The Workplace, Technology, and Theory in American Labor History

Abstract

Assessing state of American history nearly a decade ago, David Brody hailed emergence of the study of workers within workplace and argued that, among all fresh initiatives in new history, the shop-floor approach is probably most important. For Brody, difficulties encountered in operationalizing the notion of a unified working-class culture made attractive pursuit of economic approach, taking as its starting point not culture, but and job, and broadening out from there.1 These comments inter sected what has been a rising, though not uncontested,2 wave of labor and worker control studies that recently culminated in David Montgomery's The Fall of House of Labor, a synthetic portrait of American workers and their struggles from 1865 to 1925. However, by concentrating on social relations of workplace, it seems to me that researchers have elided question of how to regard technology and technological change as one of its core elements. The purpose of this essay is to explore problems inherent in coming to terms with technology, different ways solutions to those problems have been framed, and theoretical implications of those solutions for practice of history. In so doing essay will move from terrain of historians to that of geographers, economists, and social theorists in order to return with questions about diversity of experience and possibility of synthesis, a matter Brody also raised and to which Montgomery's volume is, in a sense, a response. What elements constitute labor process? As much recent has flowed from reconsideration of Marx's work, it is useful to begin with his classic formulation. In Donald MacKensie's words, Marx's conception ofthe process displays three elements: purposive activity (i.e., work), objects on which that is performed (i.e., materials), and the instruments of work (most commonly, tools). Practically, process is social, rather than private or individual, and in capitalism (not to speak of all existing socialisms) has an economic character as a valorization process, in that it adds determinate value to products realized from inputs.3 The necessity of accumulation, competition among capitalists, and conflicts between capital and over fruits of