspired by the work of Marglin, Edwards and Braverman, virtually redefined British
“industrial sociology”,’ (Ingham 1996: 562). The research programme of LPT – an
emphasis on the dynamics of control, consent and resistance at the point of
production – was also consistent with the writings of a new generation of radical
industrial sociology and industrial relations writers such as Huw Beynon (1975),
Theo Nichols and Peter Armstrong (Nichols and Armstrong, 1976; Nichols and
Beynon, 1977). Popularising extended theoretically informed case study methods
against an early generation of more quantitative assessment (Bechhofer et al, 1968)
their books combined an emphasis on the limited effects of new managerial
practices, such as job enrichment, with the practical and ideological problems of
trade union organisation. LPT therefore strengthened those tendencies in workplace
research that sought to reach beneath institutional, formal patterns and to discover
and explore hidden or informal realms of industrial relations and workplace conflict.
Yet why did British industrial sociology need to be ‘redefined’? After all, as one later
study noted: ‘in the early 1960s industrial sociology looked as though it had arrived.
‘Its special task was the study of social relations in work situations and to develop an
understanding of the links between industrial systems and the wider society’
(Eldridge et al, 1991: 202). A decade later and the situation had changed. It was
argued that industrial sociology had fragmented, and had become less able to explain
the new trends in economic life and the world of work such as new forms of conflict,
labour market segmentation and work organisation (Hyman, 1982; Brown, 1992:
168-174). More importantly, it influential accounts had come to view the factory as
the recipient of external orientations to work rather than as a source of conflict and
identity. Becoming more concerned with orientations to work than work itself (1st
author, 1989).
LPT was attractive because it had the capacity to connect different dimensions of
work, employment and industrial relations, and therefore counter the tendency to
fragmentation. It had a theoretical narrative – the degradation of work under the
impact of new forms of capitalist production and management - attuned to a radical
decade and based on Marxist accounts of labour and capital within capitalism. Its
focus on the ‘objective’ conditions of work contrasted positively with the somewhat
exhausted attention paid to subjective meanings, worker attitudes and class
consciousness in mainstream and radical sociology (Bechhofer, 1968; Bulmer, 1975).
However, there was also methodological continuity with the long-standing traditions
of ‘plant sociology’ stretching back to Donald Roy in the USA (1952) and the
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‘Liverpool school’ of industrial sociology that influenced a diverse range of
researchers from Lupton to Banks, Blackburn to Beynon.
In sum, as capitalism and work were changing, LPT offered to British industrial
sociology the analytical and empirical tools to maintain the historic interest in the
dynamics of work relations and the connections between workplace and the wider
social system. Of course, this is not the whole story of the sociology of work in Britain
during the last 25 years. Debates have continued on other territories such as work,
gender and the family. Indeed, complaints of narrow agendas influenced by LPT have
occasionally surfaced from the peak of second wave research to more recent times
(Salaman, 1986; Bradley et al, 2000). Such objections have recently been reassembled in the previously-referred to paper by Strangleman (2005). His case
would have been more credible if the paper had actually referred to any
contemporary research and writings from this perspective (the last relevant reference
is to Hyman in 1987). Given that 14 widely-read volumes of papers derived primarily
from the labour process conference have been published since 1990 on topics as
diverse as resistance and power, global Japanization, customer service, white-collar
work and work-life boundaries, narrowness is not the word that comes immediately
to mind (for a full list of titles see http://www.ilpc.org.uk/BookSeries.aspx).
However, there is a kernel of truth about scope and boundaries of analysis contained
in such complaints. Selectivity is inherent in any distinctive conceptual framework.
Some things are studied and others are not. The orientation of LPT to the waged
workplace and to some extent case study methods of analysing that workplace meant
that it was less equipped to address, amongst other things, issues such as the
varieties of (often informal or unwaged) types of work, temporal and spatial
dimensions, and what Glucksman calls the ‘total social organisation of labour’
(Pettinger et al, 2005; Pahl, 1988; though see Taylor and Bain, 2007 for a critique of
Glucksman). The research programme of LPT utilizes particular theoretical resources
to explain specific empirical problems. A conceptual and empirical focus on the
labour process only becomes a problem if privileging those social relations becomes a
means of denying the significance of others. That has never been the case. LPT is
neither paradigmatic nor a complete sociology of work in terms of concepts and
coverage. Whatever the limitations in its scope, our contention in this paper is that
LPT has played a necessary and positive purpose in maintaining a space for a critical
sociology of work. The history and trajectory of those debates will be familiar to
many UK readers (see Thompson and Newsome 2004), so we won’t repeat it here.
Instead we want to make an argument that the core propositions of LPT provide it
with resources for resilience (to counter claims of rival perspectives) and innovation
(to expand the scope and explanatory power of the sociology of work).
Second Wave Theory: A Reconsideration
Constructed from the responses to Braverman and a fresh range of research from the
late 1970s to the end of the 1980s, a second wave of LPT came into being that had a
strong base in the UK. Whilst a varied range of studies were undertaken, not least
into the extent of and limits to deskilling, ‘…the core of their research programme
consists of a series of historically informed empirical studies focused on managerial
control strategies and practices in work organisations’ (Reed, 1992: 155). These
studies (especially Friedman, 1977; Edwards, 1979; Littler, 1982) are well known and
their details need not be repeated here. At one level they shared a similar sense of
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scope of analysis, developing causal and sequential patterns of management control,
seeking to make connections between workplace, industrial relations, the state and
broader social structures, though the some focus on struggle at the micro level and
how this related to broader management regimes. Beyond conditions of sale of
labour power, detailed attention was paid to the myriad of job controls, wage-effort
bargains, individual and informal, collective and organised, especially in the work of
Edwards and Scullion (1982). Elaboration of this dialectic of control and resistance
became a central feature of the approach, but was modified through the pioneering
work of Burawoy (1979) over the question of consent of the worker to managerial
controls inside the labour process.
Also notable during this period were a series of factory case studies of women
production workers by a new generation of feminist industrial sociologists (Pollert,
1981; Cavendish, 1982; Westwood, 1984). Ethnographic methods not only allowed a
close observation of the conditions and informal practices of female wage labour, but
the very marginalisation of the concerns of women workers by the local and national
trade union apparatus stimulated a focus on the dual sources of resistance and
consent in gender-based modes of control and shop floor cultures.
The new generation of theory-led case studies illustrate how ‘matters at the point of
production’ are indicative not just of battles over the frontier of control, but also of
‘how workers are persuaded to release their labour power’ (Edwards and Scullion,
1982: 151). Whilst labour power is clearly reproduced inside and outside the
workplace, the distinctive and innovatory nature of second wave theory was
facilitated by the concept of the dynamics of workplace regulation having a ‘relative
autonomy’ (Edwards, 1990). The implication is that similar external situations can
produce different internal labour process outcomes, because of the distinctiveness
and peculiarities of particular points of production. However, this does not mean
some infinite variety of workplaces isolated from capital accumulation, but rather
that labour processes have common and specific features. Selecting and shaping
labour power, or determining work effort are necessarily variable given
differentiation and competition between capitals and between workers as socially
and historically diverse owners and sellers of labour power. The special,
indeterminate status of labour power as human, embodied, mobile and active ensure
common imperatives of control are tried, but also that any settlement is temporary
and diverse.
Building on the relative autonomy concept, a related theoretical shift was to retain
focus on the problematic of labour power through materialist accounts of conflicts
between capital and labour, but that sought to move beyond the limitations of
existing debates on class struggle and industrial relations. The work of many second
wave writers led them to try and disentangle LPT from Marxism; or more precisely
those elements that pertain to the relations between production and political
economy, from the complete baggage of assumptions about society and social
transformation (Thompson, 1990; Edwards, 1990). The central argument was that
the dynamics of relations between capital and labour as actors in the workplace
cannot be assumed to be continuous with capital and labour as societal actors. In
other words, labour process struggles might have diverse, not predictable or singular
outcomes at the level of the political and the political within work.
Challenges to and for LPT
5
New economies for old?
The mid-1980s saw the emergence of paradigm break theories such as post-Fordism
and flexible specialization (Piore and Sabel, 1984; Lash and Urry, 1994). What
marked these approaches was an unshakeable optimism with respect to trends in
work and employment. More recently the new economy baton has been passed to
proponents of the knowledge economy from managerial writers (Despres and
Hiltrop, 1995) to high profile social theorists (Castells, 1996). Details of the plot
(knowledge as driver of change) and some of the characters (expert labour,
independent sub-contractors) change, but the optimistic message about a move from
command and control to collaborative high trust, high commitment work relations
remains the same.
This has led to a return of upskilling arguments. Indeed the proclamation of the
existence of or need for a high skills model is an unquestioned feature of public
policy across all OECD countries. Labour process research drawing on case studies
and wider skill surveys has repeatedly questioned this myth (Thompson et al, 2000).
Whilst there will be growth at both ends of the spectrum, most new jobs are in the
UK and US are in low skill, low wage parts of the service sector (Nolan and Wood,
2003; Henwood 2005). Many of the signifiers of high skill – qualifications, the
spread of information and communication technologies, and investment in research
and development are merely proxies that have little relationship to actual skill and
knowledge worked on the job (Warhurst and Thompson, 2006). For example, the
main UK skill survey has shown a marked decline in task discretion and job influence
(Felstead, Gallie and Green, 2004). Whilst autonomy might appear to be distinct
from skill, discretion in tasks is a core feature of the capacity of employees to utilise
their skills.
The supposed need for skills in the new economy and paradigm shifts in production
and markets where seen to have positive implications for workers in the labour
process. As such the 1990s meant labour process research fought a necessary, if
somewhat defensive battle to analyse the continuities and constraints associated with
‘lean production’, ‘flexibility’ and other new management practices. In contrast to the
optimistic claims of workplace transformation that remained stubbornly persistent
in much of the managerially orientated literature, a wealth of qualitative case study
research from North America (Parker and Slaughter, 1988; Rinehart et al, 1997) and
the UK (Elger and Smith, 1994; Delbridge 1998) emerged to illustrate the ‘dark side’
of these lean production regimes. These accounts, heavily reliant on the
control/resistance framework for their theoretical resources, reviewed the
opportunities these new workplace regimes present to actively extend labour control.
Far from providing a replacement to the mind-numbing stress of mass production,
flexiblity systematically intensifies work by finding yet new ways to remove obstacles
to the extraction of effort. Moreover by restoring an emphasis on the experience of
employees, such research also demonstrated that workers continue to adopt an array
of resistive responses to this extension of control.
LPT is, however concerned with the transformation of labour power rather than a
particular means, such as deskilling. As an important collection of studies largely
from the Labour Process Conference (Warhurst et al, 2004) has shown, whilst there
is a persistent trend towards the maintenance of low skill jobs, that has been
6
accompanied by significant shifts in the definition and nature of skills. The most
prominent of these has been the rise of ‘generic’ skills with the shift to service work –
adaptability, motivation, co-operativeness - many of which are attitudes, social
predispositions and character traits. In other words, LPT has been at the forefront of
research into new sources of labour power.
A good example is the way that Bolton (2005) has built on and from Hochschild’s
(1983) work on emotional labour. Whilst Hochschild drew on Braverman as part of
her attempt to show how the profit motive ‘slipped in under acts of emotion
management’ (1983, 119), her account of the ‘transmutation’ of worker neglects the
indeterminacy of labour. Bolton uses a ‘partnership’ pf LPT and Goffman to develop
a ‘detailed realist account of workplace emotion’ (2005, 3), that gives consideration
to emotions to the contested nature of the emotional effort bargain. In a similar vein,
writers sympathetic to LPT have developed the developing the concept of aesthetic
labour (first used in Warhurst et al, 2000). Whilst there is now an extensive range of
writing about the body, materialist accounts focus on managerial interventions with
respect to workers’ corporeality and consideration of how the body becomes ‘a focus
of diverse labour processes’ (Wolkowitz, 2006: 2).
Another conceptual innovation concerns knowledge and skills. While we may not be
seeing an increased demand for high autonomy knowledge workers (see critique
from Warhurst and Thompson, 2006), management have become more interested in
the knowledgeability of employees. In pursuit of the ‘high performance workplace’,
firms need to move beyond the limits of Taylorism and Fordism to introduce
organisational structures and practices that facilitate initiative and innovation in the
form of creativity and continuous improvement on the part of workers. Yet many of
these skills are social rather than technical. As a result, employers, particularly in the
service sector, may be choosing to invest more in recruitment and selection processes
to identify workers with the required personal characteristics than skill development
and learning (Callaghan and Thompson, 2002). The expanded definition of skill
benefits capital rather than labour. Employees or the education system are given the
responsibility for ‘skill’ development and maintaining employability; social skills
carry no wage or other premium in the occupational hierarchy; and mobilising the
whole person rests on a qualitative intensification of labour.
This argument is consistent with more general evidence of work intensification.
Insecurity in the labour market may have been overstated (see Fevre, 2007), but
sources of insecurity and pressure in the labour process – linked to increased
responsibilities and falling staffing levels in response to heightened market
pressures; subjection to greater accountability, measurement and appraisal; and
emotional exhaustion – is attested to in a growing range of studies (Heery and
Salmon, 2000; Green, 2001; Burchell et al, 2002). Overwork, time squeeze and
‘negative job-to-home spillover’ from high performance practices have also been
noted in extensive UK surveys (Hogarth et al, 2000).
Capital’s expanded use of labour power can be a source of consent and common
interests. That is certainly the line that emerges from discourses of high performance
work systems (see Lloyd and Payne 2006). But current conditions make that
unlikely. Discretionary effort is being asked for from employees, including taking
over responsibility for career development, when many employers are making less
investment in training and skill development, and workers feel insecure in their jobs,
7
despite relatively stable figures for job tenure (Cappelli, 1999; Beynon et al, 2002).
This collectivisation of effort and decollectivisation of risk (Burchell et al, 2002)
frequently applies just as much to core workers and firms that develop track records
of high performance (Konzelmann and Forrent, 2002). Labour process and other
theorists have been rebuilding connections between workplace dynamics and the
broader political economy by trying to conceptualise these new conditions that bear
little resemblance to any variety of post-Fordism. Such outcomes point to the
dominance of financial circuits of capital and to the impact of capital markets driven
by the pursuit of shareholder value (Lazonick and O’Sullivan, 2000; Froud et al,
2006; Thompson, 2003), as well as profitability from the whole value chain through
systematic rationalization (Altmann and Deiß, 1998). Successive waves of downsizing
and delayering are undertaken as firms seek ways of cutting costs to improve
financial performance.
New Identities for Old Interests?
If arguments for upskilling and the end of Taylorism drew inspiration from different
owners of capital and their production regimes (the Japanese especially), another
source of attack on LPT came from an attention to the existential character of owners
of labour power within new service and professional contexts. In the 1990s the
influence of post-modernism peaked in most of the social sciences. This was
manifested in what became known as the ‘cultural turn’ – the argument that the
reproduction of everyday life and the basis of domination had shifted from the
material to the symbolic (Lash and Urry, 1994). Such arguments were taken into the
labour process debate by Hugh Willmott and David Knights, who were centrally
involved in the Labour Process Conference which has acted as key source for
disseminating labour process research and ideas from the early 1980s.
They led an assault on the critical materialist or modernist orthodoxy that had
characterised second wave thinking. Drawing in Foucauldian notions of power and
identity, their aim was to understand how (post) modern individuals are constituted
by and subjugated to the discourses and disciplines within the modern corporation
(Knights and Willmott, 1989). At one level such arguments can be seen as a radical
version of the mainstream argument in the business and management literature that
culture and the management of commitment have displaced control and
bureaucracy. The outcome that individuals ‘buy into’ the system is held in common,
but the explanation is sought in processes of seduction, surveillance and selfdiscipline.
In this version of LPT, identity rather than labour becomes the site of indeterminacy.
Post-modern perspectives in the labour process debate have also been developed
through Foucault-influenced case studies on work organisation and new
management practices (Barker, 1993; Sewell, 1998). In both variants of the postmodern position worker resistance and self-organisation is seen as diminished or
defunct. In contrast to the post-modernist view that subjectivity is no longer a
significant source of resistance, a substantial body of workplace research has
identified that employees remain knowledgeable about management intentions and
outcomes and retain the resources to resist, misbehave or disengage (e.g. McKinlay
and Taylor, 1996; 1st author 1999). Whilst traditional qualitative, case study research
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supplied sources of resilience concerning labour agency, it added little to the
analytical armoury of LPT.
That was provided, in part, by Ackroyd and Thompson’s (1999) work on
organisational misbehaviour. As was explicitly recognised in the book, there is a long
and fruitful tradition in British sociology that explores the informal and recalcitrant
side of employee (mis)behaviour from the effort bargain studies of Baldamus (1957)
to the workplace deviancy studies of Ditton (1977) and Mars (1982), and the classic
account of control and resistance patterns by Edwards and Scullion (1982). It is also
worth noting that attempts to defend and extend conceptions of agency were
paralleled in Hodson’s (1995, 2001) exploration of the role of resistance in
maintaining employee dignity at work.
However, the misbehaviour perspective did bring something distinctive to the table.
This involved a systematic and distinctive mapping of worker action and agency
based on four distinct loci of struggle over working time, working effort, the product
of work and work identities. Each dimension of misbehaviour is described as a form
of appropriation underpinned by group self-organisation around a variety of
interests and identities. This framework constitutes a conceptual innovation in two
ways. First it moves beyond the control and resistance model. Referring to the term
appropriation, Fleming comments that, ‘rather than resistance being conceived as a
negative reaction to power the authors instead frame misbehaviour as an active set of
practices that attempt to recover a degree of autonomy at work’ (2001, 190-1).
Clearly, this argument extends the view that the workplace has a degree of ‘relative
autonomy’ within which struggles over divergent interests and identities takes place.
Second, it seeks to resolve some of the disputes about subjectivity through an explicit
focus on identity: ‘Interests and identities are not opposites. They reciprocally and
discursively form one another…’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999: 55).
The defence of the core idea of indeterminacy of labour and provision of new
categories of employee action significantly expanded conceptions of agency available
to researchers in the sociology of work. New research from a labour process
perspective is putting flesh on that argument, for example Taylor and Bain’s (2005)
graphic account of how call centre workers are using humour as a tool of both
informal and formal resistance, Linking back to the previous section, we can say that
enhanced managerial efforts to mobilise the whole person of the through
teamworking, corporate culture, customer care programmes and the like meet
worker identities and interests on a new, more contested terrain or emotional effort
bargain.
Limitations and moving on: re-mapping labour power in a globalising
economy
We have sought to demonstrate that LPT has been a source of resilience and
innovation in thinking about work and its contexts. That is not to say that the
approach is without limitations. Given the nature of the above two debates,
engagement with other dimensions of a broader sociology of work were neglected,
notably the employment and reproduction of labour power, community, class and
professions, kinship and external linkage (see for example, Crompton, 2006, 2008).
Sociological writings using labour market and workplace survey data, exploring the
9
interplay between markets, organisations and intensification of labour are
particularly important (Green 2006; McGovern et al, 2007). This ties in with a
previous ‘methodological’ weakness we have identified.
Second wave theory began with broadly based, historical accounts of workplace
change, then put through the critical filter of numerous workplace case studies to test
propositions about management control and skill formation strategies and practices;
and more sophisticated typologies of conflict and consent. Whilst much of value was
generated, the danger is that the research programme can disappear into micro-level
case studies whose causal chain ends at the office door. This trend was accentuated
by the idea of a ‘relative autonomy’ of the labour process. Whilst this opened a space
to see distinctive workplace dynamics, when the ‘relativity’ becomes the dominant
focus, it created the potential, if unintended, legitimation of a narrower frame of
analysis.
A great strength of LPT is its capacity to connect the workplace to a broader political
economy. In too much labour process research, distinctions about moments in
political economy (exchange, production, circulation, realisation) have been lost or
subordinated to a general focus on the labour process as work organisation– an
empirical site of employment. The focus on the workplace to research the labour
process is empirically logical. Workplaces as a rule do not walk around but are
spatially set pieces of physical capital, with inputs (labour and capital) flowing into
sites with fixed abode. Empirically, however, this leaves out those who contribute but
are not workplace located, or have recently left or even future workers and managers
that have yet to enter the abode of production. In other words pre-production,
reproduction and post-production tend to excluded or less well examined when we
only look at what occurs in actually existing workplaces. Multi-site, multi-layered
research studies can overcome some of these issues, but these often end up
disconnected from actual labour processes. Longitudinal research also challenges
problems of stasis and the tendency to construct case study stories on the basis of
limited temporal investigations.
Whilst new thinking about financialised or disconnected capitalism, discussed
earlier, are an important attempt to restore links to a bigger picture, there have been
other innovations in creating a less ‘organisation-centric’ frame of analysis. Elger and
Smith’s (2005) work on Japanese-owned companies in the UK had repeat visits to
factories over a number of years which revealed interesting interactions between the
labour market, employment relations and work organisation. In some factories the
size of the workforce could vary by as much as 500 within a few months (Smith et al,
2004) which had major implications for ‘work discipline’ and ‘work effort’, as these
interacted with such mercurial labour flows. As well as the need for temporal and
spatial dynamic to be introduced back into the LPT, there is requirement to see how
ICTs decentre work from a single physical site and open up working to any space
with communication facilities which have implications for ‘workplace-civic societyhome’ reconfigurations (Felstead and Jewson, 2005).
These empirical shifts also require a theoretical adjustment in how LPT
conceptualises labour power, so that it can encompass the transnational flows of
workers and capital, and the shifts in the responsibility for maintaining workers
ready for the market. It is useful to think about labour power as possessing two
components or indeterminacies: effort power and mobility power (Smith, 2006).
10
The first indeterminacy emerges from the distinction between labour and labour
power made by Marx. Hiring labour power does not guarantee an automatic
outcome or product for the buyer; as the capacity to work remains within the person
of the worker, and the imperative to realise or extract this capacity as work or labour
is the very raison d’etre of the management function. The second indeterminacy
reflects the decentralization of the authority over the disposal of labour power to the
individual worker who has the burden and freedom (constraint and choice) as to
where and to which employer the individual sells his or her labour services. This can
be called mobility power, which is indeterminate in the sense that the decision on
which employer the worker chooses to park his or her labour power is given to the
individual and therefore remains a source of uncertainty for the employing firm in
calculating whether or not workers will remain with them. It is also an uncertainty
for the worker as to whether or not the employing firm will continue to require their
labour services, and where it will locate to get these resources. The explosion of
remote services, especially call or contact centres, highlights this spatial expansion of
the mobility power of employers in sectors, such as financial services, previously tied
to national economies (Taylor and Bain, 2005).
Conclusion: beyond industrial sociology
In many ways, LPT retained its influence because, intentionally or unintentionally, it
played to and built on the strengths of British industrial sociology. That is, a ‘plantbased’ approach focusing on the dynamics of formal and informal workplace
relations, with some sensitivity to a broader macro context. However, if an industrial
sociology was ever empirically and intellectually viable, it is not now. Various factors,
some discussed in this article, are redrawing the boundaries of skills and controls;
the firm, the nation and the global economy; and between the public and private
domains.
There are those who will see LPT as somehow out-of-date or out of synch with
whatever version of the ‘new economy’ is currently fashionable. But we are not in the
middle of a crisis of the knowledge economy or post-modern society, but of
financialized capitalism. The orientation of LPT towards capturing and connecting
work/place dynamics and their multiple forms of embeddedness in the broader
political economy, makes it highly relevant for our times. The re-making and remapping of labour power is central to this conception and remains integral to the
contemporary contradictions in the management of the firm. Whilst we associate
crises of financialized capitalism with banking failures and the credit crunch, there
are equivalents at the level of the employment relationship. Capital, particularly in a
service-based economy, relies on the intensive use of a broader range of worker
capacities and tacit knowledge, expressed through the ideas of discretionary effort
and high performance practices. However, the dominance of capital markets and
shareholder value mean that employers are seldom willing to pay for that enhanced
effort through a stable and inclusive workplace mutual gains bargain. Financial
pressures on the contemporary state mean that governments are often unwilling or
unable to adequately plug that gap in terms of skill formation, childcare support and
the like.
A further barrier to LPT being part of the solution rather than the problem is raised
by Strangleman: ‘The interdisciplinary nature of the Labour Process forum (sic) can
be seen to undermine a more explicitly sociological account of work by occupying
11
such a dominant position in the field’ (2005, 5). Aside from the fact that this doesn’t
sit easily with the view in the previous sentence that the debate has produced ‘a very
narrow set of interests’, he has a point. This does reflect, as Strangelman previously
notes, the fragmentation of the disciplinary base of sociology, including the fact that
many sociologists of work, supportive of LPT, are located in business schools. This
UK trend actually has mixed outcomes. Certain themes, such as total quality
management, team working, lean production, flexible specialisation, management
strategies and a tendency focus on management as the most important agency in
work are, anecdotally, more typical of work research in business schools. It might
also be the case that some themes are harder to raise – trade unions, social class,
social community, social movements connected to work, unemployment and the
unemployed, divisions within the working class. However, studying work and
employment relations within management schools is core business; the same cannot
be said for sociology departments. Setting aside this institutional peculiarity, it is
interesting that Strangleman makes the same general criticism of Work,
Employment and Society – that in a drive for interdisiplinarity, it neglects an
explicitly distinct sociology of work (2005, 7). In the UK at least, the fragmentation
genie is unlikely to be put back in the sociology bottle. The wider range of
contributions and debates reflects this and is, in many ways, a positive feature of
both LPT and Work, Employment and Society. Whilst more undoubtedly needs to be
done to feed back more of the workplace research and middle range theorising into
the disciplinary foundations of sociology, is interdisciplinarity really the main threat
to a healthy sociology of work? We think not. As we have argued, the real problem
has been the marginalisation of work and the employment relationship in
mainstream social theory, which is reflected in its weak position in most sociology
departments. Oddly enough, this division has been reproduced within labour process
debates, with the orthodox majority rejecting the post-modernist attempt to
construct an identity-based analysis that is rooted in organisation theory rather than
the employment relationship (see the debate between Thompson and O’Doherty in
Alvesson et al, 2009). The latter group now put their energies into Critical
Management Studies.
Whatever the undoubted limitations of its contribution to the discipline, LPT is
rooted in classical sociology, particularly in Marx and Weber. To re-iterate an earlier
point, LPT alone cannot be the engine for a re-invigorated sociology of work. But
with its orientation to the dynamics of capitalist political economy, it is well placed to
engage with new and welcome perspectives in economic sociology, as well as
maintaining friendly relations with others who continue with a focus on the multiple
layers of work and the employment relation. In expanding its conceptualisation of
labour power, LPT is bringing something distinctive to a new and enhanced sociology
of work that is being developed in and beyond Britain. By marginalising and
misunderstanding the world of work it is mainstream sociology that is in crisis and
need of renovation.
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