Work and Control in Capitalist Industry

Recent analyses of the organization of work in advanced capitalist industry have succeeded in breathing life back into the sociology of work and stratification, particularly in the United States. Three major efforts, in particular, have opened new avenues of inquiry. First, Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital (1975) presented a sweeping analysis of the social and organizational forces mediating technological change ("the degradation of work" of the book's subtitle) in the twentieth century. With an emphasis on how the control

over work is made possible through the separation of conception and execution, Braverman made a significant attempt to extend Marx's theory of the labor process (Marx, 1975:357–514) through the era of monopoly capitalism. Second, Richard Edwards undertakes in Contested Terrain (1979) a historical and sociological analysis of the changing organization of work in twentieth-century United States with an eye to revealing shifts in the foundation of managerial authority. Piecing together industrial data against a backdrop of developments in the general political economy of U.S. industry, Edwards concludes that the segmentation of economic organizations (core and peripheral) has transformed managerial mechanisms of control from personal to bureaucratic authority. Third, Michael Burawoy's Manufacturing Consent (1979) challenges many of the assumptions of prior work in industrial sociology, as well as some of Braverman's, through an analysis of how labor's willingness to participate in its own exploitation is "manufactured" through the organization of production. By asking "why do people work as hard as they do?" Burawoy avoids the traditional assumptions of harmony or conflict between managers and workers prevalent in earlier researches and constructs a theory that argues for the analysis of how force and consent are combined in the labor process.

Each of these writers has attempted to make explicit connections between changes in the structure of the capitalist economy and strategies of control in the workplace. All three argue that the development of large-scale, highly capitalized, monopoly-sector firms has made it possible for some capitalists to pay higher wages, offer more extensive benefits, and thus secure higher levels of stability and commitment from their workforce.

There is, however, a catch to contemporary labor process research and theory. While analysts such as Braverman, Edwards, and Burawoy have been quick to point out that the labor process in late twentieth-century capitalism differs significantly from Marx's nineteenth-century observations, their theories have by and large sought to squeeze twentieth-century observations into a nineteenth-century model. To be more precise, Braverman, Edwards, and Burawoy focus on

the transformation of the labor process coincident with the transformation of the capitalist economy and enterprise. Each offers a distinct approach to the context and consequences of the rise of large-scale, monopolistic organizations. Yet all three largely adhere to a model of society which places primary emphasis on class as the fundamental category of social life and social action and which locates the origin of inequality in the labor process. To substantiate this argument, let me consider each one in turn.

Though Braverman's argument seems to capture the historical sweep of capitalist development, a major theoretical problem remains: he fails to provide an adequate explanation for the continuing division of the population along the lines of race, gender, and, increasingly, citizenship status. Race and gender inequality is subsumed under the more general, but less useful, rubric of the industrial reserve army of labor (pp. 377–401). For Braverman, the industrial reserve army of labor is a segment of the working class created and sustained as a buffer for the oscillating and uneven development of capitalism. This "relative surplus population" (p. 386) is composed, in part, of those people unemployed as a result of business cycles, technological change, and regional or sectoral uneven development. However, a significant segment of that labor pool is accounted for by those for whom steady employment is rare or unattainable or those who are crowded into relatively limited niches in the economy (e.g., service, agricultural, or domestic employment). It is in this portion of the industrial reserve army that one finds a disproportionate share of blacks, Hispanics, women, and immigrant workers.

It is, however, precisely this coincidence between nonmarket status and real or potential market position which constitutes the major problem for the reserve army formulation. Why should blacks, women, or other groups be concentrated in the industrial reserve army? Moreover, how do we account for this historical persistence of that concentration? Braverman provides few clues to these questions. In large part, his conceptualization of capitalism as a system of inequality presumes that the categories of actors in that system are determined entirely by their positions in the labor process. Thus,

all other categories and organizations are determined entirely by, or are a function of, that fundamental relationship. Yet what is often critical in the case of the industrial reserve army composed of blacks and women is that they are full-or part-time participants in something other than a capitalist labor process: for example, housework or welfare transfer programs. In other words, participation in those other organizations provides the means for material existence when an individual is not engaged in value-producing activities; and, at the same time, participation in those organizations confers a status separate from class position.

Unfortunately, Braverman's use of the industrial reserve army concept does not provide sufficient clarity as to how or why certain groups should show up in its ranks consistently or what distinct status is attached as a result. Thus the reserve army comes to represent a residual category. I would argue, by contrast, that it is necessary to develop a better understanding of the distinctive processes responsible for constructing the category and for maintaining its important social and political consequences.

Edwards (1979), in contrast to Braverman, recognizes that race and gender are important considerations in the analysis of work organization and stratification. For example, he writes: "For members of both groups (blacks and women), their daily existence as workers is always conditioned by their special status" (p. 197). Yet Edwards is only slightly more helpful when it comes to identifying the basis of that special status or demonstrating how it is reproduced over time. With the exception of passing reference to the "special dialectics of race and gender" (pp. 194, 196) and to a cultural legacy of slavery and women's subordination to patriarchal authority (p. 197), the analysis focuses instead on the labor market positions of blacks, women, and, to some extent, alien workers.

While it might be unfair to criticize Edwards for not having broadened his analysis to account for parallel systems of inequality, the "special status" of blacks, women, and other identifiable groups plays an important role in his research on the labor process. In particular, his concept of "simple

control" (pp. 34–36) in peripheral enterprises is built around the additional (nonmarket) leverage exercised by employers over workers. Simple control infers paternalistic authority, lack of formal job rights, and arbitrary employment practices. This form of control, according to Edwards, is rooted in both the personal qualities of the employer and in the vulnerable position of employees. What accounts for their vulnerability?

The only answer provided by Edwards is a partial one: vulnerability derives from the concentration of workers into specific (segmented) labor markets. That is, when there exists an overabundance of' people to fill a limited number of positions and when those positions require little personal or organizational investment in training, then the specter of replacement by a labor market competitor creates vulnerability among employees and, therefore, leverage for employers. However, that explanation is incomplete in two senses: (1) it fails to account for the mechanisms that produce the vulnerability of secondary workers external to the labor process; and (2) it displaces to the level of the labor market the explanation for why some markets are crowded (and competitive) and others are not.

Again, let me suggest that for Edwards, as for Braverman, the inability or unwillingness to allow for the existence of a system of inequality not directly determined by the structure of the labor process leads to a rather incomplete explanation. Although Edwards concludes that racism and sexism have "become real material forces in society" (p. 195), we are neither directed to a material base nor to a set of organizational practices that might serve as their foundation.

Finally, there is the recent work by Michael Burawoy (1979). While Burawoy offers an important theoretical contribution to labor process research, he also creates an obstacle to explaining the relationship between race, gender, and citizenship and the organization of work. In the introduction to his case study of a modern machine shop, Burawoy warns (p. 25):

The political, legal and ideological institutions of capitalism guarantee the external conditions of production. Under capitalism, these institutions mystify the productive status of work-

ers, capitalists, managers, etc. Thus, the political, legal and ideological apparatuses of the capitalist state transform relations among agents of production into relations among citizens, sexes, races and so on.

In other words, the explanation for the continued participation of workers in the capitalist inequality relationship lies squarely in the labor process. For Burawoy, the organization of the labor process simultaneously obscures the capitalists' appropriation of surplus and secures workers' participation in the wage labor contract (pp. 23–30). Therefore, workers' interests cannot simply be taken as given, nor can opposition (or cooperation) between workers and managers be assumed as invariant characteristics of industrial organization. Rather, interests, opposition, and consent are manufactured through the activities of the labor process.

Although Burawoy's argument presents a formidable challenge to underlying (but generally unsubstantiated) assumptions about conflict or harmony, his theory of the structural determination of interests and attitudes tends to overlook the ways in which the status of workers external to work organizations can be manipulated internally. This is evident in two ways. First, the theory is heavily weighted in the direction of work structures and practices found in monopoly or core industries. This insulation of the machine shop he studied from the vagaries of market fluctuations made possible the development of bureaucratically administered job structures and increased the importance of seniority and job rights over and against other worker characteristics, such as race and gender. However, outside of such enterprises, Burawoy's theory lends little insight. How, for example, do we account for the manipulation of women or minorities in settings that do not provide job rights equivalent to internal labor markets?

Second, even in those enterprises or industries ostensibly employing internal labor markets, job segregation by race and gender have not been eliminated. As Doeringer and Piore (1975) point out, internal labor markets can operate quite effectively to produce segregated job ladders in which the recruitment of women and minorities facilitates the separa-

tion of labor processes. Equally important, supposedly objective testing criteria within internal labor markets are often suborned by subjective assessments made about workers by supervisory personnel.

In this light, Burawoy's assertions about the primacy of activities in the labor process must be questioned. If statuses created external to the organization do indeed have consequences internally, then how are those statuses produced and what impact do they have on work organization? Similarly, if those statuses are manipulated to the advantage of employers, ought we not expect them to have a direct bearing on relationships between workers as well?