Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism
286
Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism
286Overview
Manufacturing Consent, the result of Burawoy's research, combines rich ethnographical description with an original Marxist theory of the capitalist labor process. Manufacturing Consent is unique among studies of this kind because Burawoy has been able to analyze his own experiences in relation to those of Donald Roy, who studied the same factory thirty years earlier. Burawoy traces the technical, political, and ideological changes in factory life to the transformations of the market relations of the plant (it is now part of a multinational corporation) and to broader movements, since World War II, in industrial relations.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226217710 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 286 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Manufacturing Consent
Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism
By Michael Burawoy
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 1979 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-21771-0
CHAPTER 1
The Demise of Industrial Sociology
An account of the demise of industrial sociology must examine trends in sociology and their relationship to changes in capitalism. The rise of "the end of ideology" through the 1950s led Daniel Bell, Clark Kerr, Seymour Martin Lipset, Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, and others to claim that the major problems of capitalism had been overcome. All that remained was to perfect modern society. Among the accomplishments of United States capitalism they counted the incorporation of industrial workers and the institutionalization of industrial conflict. Strikes were "withering away," and those that continued to break out affected the marginal sectors of the labor force — those not yet integrated into the wider society. The industrial worker was no more an agent of revolution than the burgeoning middle classes. Rather, workers were portrayed as "authoritarian" rather than radical; "capitalist" rather than "socialist." A kind of euphoria had descended on the cold-war sociologists. In particular, blue-collar workers were no longer perceived as a "potential problem," and so they receded from the sociological focus.
The shift of interest away from the industrial laborer was accompanied by mounting criticism of the early studies of industrial behavior for their supposed myopia. These commentaries frequently took the seminal Western Electric studies of "restriction of output" as a point of departure. Plant sociology, as Clark Kerr and Lloyd Fisher referred to it, paid little attention to the environment. It ignored the constraints of technology and paid too much attention to "human relations." It ignored external orientations to work. It tended to downplay the economic rationality of the worker. It ignored class conflict and presented only managerial perspectives. Without doubt, the various critiques were long overdue and provided important correctives. Yet they also overlooked the real if partial truths embedded in the early studies. In this work I shall try to rescue the rational kernel of plant sociology by thematizing these partial truths within a Marxist framework. Thus, rather than highlight the absurdity of isolating the factory from its environment, I shall try to pin down the precise nature of its isolation or relative autonomy — an autonomy that allowed the early researchers to make so many contributions to the understanding of industrial organizations. Rather than argue that conflict between management and worker is endemic or "structural," I shall show how both conflict and consent are organized on the shop floor. Rather than continually harp on the manipulativeness and inefficacy of the human-relations attempt to elicit greater cooperation from workers, I shall stress its essential truth, namely, that activities on the shop floor cannot be understood outside the political and ideological realms of the organization of production. While the view that workers are somehow irrational in their responses to work is an untenable position, the notion that they lean toward economic rationality is equally unsatisfactory. In this study I shall show how rationality is a product of the specific organization of production and is part and parcel of the factory "culture." In short, rather than dismiss the findings of industrial sociology, I shall move beyond them by placing and sometimes incorporating them into a broader perspective.
The Emergence of Organization Theory
The new studies that emerged to replace plant sociology shifted the focus of investigation to organizations in general — to hospitals, voluntary associations, trade unions, political parties, and so on. General theories, conceptual schemes, and focal problems were constructed to encompass behavior in all types of organizations. Three themes appeared to dominate the literature. First, there were the studies of bureaucracy — the functions and dysfunctions of rules. These sprang from Max Weber's speculations on the relationship between bureaucracy and efficiency. A second set of studies developed a behavioralist framework that looked at organizations from the point of view of the individual as a decision-maker. The psychological emphasis of these theorists can be seen as deriving from the human-relations perspectives on industrial work. Finally, a number of students began to develop frameworks for understanding the relationship between organizations and their environment. Some concentrated on the influence of socialization, community, etc., on industrial behavior, while others dwelt on the dependence of the organization on environments characterized by different degrees of uncertainty. Still others began to combine these two approaches in an attempt to understand the conditions of industrial development.
Whatever their shortcomings, about which I shall have more to say below, all these developments represented important departures from the earlier studies. The questions they raise, as well the questions from which they arise, appear and reappear throughout the body of this work. The importance of rules will be central to my interpretation of shop-floor politics, although their implications will be understood in terms of domination rather than efficiency. The fact that even the most oppressed worker is faced with making decisions that appear to be significant is something no study of work can avoid. However, the importance of these choices for the production of consent, and the link between such "indeterminacy" at the individual or micro level and the more limited variation at the macro level, will be the focus of my discussion. Finally, I shall spell out the relationship between the organization and its environment in terms of both markets and the processes of socialization, and in the appendix I shall address these issues in terms of industrial development in Zambia. As in earlier industrial-sociology studies, advances made by organization theory will be incorporated into a Marxist framework.
With the subsumption of industrial sociology under organization theory, the distinctiveness of the profit-seeking capitalist enterprise is lost. At the same time, the development of conceptual schemes and theories to encompass all forms of organizations and associations expresses a very real truth, namely, the penetration of bureaucratic patterns and commodity relations into all areas of society. However, being unreflective about its roots in capitalist society, organization analysis loses this truth by projecting it into general theories that conceal the historically specific features of capitalist and, in particular, advanced capitalist society. Thompson's concern with an organization's ability to control or contain uncertainty in its environment reflects the emergence of large corporations or government agencies that possess resources to engage in buffering, leveling, forecasting, rationing, and so forth. As I hope to suggest, later in this study, restoring Thompson's insights to their political and economic context sheds much light on changes occurring in contemporary society. In the same vein, criticisms of studies like the Western Electric experiments are often based on observations made in organizations in a different period, without due regard to changes in the historical context — a context that the studies themselves deemphasize. Would the bank wiring room look the same today as it did in 1932? What differences might one observe, and how might we explain them? These are the sorts of questions a theory sensitive to historical change might pose.
There have, of course, been attempts to explain change in organizations; the point is that these attempts have been of an ahistorical nature. Descriptions of changes are elevated into spurious explanations of change through the constitution of natural laws of development — the ineluctable processes of rationalization, bureaucratization, the pursuit of efficiency, and so on. Others, with less grand visions, substitute the empiricism of shopping lists for the development of explanations. Where explanations are attempted, they tend to preserve the isolation of the organization from its environment, except in moments of transition. These are the theories of organizational persistence, which highlight efficiency, traditionalizing forces, vested interests, absence of competition, and so on. But organizations do not simply "persist." Like any other enduring patterns of social relations, they have to be continually produced — that is, reproduced. While one of the unique features of the capitalist enterprise is its apparent ability to reproduce its own relations, it must be stressed that this autonomy is only apparent (relative). Theories of organizational persistence take for granted the conditions of persistence and ignore the tendencies toward the erosion of these conditions by the very reproduction of relations.
Once the question of reproduction is posed, one must go beyond the organization and examine the interrelationship of the different parts of society that guarantee its reproduction. But this involves, first, examining what different organizations produce and, second, recognizing not only that they produce useful things or "services" but that, directly or indirectly, they also produce profit. It involves the construction of a concrete totality that represents capitalist or advanced capitalist society — in fact, the construction of a theory of advanced capitalism. Not only would it go beyond organization theory; it would deny the latter its right to exist as a distinctive enterprise. It would restore the timeless generalities of organization theory to their specific historical context. And, by the same token, it would unmask appearances, link the part to the whole, the past to the future, and thereby shatter the appearance of naturalness and inevitability in the present order of things.
The Paradox of Organization Theory
In the development of its general and abstract concepts, organization theory has missed the particular and concrete products of organizations. It has substituted formal rationality for substantive rationality and has underplayed the essential feature of the capitalist labor process — the transformation of nature or raw materials into useful things, on the one hand, and into profit, on the other. Instead, the ahistorical formulations are upheld by dwelling on universal aspects of social relations and by thrusting aside concrete action, practices, the doing and making of things. And it is precisely out of this one-sided picture that a fundamental paradox emerges. These studies, both the early and the late ones, rest on one or the other, or on some combination, of two divergent premises, namely, the assumption of underlying harmony and the necessity of social control. Taken together, these premises appear contradictory; for if there is underlying harmony and consensus is not problematical, then why is social control important or necessary? And, conversely, if social control is so important, then how can we take consensus as given?
The paradox has remained latent in part because the two themes have in general been developed separately, by authors drawing on the different sociological traditions originating with Emile Durkheim, on the one hand, and Max Weber, on the other. In this way the contradictory assumptions have been kept apart. Moreover, writers in the two traditions have not always pursued the implications of their respective positions. Thus, where social control has been a focal concern, no theory of conflict has been developed to establish the necessity of social control. When the emphasis has been on harmony, harmony is assumed rather than explained, and conflict is looked on as pathological or even accidental. I will deal with each theme in turn.
The assumptions of the social-control literature have been formulated by Arnold Tannenbaum:
Organization implies control. A social organization is an ordered arrangement of individual human interactions. Control processes help circumscribe idiosyncratic behaviors and keep them conformant to the rational plan of organization. Organizations require a certain amount of conformity as well as integration of diverse activities. It is the function of control to bring about conformance to organizational requirements and achievement of the ultimate purposes of the organization. The coordination and order created out of the diverse interests and potentially diffuse behaviors of members is largely a function of control.
But what are these "idiosyncratic" behaviors, "diverse" interests, etc., that have to be controlled? Can one study control in organizations without a theory of what is to be controlled? Tannenbaum manages to do so by asking general questions of the type, "In general how much say or influence does the manager of your station have on what the following groups do in the company?" So, without reference to the activities being controlled or to the resources wielded to exercise that control, let alone to the "deviant" tendencies against which control is directed, Tannenbaum is able to characterize organizations by their total amount of control and its distribution. This purely formal mode of measuring control (is he in fact measuring control at all?) enables him to compare very different types of organizations and to construct typologies of "control." But what "control" is all about — why it is there in the first place and the possibility that it has to be understood, at least in part, in terms of its function — is totally lost from sight.
Amitai Etzioni's synthesis does recognize that the underlying impetus to social control cannot be ignored. Etzioni stands in the Weberian tradition of organization theory and creates typologies based on the type of power (resources) mobilized to elicit conformity (compliance) and the types of "involvement" of participants. Although he acknowledges that conflict is endemic in organizations, Etzioni fails to present a basis or source for particular patterns of conflict. While he does advance beyond Weber in positing different orientations of participants, he provides no theory to account for these orientations or to explain how they generate conflict. At best he provides ad hoc hypotheses, which tend to lose historical specificity under the pressure to develop more general formulations.
In the other tradition, which postulates an underlying harmony among members of the industrial organization, the focal concern is the very presence of conflict. Those who have been concerned with efficiency and productivity have frequently located the source of conflict in workers' adherence to a "lower social code" and their failure to comprehend the "economic logic" of management. From a different perspective, the same observations signify an embryonic form of class consciousness.
Others have suggested that conflict stems from the lack of integration of worker and organization. New patterns of management, including employee-centered supervision and granting greater responsibility to the work group, are proposed for reintegrating individual and organization. Another perspective attributes lack of cooperation to the agencies of industrial work and suggests minor restructuring of the organization of production. "Job enlargement," "job enrichment," "job rotation," and so on, are part of the everyday vernacular of management consultants. Less concerned with social engineering, Robert Blauner has tried to establish a curvilinear relationship between the level of "alienation" and the type of "technology," suggesting that automation will usher in a less oppressive regime of labor. The approach of the sociotechnical systems associated with the Tavistock Institute emphasize a lack of congruence between the technical and social systems as the source of inefficiency and conflict.
In combating the literature on "restriction of ouput," which portrays workers as compulsive soldierers, a number of studies document the ways in which management is responsible for lapses in the translation of effort into output. In other words, the responsibility for "restriction of output" is placed at the feet of management. A related analysis attributes conflict to uncertainty in the process of production or in the environment. Here, as in all the above cases, it is implied that, in principle, the source of conflict can be removed. That is, conflict is not inherent or inevitable but reflects some irrationality — human, technical, or environmental — that is not a necessary feature of capitalism.
Finally, mention must be made of those who, while retaining the assumption of an underlying harmony of interests, nevertheless regard conflict as endemic to the industrial organization. The "unitary" framework of industrial relations is replaced by a "pluralist" framework, which conceives of the workplace as an arena for a number of competing groups. The pluralism of the factory is a sibling of the pluralism of the political realm, in which groups compete for "values" through a shared framework of norms and rules. Undoubtedly, I am doing some injustice to these studies by forcing them into the mold of the "harmony" or "social-control" perspectives. Undoubtedly, many of them combine features of both perspectives. But none of them resolves the paradox, because they all miss the specifically capitalist aspects of the labor process — the very features that provide the focus of my study.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Manufacturing Consent by Michael Burawoy. Copyright © 1979 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
PrefacePart 1 - From Sociology to Marxism
1. The Demise of Industrial Sociology
2. Toward a Theory of the Capitalist Labor Process
Part 2 - Changes in the Labor Process
3. From Geer Company to Allied Corporation
4. Thirty Years of Making Out
Part 3 - The Production of Consent
5. The Labor Process as a Game
6. The Rise of an Internal Labor Market
7. Consolidating an Internal State
Part 4 - The Relative Autonomy of the Labor Process
8. The Labor Process in a Recession
9. The Labor Process and Worker Consciousness
Part 5 - The Motors of Change
10. Struggles on the Shop Floor
11. Class Struggle and Capitalist Competition
12. From Competitive to Monopoly Capitalism
Appendix
Comparative Perspective: Change and Continuity in the Zambian Mining Industry
Notes
Bibliography
Index