Labor Process Theory

Abstract

Ten years ago, Knights and Willmott (1990) edited an influential book that ad dressed the status and future of the labor process tradition. On almost every issue, there was considerable disagreement among the contributors, but they agreed that the state of labor process theory (LPT) was problematic. Knights, Thompson, Willmott, Burrell, West, Littler, and Edwards all agreed that LPT was in a state of wreckage and disarray. An account of employee subjectivity? Missing from LPT. A politics of production that would link with labor organizations to eman cipate workers? Not articulated. An explanation for the vexing boundary prob lem of how workplace dynamics interact with broader social and institutional environments? Not in the cards. Almost every article in the text discussed the need for LPT's revitalization, reconstruction, and renewal. Ten years later, where are we? Though the 1990s have seen the emergence of New Labor in the UK and the ascendancy of the New Democrats in the United States, LPT cannot reasonably be said to have had any impact on their political success. Gently put, the 1990s have been a moribund time for LPT as a political project—as it has been for the Left in general. But intellectually, I would argue, we are better off. The last decade has seen the importation of postmodernist ideas into the LPT debate, providing a welcome tonic to the essentialism inherent in traditional LPT's humanist conception of subjectivity1 (e.g., Burawoy 1985). While research on control and resistance in the 1970s and 1980s developed insightful accounts of different forms of class struggle, it did so by seeking explanations for these phenomena from an exclusively Marxian perspective characterized by totalizing2