Waving, Not Drowning: Explaining and Exploringthe Resilience of Labor Process Theory

Paul Thompson & Chris Smith

Published online: 10 June 2009# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009

Key words labor process theory . labor power . control . skill . resistance . political economy

Labor Process Theory (LPT) in its modern postBraverman (1974) form has for over30 years influenced, to varying degrees and in different places, industrial sociology,industrial relations, labor history and organizational analysis. From the early 1980s itbecame the dominant approach to the study of work and the workplace in the UnitedKingdom and remains influential there, and in parts of Europe, Australasia and Canada.What accounts for this intellectual durability? Institutional supports such as an annualinternational conference (now in its 27th year) and a large scale publishing program (21volumes in various labor process series) have helped. But LPT has had to have hadsomething to say and a capacity for both innovation and resilience, as for over threedecades it has been deployed and expanded to produce critical perspectives on trends inglobal workplace developments. In some countries, notably the United States, it retained anarrow commentary on skill formation and destruction, but in Europe and Australasiaespecially, it has been the key touchstone for theorizing workplace reforms and innovation.

In accounts of the chronology of LPT it is common to refer to a number of overlappingphases or waves of labor process research and writing (Thompson and Smith 1999;Thompson and Newsome 2004). Beyond the early period of application and testing ofBravermanian precepts (deskilling and singular management control regimes especially),the second wave (mostly during the 1980s) involved a serious period of theory building inwhich different typologies of control were developed along with the argument thatresistance is inseparable from control, and secondly that consent is always part of human

Employ Respons Rights J (2009) 21:253262DOI 10.1007/s10672-009-9116-4

P. Thompson (*)Department of Human Resource Management, University of Strathclyde, 50 Richmond Street, Glasgow,Scotland G1 1XUe-mail: p.thompson@strath.ac.uk

C. Smith (*)School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK

labor processes. The work of Richard Edwards, Friedman, Burawoy are significant andlater 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 ofthese extensive research programmes (see Knights and Willmott 1990).

These second wave studies shared a similar sense of scope of analysis, seeking toelucidate patterns of management control by making connections between a number oflevels of action: workplace, the state, informal industrial relations and wider productionregimes. Part of the purpose was to make clear that particular outcomes, such asdeskilling and Taylorism were not laws of capitalist development, so much astendencies and historical patterns typical of some but not all capitalist societies. Moregenerally we could say that Labor and Monopoly Capital had undervalued the way thelabor process is embedded within socio-cultural contexts which lay out differing waysof putting together the employment relationship and the organization of the labor process.A core theory aimed to identify strong tendencies deriving from the structural propertiesof capitalist political economy but leave open to empirical investigation what particularmechanisms and outcomes were operative in particular conditions. So for example, thecore refers not to deskilling, but to the tendency for competition between capitals toresult in pressure for the cheapening the costs of labor and the continual transformation oflabor 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 betweencapitalism and labor-management regimes. As the introduction to a recent Canadian volumeof labor process-influenced writings has noted, during an incredibly fertile period ofanalysis, critical studies of work succeeded in pushing debates about work in advancedindustrialized nations in new directions, thereby ensuring a more nuanced, textured anddynamic understanding (Shalla 2007: 4). This was especially evident in a newgeneration of theory-led case studies of the workplacefor example, Nichols andArmstrong (1976), Nichols and Beynon (1977) as well as historical essays on thedevelopment of the labor process, as collected in Zimbalist (1979), and industrial relationsfieldwork case studies, best exemplified by Edwards and Scullion (1982). There were otherhistorical 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 thegendering of work, especially manufacturingPollert (1981), Cavendish (1982), Westwood(1984), and Cockburn (1983).

Despite these empirical gains, by the end of the 1980s LPT was already in a moredefensive mode theoretically, attempting to defend its ground against a number ofparadigm break perspectives that associated its propositions about Taylorism/Fordismwith the old economy. In a post-Fordist new world, traditional managerial controls andwork organization were inimical to new forms of competition, and as such LPT associatedwith these controls was also increasingly deemed to be old fashioned. Rule based andtechnical controls diminished or became softer as values became fashionable and skillsand knowledge increased in a new economy. Industrial relations were replaced withhuman resource management, mass production with flexible specialization, leanproduction and high performance work systems as the purpose of employer strategy.More importantly post-modern and post-structuralist variants of paradigm breakarguments tended to emphasize the diminishing significance of work itself and ofconflicting interests in the employment relationship. Reflecting the general cultural turnin theory and practice, the focus of attention shifted from work to identity andconsumption. We will examine the reaction to these moves and how LPT continued toadvance in reaction to these trends.

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Corrections and Complaints

The supposed need for skills in the new economy and paradigm shifts in production andmarkets were seen to have positive implications for workers in the labor process. Teamworkingin production implied a broadening of skills, and devolution of job discretion frommanagementto workers; congested mass markets, required product differentiation and accompanyingupskilling 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, notdetailed and skill-diminished ones. In the face of these challenges for much of the 1990s laborprocess research fought a necessary, if somewhat defensive battle to analyze the continuities andconstraints inside the reality of lean production, flexibility and other new managementpractices if not the hype. In contrast to the optimistic claims of workplace transformation thatremained stubbornly persistent in much of the managerially orientated literature, a wealth ofqualitative case study research inspired by LPT from North America (Parker and Slaughter1988; Milkman 1997) and the United Kingdom (Garrahan and Stewart 1992; Elger and Smith1994; Delbridge 1998) emerged to illustrate the dark side of these lean production regimes.These accounts, heavily reliant on the control/resistance framework for their theoreticalresources, reviewed the opportunities these new workplace regimes present to actively extendlabor control. Far from providing a replacement to the mind-numbing stress of massproduction, evidence suggested that flexibility systematically intensifies work by finding yetnew ways to remove obstacles to the extraction of effort. Moreover by restoring an emphasison the experience of employees, such research also demonstrated that workers continue toadopt an array of resistive responses to this extension of control.

Burying the positive claims for lean and flexibility did not mean that upskilling optimistsdisappeared. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things is that such scenarios periodicallyreappear, often in the same forms that Braverman originally critiqued (see Adler 2007). Inother words, they are reliant on proxies (such as qualifications or occupational shifts) fortheir optimistic claims. This has been particularly true for proponents of the knowledgeeconomy, dependent to a large extent on the quantitative assertion that the proportion ofknowledge is rapidly increasing, and as such so are the skills of so-called creativeknowledge workers. Labor process theorists have been in the forefront of refuting suchclaims (Fleming et al. 2004; Warhurst and Thompson 2006; and various papers inMcKinlay and Smith 2009), pointing to the large increase in routine service sector jobsreliant largely on social competenciesan issue that we return to later.

As we indicated above, the other major challenge faced by LPT flowed from the culturalturn in social theory and was manifested in two main ways. First through the growth ofconsumption and the spread of a service-based society in which production is sociologicallydisplaced analytically and work is negated empirically (Bauman 1998). Other research (e.g.Pettinger 2006) pointed to the continuing materiality of intangible services, from thescripted interactions and shelf-filling of typical jobs, to the chain of tasks that link theproduction, distribution and sale of commodities. As Warhurst et al. (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. Inother words, the penetration of capital into new areas of personal life and the globalizationand integration of information and communication technologies into work and leisure hasextended and deepened controls not diminished them.

Secondly, issues of culture and identity became the focal point of workplace dynamics inthis culture turn, with managers in search of culture change meeting employees desirous of

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secure identities in an unhappy middle (Willmott 1993; Casey 1995). Labor processresearch had, in fact, anticipated from an early stage the idea of a shift to soft(er) andsometimes indirect forms of control. In the previously-referred to research on leanproduction regimes, emphasis was put on attempts by management to pay increasedattention to the normative sphere in order to by-pass trade union representation andencourage worker identification with the company (Danford 1999). Drawing from the coreconcepts of the indeterminacy of labor and the structured antagonism between the interestsof capital and labor, LPT questioned the idea that the new wave of normative interventionsby management was actually successful in achieving significant levels of employeecommitment (Leidner 2006). Rather, normative controls remained as contradictory as anyother form of control situated within a capitalist labor process, evidence of underlyingstructural antagonisms that are latent, even within the most consensual of labormanagement regimes.

Core LPT Contributions

In sum, as capitalism and work were changing, LPT offered the critical study of work theanalytical and empirical tools to maintain the historic interest in the dynamics of workrelations and the connections between workplace and the wider social system. Howeverwithin a largely defensive discourse, there was limited theory building beyond the secondwave, but rather an insistence on the importance of core propositions: tools for analyzingthe 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 discoursesought to ring fence the autonomy of the capitalist labor process and institutionaldistinctiveness of the employment relationship. Hence the idiosyncratic and innovatorynature of second wave theory was facilitated by the concept of the dynamic of workplaceregulation having a relative autonomy (Edwards 1990) where the separation of capitalsmeant in each workplace workers and managers had, to an important extent, to work out orenact labor process organization. Thus despite the increasing global scale of the capitalistproduction, the workplace remained a site of autonomous action that the strong tradition ofcase study research continued to expose. But such action needed to be relocated withinmore layers of economic and institutional structure, because production and markets wereincreasingly stretched across this wider canvass. The upside of this perspective onworkplace autonomy was the critique it provided to grand claims of either permanentdeskilling or upskilling; the downside was to drift away from a systematic description of therelations between the labor process and structural trends in capitalist political economy. Wewill return to this issue later in the paper.

The new core theory also sought to retain a privileging of analysis of labor power andthe capital-labor relationship, without the burden of traditional Marxian assumptions aboutclass in the wider societal terrain. As one of us recently put it:

This does not mean a universal privileging over (for example, gender relations andthe family), but for an analysis of the dynamic interactions between political economyand workplace change. In this sense, LPT is more accurately described as a form ofcritical 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 thegravedigger of capitalism (Thompson 2009: 107).

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Capitalism requires labor power in order to expand; and labor power is a specialcommodity unlike fixed capital or raw materials, because: i. it is embodied within humanbeings; ii. it cannot be stored or banked; and iii. it has to be extracted through control andconsent in effort or wage bargains over the sale and conditions of sale of labor power asthe unique property of the worker. Labor power was sometimes noted by Marx to be theproperty of the workerbut it is property which is not like capital, as the latter has anobjective identity independent of the capitalist and appears in different forms. Rather laborpower is part of the person of the worker, who must internally divide or alienate his or herexistential self from the commodity labor power that he or she possess when enteringcapitalist employment and work relations. Thus the worker is internally divided because ofthe material inability to completely externalize the commodity labor power, which is withinhim or her as a purely latent force that requires a labor process to manifest or externalizefrom his or her self. There is an essential duality to labor power.

Given these features we can say that labor power is indeterminate (i.e. not fixed, settledand predictable) and in two senses: i. labor power has to be extracted from workers aseffort, and in competitive conditions this is through bargained consent and is thereforeopen-ended; and ii. free mobility of workers, creates uncertainties over labor supply toensure the daily and extended reproduction of labor power fit for productive use, whichcreates mobility bargaining opportunities and threats for both employers and workers(Smith 2006). LPT is principally concerned with exploring employer and worker strugglesover effort and mobility powers as two dimensions of labor power within capitalism as apolitical economy.

New Wave LPT Contributions

LPT has retained this emphasis on the core features of the dynamics of labor power, whilstseeking to apply them to the changing conditions of capitalist production. These can be callednewwave 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 ofrelatively low skill jobs in the contemporary economy, it is also necessary to recognize that thishas been accompanied by significant shifts in the definition and nature of skills. At the heart ofthese shifts has been the rise of generic or soft skills such as communication, adaptabilityand cooperativeness; often associated with the relentless rise of service work. There have beenlegitimate concerns raised about the status and depth of such characteristics, indeed whetherthey should be considered skills at all. It is true that they are more akin to attitudes, socialpredispositions and character traits rather than technical skills or expertise. The expandedconception of definition of skill also benefits capital more than labor. Employees or theeducation system are given the responsibility for skill development and maintainingemployability; 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 Bravermans craft-oriented understandings of skill remind usthat we need to maintain a focus on how the major economic actors seek to transform andutilize labor power, rather than read skills through a particular time and template. It is alsodifficult to deny that, together with the mobilization of employee tacit knowledge through

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practices such as team and project work, they are central sources of new labor power andproductivity. LPT has been at the forefront of research into these new sources: building onearlier concepts of emotional labor and emotional effort bargains (Bolton 2005, 2008), aswell as exploring how the body and aesthetic labor becomes a focal point of employer workinitiatives (Witz et al. 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 toshape employee identities has been associated with wider claims about a cultural turn. Atone level such arguments can be seen as a radical version of the mainstream argument inthe business and management literature that culture and the management of commitmenthave displaced control and bureaucracy. The outcome that individuals buy into thesystem 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 becomesthe site of indeterminacy. Post-modern perspectives in the labor process debate have alsobeen developed through Foucault-influenced case studies on work organization and newmanagement practices (Barker 1993; Sewell 1998).

However, case study research within LPT has addressed the issue of shifts to softer ormore indirect controls in both the service sector and manufacturing, whilst emphasizing thatnew practices were mainly added to traditional ones (see Thompson and Harley 2007). Afurther generation of researchers have been in the forefront of studies of call center work,noting the trend towards integrated systems of technical, bureaucratic and normativecontrols (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 hasbeen to take for granted that the identities held out by employers are attractive to workersand would uphold their sense of themselves as autonomous individuals. This raises issuesof agency and resistance.

New Forms of Agency

We have already referred to the post-modernist view that subjectivity is no longer asignificant source of resistance and that worker and managerial identity orientations stifledissent. In countering the post-modern view, the kind of traditional qualitative, case studyresearch undertaken by labor process researchers reminded us of the resilience of laboragency, but little was added to the traditional control, resistance and consent framework ofsecond wave theory.

That was provided initially by Ackroyd and Thompsons (1999) work on organizationalmisbehavior. This involved a systematic and distinctive mapping of worker action andagency 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 thatworkplace resistance was analytically distinct from class struggle and ratchet it down onenotch further (Ackroyd and Thompson 1999: 165), making more visible a further realm ofmore informal worker action. This is clearly influenced by the previously discussed view ofthe workplace having a degree of relative autonomy. The fact that issues of identity andmicro-level dimensions of action were fore grounded, opened up lines of communicationwith more sympathetic post-structuralists writing about irony and cynicism in the face of

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managerial discourses (Fleming and Spicer 2002), as well as encouraging labor processscholars to explore new understandings of issues such as sexual misconduct and workplacehumor as a form of cultural subversion (Taylor and Bain 2003). Similar approaches werealso developed in the United States by Hodson (1995, 2001), though utilizing the idea ofdignity at work as well as resistance. Taken together, the effect of new approaches has beento reassert the idea that employees remain knowledgeable about management intentions andoutcomes and retain the resources to resist, misbehave or disengage, as well as expandedthe conceptual and empirical repertoire of employee action.

New Types of Political Economy

The Canadian collection referred to earlier describes labor process and related contributionsas a political economy approach, concerned to develop a more complete and adequateexplanation of the complexities of work and its transformation in the post-industrial era byidentifying, analyzing and critiquing the power structures and social relations at work aswell 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 relativeautonomy of the labor process and the ultimately arid nature of many debates with post-structuralists and other paradigm warriors.

More recent writing within LPT has been seeking to restore these connections. Part ofthe effort has been focused on re-conceptualizing contemporary political economy as a newform of financialized capitalism rather than the more optimistic accounts of a new orknowledge economy (Thompson 2003). This is compatible with wider critical accounts ofthe rise of shareholder value growth regimes that rely on capital market metrics andmeasures toenforce ever increasing rates of dividend payments and appreciation in share price as markers offinancial performance (Lazonick and OSullivan 2000; Henwood 2003). Whilst the creditcrunch or financial tsunami has focused attention on the general nature and contradictions ofsuch economies, where LPT has added something distinctive is on the destabilizing effect ofthe pursuit of shareholder value on the management of work and employment relations.Shareholder value as a growth regime focuses on asset management and anticipated revenuestreams. With perpetual restructuringmanifested in downsizing, merger and acquisition anddelayeringthe norm in many sectors, it has become more difficult for management topursue 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 capitalsupplying the system to sustain it. Given the potential damage to the traditional socialcompact (or psychological contract in mainstream management terms), this creates fertileconditions for conflicts of interest between capital and labor in the current period.

A second set of re-connections to a wider political economy derive from the shrinking ofthe world, with production and markets being integrated on a scale never previouslywitnessed. This means objectively that the worker on the assembly line in Guangzhou islinked to the worker on the assembly line in Detroit. As such, analysis of the workplacerequires integration to keep pace with changes in the political economy of capitalism, butwithout reducing or privileging either space, or moving to an institutional perspective ofcapitalism that over-emphasizes the specificity of national variants, but without any senseof the singularity of the systemic features of the system as political economy (Smith andThompson 1998; Smith and Meiksins 1995; Elger and Smith 2005). In these geographicalshifts, we have witnessed writers connected to LPT for a long period, such as PaulEdwards, call for fusion of workplace research with critical realism, to enact multi-leveledanalysis to face the more multi-layered world (Edwards 2005).

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Conclusion

We have argued in this short contribution that LPT has shown considerable resilience to renewand develop itself in response to practical and intellectual challenges. At the heart of thisresilience and capacity for innovation is a focus on the dynamics of labor power withincapitalism. The central problematic of labor power is the inability of the employer to access thiscommodity without going through the person of worker. This is the basis of conflict becausethere is no stable agreement between worker and employer over the quantity and quality of laborpower that can be expended in a given period. This is a constantly changing equation givencompetition between capitals; competition between workers as owners of labor power; theconflict between technology and people; and themore or less constant striving after newways ofextracting more labor power through employers strategies of different typesdeskilling,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 lessskilled since the purpose of hiring labor power is to expand capital and if skilled labor ismore productive, then there are clear incentives to retain it within the firm. Of course onestrategy for expansion might be to cheapen the costs of labor power by reducing the labortime necessary for its reproduction. But equally another strategy is to move into newbranches of industry with more skilled labor power and earn more surplus throughinnovation. But given that the labor process can also enhance the external market value ofthe commodity labor power-through training, specialization, access to new information andknowledge (through the arts and skills of the occupation as well as access to new workthrough social networks formed in the workplace) then there is a more or less permanentstruggle between workers and employers over the valuation of labor power, which is alsoanother way of describing the issue of employer control and worker resistance.

In contemporary industry, skill formation takes many forms-through occupational jurisdic-tions; internal labor markets within large organizations; social networks tied to particular places orindustries; employers banding together to share training burdens (Crouch 2005). Bravermansthesis on skill degradation through the continued separation between head and hand (conceptualand operational skills) misses new areas of accumulation that are constantly innovated withincapitalism through its international expansion and technological dynamism. One key area, aswe have noted, is the qualitative intensification of labor through more flexible and expandeduse of worker capacities and tacit knowledge. More demanding work (Green 2006) is afundamental and often inequitable shift in the effort bargain, particularly as the elasticnature 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 onecontrol strategy, or one elevating one type of resistance or ideal workplace, and demonstratedthat it is an intellectual resource that continues to expose new management fashions to criticalinterrogation. We stressed the importance of some core conceptssuch as the indeterminacyof labor power and the dualism of labor within capitalismand have noted that theinteraction between these new trends and the re-mapping, remaking and recalcitrance of laborpower remains central to the development of capitalism.

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Waving, Not Drowning: Explaining and Exploring the Resilience of Labor Process TheoryCorrections and ComplaintsCore LPT ContributionsNew Wave LPT ContributionsNew Dimensions of SkillNew Forms of ControlNew Forms of AgencyNew Types of Political Economy

ConclusionReferences

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