Sociology Copyright © The Author(s) 2009, Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav BSA Publications Ltd® Volume 43(5): 913–930 DOI: 10.1177/0038038509340728

Labour Power and Labour Process: Contesting the Marginality of the Sociology of Work Paul Thompson

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University of Strathclyde

Chris Smith

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Royal Holloway, University of London

A B S T RACT

This article opens by suggesting that the decline in the sociology of work in the UK has been overstated; research continues, but in locations such as business schools. The continued vitality of the field corresponds with material changes in an increasingly globalized capitalism, with more workers in the world, higher employment participation rates of women, transnational shifts in manufacturing, global expansion of services and temporal and spatial stretching of work with advanced information communication technologies. The article demonstrates that Labour Process Theory (LPT) has been a crucial resource in the sociology of work, especially in the UK; core propositions of LPT provide it with resources for resilience (to counter claims of rival perspectives) and innovation (to expand the scope and explanatory power of the sociology of work). The article argues that the concept of the labour power has been critical to underpinning the sustained influence of labour process analysis. K E Y WOR D S

labour power / labour process / labour process theory / sociology of work

Crisis, What Crisis? he central rationale contained in the Call for Papers for this Special Issue is that ‘the study of work may have become progressively marginal to mainstream sociology’. It would be difficult to disagree with that judgement. The

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sociology of work has a long and distinguished history in Britain. Yet as a thoughtful and wide-ranging paper from Strangleman (2005) sets out, at the beginning of a new century the situation, on the surface at least, does not look good. Few sociology departments have any expertise in the area, the bookshelves are full of studies of culture and consumption rather than production and work, and the British Sociological Association has not had work and employment as a theme for its annual conference since 1984. Yet our view is that a marginalization thesis needs to be underpinned by a very careful examination of the intellectual and institutional trends that shape the means of production of research on work and the workplace. What exactly has become marginalized? It’s difficult to maintain that it’s work itself. Despite gloomy predictions, employment and job creation rates have continued to rise, albeit unevenly across the industrialized world, fuelled, in part by significant increases in the participation of women in the labour force. Moreover, whatever the reason – the work itself, the material rewards, the sense of identity and self-respect – authoritative surveys show high levels of positive association with work (European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, 2007). That is not to say that all is sweetness and light. Books such as Polly Toynbee’s Hard Work (2003), Madeline Bunting’s Willing Slaves (2004) and Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character (1998) have been at the forefront of extensive debate in popular discourse on issues such as the provision of decent and dignified work, the long hours culture and work-life balance. One could repeat a similar story in Australia, the USA and other societies. Yet a different narrative dominates broader social theory. Leading contributors have tended to proclaim the end or at least decentring of work or work society (Bauman, 1998; Lash and Urry, 1994). Post-Fordist or post-modern variants of a ‘new economy’ are based on individualized, consumption-oriented actors rather than collectivities with interests and identities rooted in the employment relationship. Two strands are intermeshing here. On the one hand, post-modernists following the cultural turn are asserting the centrality of identity and consumption (Pakulski and Waters, 1996). On the other, social theorists such as Beck (2000) are rehearsing new versions of ‘end of class’ or end of capital-labour conflict arguments (Gorz, 1999). The other influential new economy narrative is based on the centrality of knowledge. In the informational or knowledge economy the traditional factors of production are displaced by weightless or immaterial sources of competitive advantage (Castells, 1996). Rather than the accumulation of capital, socio-economic life is characterized by the flow or circulation of ideas and information. This is not the place for a critique of new economy narratives (see Bradley, 2000; Henwood, 2005; Thompson, 2003), but to make three observations with important implications for a sociology of work. First, given that, as Crompton (2008) notes, classical sociology has strongly linked class and work, the latter has been a conceptual casualty of the perceived decline of the former. Second, marginalization is a consequence of misrepresentation. Dominant social theory

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retains a sociology of the economy, but without a substantive sociology of work. New economies are conceived either as not centred on work relations, or having largely benign consequences for the people at work. The combined effect of these two strands of social theory has been to render large sections of the economy, workforce and work relations invisible. It is our contention that these trends are not analogues of objective developments in the contemporary economy and workplace, but largely outcomes of the intellectual choices and orientations of social theory. However, social theory and social science are not identical. Large numbers of social scientists in the UK and other countries have continued to research and write about this supposedly marginalized realm. Interestingly, of the top 20 most-cited articles in Sociology, 12 are about work and/or class. Moreover, a specialist journal – Work, Employment and Society (WES) – also published by the British Sociological Association under the initial auspices of Richard Brown, is now in its 22nd year. It is exceedingly odd that no mention is made in the Call for Papers of Sociology’s sister journal. The most logical inference would appear to be that WES is not seen as contributing enough or effectively to rediscovery and innovation. Yet, as a review by the outgoing editors outlines (Rainbird and Rose, 2008), it has been a remarkable success story since its launch in terms of the breadth, number and quality of its submissions. The recurrent themes identified by Rainbird and Rose – employer control and new forms of work, new divisions of labour, privatization and commercialization of the public sector, the nature of service encounter, selfemployment, informal work and employee relations in small firms, the articulation of home and work etc – are surely conceptually and empirically innovative enough to satisfy any reasonable criteria of variety and innovation. Though methodologically and theoretically pluralist, a number of the editors of WES – Theo Nichols, Paul Edwards, Paul Stewart and the current Strathclyde team – have been strongly associated with labour process debates and perspectives. It is our view that the association between the sociology of work and Labour Process Theory (LPT) has been a source of strength not weakness. This positive view appears to be shared by many of the readers of Sociology. Of the 12 previously mentioned most-cited articles, half concerned labour process debates.

Labour Process Theory and British Industrial Sociology In June 1978 many of Britain’s leading industrial sociologists met to debate Braverman’s (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital. This was the beginning of a development in which, ‘During the late 1970s, studies of the “labour process”, inspired by the work of Marglin, Edwards and Braverman, virtually redefined British “industrial sociology”’ (Ingham, 1996: 562). The research programme of LPT – an emphasis on the dynamics of control, consent and resistance at the point of production – was also consistent with the writings of a new generation of radical industrial sociology and industrial relations writers such as Huw

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Beynon (1975), Theo Nichols and Peter Armstrong (Nichols and Armstrong, 1976; Nichols and Beynon, 1977). Popularizing extended theoretically informed case study methods against an early generation of more quantitative assessment (Bechhofer et al., 1968), their books combined an emphasis on the limited effects of new managerial practices, such as job enrichment, with the practical and ideological problems of trade union organization. LPT therefore strengthened those tendencies in workplace research that sought to reach beneath institutional, formal patterns and to discover and explore hidden or informal realms of industrial relations and workplace conflict. Yet why did British industrial sociology need to be ‘redefined’? After all, as one later study noted: ‘in the early 1960s industrial sociology looked as though it had arrived. Its special task was the study of social relations in work situations and to develop an understanding of the links between industrial systems and the wider society’ (Eldridge et al., 1991: 202). A decade later and the situation had changed. It was argued that industrial sociology had fragmented, and had become less able to explain the new trends in economic life and the world of work, such as new forms of conflict, labour market segmentation and work organization (Hyman, 1982; Brown, 1992: 168–74). More importantly, its influential accounts had come to view the factory as the recipient of external orientations to work rather than as a source of conflict and identity – becoming more concerned with orientations to work than work itself (Thompson, 1989). LPT was attractive because it had the capacity to connect different dimensions of work, employment and industrial relations, and therefore counter the tendency to fragmentation. It had a theoretical narrative – the degradation of work under the impact of new forms of capitalist production and management – attuned to a radical decade and based on Marxist accounts of labour and capital within capitalism. Its focus on the ‘objective’ conditions of work contrasted positively with the somewhat exhausted attention paid to subjective meanings, worker attitudes and class consciousness in mainstream and radical sociology (Bechhofer et al., 1968; Bulmer, 1975). However, there was also methodological continuity with the long-standing traditions of ‘plant sociology’ stretching back to Donald Roy in the USA (1952) and the ‘Liverpool school’ of industrial sociology that influenced a diverse range of researchers from Lupton to Banks, Blackburn to Beynon. In sum, as capitalism and work were changing, LPT offered to British industrial sociology the analytical and empirical tools to maintain the historic interest in the dynamics of work relations and the connections between workplace and the wider social system. Of course, this is not the whole story of the sociology of work in Britain during the last 25 years. Debates have continued on other territories such as work, gender and the family. Indeed, complaints of narrow agendas influenced by LPT have occasionally surfaced from the peak of second wave research to more recent times (Bradley et al., 2000; Salaman, 1986). Such objections have recently been reassembled in the previously referred to paper by Strangleman (2005). His case would have been more credible if the paper had actually referred to any contemporary research and writings from this perspective (the last relevant reference is to Hyman in 1987). Given that 14 widely read

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volumes of papers derived primarily from the labour process conference have been published since 1990 on topics as diverse as resistance and power, global Japanization, customer service, white-collar work and work-life boundaries, narrowness is not the word that comes immediately to mind.1 However, there is a kernel of truth about scope and boundaries of analysis contained in such complaints. Selectivity is inherent in any distinctive conceptual framework. Some things are studied and others are not. The orientation of LPT to the waged workplace, and to some extent case study methods of analysing that workplace, meant that it was less equipped to address, amongst other things, issues such as the varieties of (often informal or unwaged) types of work, temporal and spatial dimensions, and what Glucksman calls the ‘total social organisation of labour’ (Pahl, 1988; Pettinger et al., 2005; though see Taylor and Bain, 2007, for a critique of Glucksman). The research programme of LPT utilizes particular theoretical resources to explain specific empirical problems. A conceptual and empirical focus on the labour process only becomes a problem if privileging those social relations becomes a means of denying the significance of others. That has never been the case. LPT is neither paradigmatic nor a complete sociology of work in terms of concepts and coverage. Whatever the limitations in its scope, our contention in this article is that LPT has played a necessary and positive purpose in maintaining a space for a critical sociology of work. The history and trajectory of those debates will be familiar to many UK readers (see Thompson and Newsome, 2004), so we won’t repeat it here. Instead, we want to make an argument that the core propositions of LPT provide it with resources for resilience (to counter claims of rival perspectives) and innovation (to expand the scope and explanatory power of the sociology of work).

Second Wave Theory: A Reconsideration Constructed from the responses to Braverman and a fresh range of research from the late 1970s to the end of the 1980s, a second wave of LPT came into being that had a strong base in the UK. Whilst a varied range of studies were undertaken, not least into the extent of and limits to deskilling, ‘…the core of their research programme consists of a series of historically informed empirical studies focused on managerial control strategies and practices in work organisations’ (Reed, 1992: 155). These studies (especially Edwards, 1979; Friedman, 1977; Littler, 1982) are well known and their details need not be repeated here. At one level they shared a similar sense of scope of analysis, developing causal and sequential patterns of management control, seeking to make connections between workplace, industrial relations, the state and broader social structures, though some focus on struggle at the micro level and how this related to broader management regimes. Beyond conditions of sale of labour power, detailed attention was paid to the myriad of job controls, wage-effort bargains, both individual and informal, collective and organized, especially in the work of Edwards and Scullion (1982). Elaboration of this dialectic of control and resistance became a central feature of the approach, but was modified through

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the pioneering work of Burawoy (1979) over the question of consent of the worker to managerial controls inside the labour process. Also notable during this period were a series of factory case studies of women production workers by a new generation of feminist industrial sociologists (Cavendish, 1982; Pollert, 1981; Westwood, 1984). Ethnographic methods not only allowed a close observation of the conditions and informal practices of female wage labour, but the very marginalization of the concerns of women workers by the local and national trade union apparatus stimulated a focus on the dual sources of resistance and consent in gender-based modes of control and shop floor cultures. The new generation of theory-led case studies illustrates how ‘matters at the point of production’ are indicative not just of battles over the frontier of control, but also of ‘how workers are persuaded to release their labour power’ (Edwards and Scullion, 1982: 151). Whilst labour power is clearly reproduced inside and outside the workplace, the distinctive and innovatory nature of second wave theory was facilitated by the concept of the dynamics of workplace regulation having a ‘relative autonomy’ (Edwards, 1990). The implication is that similar external situations can produce different internal labour process outcomes, because of the distinctiveness and peculiarities of particular points of production. However, this does not mean some infinite variety of workplaces isolated from capital accumulation, but rather that labour processes have common and specific features. Selecting and shaping labour power, or determining work effort, is necessarily variable given differentiation and competition between capitals and between workers as socially and historically diverse owners and sellers of labour power. The special, indeterminate status of labour power as human, embodied, mobile and active ensures common imperatives of control are tried, but also that any settlement between labour and capital is temporary and diverse. Building on the relative autonomy concept, a related theoretical shift was to retain focus on the problematic of labour power through materialist accounts of conflicts between capital and labour, but that sought to move beyond the limitations of existing debates on class struggle and industrial relations. The work of many second wave writers led them to try and disentangle LPT from Marxism; or more precisely those elements that pertain to the relations between production and political economy, from the complete baggage of assumptions about society and social transformation (Edwards, 1990; Thompson, 1990). The central argument was that the dynamics of relations between capital and labour as actors in the workplace cannot be assumed to be continuous with capital and labour as societal actors. In other words, labour process struggles might have diverse, not predictable or singular, outcomes at the level of the political and the political within work.

Challenges to and for LPT New Economies for Old? The mid 1980s saw the emergence of paradigm break theories such as postFordism and flexible specialization (Lash and Urry, 1994; Piore and Sabel, 1984).

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What marked these approaches was an unshakeable optimism with respect to trends in work and employment. More recently, the new economy baton has been passed to proponents of the knowledge economy from managerial writers (Despres and Hiltrop, 1995) to high profile social theorists (Castells, 1996). Details of the plot (knowledge as driver of change) and some of the characters (expert labour, independent sub-contractors) change, but the optimistic message about a move from command and control to collaborative high trust, high commitment work relations remains the same. This has led to a return of upskilling arguments. Indeed the proclamation of the existence of or need for a high skills model is an unquestioned feature of public policy across all OECD countries. Labour process research drawing on case studies and wider skill surveys has repeatedly questioned this myth (Thompson et al., 2000). Whilst there will be growth at both ends of the spectrum, most new jobs in the UK and USA are in low-skill, low-wage parts of the service sector (Henwood, 2005; Nolan and Wood, 2003). Many of the signifiers of high skill – qualifications, the spread of information and communication technologies, and investment in research and development – are merely proxies that have little relationship to actual skill and knowledge worked on the job (Warhurst and Thompson, 2006). For example, the main UK skill survey has shown a marked decline in task discretion and job influence (Felstead et al., 2004). Whilst autonomy might appear to be distinct from skill, discretion in tasks is a core feature of the capacity of employees to utilize their skills. The supposed need for skills in the new economy and paradigm shifts in production and markets were seen to have positive implications for workers in the labour process. The 1990s meant labour process research fought a necessary, if somewhat defensive battle to analyse the continuities and constraints associated with ‘lean production’, ‘flexibility’ and other new management practices. In contrast to the optimistic claims of workplace transformation that remained stubbornly persistent in much of the managerially orientated literature, a wealth of qualitative case study research from North America (Parker and Slaughter, 1988; Rinehart et al., 1997) and the UK (Delbridge, 1998; Elger and Smith, 1994) emerged to illustrate the ‘dark side’ of these lean production regimes. These accounts, heavily reliant on the control/resistance framework for their theoretical resources, reviewed the opportunities these new workplace regimes present to actively extend labour control. Far from providing a replacement to the mind-numbing stress of mass production, flexibility systematically intensifies work by finding yet new ways to remove obstacles to the extraction of effort. Moreover, by restoring an emphasis on the experience of employees, such research also demonstrated that workers continue to adopt an array of resistive responses to this extension of control. LPT is, however, concerned with the transformation of labour power rather than a particular means, such as deskilling. As an important collection of studies largely from the Labour Process Conference (Warhurst et al., 2004) has shown that, whilst there is a persistent trend towards the maintenance of low skill jobs, this has been accompanied by significant shifts in the definition and nature of skills. The most prominent of these has been the rise of ‘generic’ skills

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with the shift to service work – adaptability, motivation, cooperativeness – many of which are attitudes, social predispositions and character traits. In other words, LPT has been at the forefront of research into new sources of labour power. A good example is the way that Bolton (2005) has built on and from Hochschild’s (1983) work on emotional labour. Whilst Hochschild drew on Braverman as part of her attempt to show how the profit motive ‘slipped in under acts of emotion management’ (1983: 119), her account of the ‘transmutation’ of workers neglects the indeterminacy of labour. Bolton uses a ‘partnership’ of LPT and Goffman to develop a ‘detailed realist account of workplace emotion’ (2005: 3) that gives consideration to the contested nature of the emotional effort bargain. In a similar vein, writers sympathetic to LPT have developed the concept of aesthetic labour (first used in Warhurst et al., 2000). Although there is now an extensive range of writing about the body, materialist accounts focus on managerial interventions with respect to workers’ corporeality and consideration of how the body becomes ‘a focus of diverse labour processes’ (Wolkowitz, 2006: 2). Another conceptual innovation concerns knowledge and skills. While we may not be seeing an increased demand for high autonomy knowledge workers (see critique from Warhurst and Thompson, 2006), management have become more interested in the knowledgeability of employees. In pursuit of the ‘high performance workplace’, firms need to move beyond the limits of Taylorism and Fordism to introduce organizational structures and practices that facilitate initiative and innovation in the form of creativity and continuous improvement on the part of workers. Yet many of these skills are social rather than technical. As a result, employers, particularly in the service sector, may be choosing to invest more in recruitment and selection processes to identify workers with the required personal characteristics rather than skill development and learning (Callaghan and Thompson, 2002). The expanded definition of skill benefits capital rather than labour. Employees or the education system are given the responsibility for ‘skill’ development and maintaining employability; social skills carry no wage or other premium in the occupational hierarchy; and mobilizing the whole person rests on a qualitative intensification of labour. This argument is consistent with more general evidence of work intensification. Insecurity in the labour market may have been overstated (see Fevre, 2007), but sources of insecurity and pressure in the labour process are attested to in a growing range of studies (Burchell et al., 2002; Green, 2001; Heery and Salmon, 2000). These sources are linked to increased responsibilities and falling staffing levels in response to heightened market pressures; subjection to greater accountability, measurement and appraisal; and emotional exhaustion. Overwork, time squeeze and ‘negative job-to-home spillover’ from high performance practices have also been noted in extensive UK surveys (Hogarth et al., 2000). Capital’s expanded use of labour power can be a source of consent and common interests. That is certainly the line that emerges from discourses of high performance work systems (see Lloyd and Payne, 2006), but current conditions make that unlikely. Discretionary effort is being asked for from employees, including taking over responsibility for career development, when many employers are making less investment in training and skill development, and workers feel

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insecure in their jobs, despite relatively stable figures for job tenure (Beynon et al., 2002; Cappelli, 1999). This collectivization of effort and decollectivization of risk (Burchell et al., 2002) frequently applies just as much to core workers and firms that develop track records of high performance (Konzelmann and Forrant, 2003). Labour process and other theorists have been rebuilding connections between workplace dynamics and the broader political economy by trying to conceptualize these new conditions, which bear little resemblance to any variety of postFordism. Such outcomes point to the dominance of financial circuits of capital and to the impact of capital markets driven by the pursuit of shareholder value (Froud et al., 2006; Lazonick and O’Sullivan, 2000; Thompson, 2003), as well as profitability from the whole value chain through systematic rationalization (Altmann and Deiß, 1998). Successive waves of downsizing and delayering are undertaken as firms seek ways of cutting costs to improve financial performance.

New Identities for Old Interests? If arguments for upskilling and the end of Taylorism drew inspiration from different owners of capital and their production regimes (the Japanese especially), another source of attack on LPT came from an attention to the existential character of owners of labour power within new service and professional contexts. In the 1990s the influence of post-modernism peaked in most of the social sciences. This was manifested in what became known as the ‘cultural turn’ – the argument that the reproduction of everyday life and the basis of domination had shifted from the material to the symbolic (Lash and Urry, 1994). Such arguments were taken into the labour process debate by Hugh Willmott and David Knights, who were centrally involved in the Labour Process Conference, which has acted as the key source for disseminating labour process research and ideas from the early 1980s. They led an assault on the critical materialist or modernist orthodoxy that had characterized second wave thinking. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of power and identity, their aim was to understand how (post-)modern individuals are constituted by and subjugated to the discourses and disciplines within the modern corporation (Knights and Willmott, 1989). At one level such arguments can be seen as a radical version of the mainstream argument in the business and management literature that culture and the management of commitment have displaced control and bureaucracy. The outcome that individuals ‘buy into’ the system is held in common, but the explanation is sought in processes of seduction, surveillance and self-discipline. In this version of LPT, identity rather than labour becomes the site of indeterminacy. Post-modern perspectives in the labour process debate have also been developed through Foucault-influenced case studies on work organization and new management practices (Barker, 1993; Sewell, 1998). In both variants of the post-modern position worker resistance and self-organization are seen as diminished or defunct. In contrast to the post-modernist view that subjectivity is no longer a significant source of resistance, a substantial body of workplace research has identified that employees remain knowledgeable about management

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intentions and outcomes and retain the resources to resist, misbehave or disengage (e.g. Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999; McKinlay and Taylor, 1996). While traditional qualitative case study research supplied sources of resilience concerning labour agency, it added little to the analytical armoury of LPT. That was provided, in part, by Ackroyd and Thompson’s (1999) work on organizational misbehaviour. As was explicitly recognized in the book, there is a long and fruitful tradition in British sociology that explores the informal and recalcitrant side of employee (mis)behaviour from the effort bargain studies of Baldamus (1961) to the workplace deviancy studies of Ditton (1977) and Mars (1982), and the classic account of control and resistance patterns by Edwards and Scullion (1982). It is also worth noting that attempts to defend and extend conceptions of agency were paralleled in Hodson’s (1995, 2001) exploration of the role of resistance in maintaining employee dignity at work. However, the misbehaviour perspective did bring something distinctive to the table. This involved a systematic and distinctive mapping of worker action and agency based on four distinct loci of struggle over working time, working effort, the product of work and work identities. Each dimension of misbehaviour is described as a form of appropriation underpinned by group self-organization around a variety of interests and identities. This framework constitutes a conceptual innovation in two ways. First it moves beyond the control and resistance model. Referring to the term appropriation, Fleming comments that, ‘rather than resistance being conceived as a negative reaction to power the authors instead frame misbehaviour as an active set of practices that attempt to recover a degree of autonomy at work’ (2001: 190–1). Clearly, this argument extends the view that the workplace has a degree of ‘relative autonomy’ within which struggles over divergent interests and identities takes place. Second, it seeks to resolve some of the disputes about subjectivity through an explicit focus on identity: ‘Interests and identities are not opposites. They reciprocally and discursively form one another …’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999: 55). The defence of the core idea of indeterminacy of labour and provision of new categories of employee action significantly expanded conceptions of agency available to researchers in the sociology of work. New research from a labour process perspective is putting flesh on that argument; for example, Taylor and Bain’s (2003) graphic account of how call centre workers are using humour as a tool of both informal and formal resistance. Linking back to the previous section, we can say that enhanced managerial efforts to mobilize the whole person through teamworking, corporate culture, customer care programmes and the like meet worker identities and interests on a new, more contested terrain or emotional effort bargain.

Limitations and Moving On: Re-mapping Labour Power in a Globalizing Economy We have sought to demonstrate that LPT has been a source of resilience and innovation in thinking about work and its contexts. That is not to say that the

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approach is without limitations. Given the nature of the above two debates, engagement with other dimensions of a broader sociology of work was neglected, notably the employment and reproduction of labour power, community, class and professions, kinship and external linkage (see e.g. Crompton, 2006, 2008). Sociological writings using labour market and workplace survey data, exploring the interplay between markets, organizations and intensification of labour, are particularly important (Green, 2006; McGovern et al., 2007). This ties in with a previous ‘methodological’ weakness we have identified. Second wave theory began with broadly based, historical accounts of workplace change, then put these through the critical filter of numerous workplace case studies to test propositions about management control and skill formation strategies and practices, and more sophisticated typologies of conflict and consent. Although much of value was generated, the danger is that the research programme can disappear into micro-level case studies whose causal chain ends at the office door. This trend was accentuated by the idea of a ‘relative autonomy’ of the labour process. Whilst this opened a space to see distinctive workplace dynamics, when the ‘relativity’ becomes the dominant focus it creates the potential, if unintended, legitimation of a narrower frame of analysis. A great strength of LPT is its capacity to connect the workplace to a broader political economy. In too much labour process research, distinctions about moments in political economy (exchange, production, circulation, realization) have been lost or subordinated to a general focus on the labour process as work organization – an empirical site of employment. The focus on the workplace to research the labour process is empirically logical. Workplaces as a rule do not walk around but are spatially set pieces of physical capital, with inputs (labour and capital) flowing into sites with fixed abode. Empirically, however, this leaves out those who contribute but are not workplace located, those who have recently left, or even future workers and managers who have yet to enter the abode of production. In other words pre-production, reproduction and post-production tend to be excluded or less well examined when we only look at what occurs in actually existing workplaces. Multi-site, multilayered research studies can overcome some of these issues, but these often end up disconnected from actual labour processes. Longitudinal research also challenges problems of stasis and the tendency to construct case study stories on the basis of limited temporal investigations. New thinking about financialized or disconnected capitalism, discussed earlier, are an important attempt to restore links to a bigger picture, but there have been other innovations in creating a less ‘organization-centric’ frame of analysis. Elger and Smith’s (2005) work on Japanese-owned companies in the UK had repeat visits to factories over a number of years, which revealed interesting interactions between the labour market, employment relations and work organization. In some factories the size of the workforce could vary by as much as 500 within a few months (Smith et al., 2004), which had major implications for ‘work discipline’ and ‘work effort’, as these interacted with such mercurial labour flows. As well as the need for a temporal and spatial dynamic to be introduced back into the LPT, there is a requirement to see how ICTs decentre work

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from a single physical site and open up working to any space with communication facilities – which has implications for ‘workplace-civic society-home’ reconfigurations (Felstead and Jewson, 2005). These empirical shifts also require a theoretical adjustment in how LPT conceptualizes labour power, so that it can encompass the transnational flows of workers and capital, and the shifts in the responsibility for maintaining workers ready for the market. It is useful to think about labour power as possessing two components or indeterminacies: effort power and mobility power (Smith, 2006). The first indeterminacy emerges from the distinction between labour and labour power made by Marx. Hiring labour power does not guarantee an automatic outcome or product for the buyer, as the capacity to work remains within the person of the worker, and the imperative to realize or extract this capacity as work or labour is the very raison d’etre of the management function. The second indeterminacy reflects the decentralization of the authority over the disposal of labour power to the individual worker who has the burden and freedom (constraint and choice) as to where and to which employer the individual sells his or her labour services. This can be called mobility power, which is indeterminate in the sense that the decision on which employer the worker chooses to park his or her labour power is given to the individual and therefore remains a source of uncertainty for the employing firm in calculating whether or not workers will remain with them. It is also an uncertainty for the worker as to whether or not the employing firm will continue to require their labour services, and where it will locate to get these resources. The explosion of remote services, especially call or contact centres, highlights this spatial expansion of the mobility power of employers in sectors, such as financial services, previously tied to national economies (Taylor and Bain, 2005).

Conclusion: Beyond Industrial Sociology In many ways, LPT retained its influence because, intentionally or unintentionally, it played to and built on the strengths of British industrial sociology. That is, a ‘plant-based’ approach focusing on the dynamics of formal and informal workplace relations, with some sensitivity to a broader macro context. However, if an industrial sociology was ever empirically and intellectually viable, it is not now. Various factors, some discussed in this article, are redrawing the boundaries of skills and controls; the firm, the nation and the global economy; and between the public and private domains. There are those who will see LPT as somehow out of date or out of synch with whatever version of the ‘new economy’ is currently fashionable. But we are in the middle of a crisis not of the knowledge economy or post-modern society, but of financialized capitalism. The orientation of LPT towards capturing and connecting work/place dynamics and their multiple forms of embeddedness in the broader political economy makes it highly relevant for our times. The remaking and remapping of labour power is central to this conception and remains integral to the contemporary contradictions in the management of the

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firm. Whilst we associate crises of financialized capitalism with banking failures and the credit crunch, there are equivalents at the level of the employment relationship. Capital, particularly in a service-based economy, relies on the intensive use of a broader range of worker capacities and tacit knowledge, expressed through the ideas of discretionary effort and high performance practices. However, the dominance of capital markets and shareholder value means that employers are seldom willing to pay for that enhanced effort through a stable and inclusive workplace mutual gains bargain. Financial pressures on the contemporary state mean that governments are often unwilling or unable to adequately plug that gap in terms of skill formation, childcare support and the like. A further barrier to LPT being part of the solution rather than the problem is raised by Strangleman: ‘The interdisciplinary nature of the Labour Process forum [sic] can be seen to undermine a more explicitly sociological account of work by occupying such a dominant position in the field’ (2005: 5). Aside from the fact that this doesn’t sit easily with the view in the previous sentence that the debate has produced ‘a very narrow set of interests’, he has a point. This does reflect, as Strangleman previously notes, the fragmentation of the disciplinary base of sociology, including the fact that many sociologists of work, supportive of LPT, are located in business schools. This UK trend actually has mixed outcomes. Certain themes, such as total quality management, team working, lean production, flexible specialization, management strategies and a tendency to focus on management as the most important agency in work, are, anecdotally, more typical of work research in business schools. It might also be the case that some themes are harder to raise – trade unions, social class, social community, social movements connected to work, unemployment and the unemployed, divisions within the working class. However, studying work and employment relations within management schools is core business; the same cannot be said for within sociology departments. Setting aside this institutional peculiarity, it is interesting that Strangleman makes the same general criticism of Work, Employment and Society – that in a drive for interdisciplinarity, it neglects an explicitly distinct sociology of work (2005: 7). In the UK at least, the fragmentation genie is unlikely to be put back in the sociology bottle. The wider range of contributions and debates reflects this and is, in many ways, a positive feature of both LPT and Work, Employment and Society. Although more undoubtedly needs to be done to feed back more of the workplace research and middle range theorizing into the disciplinary foundations of sociology, is interdisciplinarity really the main threat to a healthy sociology of work? We think not. As we have argued, the real problem has been the marginalization of work and the employment relationship in mainstream social theory, which is reflected in its weak position in most sociology departments. Oddly enough, this division has been reproduced within labour process debates, with the orthodox majority rejecting the post-modernist attempt to construct an identity-based analysis that is rooted in organization theory rather than the employment relationship (see the debate between Thompson and O’Doherty, 2009). The latter group now put their energies into Critical Management Studies. Whatever the undoubted limitations of its contribution to the discipline, LPT is rooted in classical sociology, particularly in Marx and Weber. To reiterate

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an earlier point, LPT alone cannot be the engine for a reinvigorated sociology of work. But with its orientation to the dynamics of capitalist political economy, it is well placed to engage with new and welcome perspectives in economic sociology, as well as maintaining friendly relations with others who continue with a focus on the multiple layers of work and the employment relation. In expanding its conceptualization of labour power, LPT is bringing something distinctive to a new and enhanced sociology of work that is being developed in and beyond Britain. By marginalizing and misunderstanding the world of work it is mainstream sociology that is in crisis and need of renovation.

Acknowledgement The authors would like to thank the comments we received when we presented a version of this paper in the Thematic Session New Developments in Labour Process Theory at the American Sociology Association Conference in Boston, MA, in 2008.

Note 1

For a full list of titles see http://www.ilpc.org.uk/BookSeries.aspx

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Paul Thompson Is Professor of Organizational Analysis in the Department of Human Resource Management, the University of Strathclyde. His research interests focus on skill and work organization, control and resistance, organizational restructuring, and changing economies. He has been active in the International Labour Process Conference for many years. Recent books include New Technology @ Work (Routledge, 2008) with Paul Boreham, Rachel Parker and Richard Hall; and A Handbook of Work and Organization (Oxford University Press, 2004) with Stephen Ackroyd, Pam Tolbert and Rose Batt. Address: University of Strathclyde, Department of Human Resource Management, Graham Hills Building, 50 Richmond Street, Glasgow G1 1XU, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Chris Smith Is Professor of Organisation Studies and Head of the School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests are in labour process theory, knowledge transfer through the transnational firm, and professional labour. He is currently researching the organization of the labour process in Chinese factories. He has been active in the International Labour Process Conference for many years. Recent publications include: Creative Labour – Working in the Creative Industries with Alan Mckinlay, (Palgrave, 2009); Remaking Management: Between Global and Local with Brendan McSweeney and Robert Fitzgerald (Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Assembling Work with Tony Elger (Oxford University Press, 2005). Address: School of Management, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK. E-mail: [email protected]