The State of the Labour Process Debate after 25 Years:

Some Reflections from Industrial Relations and

Industrial Sociology

Notes for remarks to plenary panel at the 25th International

Labour Process Conference, Amsterdam, April 2007

Paul Edwards
Industrial Relations Research Unit
Warwick Business School
University of Warwick
UK

&

Advanced Institute of Management Research

Email: Paul.Edwards@wbs.ac.uk
There are two elements in my remarks. First, I want to look backwards but also forwards.
Second, I will make some negative comments on the state of the debate but will be,
overall, positive as to what has been achieved and what can be done in the future. In
form, then, my remarks happily commit the frequently excoriated sin of ‘dualism’, and in
terms of content I am also happy to engage in dualism and indeed see it as essential.1

The labour process debate is not the same as that approach that has become identified as
Labour Process Theory. Gabriel, for example, lists six approaches to the study of a
(perhaps the) central issue in the debate, namely, management control and worker
resistance, and their relationships with worker identity.2 I make no pretence to assess all
six, and should stress that my remarks come from the tradition of workplace industrial
relations and industrial sociology. I see it as continuing to offer a key set of perspectives,
and indeed as having established themes that other approaches seem to re-discover. It
also offers a distinct view of the nature of workplace relations and helps to maintain a
more exact focus on what the ‘labour process’ is, and is not, than has been present
recently.3

Looking back

When we look back, perhaps the major negative comment stems from the number of
contributions that have felt it necessary to re-assess or re-direct the terms of the debate,
together with the content of those contributions. In addition to Gabriel’s re-think, there
are the recent contributions by Mumby, May and others, as well as several earlier efforts
at review, including the conclusion of Storey as early as 1985 that the debate had run into
the sand.4 The number of contributions suggests a lack of clarity and the absence of any
agreed paradigm.

1
The form-content distinction is also one that is often criticized, so there is a third dualist sin in the space
of four sentences.
2
Y. Gabriel, ‘Beyond Happy Families’, Human Relations (52) 1999. His focus is in fact the control-
resistance-identity problematic, to which he objects. At pp. 182-3 he argues, possibly tongue-in-cheek, that
all the approaches suffer from ‘fatal sins, such as essentialism, dualism and relativism’.
3
I should also say that I am focusing on the labour process debate as debate, and not on the concrete
experience of labour over the last 25 years. Numerous books from the ILPC have offered important
analyses of the latter. Francis Green’s Demanding Work (Princeton UP, 2006) provides a major overview,
albeit from a tradition that connects less directly than it might with the stuff of the ILPC.
4
D. K. Mumby, ‘Theorizing Resistance on Organization Studies: a Dialectical Approach’, Management
Communication Quarterly, 19 (2005); T. May, ‘From Banana Time to Just in Time’, Sociology, 33 (1999);

1
As to the content of the reviews, the dominant tendency has been to shift away from a
distinctive view of the nature of the labour process. The ‘term has often lost all
semblance of definition and become no more than a synonym for “work” or
“occupation”.’5 Braverman and those who debated his work initially were clear that the
labour process is that part of the mode of production in which workers’ productive
capacity is deployed in order to produce use values and at the same time surplus value;
there was an interest in the nature of the valorization process and in the dynamics of
struggle and exploitation.6 This view has evidently been de-emphasized more recently,
with the growth of interest in identity and subjectivity and with the rise of post-
structuralist Foucault-inspired analyses. I would place myself among those offering an
‘orthodox’ counter-critique and will say nothing here in overall terms about it.7 Two
points need brief statement, however. First, I will focus on specific themes relating to the
analysis of the labour process as just described. Whether or not ‘identity’ and
‘subjectivity’ are interesting topics is not the concern here, though I of course need to
assert along with the counter-critics that any apparent neglect in orthodox approaches is
not fatal. Second, this does not mean that orthodox views have all the answers. It is true
that they neglected some major issues. Hyman identifies a failure to address gender and

J. Storey, ‘The Means of Management Control’, Sociology, 19 (1985); D. Spencer, ‘Braverman and the
Contribution of Labour Process Analysis’, Work, Employment and Society, 14 (2000). Only the last of these
argues for a return to the themes of Braverman and an emphasis on the distinctively capitalist properties of
the labour process and on valorization.
5
P. Armstrong, ‘Management, Labour Process and Agency’, Work, Employment and Society, 3 (1989), p.
307.
6
H. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); Brighton Labour
Process Group, ‘The Capitalist Labour Process’, Capital and Class, 1 (1977); S. Cohen, ‘A Labour Process
to Nowhere?’ New Left Review, 165 (1987); A. Friedman, Industry and Labour (London: Macmillan,
1977).
7
See S. Ackroyd and P. Thompson, Organizational Misbehaviour (London: Sage, 1999), pp. 150-65 and T.
Nichols, ‘Industrial Sociology and the Labour Process’, in H. Beynon and P. Glavanis, eds, Patterns of
Social Inequality (London: Longman, 1999). Nichols notes sardonically the arrival of management and OB
scholars on the terrain of industrial sociology: such ‘colonialists often do develop peculiar views of the
countries that they invade’ (p. 115). For a substantial critique of Foucaultian approaches to power see S.
Lukes, Power: A Radical View (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2nd edn 2005), p. 88-107. My own observations are
scattered: P. Edwards, ‘Power and Ideology in the Workplace’, Work, Employment and Society, 20 (2006),
p. 573; P. Edwards and M. Collinson, ‘Empowerment and Managerial Labor Strategies’, Work and
Occupations, 29 (2002).

2
ethnicity as a key limitation of Marxist views of work;8 and other weaknesses could
readily be listed. But this does not mean abandoning the core arguments.

There has indeed been a tendency towards rhetorical distancing from some approach that
is felt to be in error. Braverman is the usual target, but it is not uncommon to find his
work bracketed with that of Burawoy and Richard Edwards as comprising ‘labour
process theory’. This approach has two major limitations. First, it treats as uniform what
is in fact varied; Burawoy for example specifically set his approach in contrast to
Braverman’s. Second, it finds a weakness in an argument and then suggests that the
whole approach is faulty. Thus it is certainly true that Burawoy stressed the success of
management in the factory that he studied in securing compliance and neutralizing
resistance. But this was either a particular empirical limitation, in not seeking out
evidence of deeper resistance, or an analytical mistake, in assuming that what was true of
this one factory in Chicago is true generally. But it has no bearing on the wider approach
that Burawoy was adopting. In particular, ‘dualism’ is commonly seen as a central
problem in Labour Process Theory, that is a mode of analysis in which ‘control’ and
‘resistance’ are treated as stark opposites. Yet Burawoy argued that, rather than there
being a straight opposition between capitalist control and worker resistance, workers in
fact produce consent as an integral part of the production process.9

Attempts at repositioning also seem to be rather weak. Consider Mumby. We need to

8
R. Hyman, ‘Marxist Thought and the Analysis of Work’, in M. Korczynski et al., eds, Social Theory at
Work (Oxford: OUP, 2006).
9
M. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1979). The criticism is more relevant to
Richard Edwards, especially Contested Terrain (London: Heinemann, 1979). This work developed ideal
types of managerial control strategies and argued that each produced worker resistance and was
successively replaced. But it could be criticized without abandoning ‘LPT’ as a whole: P. Nolan and P.
Edwards, ‘Homogenize, Divide and Rule’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 8 (1984). A useful further
case is the work of Ezzamel et al. (M. Ezzamel, H. Willmott and F. Worthington, ‘Accounting and
Management-labour relations’, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 29 (2004)). This offers a
substantive analysis that is consistent with labour process analysis and indeed uses the Burawoy phrase ‘the
politics of production’: M. Burawoy, The Politics of Production (London: Verso, 1985). But its rhetoric
repeatedly insists that LPT imputes interests to labour around resisting exploitation, assumes that people
respond to work situations directly as a result of the economic categories they occupy, and that
subjectivities are fixed by class location (pp. 271, 273, 274). No sensible analysis would do this. If by
‘subjectivity’ is meant a concern to analyse why workers in particular situations think and act as they do in
relation to the politics of production, then there is no problem, and indeed the substance of the analysis is
consistent with that of studies cited below. If it means in addition the abandonment of a distinct focus on
the politics of production and the adoption of a perspective based on the ‘disciplinary society’, then the
concreteness of the analysis is diluted and – ironically – the alleged certainties of LPT are replaced by those
of post-structuralism.

3
 address the mechanisms by which the dialectic of control and resistance produces
– either at the level of the day-to-day or in the longer term – critical reflection and
transformation, and reproduction of the status quo. [And we should see how]
social actors attempt to ‘fix’ meanings in ways that resist and/or reproduce extant
relations of power.
Or May:
Strategies should be viewed in terms of their abilities to mobilise dispositional
powers that, in turn, create the conditions under and through which organisational
interactions take place. Tactics of resistance to such strategies then draw upon
episodic power within the spaces in which dispositional power is limited. The
success of these local protests in being generally transformative will then depend
upon their effects in exposing the antagonisms between strategies, as well as their
unintended consequences.10
It is hard to disagree, but also hard to see how analytical advance has been made on the
better extant studies.

There are two points here. The first turns on the understanding of specific concepts such
as strategy. May cites a number of works which have surely established, empirically as
well as conceptually, the kind of argument just quoted. And there are many more that he
does not mention, notably those of Batstone and colleagues – who sub-title their major
work ‘the organization of conflict and accommodation’ precisely to highlight the
dialectics of control and resistance and the ways in which strategies reflect but can also
transform underlying structural conditions – and Nichols and Beynon.11 There are also
some well-defined treatments of strategy that not only say what May says but that also go
beyond these core facts to establish how strategies vary according to economic and other
conditions.12 I will not dwell further on the negatives of the past, though the appendix
gives some further evidence for the claims just made.

10
Mumby, op. cit., pp. 23 and 24; May, op. cit., pp. 779-80.
11
E. Batstone, I. Boraston and S. Frenkel, Shop Stewards in Action (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977) and The
Social Organization of Strikes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978); T. Nichols and H. Beynon, Living with
Capitalism (London: Routledge,1977).
12
Notably R. Hyman, ‘Strategy or Structure?’ Work, Employment and Society, 1 (1987). Hyman’s work
seems to have received remarkably little attention within the labour process debate,, and certainly within its
subjectivist and post-structuralist aspects. This is despite the fact that it addressed with great precision and

4
The second point relates to the conceptualization of the labour process. I return to this
below, but in shifting towards the positives of the past I would argue that – the many
critiques notwithstanding – there is in fact a reasonably clear set of core principles of
labour process analysis. These have been adumbrated by Paul Thompson and they do not
need repeating here.13

There are two further important positives. The first is empirical. We know a great deal
about the evolution of the labour process in the past 25 years, as for example in the mass
of evidence on the nature of work in Japanese firms both at home and overseas and on the
effects of initiatives such as TQM. Think also of the alternatives, namely, the bland and
misleading pictures from The Machine that Changed the World and the TQM gurus, that
would have been all that we had to go on. Research has also helped to puncture myths of
the new economy, the knowledge worker, and the like. This statement is more
controversial than the previous one, in that some arguments on these topics have come
from respected social scientists. But it does none the less seem to be the case that they
have been in error, in part at least because of their search for the sweeping and the
transformative, as opposed to seeing what was happening in concrete circumstances.
Several labour process studies have indeed stressed explicit continuities with the past.14

And it is not just a question of piling up empirical detail that questions, as it is bound to
question, large-scale predictions. In relation to TQM and employee participation
schemes, for example, we know a great deal about the conditions under which they have
certain effects. This research seems to me to escape the sin of essentialism in two
respects. First, it is not argued that TQM is a distinct set of practices; rather it is analysed
as a political project that combines a set of factors. Studies trying to compare TQM and

sophistication issues of the interplay of conflict and accommodation. Some of the key papers are
reproduced in The Political Economy of Industrial Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989). One obvious
reason for this neglect is that Hyman’s work was explicitly Marxist in provenance and that it could thus be
pigeon-holed rather than interrogated constructively.
13
P. Thompson, ‘Crawling from the Wreckage’, in D. Knights and H. Willmott, eds, Labour Process
Theory (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990); P. Thompson and S. Ackroyd, ‘All Quiet on the Workplace
Front?’ Sociology, 29 (1995).
14
A. Scott, Willing Slaves? (Cambridge: CUP, 1994); M. Webb and G. Palmer, ‘Evading Surveillance and
Making Time’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 36 (1998). And more generally P. Thompson and C.
Warhurst (eds), Workplaces of the Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998). This last is one of the 21 volumes
generated from the series of Labour Process Conferences; several earlier volumes sustain the arguments in
this paragraph about Japanese management and TQM.

5
non-TQM workplaces found that there was often not this sharp contrast and that instead
quality principles are expressed in different ways. Second, in relation to the effects, TQM
is seen as having a contingent impact, shaped by specified contextual factors.15

Similar points could readily be made in relation to one of the major contemporary
management practices, the High Performance Work System. Labour-process-inspired
analysis has revealed the limitations of the HPWS model by showing something of how
the black box of production works. And this is not just a matter of revealing the costs to
workers of the relevant practices, important though that is. It has also been shown that the
systems have inconsistent elements, that they may ‘work’ only because of other
conditions and not because of their inherent properties, and that their meaning is
established and amended through social processes.16 Given the massive influence that the
HPWS model has had, this critical role has been of major importance. In one key sense
the implication is: keep up the good work. Many of the analytical lessons about HPWSs
are in fact very similar to those that would apply to TQM or earlier initiatives. But
managerialist research and practice continues to claim that ‘things are different this time’
and the only way to counter such claims is to show that things may not in fact be that
different.

This optimism is, however, tempered by three points, all of which stem in various ways
from reliance on the single case study focused on the immediate point of production. First
is a failure to offer sufficient detail on a study to be able to place it in a wider context.
Even some book-length accounts say little about key facts such as pay levels and the
labour market experience of the workers studied. My own feeling is that this limitation is
most marked among post-structuralist accounts that are interested in the creation of
identity and that also deliberately eschew causal analysis. It is apparent for example in
Barker’s well-known study, which finds a distinct form of ‘concertive’ control. But it

15
P. Edwards et al., ‘The Determinants of Employee Responses to Total Quality Management’,
Organization Studies 19 (1998); C. Rees, ‘Worker Responses to Quality Organisation’, Work, Employment
and Society 15 (2001). A feature of the latter study is its linking of material influences to subjective
responses and its insistence that this ‘dualism’ is a useful ‘heuristic device’ that facilitates a clear picture of
the nature of employee responses (p. 759).
16
H. Ramsay et al., ‘Employees and High Performance Work Systems’, British Journal of Industrial
Relations, 38 (2000); A. Hesketh and S. Fleetwood, ‘Beyond Measuring the Human Resources
Management – Organizational Performance Link’, Organization, 13 (2006).

6
does not try to say how common this is or what conditions produce it. It also seems to me
that there is a tendency for the ‘sin’ of essentialism to re-emerge, in that new forms of
teamwork are described as though this particular pattern must result and as though
teamwork indeed has essential immanent characteristics.17

This argument receives some support when we look at Sewell’s analysis of patterns of
teamwork, which in fact embraces only three cases and which admits that these may be
extreme examples of extensive electronic surveillance. Yet if one were trying to analyse
the meanings of teamwork, there is a larger set of cases available, from which it is
possible to offer some causal analysis. There are clearly different kinds of teams, and
where teamwork is combined with other conditions it is more likely to generate outcomes
of value to workers as well as to management than is true when these conditions are
absent.18

As Thompson and Ackroyd comment on another example of Sewell’s work, there is a

tendency to strip out context and to produce an abstract control imperative.19 There is a
need to address context much more clearly and to try to develop an explanatory and
causal analysis, for why else do we study things?

The second point is that sets of individual studies have not formed a coherent research
programme, so that it hard to reach general conclusions. The ability to draw such
conclusions around particular themes, like TQM, has emerged ex post and fortuitously,
and there are many gaps in the record.

Third, analysis at the point of production has not made sufficient connections to wider
aspects of capitalism as a dynamic mode of production. I comment on this further below.

17
J. Barker, The Discipline of Teamwork (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1999).
18
G. Sewell, ‘The Discipline of Teams’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 43 (1998). Cf. J Bélanger et al.,
‘Commitment at Work and Independence from Management’, Work and Occupations, 30 (2002). For a
formal model developing this point, see P. Edwards et al., ‘The Bases of Compromise in the Workplace’,
British Journal of Industrial Relations, 44 (2006).
19
G. Sewell, ‘Nice Work? Rethinking Managerial Control in an Era of the Knowledge Economy’,
Organization 12 (2005); P. Thompson and S. Ackroyd, ‘A Little Knowledge is still a Dangerous Thing’,
Organization 12 (2005), p. 707.

7
Looking forward

We need clearer analytical categories. Mumby dismisses one attempt – that of Hodson –
to identify types of worker behaviour as tending the sin of reification.20 He seems to
prefer to stress the deeply embedded connections between control and resistance. Yet he
does not say what a research programme would then look like, and probably for good
reason: celebrating complexity does not in fact generate any particular research questions.
By contrast, as Gabriel has noticed, a focus on organizational control as a ‘defining
feature of post-modernity has tended to obscure the possibility that different
organizations employ different strategies of control’.21 This basic fact seems self-evident,
and it was addressed theoretically in the early ‘LPT’ works by Richard Edwards and
Andy Friedman. Yet it does no harm to re-assert it in order to explore and explain
empirical patterns. Four themes may be distinguished.

Focus

I noted above arguments that the labour process should not be a synonym for work and
that accumulation and valorization should be (re-)placed at centre stage.22 This is a key
point in any study that uses the term labour process other than rhetorically. The interest is
in how labour power is deployed, how a surplus is generated, and what the consequences
are.

This does not mean that the focus is solely on direct producers, but it does mean that
distinct tools are needed to understand groups such as managers. As Armstrong argued,

20
R. Hodson, ‘Good Soldiers, Smooth Operators and Saboteurs’, Work and Occupations, 18 (1991).
21
Gabriel, op. cit., p. 186.
22
Nichols, op. cit.; Armstrong, op. cit., p. 309. Note that Armstrong argues that Braverman wrongly treated
management as a labour process, but does not then dismiss Braverman’s project, suggesting instead that
this particular view of management was in fact in conflict with the project as a whole. It is also convenient
to note here that, even in formal statements within Marxist theory, use and exchange values are both
stressed. One important concomitant is that worker resistance is not reduced to a narrow economistic
struggle over the price of labour power. Workers produce use value as well as surplus value, and they take
pride in their work. Workplaces struggles are thus about the meaning and value of work as well as wages,
though as many Marxists stress the functioning of capitalist markets makes it hard to sustain arguments
about the former, and workers learn the ‘rules of the game’. See E. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), ch. 17. Note also Armstrong’s use of the agency framework. The
principal-agent model is well-established in economics; it tends to treat the relationship in rationalistic
terms. Implicit in Armstrong’s use of the model are at least two things: a view of the principal-agent
relationship as political and not just economic; and the location of politics within a view of the
contradictions of the management process, as opposed to a view of politics as merely incidental.

8
management is not a labour process: the labour process is ‘the means of securing the
material base of human existence’, capitalism is only one way of organizing the labour
process, and the fundamental of management is that it is an agency relationship. This fact
does not mean that management is simply a technical activity. On the contrary,
Armstrong underlines contradictions in the agency relationship between controlling the
agent through performance management and allowing trust and discretion. These
contradictions might seem to be identical to those of control and autonomy that pertain to
‘real’ labour processes, but for Armstrong they arise within an agency relationship and
there are cases where management has not been de-skilled that the agency view can
explain and alternatives cannot. A stronger argument would certainly be needed to
sustain the point.23

For present purposes, the key is that a labour process perspective can say some distinctive
things about management, and that we need to understand the labour process, not as work
in general, but as a form of human activity that takes a particular character under
capitalism. Here, managers and workers meet in a relationship of ‘structured
antagonism’, and they define themselves in this relationship: there can be no manager
without a worker, and the basics of social class lie in the dynamics and contradictions of
the relationship.24

Now, the early labour process debate shared with Marxian debates at the time a concern
to distinguish, usually in very abstract ways, productive and unproductive labour, a

23
Armstrong asks why, if the end result of the organization of managerial and non-managerial labour is the
same, there is any point making the distinction. His answer is that it is not always the same: managerial
work is not necessarily ‘de-skilled’ even when this is technically feasible (p. 320). This seems a rather
weak answer empirically, since not all non-managerial labour is de-skilled. It is also weak conceptually, in
that trends in the organization of managerial work need to be treated as the result of contradictions in an
agency relationship, whereas non-managerial work follows a different dynamic. Evidence that
‘management’ retains its core supervisory nature can be found in the work of Colin Hales: ‘Rooted in
Supervision, Branching into Management’, Journal of Management Studies, 42 (2005). But this does not
dispose of the ‘so what?’ issue. Part of an answer is in observations such as those of Tony Watson (In
Search of Management, London: Thomson, 2001): middle managers recognize their distance from
shopfloor employees even though they are also aware that they are removed from higher corporate
decision-making. The wider theoretical point is that managers are agents of capital, and that they gain from
this to the extent that they can move closer to the principals but lose if their role as agents can be performed
in some other way. Paul Thompson (‘Introduction:Unmanageable Capitalism?’ in S. Ackroyd et al., eds,
The Oxford Handbook of Work and Organization (Oxford: OUP, 2005) has re-stated the agency view of
managers and used it to address some of the contradictions in the management process.
24
P. Edwards, ‘Late Twentieth Century Workplace Relations’ in R. Crompton et al. (eds), Renewing Class
Analysis (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

9
concern whose disappearance can only be welcomed. But there was the important
analytical question of what a labour process debate is about. It is not about everything
that goes on in employing organizations. Worker subjectivity is relevant only in so far as
it affects the organization of conflict and co-operation in the work process.

Managerial work is certainly not ignored in this perspective. But it becomes

problematized in terms of its connection to the generation of use-values and surplus
value. Is it the case for example that changing the role of the supervisor to that of coach
and facilitator alters relationships with workers? Such a shift can be seen as one that
stresses use-values (achieving a productive task) over surplus value (controlling workers)
though the latter will of course have to be secured by other means. This does not mean
that (1) the analyst directly wishes to categorize all behaviour as to do with use-value or
surplus value or (2) some view is taken as to what a use-value really is. Let is suppose
that the supervisor just imagined works is a weapons factory, and that becoming a coach
means that workers are trained better and that weapons are produced more efficiently.25
The argument does not necessarily mean that weapons are inherently useful. It simply
means that, under current social and political arrangements, there is demand for these
products, that they have a use under these arrangements and that there are more and less
efficient ways of providing the products. That deals with point (2). As for point (1), the
idea of the two types of value is an analytical one, which allows us to ask about the ways
in which work is configured and the changing composition of jobs. For example, what is
the balance between the activities or control and co-ordination among a group of
managers, and how is the agency relationship managed (e.g. in terms of performance
targets or a reliance on other mechanisms such as trust)?

A focus on the labour process and valorization may help to avoid an undue interest in the
specific concept of resistance and whether or not it is (still) important. Such a question is,
arguably, unanswerable: it is not as though in some mystical past there was a mass of
‘resistant’ workers (and indeed a great of industrial sociology said why there was not);
there is no way of comparing evidence in a reliable way; and whether or not any given

25
We need to treat efficiency here is its technical sense of producing more output for a given set of inputs.
The production process is co-ordinated in a way that is technologically superior to its previous form.
Workers are not working any harder.

10
act is a case of resistance requires careful scrutiny. On the last point, going absent, for
example, may be a conscious act of hostility to management; it may be a pragmatic
taking of benefits on offer; it may reflect ‘excess’ conformity if physical and emotional
exhaustion make the worker unfit to work; and so on. And absence will have different
implications for fellow workers (shared expression of resistance, a cause of lateral
conflict because those at work have extra work to do . . . . ) and for managers (a cost if
work cannot be re-organized easily, or something relatively costless if other workers
cover the relevant duties).26

The solution is to look at the organization of the labour process and the way in which a
frontier of control is created and sustained. Thus workers may not ‘resist’ but may obtain
benefits, for example through legal rights. Thus Burawoy notes that workplace regimes
are located in national contexts and that states take different views of the regulation of the
labour process. To take a simple example, in the UK since 1971 there have been legal
protections against unfair dismissal and indeed the number of issues on which employees
can bring claims against employers has risen from one to 90. The operation of the rights
is plainly far from automatic, but the terms of the labour process have changed. We thus
need to look at workplace regimes and how they produce packages of costs and benefits
for workers, and not seek out resistance for its own sake.27

Levels of analysis

The second key issue is levels of analysis. The Foucaultian insistence that power and
knowledge are parts of the same thing means, to the extent that it means anything, that at

26
P. Edwards and H. Scullion, The Social Organization of Industrial Conflict (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982),
goes into these issues in detail, arguing that the salience of an action depends on its location in the
workplace regime. Where managerial control is extensive, absence may pose few costs, while actions such
as quitting can have benefits in removing those who might challenge the regime more directly.
27
My current research focuses on cases, small firms, where ‘resistance’ is largely absent. But there are
certainly interesting questions such as why apparently all-powerful managements are constrained to
acknowledge workers’ concerns and why low-wage jobs continue to exist in advanced economies. The
answer to the former question turns on such factors as: the fact that workers’ power is not zero; mutual
obligations sometimes based in family or other ties; and the need for any employer to secure a minimal
level of consent if the labour process is to continue to function. See M. Ram, Managing to Survive (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994). The latter question links to themes raised below about relating the labour process to
wider structural issues; in this case, the jobs exist because of a supply of workers through legal and illegal
migration, intense product market competition, and the fact that employers, lacking other options, are
willing to occupy these highly competitive and insecure market niches. See e.g. P. Edwards and M. Ram,
‘Surviving on the Margins of the Economy’, Journal of Management Studies, 43 (2006).

11
the immediate point of production there is a potential constant negotiation over claims to
control resources. If workers argue about effort levels, they are asserting their power and
their knowledge that they are aware that there is indeed a bargain and that they can
change something. Such ideas do not of course need Foucault to be stated. Thus Edwards
and Scullion went out of their way to criticize the ‘toolbox theory of sanctions’: the idea
that workers have bargaining resources simply available for use like tools in a box.
Deploying sanctions requires a language to express a sense of opposition from
management and to take a view that what exists is not given for all time.28

At this level of the point of production one may wish to contrast different types of worker
ideology as Hodson does. The point of this is not to reify behaviour, but to deploy some
ways of capturing variation, rather than simply finding out the essence of worker
behaviour anywhere. The categories will depend on the topic at hand. Thus Mars made
very effective use of a different set of four categories, Goss in a very different context has
also offered four models of types of employment relations in small firms, Burawoy offers
another set of four types of workplace regime, and so on.29 Now, any of these categories
can be interrogated for their logic and completeness, and in various places I have
suggested that none of these is wholly adequate. But they certainly take us quite a long
way. The reader of Mars will have a much clearer view of different types of ‘fiddles’ and
the conditions generating them than would have been possible without these analytical
ideal types.

Similar moves can be identified in more recent analyses of contemporary work, notably
that of service employees. Understanding of this work began with accounts of the distinct
nature of the service encounter, and has more recently identified different types of service
work. Frenkel for example speaks of mass service and mass customized types of work.
Related to this, there is now a huge amount of work on call centres, which is increasingly
differentiating types of such work according to the market segment in which the firm is
engaged and hence different levels of pay and different degrees of worker autonomy.30

28
Edwards and Scullion, op. cit.., p. 163.
29
G. Mars, Cheats at Work (London: Counterpoint, 1982); D. Goss, ‘In Search of Small Firm Industrial
Relations’, in R. Burrows et al. (eds), Deciphering the Enterprise Culture (London: Routledge, 1991); M.
Burawoy, op. cit., ch. 3.
30
S. Frenkel, xx, in S. Ackroyd et al., eds, (Oxford: OUP, 2005);

12
Once we have categories of types of work situation, we can begin to ask about causal
influences on them. Mars provided an extended and in many ways exemplary explanation
of the four patterns of ‘fiddle’ that he identified, which turned on the structure of the
work tasks. We would also now want to give more attention to managerial strategies and
the operation of the capitalist economy. Thus one of Mars’s types was the ‘wolf’ fiddle,
practised by gangs of workers with a strong sense of collective identity; dockers were his
archetypal example. They were able to sustain their position because of a set of factors:
their work was hard to monitor; they worked in gangs; and it was hard for management to
find substitute labour. Containerization of dock work has challenged all these conditions
and has led to major redefinitions of the job of a docker. This development in turn
reflects competition between ports, the role of the state in allowing work that in many
countries was legally defined as dockers’ work to be carried out by other workers, often
well away from ports themselves, and so on.31 In short, changing structural conditions
shape events within the politics and production, and at this level people make choices as
to how to respond to these conditions, and out of the resulting actions, bargains and
compromises a new pattern of workplace politics emerges.

A related issue is the placing of a work regime in its organizational and economic
context. As Thompson argues, we need to locate a workplace in corporate strategies and
the development of the economy as a whole.32 A call for multiple levels of analysis is
increasingly common, and rightly so given the pressures of globalization and the way in
which market rationality impinges of the workplace. Some of the early studies, such as
those of Friedman, were explicitly concerned with the historical evolution of forms of
labour and the connections between workplace practices and competitive conditions. My
only comment here is one of practical research design: if we are interested in the
dynamics of workplace relations, we need a relatively micro focus, albeit one that is
sensitive to material conditions – and it is reasonable to ask, as argued below, that
researchers give explicit attention to these conditions. But a ‘complete’ placing of a
workplace regime in the circuit of capital would be too much to ask.

31
See P. Turnbull and S. Weston, ‘Employment Regulation, State Intervention and the Economic
Performance of European Ports’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 16 (1992), and ‘Co-operation or
Control?’ British Journal of Industrial Relations, 31 (1993).
32
P. Thompson, ‘Disconnected Capitalism’, Work, Employment and Society, 17 (2003).

13
A reasonable approach is to pursue causal influences as far as is needed for the task at
hand. Thus Delbridge argued that the pattern of workplace relations that he observed at
‘Valleyco’ reflected the fact that this factory was a supplier to others and was thus under
distinct kinds of customer pressure.33 Studies of small firms have also addressed how
‘exogenous’ influences such as ethnicity and family shape the labour process.34 They
show that co-ethnic ties influence the effort bargain by establishing relations of mutual
dependence and moderating managerial control. Now, such research might be read as
saying that ethnic and family identities are key, and that studies privileging the labour
process are in error. But such a view makes sense only if one operates without analytical
distinctions and wishes to treat social life as undifferentiated. If the research question is
people’s sense of identity and meaning, then the intersections of class, race, and gender
are central.35 But if we are concerned with the production of surplus at the point of
production, then gender, ethnicity and so on can be treated as factors that shape particular
labour processes but which are analytically separate from the labour process itself. Future
research might take this theme further. From the Delbridge example, one might wish to
explore supply chain effects more directly, and also to compare workplaces in different
locations in a supply chain. From the ethnicity example, the obvious point is to try to
compare otherwise similar workplaces with differing ethnic mixes. But the key point is
not to dissolve the analysis and to keep a velar view as to what is to be explained.

There is a body of work that addresses the changing structure of capitalism, some of it
from scholars with an approach with strong affinities to labour process analysis.36
Establishing links between this level of analysis and workplace regimes is an important
task. By this, I mean that analysis of corporate strategies and re-structuring cannot
directly interrogate the effects of these activities at workplace level, for example whether

33
R. Delbridge, Life on the Line in Contemporary Manufacturing (Oxford: OUP, 1998).
34
See note 27 above, and M. Ram et al., ‘Making the Link: Households and Small Business Activity in a
Multi-ethnic Context’, Community, Work and Family, 4 (2001).
35
E.g. M. Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men (New York: Russell Sage, 2000).
36
E.g. Lazonick, whose early work examined labour processes historically and who more recently had
addressed the financial structure of capitalism, and Karel Williams and colleagues: W. Lazonick,
‘Industrial Relations and Technical Change’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 3 (1979); Business
Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy (Cambridge: CUP, 1991); K. Williams et al., Why Are
the British Bad at Manufacturing? (London: RKP, 1983), Cars (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1994), J. Froud
et al., ‘Caterpillar: Two Stories and an Argument’, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 23 (1998).

14
new accounting regimes actually secure the tighter control of production costs that they
seek; workplace analysis remains an important element here.37

Effects of worker behaviour

It is important to continue to ask explicitly about the implications of worker activity.38

This would be my one qualification to Ackroyd and Thompson’s insistence on the
continued presence of worker ‘misbehaviour’. As well as showing that it exists, and that
managerial claims to secure control and commitment are empirically hollow and
conceptually impossible, we need to continue to ask what it does. Does it represent
Burawoyian consent to one’s own exploitation and even if it does, what might the
practical implications be?39 Burawoy’s workers (in mid-1970s US manufacturing) were
doing reasonably well in having secure and relatively well-paying jobs. At the time, their
interests may well have lain – in the sense of the balance of costs and benefits of
alternative lines of action – in continuing as they were. We now know with the benefit of
hindsight that many threats were on the horizon, and it is a perfectly proper question to
ask whether these might have been anticipated and what if anything might have been
done about it. It is also analytically important to ask how patterns of behaviour reproduce
existing relationships. Thus high quit rates in low-wage and insecure jobs tend to
undermine any worker collectivity and, along with other factors, to reproduce this form
of labour process.

In other circumstances, worker action has clear effects. Among the most common noted
in labour process studies is some kind of tacit disobedience that means that a managerial
initiative fails to achieve its ends. Another is the exploitation of space to bend rules. Thus
call centre studies reveal workers who spend longer than they are supposed to on calls.
This gives them some personal satisfaction and is not necessarily consciously ‘resistance’
against ‘management’. It may also have the result – in an echo of Roy’s finding that

37
As in the work of Ezzamel, op. cit.
38
I recall Theo Nichols arguing – I think at the first Labour Process Conference in 1983 – that there was
undue interest in what went on at the point of production, and not enough attention to what this meant for
outcomes such as productivity. His point remains important. It is developed in Nichols, op. cit. and also in
his The British Worker Question (London: RKP, 1986).
39
Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent.

15
workers break formal rules to achieve substantive objectives – of improving customer
service.40 It is within such ambiguities that ‘resistance’ takes its meaning.

It is also important to note longer-term effects. Ackroyd and Thompson focus on specific
and small-scale acts if misbehaviour, as do Noon and Blyton in their discussion of five
survival strategies.41 These acts may in themselves come to shape how a workplace
regime is defined. This was the burden of many of the classic studies, which
demonstrated that there was an established space for workers that managers attempted to
change at their peril. Such clearly established custom and practice may be less common
than it was, but it illustrates the wider point that socially constructed expectations shape
the extent to which managerial objectives can be met. Overt ‘resistance’ may be limited,
but, as the limited effectiveness of TQM and HPWS models shows, management
intentions are often not realized. The reasons turn on the contradictions inherent in the
organization of work: establishing control while eliciting consent, meeting customer
‘needs’ while also hitting financial targets, and so on.

Beyond specific acts that come to define workplace regimes there are more deliberate
efforts to alter the terms of the labour process. These embrace bargaining over pay and
conditions, strikes, and at the extreme quasi-revolutionary protests. Such acts, or the
threat of them, can come to define a certain terrain of workplace relations. Terrains
cannot necessarily be ordered in terms of whether they are better or worse from the
worker’s (or the manager’s) point of view. Gallie, in his classic comparison of French
and British oil refineries, showed that in some respects – for example shift work and
manning levels – the French workers were the more militant, but also that French
management retained much greater freedom of action than did its British counterparts.42
In some circumstances, an ordering may be possible if the frontier of control is
unambiguously more in favour of workers in one place than in another. But it may also
be that workers who have won workplace battles thereby expose themselves to

40
D. Roy, ‘Quota Restriction and Goldbricking in a Machine Shop’, American Journal of Sociology, 57
(1952); ‘Work Satisfaction and Social Reward in quota Achievement’, American Sociological Review, 18
(1953); ‘Efficiency and the “Fix”’, American Journal of Sociology, 60 (1954).
41
M. Noon and P. Blyton, The Realities of Work (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2nd edn 2002).
42
D. Gallie, In Search of the New Working Class (Cambridge: CUP, 1978), esp. pp. 300-317.

16
counterattack. And so on. The point is that we need to address such issues directly if the
significance of misbehaviour, resistance, and so forth is to be grasped.

One of the benefits of research around the HPWS is interest in a range of outcomes of
workplace relations, embracing wages and job satisfaction but also the relationship
between the workplace and family and other spheres. A labour process perspective might
build on this approach by looking systematically at outcomes and the quality of jobs.

Comparative analysis

The key future development, which draws together the preceding three themes, is
comparative analysis. The most effective studies have always been comparative in at
least one of several senses: direct comparison within the same study (Lupton, Gouldner,
Mars, Gallie); comparison of one study with specifically comparable data from other
studies (Burawoy); a use of a new study in the light of previous expectations in the
literature (e.g. Ditton’s study of the control of time by workers paid flat rate, taking as its
foil evidence of the practices of workers paid by the piece).43 Through the imagination
and effort of Hodson and his collaborators it has also been possible to draw together
workplace ethnographies into a comparative data set, now numbering 204 cases.44 But
such a collection depends on what was in the available ethnographies, and it necessarily
looks backwards to what has been done.45 As argued above, it has also been possible, in
more discursive fashion, to extract from studies of teams or TQM some factors that seem
to explain patterns of variation. But more planned and systematic comparisons would
have obvious benefits of generating directly comparable data.

Comparative analysis in this field is bound to be hard because the phenomena of interest
do not vary independently of each other or in ways that are easily observable in advance.

43
In addition to studies cited above: T. Lupton, On the Shop Floor (Oxford: Pergamon, 1963); A. Goulder,
Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (New York: Free Press, 1955); J. Ditton, ‘Baking Time’, Sociological
Review, 27 (1979).
44
R. Hodson, Dignity at Work (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). Recent studies include V. Roscigno and R.
Hodson, ‘The Organizational and Social Foundations of Worker Resistance’, American Sociological
Review, 69 (2004). This last study makes imaginative use of Qualitative Comparative Analysis, a method
that might well be used to develop systematic comparative workplace studies.
45
It should also be noted that the richness of the data is often limited. Thus Hodson is constrained to record
wages, job security, and other key measures into two or three categories. And there must be some question
as to the comparability of categories over time and space. For other conceptual and empirical issues, see P.
Edwards and J. Bélanger, ‘Generalizing from Workplace Ethnographies: From Induction to Theory’,
unpublished paper, 2006.

17
As noted above, studies of TQM have in fact found it hard to find firms that clearly ‘had’
or ‘did not have’ the relevant practice; quality principles need not go under a particular
label. There is no simple solution to this issue, but sensitivity to previous studies and to
likely sources of variation can give some pointers. Thus studies of call centres have
shown variation according to market segment, and future studies might be more
systematic in comparing within a segment. Similarly, this sector is one that has seen rapid
globalization, and as research is already showing it is productive to compare ‘new’
countries with ‘old’ ones in terms of how the ‘same’ work is organized and
experienced.46

Studies in this vein have made useful advances in deploying quantitative surveys within
case studies of particular settings. This has been of great value in demonstrating the
representativeness of the results and also in showing that claimed differences between
cases are real. None the less, there are limits to the value of self-report data on such
things as work intensification, and independent direct observation can also be valuable. It
is for example common to read that performance management systems put new pressures
on workers and run counter to claims about empowerment. This is a perfectly sensible
argument. But there are benefits in substantiating it in more detail. In any particular case,
the exact ways in which the effect works need demonstrating, and the extent to which the
effect is real – in the sense of being substantial and affecting a significant number of
workers – needs evidence. Illustrative quotations do not show just how important the
effect really is. And across cases it is important to know whether all PMSs have this
effect, or only some, and if the latter why.

The classic studies were able to address these issues through the presence of the
researcher in the workplace for a substantial amount of time, so that it was possible to
find out what ‘really’ happened as opposed to what respondents might report. Some were
based on structured observation, as in the Batstone et al. studies and, with a different
focus, the work of Blackburn and Mann.47 Observation is time-consuming and expensive,
and there are also issues of access for such studies as firms become leaner and outcome-

46
P. Taylor and P. Bain, ‘“India Calling to the Far Away Towns”: the Call Centre Labour Process and
Globalization’, Work, Employment and Society, 19 (2005).
47
R. Blackburn and M. Mann, The Working Class in the Labour Market (London: Macmillan, 1979).

18
oriented. But the pay-offs are considerable and the demands on those being researched
are less, in terms of time if not exposure, than is the case with survey and interview
methods.

Conclusions: role of labour process analysis

A distinctively labour process analysis of work needs to retain its core strengths. These
include an empirical interest in the experience of work at the point of production and a
theoretical concern with the contradictory relationships between capital and labour. And,
in terms of method, detailed case studies and ethnographies have been, and should be, the
preferred approach. Large-scale comparative surveys do not fit well with these
preferences – though it certainly makes sense for them to be informed by labour process
issues in terms of the questions that they ask.

Within the labour process tradition, I would argue, first, for more explicit comparative
analysis, which can be within a country as well as being internationally comparative.
Second, it would be a great help if analysts took it upon themselves to collect and report
key data on such things as pay levels, quit rates, local unemployment rates, and the labour
market experience of employees. Third, systematic observation can reveal important
information about the nature of the work task and other key issues such as the ways in
which managerial controls are deployed (e.g. extent of direct supervision, frequency of
reporting of data). It would also be desirable, if difficult, to observe processes such as
performance appraisals. There are now useful studies that give workers’ self-reports of
how far performance targets are agreed or imposed, and what the effects of the targets on
subsequent behaviour are. But it is also desirable to have direct evidence on what goes
on, how far workers talk among themselves about appraisals and develop some collective
norms about them, and if possible how far appraisal really shapes the effort bargain.48
Fourth, the time dimension is central. A question about the large number of one-off case
studies that now exist naturally concerns how stable the relationships reported are.

48
Consider here for example S. R. Barley and G. Kunda, Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2004). This is a work by two leading ethnographers, studying ‘itinerant experts’ such as
computer programmers who move between companies on a freelance or contract basis. It embraced periods
of participant observation in staffing agencies, but most of the information on work itself seems to have
been gathered through interviews. The labour process itself was naturally hard to observe, but observational
detail would, in principle, be highly desirable.

19
Understanding a workplace over time can surely reveal a great deal about processes of
change (and continuity).49

As for multi-level analysis, a basic need is that the context of a workplace be described in
terms of such features as the type of product, the intensity of competition, and the place
of the workplace in the (exchange) value chain. We can then obtain some view of the
causal forces at work. Just how much further one should go in developing a multi-level
analysis must then surely depend on the task at hand. The danger of being too ambitious
is that analysis becomes superficial. Influences from outside the workplace itself need to
be traced to the extent that they are likely to shape events.

As to what might be studied, there is a huge range of choice but also challenges.
Workplace sociology developed from studies of large groups of workers assembled in
distinct work sites. As the character of work changes, the idea of a fixed work place also
loses resonance. A solution may lie less in multi-level approaches and more in the use of
multiple methods embracing interviews and systematic observation. To mention just two
candidates: understanding the re-structuring of work at the bottom of the labour market,
in the light for example of migration to developed economies, is an important issue; and
the nature of managerial work continues to deserve attention. On the latter, we know
something of ‘middle managers’ but it would also be very instructive to learn more about
higher levels of management, for example how identities and loyalties are created and the
way in which the agency relationship with capital is understood and played out. Sklair for
example identifies a ‘transnational capitalist class’ of elites in multinational companies
and state agencies, though his work seems largely a hypothesis about the presence of
such a class rather than detailed substantiation of its existence as an economic category,
still less as a class with shared awareness and interests.50 It would be extremely valuable,
if challenging, to analyse the work of putative members of this class, their agency
relationships, their roles in planning corporate re-organizations, and so on. There is some
well-established research on the structures of corporate power and managerial elites that

49
E.g. B. Ahlstrand, The Quest for Productivity (Cambridge: CUP, 1990).
50
L. Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

20
could offer some foundations here.51 A less challenging study might take some
occupational groups and examine their positions within management and how they define
the nature of the managerial task – pursuing the agenda on these issues established by
Armstrong.52 Such a study would take the Foucaultian interest in ‘knowledge’ and render
it in a reasonably precise way by asking about knowledge claims and how they are
sustained, together with the relationship between these claims and the material demands
of a capitalist enterprise: some claims to knowledge are more successful than others and
it is important to understand why. Plainly, comparative analysis would be of central value
here.

In short the labour process debate, qua debate, has entailed a fair number of false starts,
re-inventions of wheels, and attempts to establish stark differences between perspectives
where there is also common accord. It has also generated important empirical evidence
and sustained critical engagement with major changes in the experience of work over 25
years. Analysis now needs to build on these strengths by examining workplace regimes
and their costs and benefits, and placing such examination in the context of capitalism as
a mode of production.

Appendix: Remarks on the Post-structuralist Turn

Ackroyd and Thompson have made a particular point of re-asserting an approach based
on an appropriately explicated labour process analysis, and I agree with much of their
argument. I want here to underline a few key points. I take May as an example, because
this explicitly goes back before Braverman to try to argue that an LPT analysis is
insufficient.

May has an impoverished view of what was actually found out. His point to frame the
analysis is Roy’s famous piece on ‘banana time’. To begin with this study itself, it was
used to illustrate the ways in which workers alleviate boredom by playing tricks on each
other. So far, so good. But, first, what is this piece saying about ‘resistance’? Its key point

51
J. Scott, Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes (Oxford: OUP, 1997); R. Whitley et al., Masters of
Business (London: Tavistock, 1981); J. Fidler, The British Business Elite (London: RKP, 1981).
52
P. Armstrong, ‘Professional Knowledge and Social Mobility’,Work, Employment and Society, 7 (1993),
and other papers cited therein.

21
is that workers’ games allow them to tolerate boredom. In what sense this represents
resistance is unclear. Second, Roy was not seeking out eternal truths of workers
everywhere but asking how largely powerless workers make sense of their worlds and
create some meaning. In his other studies, not cited by May, he showed that other
workers bargain extensively over the terms of their effort and presumably do not need
banana times to establish meaning.53

Turning to May’s wider arguments, he acknowledges the work of Hyman, Friedman and
others but seems to have a limited grasp of the richness of these contributions. He sums
up my own as regarding ‘informal practices as symptomatic of a general, but also locally
variable, desire to assert control’ (p. 770). This is true at some level, but I also went out
of my way to reject the idea that there is simply a reservoir of latent discontent ready to
burst out, and went into great detail as to the conditions that generate discontent and lead
to its emergence in one form or another. Strikes and absenteeism for example are not
expressions of the ‘same’ thing. I was also interested in a lot more than informal
practices, covering a range of formal ones in original empirical analysis and addressing in
more general works long-term issues of class conflict.54 And, together with Hyman and
many others, I stressed that any existing balance of relations between managers and
workers was the crystallization of previous overt and tacit struggles and represented a
historically generated compromise. Such views established, and illustrated empirically,
what May seems to see (in the passage quoted in my main text) as new.

May then moves on to his major theme.

The question now arises as to whether the above perspectives are sufficient in
accounting for indeterminacy and observed variations in local conditions. [A
Foucaultian approach questions] the adequacy of the dichotomy between the
subject and power at work, as utilised in the above accounts (p. 771).
It is not shown that the accounts in question operate with this dichotomy. Studies such as
Lupton’s – not discussed by May – demonstrate a clear interplay between workers and
the power relations in which they are embedded. Some workers developed an extensive
repertoire of means to bargain with management and in the process defined who they

53
D. Roy, ‘Banana Time’, Human Organization, 18 (1958); cf works cited at note 40, above.
54
P. Edwards, Conflict at Work (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

22
were, in terms of their sense of shared collectivity and distance from management. Others
did not, and were more isolated and individualized. Lupton, moreover, offered an explicit
explanation of the differences that he observed. Finally, he stressed that workplace
practices cannot be divided into ‘resistance’ or ‘consent’ – though he did not use these
terms – but, rather, constitute complex wholes whose meanings need to be grasped in
context.

In my view, not only did work such as Lupton’s directly address indeterminacy and local
conditions, but attempts to use Foucault to correct an alleged deficiency are far less
successful. They are very little interested in explaining empirical variation and much
more concerned with the fundamentals of power and subjectivity. They thus seem to
make exactly the kind of error attributed to ‘labour process’ writing. They are also so
concerned with subjectivity that they often say very little about the concrete organization
of work such as how tasks are allocated and how performance is monitored and
negotiated. They also shift between the micro and the macro too easily. Thus May speaks
of a shift from the space of banana time to the intensity of controls under just-in-time
regimes as though there has been such a simple unilinear and universal trend, and as
though the approach of Foucault allows us in some way to know that this has indeed been
the case.

A final point here concerns meaning and pride in work. Consider a recent study of
resistance and its links with aesthetics and performativity.55 This argues that computer
programmers take pride in the quality of work and that they resent, and resist, managerial
concerns to deliver a product within a budget. This seems to be sensible if scarcely
surprising. But, first, pride in work is not a new phenomenon. The theme runs through the
classic studies, which emphasize the satisfactions of doing a ‘good day’s work’. This is
true even in very repetitive jobs: Kusterer for example revealed the pride that producers
of paper cups took in turning out a good product, and also the fact that this commitment
to quality was often greater than that of managers concerned with output targets.56 And a

55
P. Case and E. Piñeiro, ‘Aesthetics, Performativity and Resistance in the Narratives of a Computer
Programming Community’, Human Relations, 59 (2006).
56
K. Kusterer, Know-how on the Job (Boulder: Westview, 1978). ‘Contemporary workplace ethnographies
abound with contextually rich accounts of the importance of feelings of pride in one’s accomplishments’:
Hodson, op. cit., p. 45. ‘There is a difference between the corporate and the working class. Corporate is

23
central theme in Roy’s work was that workers would find ways of achieving a task that
were more efficient than those entailed in management’s own rules. Second, the study of
programmers lacks context in explaining just which workers resisted managers and under
what conditions. The sense of resistance is presented as a characteristic shared by all the
group and as a universal condition. Did in fact all or only some workers resist and why?
Traditional workplace studies, by contrast, managed to deal with variation, in showing,
for example, why some workers ‘restrict effort’, why some do not, and the conditions
producing these results – as well as developing a critical analysis of the very concept of
‘output restriction’.

only concerned with the dollar. The working class is concerned with doing the job right, the feel, and
getting the job done’ (US worker quoted by Lamont, op, cit., p. 1). See also note 22 above for the
theoretical base of this theme.

24