Waving, Not Drowning: Explaining and Exploring the Resilience of Labor Process Theory1
Paul Thompson and Chris Smith
Labor Process Theory (LPT) in its modern post-Braverman (1974) form has for over 30 years
influenced, to varying degrees and in different places, industrial sociology, industrial
relations, labor history and organizational analysis. From the early 1980s it became the
dominant approach to the study of work and workplace in the UK and remains influential
there, and in parts of Europe, Australasia and Canada. What accounts for this intellectual
durability? Institutional supports such as an annual international conference (now in its 27th
year) and a large scale publishing program (21 volumes in various ‘labor process’ series) have
helped. But LPT has had to have had something to say and a capacity for both innovation
and resilience, as for over three decades it has been deployed and expanded to produce
critical perspectives on trends in global workplace developments. In some countries, notably
the US, it retained a narrow commentary on skill formation and destruction, but in Europe
and Australasia especially, it has been the key touchstone for theorising workplace reforms
and innovation.
In accounts of the chronology LPT it is common to refer to a number of overlapping phases
or waves of labor process research and writing (Thompson and Smith 1999; Thompson and
Newsome 2004). Beyond the early period of application and testing of Bravermanian
precepts (‘deskilling’ and singular management control regimes especially), the second wave
(mostly during the 1980s) involved a serious period of theory building in which different
typologies of control were developed along with the argument that resistance is inseparable
from control, and secondly that consent is always part of human labor processes. The work
of Richard Edwards, Friedman, Burawoy are significant and later in that decade attempts to
specify a core theory was made by mainly British scholars (especially Paul Edwards,
Thompson, Littler) who aimed to pull together the outcomes of these extensive research
programmes (see Knights and Willmott 1990).
These second wave studies shared a similar sense of scope of analysis, seeking to elucidate
patterns of management control by making connections between a number of levels of
action: workplace, the state, informal industrial relations and wider production regimes. Part
of the purpose was to make clear that particular outcomes, such as deskilling and Taylorism
were not ‘laws’ of capitalist development, so much as tendencies and historical patterns
typical of some but not all capitalist societies. More generally we could say that Labor and
Monopoly Capital had undervalued the way the ‘labor process’ is embedded within sociocultural contexts which lay out differing ways of putting together the employment
relationship and the organization of the labor process. A core theory aimed to identify
strong tendencies deriving from the structural properties of capitalist political economy but
leave open to empirical investigation what particular mechanisms and outcomes were
operative in particular conditions. So for example, the core refers not to deskilling, but to
the tendency for competition between capitals to result in pressure for the cheapening the
costs of labor and the continual transformation of labor power. This may or may not create
pressures to replace skilled workers with less skilled.
The result of this theorizing was to advance a more contingent relationship between
capitalism and labor-management regimes. As the introduction to a recent Canadian volume
1
The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal
21.3: 253-262, Published online: 10 June 2009, # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009
1
of labor process-influenced writings has noted, ‘… during an incredibly fertile period of
analysis, critical studies of work succeeded in pushing debates about work in advanced
industrialized nations in new directions, thereby ensuring a more nuanced, textured and
dynamic understanding…’ (Shalla 2007: 4). This was especially evident in new generation of
theory-led case studies of the workplace – for example, Nichols and Armstrong (1976),
Nichols and Beynon (1977) as well as historical essays on the development of the labor
process, as collected in Zimbalist (1979), and industrial relations fieldwork case studies, best
exemplified by Edwards and Scullion (1982). There were other historical and industrial
relations case studies, as in the two edited volumes by Wood (1982; 1989). Also important
were feminist voices that critically drew on Braverman to explore the gendering of work,
especially manufacturing – Pollert, (1981), Cavendish, (1982), Westwood, (1982), and
Cockburn (1983).
Despite these empirical gains, by the end of the 1980s LPT was already in more defensive
mode theoretically, attempting to defend its ground against a number of ‘paradigm break’
perspectives that associated its propositions about Taylorism/Fordism with the ‘old
economy’. In a post-Fordist new world, traditional managerial controls and work
organization were inimical to new forms of competition, and as such LPT associated with
these controls was also increasingly deemed to be old fashioned. Rule based and technical
controls diminished or became softer as values became fashionable and skills and
knowledge increased in a new economy. Industrial relations were replaced with human
resource management, mass production with flexible specialization, lean production and
high performance work systems as the purpose of employer strategy. More importantly
post-modern and post-structuralist variants of paradigm break arguments tended to
emphasise the diminishing significance of work itself and of conflicting interests in the
employment relationship. Reflecting the general ‘cultural turn’ in theory and practice, the
focus of attention shifted from work to identity and consumption. We will examine the
reaction to these moves and how LPT continued to advance in reaction to these trends.
Corrections and complaints
The supposed need for skills in the new economy and paradigm shifts in production and
markets were seen to have positive implications for workers in the labor process. Team
working in production implied a broadening of skills, and devolution of job discretion from
management to workers; congested mass markets, required product differentiation and
accompanying upskilling of workers to match a more bespoke product markets; and new
economic activity, especially ICTs and creative industries, increased demand for flexible and
skilled workers, not detailed and skill-diminished ones. In the face of these challenges for
much of the 1990s labor process research fought a necessary, if somewhat defensive battle
to analyze the continuities and constraints inside the reality of ‘lean production’, ‘flexibility’
and other new management practices if not the hype. 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 inspired by LPT from North
America (Parker and Slaughter 1988, Milkman 1997) and the UK (Garrahan and Stewart
1992, 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 labor control. Far from providing a replacement to the
mind-numbing stress of mass production, evidence suggested that flexibility 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
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demonstrated that workers continue to adopt an array of resistive responses to this
extension of control.
Burying the positive claims for lean and flexibility did not mean that upskilling optimists
disappeared. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things is that such scenarios periodically
reappear, often in the same forms that Braverman originally critiqued (see Adler 2007). In
other words, they are reliant on proxies (such as qualifications or occupational shifts) for
their optimistic claims. This has been particularly true for proponents of the knowledge
economy, dependent to a large extent on the quantitative assertion that the proportion of
knowledge is rapidly increasing, and as such so are the skills of so called creative of
knowledge workers. Labor process theorists have been in the forefront of refuting such
claims (Fleming, Harley and Sewell 2004; Warhurst and Thompson 2006; and various papers
in McKinlay and Smith 2009), pointing to the large increase in routine service sector jobs
reliant largely on social competencies – an issue that we return to later.
As we indicated above, the other major challenge faced by LPT flowed from the ‘cultural
turn’ in social theory and was manifested in two main ways. First through the growth of
consumption and the spread of a service-based society in which production is sociologically
displaced analytically and work is negated empirically (Bauman 1998). Other research (e.g.
Pettinger 2006) pointed to the continuing materiality of ‘intangible’ services, from the
scripted interactions and shelf-filling of typical jobs, to the chain of tasks that link the
production, distribution and sale of commodities. As Warhurst, Thompson and Nickson
(2008, 101), observe, ‘Recent research of interactive services, particularly call centre, retail
and hospitality work, whilst analyzed through the paradigms of emotional labor and, more
recently, aesthetic labor, draw extensively on LPT to explain how and why such work is
organized and controlled’. In other words, the penetration of capital into new areas of
personal life and the globalization and integration of information and communication
technologies into work and leisure has extended and deepened controls not diminished
them.
Secondly, issues of culture and identity became the focal point of workplace dynamics in this
culture turn, with managers in search of culture change meeting employees desirous of
secure identities in an unhappy middle (Willmott 1993; Casey 1995). Labor process research
had, in fact, anticipated from an early stage the idea of a shift to soft(er) and sometimes
indirect forms of control. In the previously-referred to research on lean production regimes,
emphasis was put on attempts by management to pay increased attention to the normative
sphere in order to by-pass trade union representation and encourage worker identification
with the company (Danford 1999). Drawing from the core concepts of the indeterminacy of
labor and the structured antagonism between the interests of capital and labor, LPT
questioned the idea that the new wave of normative interventions by management were
actually successful in achieving significant levels of employee commitment (Leidner 2006).
Rather, normative controls remained as contradictory as any other form of control situated
within a capitalist labor process, evidence of underlying structural antagonisms that are
latent, even within the most consensual of labor management regimes.
Core LPT contributions
In sum, as capitalism and work were changing, LPT offered the critical study of work 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. However
within a largely defensive discourse, there was limited theory building beyond the second
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wave, but rather an insistence on the importance of core propositions: tools for analyzing
the transformation of work that put labor power and capitalist political economy at its heart.
Even so, LPT did not present itself as paradigmatic, as a theory of everything. But rather,
against the wave of paradigm break theories, writers within a labor process discourse sought
to ring fence the autonomy of the capitalist labor process and institutional distinctiveness of
the employment relationship. Hence the idiosyncratic and innovatory nature of second wave
theory was facilitated by the concept of the dynamic of workplace regulation having a
‘relative autonomy’ (Edwards 1990) where the separation of capitals meant in each
workplace workers and managers had, to an important extent, to work out or enact labor
process organization. Thus despite the increasing global scale of the capitalist production,
the workplace remained a site of autonomous action that the strong tradition of case study
research continued to expose. But such action needed to be relocated within more layers of
economic and institutional structure, because production and markets were increasingly
stretched across this wider canvass. The upside of this perspective on workplace autonomy
was the critique it provided to grand claims of either permanent deskilling or upskilling; the
downside was to drift away from a systematic description of the relations between the labor
process and structural trends in capitalist political economy. We will return to this issue later
in the paper.
The new core theory also sought to retain a privileging of analysis of labor power and the
capital-labor relationship, without the burden of traditional Marxian assumptions about
class in the wider societal terrain. As one of us recently put it:
This does not mean a universal privileging over (for example, gender relations and
the family), but for an analysis of the dynamic interactions between political
economy and workplace change. In this sense, LPT is more accurately described as a
form of critical labor studies, but without the teleological emphasis on labor as a
universal, liberating class destined by its location in the process of production to be
the gravedigger of capitalism (Thompson 2009: 107).
Capitalism requires labor power in order to expand; and labor power is a special
‘commodity’ unlike fixed capital or raw materials, because: i. it is embodied within human
beings; ii. it cannot be stored or banked; and iii. it has to be extracted through control and
consent in ‘effort or wage bargains’ over the sale and conditions of sale of labor power as
the unique property of the worker. Labor power was sometimes noted by Marx to be the
‘property’ of the worker –but it is property which is not like capital, as the latter has an
objective identity independent of the capitalist and appears in different forms. Rather labor
power is part of ‘the person of the worker’, who must internally divide or alienate his or her
existential self from the commodity labor power that he or she possess when entering
capitalist employment and work relations. Thus the worker is internally divided because of
the material inability to completely externalize the commodity labor power, which is within
him or her as a purely latent force that requires a labor process to manifest or externalise
from his or her self. There is an essential duality to labor power.
Given these feature we can say that labor power is indeterminate (i.e. not fixed, settled and
predictable) and in two senses: i. labor power has to be extracted from workers as effort,
and in competitive conditions this is through bargained consent and is therefore openended; and ii. free mobility of workers, creates uncertainties over labor supply to ensure the
daily and extended reproduction of labor power fit for productive use, which creates
mobility bargaining opportunities and threats for both employers and workers (Smith 2006).
4
LPT is principally concerned with exploring employer and worker struggles over effort and
mobility powers as two dimensions of labor power within capitalism as a political economy.
New wave LPT Contributions
LPT has retained this emphasis on the core features of the dynamics of labor power, whilst
seeking to apply them to the changing conditions of capitalist production. These can be
called new wave contributions and we have identified four themes: new forms of skill and
labor power; new forms of control; new forms of agency and new forms of capitalist political
economy.
New dimensions of skill
Whilst it is important to point out the persistence of the trend towards the production of
relatively low skill jobs in the contemporary economy, it is also necessary to recognize that
this has been accompanied by significant shifts in the definition and nature of skills. At the
heart of these shifts has been the rise of ‘generic’ or ‘soft’ skills such as communication,
adaptability and co-operativeness; often associated with the relentless rise of service work.
There have been legitimate concerns raised about the status and depth of such
characteristics, indeed whether they should be considered skills at all. It is true that they are
more akin to attitudes, social predispositions and character traits rather than technical skills
or expertise. The expanded conception of definition of skill also benefits capital more than
labor. 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 mobilizing the whole person rests on a qualitative intensification
of labor.
However, the limitations of Braverman’s craft-oriented understandings of skill remind us
that we need to maintain a focus on how the major economic actors seek to transform and
utilize labor power, rather than read skills through a particular time and template. It is also
difficult to deny that, together with the mobilization of employee tacit knowledge through
practices such as team and project work, they are central sources of new labor power and
productivity. LPT has been at the forefront of research into these new sources: building on
earlier concepts of emotional labor and emotional effort bargains (Bolton 2005, 2008), as
well as exploring how the body considering how the body and aesthetic labor becomes a
focal point of employer work initiatives (Witz, Warhurst and Nickson 2003; Wolkowitz 2006).
New forms of control
The idea that there has been a shift in control regimes away from traditional Taylorism,
Fordism and bureaucracy towards those in which management use value-based practices to
shape employee identities has been associated with wider claims about a ‘cultural turn’. 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
self-discipline. In this version of LPT, identity rather than labor becomes the site of
indeterminacy. Post-modern perspectives in the labor process debate have also been
developed through Foucault-influenced case studies on work organization and new
management practices (Barker 1993; Sewell 1998)
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However, case study research within LPT had addressed the issue of shifts to softer or more
indirect controls in both the service sector and manufacturing, whilst emphasizing that new
practices were mainly added to traditional ones(see Thompson and Harley 2007). A further
generation of researchers have been in the forefront of studies of call centre work, noting
the trend towards integrated systems of technical, bureaucratic and normative controls
(Callaghan and Thompson 2002), intended to create an ‘assembly line in the head’ (Taylor
and Bain 1999), within a characteristic high-commitment, low-discretion model (Houlihan
2002). As Leidner (2006) notes, the mistake of post-structuralist perspectives has been to
take for granted that the identities held out by employers are attractive to workers and
would uphold their sense of themselves as autonomous individuals. This raises issues of
agency and resistance.
New forms of agency
We have already referred to the post-modernist view that subjectivity is no longer a
significant source of resistance and that worker and managerial identity orientations stifle
dissent. In countering the post-modern view, the kind of traditional qualitative, case study
research undertaken by LP researchers reminded us of the resilience of labor agency, but
little was added to the traditional control, resistance and consent framework of second
wave theory.
That was provided initially by Ackroyd and Thompson’s (1999) work on organizational
misbehavior. The involved a systematic and distinctive mapping of worker action and agency
based on four distinct loci of struggle for the appropriation of working time, effort, the
product of work and identities. The goal was to extend the argument made in LPT that
workplace resistance was analytically distinct from ‘class struggle and ‘ratchet it down one
notch further’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999: 165), making more visible a further realm of
more informal worker action. This is clearly influenced by the previously discussed view of
the workplace having a degree of ‘relative autonomy’. The fact that issues of identity and
micro-level dimensions of action were foregrounded, opened up lines of communication
with more sympathetic post-structuralists writing about irony and cynicism in the face of
managerial discourses (Fleming and Spicer 2002), as well as encouraging labor process
scholars to explore new understandings of issues such as sexual misconduct and workplace
humor as a form of cultural subversion (Taylor and Bain 2003). Similar approaches were also
developed in the USA by Hodson (1995, 2001), though utilizing the idea of dignity at work as
well as resistance. Taken together, the effect of new approaches has been to re-assert the
idea that employees remain knowledgeable about management intentions and outcomes
and retain the resources to resist, misbehave or disengage, as well as expanded the
conceptual and empirical repertoire of employee action.
New types of political economy
The Canadian collection referred to earlier describes labor process and related contributions
as a political economy approach, ‘concerned to develop a more complete and adequate
explanation of the complexities of work and its transformation in the post-industrial era by
identifying, analyzing and critiquing the power structures and social relations at work as well
as the larger political economy..’ (Shalla 2007, 10). However, as we indicated earlier, these
connections tended to be underplayed as a result of the emphasis on the relative autonomy
of the labor process and the ultimately arid nature of many debates with post-structuralists
and other paradigm warriors.
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More recent writing within LPT has been seeking to restore these connections. Part of the
effort has been focused on re-conceptualizing contemporary political economy as a new
form of financialized capitalism rather than the more optimistic accounts of a new or
knowledge economy (Thompson 2003). This is compatible with wider critical accounts of the
rise of shareholder value growth regimes that rely on capital market metrics and measures
to enforce ever increasing rates of dividend payments and appreciation in share price as
markers of financial performance (Lazonick and O’Sullivan 2000, Henwood 2003). Whilst the
credit crunch or financial tsunami has focused attention on the general nature and
contradictions of such economies, where LPT has added something distinctive is on the
destabilizing effect of the pursuit of shareholder value on the management of work and
employment relations. Shareholder value as a growth regime focuses on asset management
and anticipated revenue streams. With perpetual restructuring - manifested in downsizing,
merger and acquisition and delayering – the norm in many sectors, it has become more
difficult for management to pursue or sustain local bargains or investment in firm-specific
assets (Thompson 2003; Jenkins and Delbridge, 2007). Labor is required to give the high
performance, without capital supplying the system to sustain it. Given the potential damage
to the traditional social compact (or psychological contract in mainstream management
terms), this creates fertile conditions for conflicts of interest between capital and labor in
the current period.
A second of re-connections to a wider political economy derive from the shrinking of the
world, with production and markets being integrated on a scale never previously witnessed.
This means objectively that the worker on the assembly line in Guangzhou is linked to the
worker on the assembly line in Detroit. As such analysis of the workplace requires
integration to keep pace with changes in the political economy of capitalism, but without
reducing or privileging either space, or moving to an institutional perspective of capitalism
that over-emphasizes the specificity of national variants, but without any sense of the
singularity of the systemic features of the system as political economy (Smith and Thompson
1998; Smith and Meiksins, 1995; Elger and Smith, 2005). In these geographical shifts, we
have witnessed writers connected to LPT for a long period, such as Paul Edwards, call for
fusion of workplace research with critical realism, to enact multi-levelled analysis to face the
more multi-layered world (Edwards, 2005).
Conclusion
We have argued in this short contribution that LPT has shown considerable resilience to
renew and develop itself in response to practical and intellectual challenges. At the heart of
this resilience and capacity for innovation is a focus on the dynamics of labor power within
capitalism, The central problematic of labor power is the inability of the employer to access
this commodity without going through the person of worker. This is the basis of conflict
because there is no stable agreement between worker and employer over the quantity and
quality of labor power that can be expended in a given period. This is a constantly changing
equation given competition between capitals; competition between workers as owners of
labor power; the conflict between technology and people; and the more or less constant
striving after new ways of extracting more labor power through employers’ strategies of
different types - deskilling, upskilling, automation, movement of capital, substitution of
labor, industrial engineering, ideological or hegemonic struggles over identity/culture/values
and many other means.
Theoretically, as we have noted, there is no imperative to degrade skilled labor to less skilled
since the purpose of hiring labor power is to expand capital and if skilled labor is more
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productive, then there are clear incentives to retain it within the firm. Of course one
strategy for expansion might be to cheapen the costs of labor power by reducing the labor
time necessary for its reproduction. But equally another strategy is to move into new
branches of industry with more skilled labor power and earn more surplus through
innovation. But given that the labor process can also enhance the external market value of
the commodity labor power - through training, specialization, access to new information and
knowledge (through the arts and skills of the occupation as well as access to new work
through social networks formed in the workplace) then there is a more or less permanent
struggle between workers and employers over the valuation of labor power, which is also
another way of describing the issue of employer control and worker resistance.
In contemporary industry skill formation takes many forms - through occupational
jurisdictions; internal labor markets within large organizations; social networks tied to
particular places or industries; employers banding together to share training burdens
(Crouch 2005). Braverman’s thesis on skill degradation through the continued separation
between head and hand (conceptual and operational skills) misses new areas of
accumulation that are constantly innovated within capitalism through its international
expansion and technological dynamism. One key area, as we have noted, is the qualitative
intensification of labor through more flexible and expanded use of worker capacities and
tacit knowledge. More demanding work (Green 2006) is a fundamental and often
inequitable shift in the effort bargain, particularly as the elastic nature of employer demands
increasingly leak into traditional private and domestic spheres.
In this paper we have hopefully removed any sense of LPT being associated with one control
strategy, or one elevating one type of resistance or ideal workplace, and demonstrated that
it is an intellectual resource that continues to expose new management fashions to critical
interrogation. We stressed the importance of some core concepts – such as the
indeterminacy of labor power and the dualism of labor within capitalism – and have noted
that interaction between these new trends and the re-mapping, remaking and recalcitrance
of labor power central which remains capitalism.
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