Labor and Technological Innovation in French Electrical Power

Abstract

Labor and Technological Innovation in French Electrical Power ROBERT L. FROST In recent years, a substantial body of scholarship has emerged in the United States that examines the effects of technological change on the character and content of industrial work and, by extension, on the political power of industrial workers within the workplace. Often focusing on the introduction of Taylorist work methods, much of this literature generally argues that the rationalization of the labor process along the lines sketched in F. W. Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (1903) reduced the skills necessary to perform productive operations. According to this genre of argument, Taylor­ ism and workplace rationalization “deskilled” workers, thereby re­ ducing their shop-floor power. The argument thus equates skill with power. Various scholars have elaborated on this thesis initially developed by Harry Braverman.1 David Montgomery has examined workers’ efforts to resist Taylorism and to reshape work rules to meet their needs, and David Noble has shown how managers introduce new technologies in order to deskill workers.2 But the basic argument—rationalizationdeskilling -disempowerment—remains predominant even though it has certain shortcomings. Some authors impute perhaps too much ratio­ nality and cynicism on the part of management and, by extension, fail Dr. Frost is assistant professor of history. State University of New York at Albany. His book, Alternating Currents: Nationalized Power in France, 1946—1970, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press, and he is currently investigating the relationships among industrial rationalization, consumerism, and the culture of technology in interwar France. With respect to this article, he would like to thank Margaret Hedstrom, Peter Kuznick, Merritt Roe Smith, Josef Konvitz, James C. Mancuso, and Gerald Zahavi for their valuable comments and Karin Wulf for her editorial advice. Much of the theoretical framework has been influenced by William Reddy's Money and Liberty in Modern Europe (New York, 1987). 'Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New' York, 1974). 2David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America (New York, 1979), esp. chap. 4; David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York, 1984).© 1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/88/2904-0006J01.00 865 866 Robert L. Frost to recognize that managers and engineers sometimes affirm “sweet” technologies and techniques on purely aesthetic grounds.3 Their ar­ guments further assume that workers are mere objects on whom new technologies are imposed, and that workers are somehow instinctually opposed to innovations that ultimately erode their power—thus pre­ suming that they realize that their skill levels essentially determine their shop-floor power. In sum, most students of the labor process seem to overstate the prescience and rationality of managers and similarly ov­ erstate workers’ recognition of the managerial agenda. Authors who concede that workers may have consented to rationalization of the la­ bor process often imply that acceptance and deference flow from “false consciousness,” not from any genuine affirmation of the ostensible benefits of “progress.”4 Some recent writings have, however, recog­ nized the complexity of managerial motivations and labor’s responses, particularly in paternalist, welfare-capitalist firms.5 Michael Burawoy has developed a valuable starting point for under­ standing the question of consent toward the rationalization of the labor process within the context of workers’ community and shopfloor culture.6 In a different context, Victoria de Grazia has indicated how, on a cultural basis, workers will accept politically motivated changes that are ostensibly contradictory to their better interests—indeed, that some workers are willing to trade a degradation of work life in return for enhanced leisure time.7 From these studies, we can begin to de­ velop an alternative interpretation of workers’ responses to techno­ logical innovation, one that stresses not deskilling, disempowerment, and resistance, but that instead focuses on consent and the often illusory phenomena of reskilling or upskilling, empowerment, and later, perhaps, disempowerment. Through such an interpretation, and by looking at key aspects of sectoral economics, technologies, and political culture, we can propose a new approach for understanding the social-historical dimensions of workplace innovation, discovering that the political, economic, and social context of innovation can have :,In The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (New York, 1975), Samuel...