Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

Oxford Handbooks Online

Perspectives on Labor Process Theory  
Paul Thompson and Damian P. OʼDoherty
The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies
Edited by Mats Alvesson, Todd Bridgman, and Hugh Willmott

Print Publication Date: Jan 2011

Subject: Business and Management, Organizational Theory and Behaviour, Research Methods
Online Publication Date: Sep 2009 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199595686.013.0005

Abstract and Keywords

Theoretical perspectives are invariably partial, comprising variants and factions. There is
a legacy of debate and disputation in critical theory. In the case of labour-process theory
(LPT), development has taken the form of a heated debate in recent years between
structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives. To reflect this position, proponents of the
two variants – Paul Thompson and Damian O'Doherty – present a short half-article on
their respective approach and understanding of labour-process theory so that the article
as a ‘whole’ conveys a sense of a perspective in ferment. Rather than replay the original
debates, the contributors have been sensibly asked to consider the following: (1) What is
LPT and what kind of problems (as a theory) is it intended to address/solve? (2) How
successful has it been in addressing those problems and issues? and (3) What are the
actual and potential relationships between LPT and CMS?

Keywords: critical theory, labour-process theory, structuralist perspectives, poststructuralist perspectives, Paul
Thompson, Damian O'Doherty

Editorial Note
THEORETICAL perspectives are invariably partial, comprising variants and factions.
There is a legacy of debate and disputation in critical theory. In the case of labor process
theory (LPT), development has taken the form of a heated debate in recent years between
structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives. To reflect this position, we have invited
proponents of the two variants—Paul Thompson and Damian OʼDoherty—to each present
a short half-chapter on their respective approach and understanding of labor process
theory so that the chapter as a “whole” conveys a sense of a perspective in ferment.

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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

Rather than replay the original debates, the contributors have been sensibly asked to
consider the following:

• What is LPT and what kind of problems (as a theory) is it intended to address/solve?
• How successful has it been in addressing those problems and issues?
• What are the actual and potential relationships between LPT and CMS?

I Paul Thompson: Labor Process Theory

(p. 100)

and Critical Management Studies

Labor process theory (LPT) is conventionally and rightly listed as one of the analytical
resources for critical management studies (CMS). Yet, the relationships between the two
have been, in the words of a classic of the former, a contested terrain. This is hardly
surprising. Even if we set aside the inevitable multiplicity of perspectives, there is a
tension in potential objects of analysis. Before CMS burst on to the scene, LPT was being
criticized at its peak of influence in the 1980s for paying too much attention to
management and too little to capital (ism) and labor. This was sometimes attributed to the
location of many of the protagonists (in the UK at least) in business schools, but was,
more likely a reflection of wider theoretical and ideological divides.

Throughout the 1990s a battle took place—“the labor process debate”—between what
some would regard as the materialist and poststructuralist participants inside and outside
the annual UK-based conference. The emergence of a separate CMS conference and
related initiatives was shaped, in part, by the nature and outcomes of those debates.
Where do we stand now—to what extent is LPT part of, separate from or hostile to CMS?

It is important to make one qualification about the debates discussed below. As social
theory so clearly indicates, institutions matter. The existence and location of an annual
and successful labor process conference and book series based in the UK has meant that
a particular weight is given to theorizing and research within its boundaries. Yet clearly
the conference, critical theory and research and LPT are not the same things. For
example, there are lively traditions of LP scholarship in North America that have
proceeded on overlapping but often very distinctive paths (e.g. Shalla and Clement 2007).
Whilst some effort will be made to refer to a wider set of debates, in a short review of this
kind, the scope for doing so will inevitably be limited and our focus must be the LPT-CMS
interface.

The Theory: Territory, Tensions, and Tantrums

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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

What is LPT and what does its “field” consist of? It is convention to refer to a number of
“waves” of development (see Thompson and Newsome 2004). The first wave is seen as
Braverman and supportive arguments, the second as the major studies from Richard
Edwards, Friedman, Burawoy, Littler, and others that followed in its wake from the late
1970s to the late 1980s. Perhaps more controversially, we could identify an overlapping
third wave over the following decade characterized largely by a series of paradigm wars
between, on the one hand, LPT and a number (p. 101) of “new production and society”
perspectives such as flexible specialization and post-Fordism, and on the other within
those attending the annual conference about territory and tasks. It is in the second
category of the third wave that the UK-based “labor process debate” took place. This
debate was initially between consolidators and reconstructionists. The former saw the
second wave as consisting of a number of common concepts vital for analyzing the
trajectories of capitalist economies and work systems, but in danger of being drowned in
a welter of seemingly contradictory empiricist case studies about skill, control, and
related issues. The main proposed solution was the development of a core theory that
synthesized and extended the insights of post-Braverman research with a view to
producing more or less coherent statements of what the contemporary labor process
looked like and the conceptual tools to understood it.

In the influential Labour Process Theory volume published at the end of the decade
(Knights and Willmott 1990), this was the clear intent of a number of the contributors—
notably myself, Paul Edwards, and Craig Littler (all 1990). In my case, that involved the
elaboration of a core theory based on a number of propositions about the structural
characteristics of the capitalist labor process that shaped and constrained workplace
relations. Part of the purpose was to distinguish between identification of strong
tendencies deriving from those structures and mechanisms and particular outcomes, such
as deskilling and Taylorism, with which LPT had become associated because of the
influence of Braverman. So for example, the core referred to a control imperative given
that market mechanisms alone cannot address the indeterminacy of labor (the conversion
of labor power into profitable work), rather than specifying a particular control strategy.
The core theory became a reference point for many later studies and we will return to its
character and status later. However, in that same volume, the two editors, in separate but
mutually supportive chapters, put forward a very different conception of territory and
task: “the systematic reconstruction of labour process theory…to develop a more
adequate, materialist theory of subjectivity” (Willmott 1990: 337). Thus was born the “the
missing subject” debate,

There was some common ground between consolidators and reconstructionists. Both
agreed that Braverman's preference for analyzing only the objective characteristics of the
capital—labor relationship had left a hole where agency and subjectivity should have
been, but differed sharply on how it should be filled, Consolidators tended to believe that
(re) inserting resistance, the capacity of creativity in labor power and the importance of
consent (Burawoy 1979) as part of the range of worker responses to its commodity status
was a substantial, if not wholly sufficient contribution to a revised LPT. For Knights,
Willmott, and their collaborators, such developments, particularly Burwaoy's emphasis on
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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

consent, was an advance on objectivism, but nowhere near enough. At first this was
framed in terms of “complementing” a structural analysis through a focus on the
subjective conditions that facilitate the reproduction of capitalism.

In itself, this is uncontroversial, but there are three problems. First, are the
(p. 102)

chosen means. It may have been “materialist,” but the raw material was a discussion of
existential problems of identity and power located in the general human condition.
Second, there was a substantive displacement effect through the rejection of all of the
available resources of LPT and search for new ones, initially in critical theory and then,
increasingly in Foucault and post-structuralism. Every critique more or less followed the
same path—well-known labor LPT texts would be picked over and critiqued with same
ultimate punchline—the absence of an adequate theory of subjectivity. Third, though
issues of subjective reproduction of capitalism and work relations are a sub-plot, they are
not the plot. It is necessary to address and explain the changing political economy of
capitalism, something that poststructuralists have generally shown little interest in.

Whilst Marx, Braverman, and others were extensively and knowledgeably discussed in
papers by Knights and Willmott, this was reconstruction without building on or from any
prior empirical or theoretical foundations. As a result of these problems, the 1990s
debate was not actually about the labor process. That it was presented as the “labor
process debate” was an accident of history—a convergence of two factors. The first, that
the Labor Process Conference was the focal point for most critical scholarship on work,
employment and organization and, therefore, provided the textual resources for debate.
Second, that Hugh Willmott and David Knights were, for a long time, its prime movers.
They and their various colleagues have produced a large body of work. Some of the more
empirically-based work is closer to mainstream labor process concerns (Knights and
McCabe 2000; Ezzamel, Willmott, and Worthington 2001). Nevertheless, my contention is
that their main interest was less the labor process itself than in critiquing labor process
theory in order to take it somewhere else— as we have seen, towards a general theory of
subjectivity.

Let's return to the proposition of a core theory. Space prevents a discussion of its content
(Jaros (2005) gives a very fair account), so I want to focus on the idea of a core. Whilst
extensively used, it always caused a certain amount of anguish. Critics of a core tend to
deny that LPT has an “essence” and describe any attempt to theorize one as a rhetorical
move to marginalize or exclude dissenting voices. If you believe that all the world is a text
and we are all mere players in language games, then theory can be anything you want it
to be. But if, on the other hand you believe that the world consists of real structures and
relations that require particular analytical resources to explain them, theory must be
about something. In terms of a core, we can debate what features, what powers, and what
effects in what circumstances. But it is difficult to imagine a credible LPT that does not
start from some attempt to elucidate the characteristic features of capitalist political
economy and their potential causal powers, mediated by labor market and other
institutions and the strategies of economic actors, with respect to work relations.

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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

Though there are exceptions (Gibson-Graham 1996), poststructuralists do not

(p. 103)

generally produce work that tries to address “structure problems,” for example the
changing nature of regimes of accumulation, state formations, the organizational forms of
the contemporary firm. Such things are only glimpsed indirectly through the foggy lens of
discourse. Nor do they recognize labor as an agency with distinctive (though discursively
articulated) interests in the employment relationship. Rather they focus on the general
indeterminacy of human agency, expressed primarily in concerns about identity. As they
progressed, the 1990s conflicts became a variant on the more general paradigm wars
between materialists and poststructuralists and for many reconstruction of LPT became a
casualty of a more general rejection of the former framework. As Delbridge notes, “While
rarely carrying the LPT banner, these debates rumble on, particularly on the ontological
status of social structures and over duality and dualisms” (2006:1210).

Amongst the exceptions have been OʼDoherty and Willmott particularly in the Sociology
(2001) paper, their last significant attempt to intervene in the “labor process debate.”
They presented their arguments as a post but not anti-structural way out of the “impasse”
in LPT. However, the paper largely rehearsed the same critiques of “structuralism” and
arguments of a decade earlier: subjectivity is the source of capitalism and its
reproduction (p. 461), the system's individualizing tendencies accentuate existential
insecurity and exploitative relations are immanent in the human condition. At the end
they declare that they have “stopped short of abandoning the central concerns and
familiar linguistic terrains of labor process analysis” (p. 472). But the paper had already
revealed that capital and labor are viewed as only as “signifiers,” useful for their
“epistemological convenience” (p. 466) rather than as conceptual building blocks of
explanation. Nor, as Friedman (2004) demonstrates, have their methods changed. Having
exhausted the classics, OʼDoherty and Willmott turn to less well-known pieces by Sosteric
and Ezzy to pick apart and then chastise for the standard sins of not understanding
subjectivity properly. Friedman goes on to observe that it would be better to develop
approaches to subjectivity in the labor process that build on rather than dismissing
previous work. This is the theme of the next section.

Theory Building: Successes and Sins

Contrary to what OʼDoherty and Willmott (2001: 466), LPT is not primarily a
“discourse”—it is, or should be, a theory building project. The existence of an “impasse”
at a meta-theoretical level does not prevent theory building through research programs
associated with the “consolidated” form of LPT. Such interventions have typically
proceeded from the following questions:

• Has there been a shift in managerial strategies towards normative controls,

(p. 104)

what might such controls consist of, towards what are they directed (reshaping
identities and/or interests) and how successful have they been?

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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

• To what extent has labor retained a capacity for resistance or dissent, what forms is
that resistance taking and how successful are they?

Whilst this way of addressing issues is clearly conceptually distinctive, it does offer
opportunities for common empirical or conceptual meeting points between the rival
perspectives.
The idea that there has been a shift in control regimes away from traditional Taylorism,
Fordism, and bureaucracy toward those in which management use value-based practices
to shape employee identities has been associated with wider claims about a “cultural
turn.” However, as Thompson and Harley (2007) have demonstrated, from the mid-1980s
onwards LPT had anticipated the idea of a shift to soft (er) and sometimes more indirect
controls. Though associated with the service sector and, for instance, control through
customers (Fuller and Smith 1991), LP researchers highlighted the way that under lean
production regimes, management focuses more on the normative sphere in order to by
pass trade union representation and encourage worker identification with the company
(e.g., Danford 1998). A further generation of researchers have been in the forefront of
studies of call centre work, noting the trend towards integrated systems of technical,
bureaucratic, and normative controls (Callaghan and Thompson 2002), intended to create
an “assembly line in the head” (Taylor and Bain 1999), within a characteristic high-
commitment, low-discretion model (Houlihan 2002). A similar story of expanded
categories to take LPT beyond conventional wage-effort transactions and into analysis of
new sources of labor power and emotional effort bargains can also be told (Bolton 2008).

Despite this degree of common argument, mainstream LP research has consistently

criticized claims made by HRM and many poststructuralist writers concerning the extent
and effectiveness of normative controls. With reference to extent, emphasis has been put
on the continued presence and often centrality of traditional controls. More pertinent to
the debates in this chapter, doubts have been cast on assumptions that management can
shape identities in a way that overcomes divergent interests and the associated actual
and potential worker resistance (and see Ezzamel, Willmott, and Worthington 2004). Such
arguments can be found in well-known studies such as Casey (1995), whose Foucauldian-
influenced perspective produces the view that that new organizational discourses and
practices produce designer employees and “corporatized selves.” As Leidner (2006)
notes, such perspectives take for granted that the identities held out by employers are
attractive to workers and would uphold their sense of themselves as autonomous
individuals.

Issues of culture and identity are certainly important in some contexts, but are
(p. 105)

seen as new sources of contestation. Whilst such observations are consistent with wider
survey and case study evidence on the limited nature of attitudinal transformation in the
context of organizational restructuring and change programs, it is one of the distinctive
strengths of LPT that it can draw on the central concept of the indeterminacy of labor to
show that control can never be complete and is always contestable. Whilst
poststructuralists draw on a notion of indeterminacy, it refers largely to the existential
insecurity of individuals (and the self-defeating character of resistance) rather than the

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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

specific characteristics of labor power under capitalism. Within LPT, this theoretical
orientation has been strengthened by new inputs, notably Ackroyd and Thompson's
(1999) mapping of organization misbehavior in which identity is key territory in which
management and employees compete to appropriate material and symbolic resources.
The new categories have been successfully applied in studies such as Taylor and Bain's
(2003) account of how call-center workers use humor and other informal action as a tool
of resistance.

It would be unfair not to acknowledge that there has been a drawing back from
deterministic readings of Foucault and the (self-) disciplining effects of discourse and
surveillance. In a widely-cited paper, Thomas and Davies (2005) argue that individuals
are not passive recipients of discourses, but resist (in this case the discourses of new
public management), utilizing the tensions between different subject positions. However,
they explicitly critique and reject conceptions inspired by “negative” labor process theory,
as such studies reply on an oppositional (and “dualistic”) conceptualization of resistance
as the outcome of structural relations of antagonism between capital and labor. Whilst the
rediscovery of resistance is welcome, as Fleming and Spicer note, in moving from a
situation where resistance was nowhere to it being everywhere, CMS runs the “risk of
reducing resistance to the most banal and innocuous everyday actions” (2007: 3). LPT
would argue that this trivialization of resistance arises, in part, from its removal from the
context of the employment relationship and the potentially divergent interests therein.

In contrast, mainstream LPT demonstrates a research program that maintains continuity

with core theory, a capacity to respond to new empirical conditions and for incremental
conceptual innovation. That is not to say that there are no sins of omission and
commission, but these have been openly recognized and discussed (Smith and Thompson
1998). Even on the “missing subject” territory, there are welcome signs that scholars
sympathetic to labor process approaches have been developing more materialist readings
of identity that connect macro structures of political economy with micro-level concerns
of everyday life (Leidner 2006; Webb 2006:194), as well as seeking to link the formation
of identity and interests together in a common conceptual schema (Jenkins and Delbridge
2007; Thompson and Marks 2007).

(p. 106) LPT and CMS: Past, Present, Future

Looking back, it is possible to view LPT as a territory where those critical of mainstream
approaches could gather and debate—a forerunner, in other words, of critical
management studies. This war of words now takes place largely across the trenches of
rival conferences, journals and networks. LPT and CMS now compete for the radical work
and organizations franchise, particularly in Europe and the US.

But is this competition a paradigm war or peaceful co-existence? The answer depends
largely whether CMS is conceived in big or small tent terms. A recent comprehensive
mapping of the territory by Adler, Forbes, and Willmott (2007) makes a heroic attempt at

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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

the former. It outlines even-handedly the heterogeneous theoretical resources

contributing to CMS and gives a prominent role to LPT. The paper also pushes forward a
reasonably consensual perspective to address the question critical of what? And it
answers in terms of the varied structures of domination and inequality, as well as seeking
to change management practices.

However, if we interrogate the “critical of what” issue more closely the fault lines shift
from a simple critical versus mainstream. The summaries provided by Adler, Forbes, and
Willmott of postmodernism/poststructuralism reinforce what we already know—that such
perspectives include many “critical” theories— including Marxism – in their definition of
the mainstream. This is because the “other” is modernism (which is taken as
incorporating capitalism, though not reduced to it) and positivism. Amongst the evils
attributed to these “isms” are belief in rational (social) scientific enquiry, a reality
independent of our perceptions, and so-called meta-narratives that seek to order and
explain broad social and historical patterns.

It is unarguable that most of the leading figures in CMS adhere to the social
constructionist approaches that generate such critique. Where this is dominant, it leads,
intentionally or otherwise, to a small tent version of CMS in which its radicalism is
epistemological rather than ontological. In other words, the focus of the critical is more
on the way that the studies are done than the position and practices of management.
Though doubts about the substantive claims made about the world by mainstream
scholars may be the starting point of critique, the ultimate focus tends to be on the means
of and motives for making them.

I have argued elsewhere (Thompson 2004) against a restrictive branding of CMS,

particularly as articulated by Fournier and Grey (2000). Hyper-reflexivity about our own
labor processes and radical relativism concerning knowledge claims are not adequate
ways of challenging managerialism in theory or practice. Whilst some contributors
maintain an interest in social change and emancipation, too much small tent CMS tends
towards self-referential textual games and (often obscure) meta-theorizing, whose
emphasis on deconstruction and denaturalization problematizes everything and resolves
nothing. As a result epistemological radicalism makes it harder to conduct debates
through common categories and criteria. The (p. 107) “impasse” in the 1990s labor
process debate was as much to do with lacking any common means of addressing and
resolving contending claims as the arguments themselves, some of which, as we saw
earlier, had more in common than sometimes thought.

If we dig beneath this somewhat asymmetric warfare, a genuine difference of territory

and theoretical orientation emerges. Whilst I entirely accept the distinction between
studying management as category and practice and managerialism as discourse and
perspective, the focus of criticality on management is inherently partial and restrictive.
Even for those of us who work in business schools, the broader social sciences, rather
than the Academy of Management, should set the context for critical engagement. This
relates to the previously noted tension concerning an overemphasis on management

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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

strategy rather than capital-labor relations and wider circuits of capital. One dimension of
the core theory emphasizes that given the role of the labor process in generating the
surplus and as a central part of human experience in acting on the world and reproducing
the economy, the role and experiences of labor and the capital-labor relationship is
privileged for analysis. This does not mean a universal privileging over (for example,
gender relations and the family), but for an analysis of the dynamic interactions between
political economy and workplace change. In this sense, LPT is more accurately described
as a form of critical labor studies, but without the teleological emphasis on labor as a
universal, liberating class destined by its location in the process of production to be the
gravedigger of capitalism.

Finally, the test of a good theory is, ultimately, whether it explains a particular reality in a
more complex and comprehensive way than its rivals, and gives us some tools for
changing it. Fetishizing being critical per se is ultimately a sectarian cul-de-sac and fails
to address the issue that in some spheres of academic life, such as organization theory (at
least in Europe) CMS is now the mainstream.

Conclusion

In a review in 1990 Gibson Burrell remarked that as a classic narrative, LPT “no longer
put bums on seats” (p. 294). It is certainly true that LPT has long ceased to be
fashionable and a lot of bands and wagons have passed us by on the other side of the
road. Whilst the continuing success of the conference might be considered by some as
institutional inertia, there is plenty of evidence that the perspectives influence and
inspire a body of relevant and radical work about the many facets of the politics of
production. Reviewing a number of recent books, Delbridge notes, “There is nothing
particularly novel in this agenda. These remain the core features of labour process
analysis and so they should…critical and theoretically informed research into the labour
process, its contexts and outcomes, retains a central place” (2006:1219).

This is not just a question of core features, but of theory. As Jaros (2005: 23) has
(p. 108)

noted, the core theory discussed earlier has survived postmodernist and orthodox
Marxian critiques as a “robust perspective from which to study the dynamics of capitalist
production.” However, I also agree with Jaros and with other sympathetic commentators
(Elger 2001; Smith 2006) that it is underspecified and requires some reworking and
expansion, for example to incorporate better understandings of the dynamics of corporate
competition, labor markets and mobility.

Though there will inevitably be some requirement for meta-theoretical debates and
critique of new economy perspectives of various kinds, mainstream LPT has to learn and
move on from paradigm wars. Previous waves have been marked by foundation,
consolidation and innovation. LPT needs to go through a serious, integrative theory
building phase, elucidating patterns and propositions discovered through relevant
research programs (see Thompson and Harley 2007). Though, as Willmott, Knights, and

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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

others have never tired of reminding us, the reproduction of capitalist political economy
is accomplished through agency, the “greatest task” is not a theory of the missing subject.
It is (to quote Talking Heads) the same as it ever was: to develop a credible account of the
relationships between capitalist political economy, work systems and the strategies and
practices of actors in the employment relationship.

II Damian P. OʼDoherty: Retrieving the

“Missing Subject” in Labor Process Analysis:
Towards Emancipation and Praxis
Subjectivity and identity refers to those dimensions of the labor process in which
individuals and their collective associations are preoccupied with the interpretation of
experience and the mobilization of organizational and “world-making” action based upon
these interpretations. Labor process theorists use the term “subjectivity” to delineate the
cognitive and sensuous, emotional qualities of individuals that mediate and stimulate
reflexive self-consciousness and wider sense-making activities associated with being-in-
the-world (Heidegger 1962). “Identity” refers to that sense of uniqueness and
distinctiveness we believe defines the essence of our individuality. These interests in
subjectivity and identity are informed by a reading of critical and existential social-
psychology (e.g. Fromm 1942; Laing 1965; Lasch 1979), and relate to those traditions of
phenomenological sociology that sought to extend the philosophical work of Edmund
Husserl (1859–1938) and Alfred Schutz (p. 109) (1899–1959). Various forms of sociology
build upon this phenomenology and have helped contribute to the development of this
distinctive form of labor process analysis including “ethnomethodology” (Garfinkel 1967),
symbolic interactionism (Blumer 1969), and the dramaturgical analysis of social relations
developed by Erving Goffman (1967).

Drawing on these traditions, a series of studies by colleagues based around the

“Manchester School” (Collinson, Contu, Grey, Kerfoot, Knights, McCabe, OʼDoherty,
Sturdy, Willmott, Worthington, Wray-Bliss) challenge romantic interpretations of
shopfloor resistance to show how many forms of conflict and struggle in the labor process
actually help to supplement and indeed support a conservative and hegemonic
managerial control of organization. The illusory quest for identity and its confirmation
provides one of the key analytical motifs of this approach helping to explain the
complexity and paradoxical nature of workplace resistance. Developments in the
Manchester School approach have more recently turned to a range of post-existential and
post-dualistic literature including the mid-period and later work of Michel Foucault, the
deconstructive writings of Derrida, the poststructuralism of Laclau and Mouffe, and the
feminist analysis of Henriques et al. (1984), Judith Butler (1990), and Ann Game (1991).
We will see how these developments in retrieving the “missing subject” help open up

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sources of volatility and disorder in organization inaccessible to the traditions of core

theory.

The Making of the Labor Process (Debate): Another Politics of

Production

The ongoing disciplinary project of making “the labor process,” both as an object of
enquiry and a site of practical action and intervention, remind us how we have to be
taught to “see” and talk about the labor process. Classic studies in the ethnography and
sociology of work show how this education is made available through apprenticeship and
socialization on the “shopfloor” (Beynon 1973; Nichols and Beynon 1977; Burawoy 1979;
Pollert 1981). Less widely accepted is the argument that academic theory also contributes
to a disciplinary formation providing discourse and concepts for students to speak about
and make sense of the world in terms of a “labor process.” Academics and practitioners
alike collude in producing and reproducing discourse that secures the labor process as an
object of scholarly enquiry and political praxis. Reflexivity is often acknowledged by
proponents of core theory but remains little more than polite lip service that elides and
misunderstands the full import of its practice (see Blum 1974; Ashmore 1989). A capacity
to suspend doubt in the representational and constitutive effects of power/knowledge
encourages analysis to be more open to the ambiguity and complexity of organization and
helps destabilize the managerial reifications that condition and restrict (p. 110)
opportunities for struggle and change. This is one of the major intellectual advances
offered by the treatment of subjectivity and identity developed in the Manchester School.

Core theory tends to confine its study of the labor process to the analyses of wage-effort
bargaining and a depiction of the organizational outcomes secured by economic
calculation. In so doing it misses important dimensions of social relations through which
organization is rendered fragile and precarious. Indeed, the pragmatic and materialist
preoccupation with wage levels and the terms and conditions of employment may actually
reinforce the logic and discipline of capitalist organization. Attending to the dynamic play
of subjectivity and identity in work organization allows research to re-vision struggle in
more expansive and “existential” terms and helps to develop what Foucault calls a
“thinking otherwise.” Recontextualizing the subject outside the restrictive economy of
what core theory calls a “structured antagonism” encourages sensitivity to lines of
connectivity and affective relationality through which the subject contracts and mediates
the wider forces and desires of “Being.”

As this chapter-half progresses we will endeavor to enter this wider realm of

“organization” from where we can better explore the disciplinary limits of core theory. We
find that there is not only indeterminacy in empirical “labor processes” but also
indeterminacy in how such processes are represented once analysis takes seriously this
excess of organization. The “labor process” escapes discursive control when working with
such reflexive awareness and thereby helps resist the intellectual and theoretical
collusion with a “managerialist” reification of organization. This temptation is one that

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core theory finds difficult to avoid. Critical management studies, on the other hand,
proves attractive in part because it seems to offer a more open space for discursive and
conceptual development free from the weight of associations sedimented in the discourse
of labor process analysis. Writing is then given chance to transgress the restrictions of
normal science so that it might work towards a subversion of our co-implication in
(re)producing the labor process as subject/object of enquiry.

Manufacturing Consent: The Limitations of Sociological Dualism

The development of empirical research that has worked outside the conventions of core
labor process theory maintains an openness to phenomena in work organization that
cannot easily be classified according to the dualistic presuppositions of orthodox labor
process theory where structure is opposed by agency, management is pitted against labor,
and control is confronted by resistance. Burawoy's (1979) interest in how consent is
organized or “manufactured” in the labor process was (p. 111) central to the articulation
of this thinking. In his ethnographic study of Allied, Burawoy found that consent was
secured not so much by management design or intention but by a form of collusive and
collective action through which individuals were able to acquire a sense of competence
and dignity by “making-out” or meeting and exceeding production targets (Burawoy
1979: 46–94). In ways that chimed with the work of Willis (1977), who showed how
rebellion amongst working-class children ensured that they got working-class jobs,
Burawoy noted that “we were active accomplices in our own exploitation” (Burawoy 1985:
10). Work was turned into a game of making-out that required all kinds of interpersonal
skills of negotiation, persuasion, and deal-making. As individuals sought to evaluate one
another in terms of their capacity to succeed and “make out,” status hierarchies and
social stigma emerged consolidating a social system that helped secure and obscure the
extraction of surplus value.

What Burawoy does not answer, however, is the question why employees want to appear
successful and to be held in high regard by their colleagues and peers. Burawoy is
seemingly unable to move beyond the naturalized and mundane, commonsensical idea
that individuals seek relative satisfactions from tedious work by pursuing such things as
peer-group recognition and status. Such a superficial and unpersuasive “compensatory”
account of identity undermines the critical coherence and credibility of his contribution.
Collinson (1992) extends the work of Burawoy by building on the theoretical analyses of
Knights and Willmott (1983, 1985, 1989) and a related series of pioneering empirical
studies of labor process conducted in the financial services industry (Collinson and
Knights 1986; Knights and Collinson 1987; Knights and Sturdy 1989). His study of Slavs
shows how an understanding of subjectivity and identity is central to a full explanation of
the behavioral and organizational nature of the capitalist labor process. Typically
romanticized in labor process study, Collinson shows how working-class shopfloor culture
can be vicious and victimizing in its defense of these privileged norms and values. His
studies help explain why employees want to appear successful and to be held in high

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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

regard by their colleagues and peers and is so doing goes further than Burawoy,
proposing a non-essentialist and existential theory of subjectivity and identity.

In simple terms, non-essentialist conceptions of subjectivity understand identity as a

historically relative and contingent condition of possibility—to which individuals are
variously subscribed and invested. This conceptual innovation is important because it
alerts empirical research to forms of struggle and resistance where identity is
disconfirmed and draws attention to the ways in which subjects deal with this denial and
negation. Collinson argues that the precarious nature of wagelabor stokes up basic
anxieties and insecurities associated with the “primordial” and existential nature of
being-in-the-world. This anxiety is deemed to stimulate forms of individualized ego-
defence that become manifest as destructive projection (i.e., what Collinson calls “critical
narcissism”) and efforts to maintain socially (p. 112) valued forms of personal identity.
These struggles take us beyond the most obvious expressions of management/labor wage-
effort bargaining to reveal the (absent) presence of deferred and displaced features of the
labor process. His study shows how a pervasive system of “competitive” masculine humor
consolidates a form of group discipline that helps to maintain the values and norms of
hard-work, honesty, practical “common sense,” and productiveness. These are values
which, paradoxically, support a conservative status quo and assist managerial
exhortations to production and output.

Confusion arises when individuals assume that these values are somehow “authentic” or
real, reflecting an inner autonomous essence that is product of their own biography and
unique personality and therefore something that can be acquired, possessed, and
defended (Knights and Willmott 1989). The quest for the realization or confirmation of
identity inevitably exacerbates the competitive and systemic effects of power and
inequality especially evident in contemporary forms of consumer capitalism where media
and advertizing is complicit in circulating images of an idealized ego-self. Individuals
remain vulnerable, therefore, to regressive and reactive forms of behavior that dispel the
sense of anxiety and insecurity. Insecurity and identity are best seen, therefore, as
parasitical on each other. These self-defeating routines that Collinson identifies can only
be effectively challenged if subjects are able to penetrate the more intangible and
abstract realms of social relations where one's sense of self is revealed as illusory and
historically contingent. In the absence of critical self-reflexivity subjects will tend to
behave in ways that inevitably reproduce and amplify conditions of insecurity and anxiety.
This self-defeating nature of resistance in the labor process poses a serious problem for
core-theory.

One way in which we might excavate and delineate these contingent and precarious
“foundations” of identity is by listening to workers and attending closely to their behavior
and activity in the labor process. In this endeavor, empirical research must seek to avoid
an over-hasty desire to objectify and label or categorize phenomena as evidence of
worker resistance or managerial control. Instead, analysis is better served where
researchers are mindful of the possible inconsistencies, contradictions, ambiguities, and
tensions of empirical data. Whether this data takes the form of observation, ethnographic

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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

field notes, interview transcripts, or other documents, these artefacts provide occasion
for insight into the provisional and processual contingency of phenomena. In this respect,
a careful reading of Collinson helps show how subjects are rarely consistent or unified in
terms of “identity” or economic class—such as “manager” or “waged labor.” We see how
“manager” or “worker” is not an entity or category, but rather emergent phenomena
always in the process of being defined by individuals and collectives preoccupied with
doing (Garfinkel 1967) manager or worker. Through various forms of “impression
management” (Goffman 1959) and identity-affirming exercises individuals represent and
display for one another their managerial or worker credentials.

(p. 113) Developing Poststructural Analyses of Struggle and Resistance

More recent contributions to the understanding of subjectivity and identity in labor

process analysis have proceeded along three main lines. First, there are those who have
worked with the ideas of Foucault to develop the traditions of ethnographic and case-
study empirical research. These studies help to show the precarious nature of subjectivity
and identity by examining the ways in which subjects get “discursively” constituted. This
conceptual opening to labor process study allows us to see how resistance and consent
are not mutually distinctive but instead entangled and co-implicated. Identity is often
“subjugated” by self-disciplinary modes of self-understanding, reflection and conduct
(through practices of HRM and corporate culture, for example), but this discipline always
remains provisional and incomplete generating unpredictable and often contradictory
efforts to stabilize and confirm one's sense of self. In their study of MultiBank, Knights
and McCabe (2000) show how managerial power can never be exhaustive, in part
because subjectivity can never be discursively “completed” or fixed. This makes the
dynamics of organizational behavior complex and volatile. Struggles for power and
control are shown to be diffuse and multidirectional, lateral and transversal across social
relations, “circulating” in ways more complex than allowed for in the predominant top-
down conception of power and its dualistic mode of power/resistance.

The ethnographic research of Ezzamel, Willmott, and Worthington (2001, 2004, 2008)
also bears the influence of Foucault to show how research interested in the question of
subjectivity does not necessarily lead to a retreat from political economy. Their study of
Northern Plant shows how one can integrate the traditional sociological themes of
shopfloor labor process study (concerned with the detail of work practices) with wider
changes in capital ownership, work technology and financial accounting (see also
Ezzamel and Willmott 1998, 2008). Their tracking of management/labor relations as a
struggle mediated by “discursive practice” provides the analytical basis upon which this
political economy of labor process study proceeds. This approach allows their research to
show how Collinson may have exaggerated his argument that shopfloor resistance is
inherently counterproductive and self-defeating. Moreover, in Northern Plant,
management and labor are understood and represented not so much in the form of
categories or layers of vertical stratification in organization but instead as processes co-

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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

implicated and co-present in cross-cutting alliances that reveal the multiple antagonisms
out of which the struggle for organization emerges.

The second main line of research has sought to advance our conception of subjectivity
and identity by drawing upon post-Lacanian psychoanalytical alternatives to Foucault
(Contu and Willmott 2006). Slavoj Zizek has been particularly attractive to emerging
scholars in labor process study. Fleming and Spicer (2003) use elements of Zizek to show
how individuals, in rationalizing their behavior as cynical and (p. 114) autonomous, blind
themselves to an “ideological fantasy” to provide an “alluring breathing space” and a
“semblance” of freedom in work organization. Workers “still act as if they believed in the
prescribed values of the organization” (p. 163; emphasis added), but describe and explain
their behavior in ways that suggest distancing through irony and resistance. This
distinction between actions and “beliefs” helps extend our understanding of the
paradoxes and double-binds associated with humanist self-delusions of freedom and
autonomy. In deconstructing essentialist notions of subjectivity and identity, the work of
Zizek offers an alternative language to Foucault and one that retains important links to
the psychoanalytical traditions of social science.

A third major line of development has been more explicitly theoretical in nature,
introducing and expositing the work of Laclau and Mouffe (du Gay 1996; Contu and
Willmott 2005; Willmott 2005; Spicer and Böhm 2007). The publication of Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy (1985) by Laclau and Mouffe introduced a complex and radical
rethinking of the nature of ontology that challenges many of the structural and dualistic
traditions in Marxist and neo-Marxist thought. For our purposes here it is important to
note that Laclau and Mouffe work with a form of “negative ontology,” i.e., one that is
forever incomplete and inexhaustible and emergent out of a processual complexity in
social relations that can never realize a final state of representational fixity. One
consequence of this is the understanding that “management” and “labor” are not
predetermined in their actions or relations by a logic of economic wage-effort bargaining.
This is one possible and indeed powerful articulation of subject positioning to which
subjects might become nominally attached so that they embody, articulate, and reproduce
a version of “labor” defined as an economic agent seeking to maximize “benefits” whilst
minimizing its “costs.” The advance made over the work of Burawoy is the understanding
that these subject positions are maintained through discursive articulation and reflexive
ways of speaking about self (and hence the importance of identity as a medium of these
articulatory practices) that are contingent and never fully exhaustive of possible self-
definition. Indeed, “labor” and “wage-effort bargaining” both have to be discursively
constituted and represented, brought into life—so to speak—by agents of representation
in ways that discipline and mobilize social relations around privileged points of
contestation and struggle (“undecidability” and “dislocation” in the language of Laclau
and Mouffe).

Beyond Subjectivity and Identity

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What Laclau and Mouffe offer is a way of thinking that shows how struggles in the labor
process are far more diverse and radical than it is possible to capture in traditional
empirical representations of work organization. Individuals are “sites” of multiple
identities and subjective investments—part class and part gender, most obviously, but
also inscribed within discourses of race, religion, age, nationality, (p. 115) etc. These
multiple associations make behavior radically uncertain and contingent in ways that
undermine the predictive and totalizing ambitions of orthodox forms of theoretical control
in labor process analysis. Once we are prepared to acknowledge that there is no
referential backstop or foundational bedrock to secure and guarantee reality we are
better prepared to examine subjectivity and identity as a medium and outcome of a social
construction of power and inequality. This helps show how “structure” is a more recursive
and immanent phenomenon and possibly more fragile than we have been led to believe,
emergent out of unpredictable and improvizational activities in the labor process instead
of rooted in some inaccessible realm of capitalist political economy far removed from the
everyday reflexive struggles of “labor.”

All three lines of research change the way we think about how organization acquires
pattern or structure. The focus on subjectivity and identity encourages analysis to show
how organization becomes patterned or institutionalized through ongoing social
construction and practical accomplishment. Careful attention to those features of the
workplace associated with the performance of subjectivity and identity shows how the
labor process is an important site of this ongoing production of organization where things
are held in contingency and suspension, and, therefore, possible transformation. It is in
this “realm” of organization (Chia 1998) where we can study how systemic effects
immanent to the practical accomplishment of the labor process emerge “behind the
backs” of individuals and collectives. Hence, there is no claim or assumption that
organization exists in an idealist or textual free play of interpretation lacking in enduring
pattern or structure. Instead, we are offered ways of thinking that destabilize the
boundaries of the labor process to display organization as a radically contingent
phenomenon, a medium and outcome of inconsistency and ambiguity in a process of
realization that is fraught with incompletion and uncertainty.

This “deconstruction” of capitalist organization is not possible in core theory where

power and inequality are seen as something that emerges out of deep structure or
underlying ontological reality in ways that mechanistically restrict the constitutive and
reflexive activities of social agency. The linguistic and discursive conventions of
sociological representation that inform mainstream labor process theory tend to over-
stabilize these processual features of organization and thereby grant too much order and
structure to organization. In so doing core theory also undermines the transformational
potential inherent to the labor process, a “potentia” that is more successfully opened up
by research that is sensitive to the ambiguous and “interstitial” dimensions of
organization. Advances in contemporary sociological theory help to explore this
intermediate domain that lies between the traditional divisions of macro/micro, structure/
agent, and the material/ideal. Structuration theory, for example, offers one way of
engaging with this dimension in organization (Giddens 1979), and the work of Giddens
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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

has been particularly influential in the development of thinking about subjectivity and
identity in labor (p. 116) process analysis. We can see this influence most obviously in the
work of Collinson (see above), but also Willmott (1984), and OʼDoherty and Willmott
(2001). However, the recent turn to Foucault opens up the question of subjectivity and
identity in ways quite different to that afforded by Giddens and brings with it a greater
attention to what Foucault (1979) calls the “microphysics of power.” This offers a
promising and exciting way of treating the empirical in future labor process study helping
to show how subjects and objects are formed out of a swarm of contingent and relational
“matter.” What we have called the “performance of subjectivity and identity” then, can be
analytically broken down and interpreted as an ongoing orchestration (or narration) of an
“assemblage” of fragments and materials distributed across space and time (media
images, role models, the family, memories, hopes, etc.). At this level of analytical detail
labor process reveals phenomena in its more primordial state, where matter subsists in
ambiguous and processual agitation.

The study of subjectivity and identity provides one way of thinking this metastability
where structure and agent are co-implicate and co-present in the recursive practices of
social agents preoccupied with questions pertaining to existential matters. The critique of
essentialist conceptions about identity provides a vital but preliminary stage in opening
up these immanent dimensions of organization. Beyond the narrow limits of wage-effort
bargaining, struggle and contestation becomes understood as a more universal and
generalized feature of social relations at work, a complex and multifaceted medium out of
which organization is constructed and deconstructed. It is out of this wider, more “open
field” (Cooper 1976) of organization/disorganization that we can extend our
understanding of the ways in which the reproduction of “labor” and the labor process is
made contingent and problematic. Attention to these realms allows us to (re)contextualize
the actions, behaviors and reflections of employees and reconnect the labor process with
these wider forces of organization/disorganization. The three main lines of research that
have advanced the study of subjectivity and identity all retain an acute sensitivity to the
empirical minutia of phenomena providing an attention to detail that shows how events in
the labor process exceed those customary boundaries and categories that separate
structure from agent and object from subject. However, recent developments in actor-
network theory (Law 2004; Latour 2005) have more rigorously taken up the challenge
posed to social science by the work of Foucault and has arguably been more successful in
representing phenomena in this “meta-stable” state—i.e., before the dualistic division
between structure and agent. Insights such as this will help labor process study build
upon its pioneering research into subjectivity and identity.

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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

Conclusions

The retrieval of the “missing subject” helps teach how transformation and change is
essential to emancipation and praxis. To this end it is sometimes necessary to (p. 117)
abandon institution and identification. In recent years we have seen a number of
protagonists in the labor process debate migrate to the field of critical management
studies where they have been able to extend and develop elements of reflexivity, anti-
performativity, and the denaturalization of work organization (see Fournier and Grey
2000). Core theory is more skeptical of the feasibility and potential of critical
management studies because it argues these elements promote relativism and an
epistemological skepticism that prevents research from knowing “reality” in the form of
trends, laws and generalisable knowledge (Thompson and Newsome 2004). There is a
legacy of vanguardism and latent social engineering in this kind of social science, where
the theoretician or academic is deemed to know best.

What core theory appears to want is an accurate mapping and tabulated description of
the reality of work organization so that it might best advise labor and its agents how best
to struggle against management in ways that will democratize or collectivize the
ownership of the means of production. At the same time, there is an undecidable and
tautological quality to these ambitions. The claim seems to be being made that to be
“critical” we have to be critical of something, and, moreover, of something that preexists
our efforts to know it. This prompts us to ask how we might presume to know what
preexists if we cannot know it. It is precisely this kind of (in its own terms) anti-scientific
faith in reality that surely undermines critical potential and leads to a whole series of
curious and paradoxical claims—of the kind we see where Thompson writes that “while
there cannot be an exact correspondence between reality and our representations of it,
good research aims to grasp the real with as much accuracy and complexity as is feasible
in given conditions” (Thompson and Newsome 2004; 58).

Implicit in what we have been arguing, however, is that this retrieval of the missing
subject in labor process analysis is really a recovery of a lost “ontology” in organization.
Studies of the labor process, attentive to the importance of subjectivity and identity, have
discovered organization to be a medium and outcome of a far greater ontological
complexity than allowed by core theory, given core theory's greater commitment to the
orthodox methods of social science. Where subjectivity and identity are explored as
factors that mediate the management and control of work, organization becomes a
precarious accomplishment, a balance of power that is constructed and contested at
multiple points of struggle and desire. As a consequence, research soon discovers that
organization operates in ways that do not conform to the logic and rationality associated
with wage-effort bargaining. If there are “forces” or “dynamics” of management—labor
interaction, they are “faulty,” incomplete, manifold, and erratic, maintained through an in
media res of discourse/practice and the multiple realms of consciousness that constitute
individual and collective subjectivity.

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This allows us to begin to study how established patterns of power and inequality are
renewed through difference and repetition in each instance of the becoming and
actualization of organization. One consequence of this alternative conception (p. 118) of
ontology is the reflexive recognition of one's own possible complicity in the reproduction
of reified conceptions of capitalist organization. Participating in the circulation and
deployment of customary discourse and their analytical and methodological strategies of
representation helps legitimate and validate a certain way of looking at, relating to, or
being in the world (Blum 1974). The legacy of research associated with the Manchester
School challenges us to interrogate our own labor process so that we might invent forms
of research and writing that recover the immanent potentiality of organization where
things are held in greater suspense and potentiality. To invite students of the labor
process to tap into the precarious volatility associated with ontological “becoming”
demands a capacity to suspend the ego-identifications of authorial identity that also
entails a collective and social challenge to predominant modes of being-in-the-world.
Research becomes “critical action learning” when self and world begin to change through
collective participation in which we collectively create and work towards emancipation
instead of prescribing change on the basis of an apriori commitment (faith) to a restrictive
version of “worker” emancipation.

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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

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Paul Thompson

Paul Thompson is Professor and Head of the Department of Human Resource

Management at the University of Strathclyde. His research traverses the labor
process, organization theory, and workplace misbehavior and conflict, and he is the
co-editor of the recent Oxford Handbook on Work and Organization (Oxford
University Press) with Stephen Ackroyd, Rosemary Batt, and Pamela Tolbert.

Damian P. OʼDoherty

Damian P. OʼDoherty is Senior Lecturer in Organization Analysis in the Manchester

Business School at the University of Manchester. He has published widely in the
fields of labor process theory, critical management studies, and organization theory.
His most recent project takes “the city” as a subject of management and organization
in which he is testing various methods of intervention and study that include the
creation of an experimental travel agency which will be launched as a new business
start-up.

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Perspectives on Labor Process Theory

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