Culture in Labor History

The key issues that must be resolved to specify the effective role of culture have been debated most sensitively in the fast-developing field of labor history. To illuminate the creation of new institutions of work and the development of workers' collective movements, labor historians have devoted increasing attention to the face of culture among both workers and employers. Yet in the main their strategies of research are not designed to respond adequately to the question addressed by this book: whether we can demonstrate and specify culture's independent effect upon the construction of factory practices.

The inextinguishable starting point for pondering culture's effect remains E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. This work, which once served as a charter for cultural inquiries, demonstrated that workers did not acquire a shared class consciousness in early nineteenth-century Britain only in response to the degradation of labor and the rise of factories; workers also depended upon the peculiar legacy of Radical political discourse, carried originally by middle-class shopkeepers and small tradespeople.^[44] In The Making , the economy moved with a dynamic of its

[43] Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 220–224. Crozier emphasizes at some points that organizational structures adapt to economic circumstances. The pattern of bureaucracy in the United States, he claims, "corresponds to a large extent to the general evolution of industrial society." See pp. 232, 296.

[44] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), pp. 197–198.

own. It established the foundation of change to which workers responded. Culture—in this instance primarily meaning the legacy of political ideas—intervened to mediate workers' reactions to capitalist development. Thompson's argument rested on circumscription: he showed that new economic conditions, typified by the steam engine and textile mill, did not suffice to explain the emergence of class consciousness. Having limited the domain of economic explanation, he celebrated the mysterious indeterminacy of human "agency," for he believed it sufficient for his purpose that culture serve as an indispensable ingredient in workers' responses.

This approach in The Making , even if it served at moments only as a device for framing the narrative, has fallen to an objection in principle: it implicitly assumes that workers have an anterior experience of socioeconomic conditions to which popular culture and political discourse respond. The powerful critiques of Gareth Stedman Jones, Patrick Joyce, and Joan Scott have made it commonplace to emphasize instead that culture and language are constitutive of and, in this sense, prior to social and economic experience.^[45] From my perspective, Thompson's initial position offers an ineffective defense of the centrality of culture for a very different reason: it does not respond adequately to social investigators who doubt that culture can be called upon to develop rigorous explanatory arguments. In any sequence of change, the number of causes that are necessary for an outcome considered in all its concreteness is unlimited. The issue is not whether cultural components represent necessary ingredients, for almost everything is worthy of that designation; it is, rather, whether cultural elements have an independent and specifiable contribution apart from the influence of other factors. Do they carry a strong, systematic effect which justifies concentrating on them in their own right? Analysts who discount the prominence Thompson lent to culture may justifiably contend that if he probed economic or demographic variables more deeply, the indeterminacy in workers' responses, which he attributed to community culture, would taper off.

Of course, Thompson's own evidence implies that the economy becomes an historical force only as it enters into human experience. He shows that the earnings of the proud artisans, the prices of tools and bread in the countryside, and even wage differentials in the new mechanical

[45] Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

industries conformed to community expectations and notions of social honor.^[46] In this sense, the economy itself operated through cultural standards. But in this line of reasoning, too, culture appears as an ingredient whose independent, structuring influence is undemonstrated. The underlying forces of market and technological development might still carry the exclusive principles configuring social change or the form of stability; after all, the "moral economy" of the community eroded as required for the furtherance of capitalist development.^[47] As Thompson tells us, lofty artisanal standards suffered earthly degradation: "The form and extent of deterioration relates directly to the material conditions of the industry—the cost of raw materials—tools—the skill involved—conditions favouring or discouraging trade union organisation—the nature of the market."^[48] When custom survived, it might do so only as it was selectively appropriated and shaped as a resource by the active, selective logic of market and technological forces.^[49]

[46] Thompson, op. cit., pp. 235–237.

[47] In my view, Thompson's discerning portrayal of the "moral economy" to which crowds appealed at times of food shortage in the eighteenth century illustrates this possibility of the explanatory adequacy of market adaptation alone. The ideal of a "moral economy" was revived periodically so long as it fulfilled a strategic function: in times of crisis it facilitated price bargaining among the common people, the gentry, traders, and local authorities. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the confluence of interests supporting the fiction of a moral economy disappeared. E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past & Present Number 50 (February 1971), pp. 126, 129. For a discussion of Thompson's more recent work, see p. 36, below. Food rioters requested in advance official permission to fix prices by riot, an occurrence which makes the riot appear as a controlled and institutionalized bargaining strategy. John G. Rule, "Some Social Aspects of the Cornish Industrial Revolution," in Roger Burt, editor, Industry and Society in the South-West (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1970), p. 93.

[48] Thompson, Making , op. cit., p. 258.

[49] Patrick Joyce's exemplary study of the paternalist regimes built upon the full-grown textile mills of the late nineteenth century illustrates the same theoretic issue. Joyce shows that workers in the textile communities of the north of England embraced factory life by identifying with their employers. Workers subscribed to folk stories about the family owners, shared membership in religious organizations with employers, and saw the mill and the collective celebrations it sponsored as the epitome of the community. The traditions of deference, religious association, and local attachment called into play for this accommodation in late Victorian Britain were invigorated and manipulated to suit the needs of capital. Despite the richness of his cultural portrait, Joyce's evidence in Work, Society and Politics could support the view that community culture had a coherence of its own while it remained subservient in practice to economic requirements. No wonder Michael Burawoy uses Joyce's evidence to emphasize the subjection of culture to the structure of the labor process. The Politics of Production (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 97–99. In his more recent examinations of nineteenth-century British workers' representations of the moral community, Joyce shows that popular concepts are not deducible from the logic of capitalism and do not "reflect" an anterior reality (Visions , op. cit., pp. 9, 333). Even if these symbols emerge through a distinctive discursivelineage and draw upon themes unrelated to the economic categories of capitalism, they may nonetheless be selected, maintained, and indirectly appropriated by the supposedly "instrumental" logic of the marketplace.

More recently, William Reddy has transformed the debate on culture's influence by tracing the development of market orientations themselves as cultural forms. In pathbreaking investigations focused upon French textile production, Reddy has demonstrated that dynamic networks of production and distribution in prerevolutionary France promoted the growth of the industry without a model of free market exchange. Only after the Great Revolution did the ideal of pure market transactions, promulgated initially by intellectual elites, gradually became part of economic agents' self-understanding.^[50] The new market model was unrealistic. It ignored overwhelming rigidities in the merchandizing of labor power, and it excluded the human interest in honor and autonomy which could not be extinguished in the production process. Yet the model became an effective prescription. It led employers to oversimplify points of contention with workers into plain monetary exchanges and thereby complicated the resolution of labor conflicts.^[51] Reddy's The Rise of Market Culture is profoundly subversive: rather than treating culture exclusively as a "tradition" separate from and opposed to the market, it turns the market regime itself into a cultural project.

The present study maintains Reddy's emphasis on the cultural construction of economic categories but fully historicizes these forms of practice and experience. In Reddy's narrative, at moments of crisis employers are forced to adopt the postulates of "market culture" to improve production. For example, to cope with mounting commercial challenges in the first half of the nineteenth century, they imagined that they appropriated, not simply a worker's output, but a labor service over which they claimed jurisdiction. When they imposed more exacting rate schedules on mule spinners to gauge labor effort, the design was allegedly determined simply by a need to exploit improved machinery.^[52] Reddy inadvertently offers a new cultural teleology: employers acquire market categories through a learning process, but in the end there is only one kind of market culture, and one definition of labor as a commodity, which they are destined to adopt.^[53] He collapses

[50] William Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 66–67. Reddy also stresses, however, that commercial change in the eighteenth century stimulated the development of the cultural model of market society (p. 61).

[51] Ibid., p. 324.

[52] Ibid., pp. 124, 213, 215.

[53] Ibid., p. 251: "Here, finally, a step was made toward paying for labor, rather than for its outcome" (p. 124). But, after all, the book does not bear the title "The Rise of a Market Culture." Reddy misleadingly portrays Adam Smith as a theorist whose premises about work-ers' conveyance of labor to employers are prototypical and universal to market models (pp. 65, 85).

market categories as real forms of experience and as schemata for the use of technology into the generic analytic model of "market society." As an issue of history, this effaces actual cross-national diversity in Europe; as a matter of theory, it reduces the explanatory power of culture. If we rest a cultural argument on the metathesis that the most general building blocks of market-industrial society, such as cost-accounting and the maximization of returns on investment, are cultural creations,^[54] this does not enable us to explain variation in realized capitalist practice.

The deciding question is not whether market conduct is culturally acquired and reproduced; the purest economic theorist is justified in ignoring this issue as a philosophical point about the origins of the "capitalist" system or its broadest parameters. The true issue of contention is whether cultural forms of explanation account for variation in historical outcomes on the shop floor better than alternative approaches do. In Reddy's narrative, "market culture" germinates as an intellectual project but disseminates out of practical necessity.^[55] From this viewpoint it is all too easy to rest the case for culture's importance upon the comfortable supposition that the most general parameters of conduct are culturally fixed, allowing historical narratives to present as adaptations to economic requirements the specific design of the institutions of work. The comparative strategy of the present study, by contrast, does not merely assert but demonstrates exactly how the cultural construction of economic concepts configured even inconspicuous parts of instrumental practice by symbolic principles that varied in this study's primary cases of Germany and Britain, as well as in Reddy's case, France.^[56]

Where, then, may we turn for the theoretical tools to handle such a case demonstration of culture's formative logic upon practice in the factory? In my view, the specification of culture's independent role in the capitalist labor process remains an open problem in contemporary social theory. The most promising theories on the scene that accept the challenge of demonstrating culture's effect, rather than (unconvincingly) taking its influence as an a priori necessity, conceive of culture as a practical schema for organizing

[54] Ibid., p. 70.

[55] See above, footnote 53, as well as ibid., p. 99.

[56] Rather than contrasting "market culture" with the pursuit of nonmonetary rewards or with less calculative varieties of economic enterprise prior to the rise of market culture, the present study contrasts different incarnations of the fundamental capitalist category of labor as a commodity.

activity.^[57] Within this general approach it may be helpful to group into three families the leading attempts to specify the influence of culture upon economic conduct. If we examine each in turn, we may clarify the conditions that must be met to demonstrate satisfactorily the independent, constitutive influence of culture upon the organization of practices at the point of production in capitalist society. Culture's influence is contested in social inquiry in part because the leading cultural theorists have not appreciated the challenge before them.