Confounded Subjectivities: the Psychological Prison in ‘Labour Process Theory’. (original) (raw)

Abstract Much of the labour process debate in the 35 years following the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital has been preoccupied with its subjective dimension, an aspect deliberately neglected by Braverman since his priority was to clarify the objective situation of labour to which subjectivity might respond. In what is still the only volume carrying the title ‘Labour Process Theory’, David Knights and Hugh Willmott (both 1990) responded to this challenge by proposing a quasi-existential treatment of subjectivities which has proved of enduring influence, not only in the labour process debate itself but also in its offshoot sub-discipline of Critical Management Studies (Hassard, Hogan and Rowlinson, 2001). This paper argues that these interventions were not soundly based either in respect of the theoretical sources on which they drew or in the interpretations of empirical research which were adduced in their support. It is further argued that progress in understanding the subjective dimension of labour will depend not on the production of more sophisticated ‘externalising’ theories of subjectivity but on a reversion to an earlier tradition of industrial sociology which pays attention to, and respects, the interpretations of their own position in the social order by the workers themselves. In essence both Knights and Willmott attribute an individualizing tendency to the capitalist social relations of production. This tendency, they maintain, sets in motion a quest for satisfactory and stable identities. In Knights’ version, this search in the case of ‘subordinate workers’ ends either in an a-political privatization or in a passive-aggressive machismo which, because of its inability to accept the legitimacy of ‘effeminate’ white collar and managerial work, is incapable either of an ‘attack’ on capitalism or of constructive co-operation within the labour process. For Willmott the individualizing tendencies of capitalism are held to react with an already-present ontological openness to produce an existential anxiety, the response to which is a ‘fetishism of identity’ founded on the illusions of psychological continuity and stability. In an attempt to shore up these illusions, individuals are said to seek out interpersonal and institutional setting which will confirm the identities in question. In the case of ‘subordinate workers’ the inadvertent result is to perpetuate the conditions of their own subordination. The paper shows that this portrayal of the working class as locked in a psychic prison of its own making largely follows from certain choices of method rather than from anything in the matters to which these are applied. The first of these is a thoroughgoing methodological individualism, manifest in the dubious attribution of individualizing tendencies to capitalism and in the posit of an individualized response to the aforesaid openness of the human condition. The second is a radical social constructionism in which the subjective response to power is seen as somehow complicit in the constitution of power itself. The third is a persistent tendency to depict the possible responses to wage labour in terms of mutually exclusive alternatives: to suppose, for example, that pride in the identity of labourer is incompatible with a determination to challenge the conditions under which labour is performed. The paper also examines the manner in which both authors have sought empirical support for these theorizations of subjectivity from some of the major ethnographic studies of the 20th century. Extending over several decades, these attempts, it is shown, feature misreadings of the case material and the straw-manning of the authors’ own interpretations of their data on a scale which entirely nullifies the claimed empirical confirmation. The paper ends with the suggestion that a more constructive approach to the ‘missing subject’ of the labour process requires a return to - and updating of - an earlier and more reflexive tradition, in which workers are treated, not as the disoriented victims of some hypostasised individualization, but as industrial sociologists in their own right, with their own theories of the social order and of the potentials attached to their own place within it. These theories need to be treated not as static and individual ‘images of society’, but as culturally-produced framings which make sense of, and are modified by, the immediate experience of the labour process as it is acted upon by managers.