The Degradation of Work - Book Report/Review Example

Running Head: RECENT CHANGES IN ORGANISATIONAL FORM Critically Examine The Proposition That Recent Changes In Organisational Form And PersonnelStrategies Mark The Final Break With The "Degradation Of Work" [Writer's Name] [Name of Institute] Critically Examine The Proposition That Recent Changes In Organisational Form And Personnel Strategies Mark The Final Break With The "Degradation Of Work" The publication of Harry Braverman thesis, degradation of work, in 1974 had enormous impact on recent changes in organisational form and personnel strategies. Baverman's approach of degradation of work was an essential social critique that claimed massive conversions of work, the organisation, and workers brought about by capitalists in order to constrict their control over workers. The thesis degradation of work reaffirmed the venerable discussion of worker-machine relations as a technological essential of capitalism, and set forth two sweeping conclusions about effects of technological changes. The research literature in existence when Braverman described unequivocally contradicted both conclusions. The conclusions asserted, as facts, the degradation of work and the homogenization of the working class that is a major cause behind the changes came in organization form and personal strategies. Braverman's degradation-of-work thesis explained how the alienation of workers had developed in the past. Braverman's degradation of work thesis is consistent with the one that Blauner had examined in Alienation and Freedom, but Braverman outlined his case in unequivocally Marxist terms and did more than any previous researcher to make Marxism a major perspective in industrial and occupational sociology. Braverman used the term labor process to describe the technical organization of work, which had earlier been called the work process. Differences between the connotations of the words "labor" and "work", suggest the reorienting effect that Braverman's formulation had on views regarding work, workers, and the workplace. (Rowlinson, 2000, 13-14) Labor is an economic commodity exchanged in the market; work describes exertion of physical and mental effort to accomplish an end--an activity that a worker performs. Braverman held that work had been degraded by capitalism, turned into mere labor. Taylorism separated the hand from the brain and vested the brains in management and the hands in labor. Work became deskilled as technological and bureaucratic controls supplanted the self-direction of skilled workers. This process of deskilling standardized work activities, robbed work of meaning, and leveled skill distinctions among workers. It enlarged and homogenized the proletariat, which came to include clerical and semiprofessional occupations. Braverman's focus on skills had the effect of conceptualizing the outcomes of the industrial transformation as technological, psychological, and economic rather than social. Harry Braverman does not make clear what Harry Braverman means by skill, but since Harry Braverman sees the degradation process as involving the separation of mental and physical activities, it seems that Harry Braverman has identified skills as cognitive abilities of workers and has then generalized beyond that point to make skills technical characteristics of jobs. Sociological conceptions of work based on workers' relations to each other, group control over activities, and normative definitions of technical relations are missing. There had been a considerable body of research on the impact of technological changes and managerial control of workers before Braverman. Since Harry Braverman wrote, more has been done in response to his thesis on the degradation of skills. The research shows that historical changes in the skill level of work have not been unidirectional. The studies have used mainly, structural designs, in which occupations or some other labor force units are classified along skill dimensions, and they have included case studies of industries and occupational groups as well as aggregate studies. Case studies have found that technological displacement of crafts has accelerated in some capitalist industries. But the losses of skill in some instances have been more than made up for by new skilled occupations and by technological and organizational changes that upgrade skill in old occupations. Changes in occupational composition as measured by census categories show an overall pattern of upgrading due largely to a substantial decline in unskilled work. Formulations that are restricted to looking for upgrading or downgrading will naturally restrict their analysis to the economic dimension and will miss sociological leads such as those pursued in some studies that have related organizational changes to alterations of skill. Another test of Braverman's labor degradation thesis is provided by research on work satisfaction. Work satisfaction has been a discussion in industrial sociology since its founding, and study after study has found workers satisfied and their work meaningful to them Richard Hamilton and James Wright (1986), in an exhaustive review of polls on satisfactions and discontents, conclude that there is no credible empirical support for the thesis of rising discontent or falling commitment to the work ethic. Workers say they like their work and find meaning in it. Under capitalism, the state serves special interests and ensures unequal distribution of property favoring the bourgeoisie (Braverman 1974): "State power has everywhere been used by governments to enrich the capitalist class, and by groups or individuals to enrich themselves." The powers of the state, such as taxation, pubic lands, and other functions of public administration, serve "as an engine to siphon wealth into the hands of special groups, by both legal and illegal means" (285). Approach of degradation of work role tends to expand as the surplus generated becomes increasingly difficult to absorb under monopoly capitalism, resulting in instability, stagnation, or recession characterized by unemployment and low productivity. Harry Braverman suggests through degradation of work that Marxist class analysis provides a structural understanding of power with a focus on economic positions without reducing all power to the level of production relations as critics have asserted. Braverman's concept of degradation of work sees the new social movements (feminist, civil rights, peace, ecological) as manifesting antagonisms that arise from non-class relations of power and argues that Marxism must address these antagonisms without reducing them to the deprivation of class relations. Braverman's concept of degradation informs that a critical Marxist theory must not view democracy as an illusion and must be based on a theoretical and practical pluralism. Approach of degradation of work has pointed to what Harry Braverman considers Marxists' uncritical acceptance of four assumptions: objective class interests, classes as social actors, classes with political consciousness, and the state as the locus of class power. Braverman define power as the capacity of a social class to realize its specific objective interests and note aspects relevant to Marx's concept of power. Braverman finds two models of power in Marx, one structural and rational, conceptualized in terms of the structural position of social classes determined by the relations of production, and one instrumental, whereby class struggle leads particular classes to seize and wield power in order to realize their own interests. Power is a structural concept appropriate to the analysis of class relations at the analytical level of the mode of production. Marx acknowledged the existence of a middle class but left many questions about it unresolved. The development of a new middle class today can be analyzed as a process that emerges from within a given structure of social relations of production that are consequent upon each historical cycle of expansion and contradiction in the realization of surplus value and the accumulation of capital. The middle class is a product of the conflict between opposing classes, the antagonisms between labor and capital in the accumulation process, and the growth of political forces in state apparatuses. Although it predates the recent debate by several decades and draws upon a theoretical framework which is as much Weberian as Marxist, Mills' classic study is nevertheless an important point of reference for contemporary Marxist theorists. His conception of white collar workers as a distinctive "new middle class" anticipates many of the arguments of later, more explicitly Marxist, researchers and serves as an illustration of some of the general problems involved in the identification of intermediate class positions. (Rowlinson, 2000, 13-14) Harry Braverman believed that the middle class would progressively erode into the working class as monopoly capitalism took hold: "While the working class in production is the result of several centuries of capitalist development, clerical labor is largely the product of the period of monopoly capitalism. Thus the early post-Marx attempts to analyze degradation of work phenomenon were severely hampered by the fact that clerical work was as yet little developed as a capitalist labor process" (1974: 348). The two types of workers, factory and office, are becoming indistinguishable because most clerical workers increasingly come from families of factory background: "The apparent trend to a large non-proletarian 'middle class' has resolved itself into the creation of a large proletariat in a new form. In its conditions of employment, this working population has lost all former superiorities over workers in industry, and in its scales of pay it has sunk almost to the very bottom" (355). This class occupies an intermediate position outside the process of capital accumulation: "Not only does it receive its petty share in the prerogatives and rewards of capital, but it also bears the mark of the proletarian condition" (407). In sum, New Left analysis of the new middle class has generally accepted the proposition that it shares with mainstream social science that this group, however defined, is fundamentally different from the working class and, as such, is particularly problematic from the point of view of the socialist movement. We shall discuss the difficulties inherent in this view in a moment. However, before we do, let us consider the related question of New Left analyses of the traditional working class. While there has been considerable discussion of the New Left's view of the new middle class, less has been said about its approach to the working class. In one sense, this is not surprising since, with the exception of the burgeoning literature on the labor process stimulated by Harry Braverman degradation of work, there have been very few major theoretical or empirical studies of this group from within the contemporary left. Nevertheless, two distinct views of the working class are implicit in most of the major contributions to the new debate on class. One view accepts, to a great extent, the central proposition of the myth of classlessness -- the idea that the working class has accommodated itself to contemporary capitalism. Such an argument can be seen clearly in discussions of the new working class. In emphasizing the revolutionary potential of new working-class elements Harry Braverman simultaneously emphasizing the inability and perhaps unwillingness of the traditional working class to break out of its capitalist straitjacket. (Grugulis, 2000, 3) Similarly, the emphasis on the revolutionary character of the Third World that has been the hallmark of the theorists associated with The Monthly Review in the United States also contains an element of despair regarding the proletariat under advanced capitalism. This school of thought tends to play down the possibility of revolutionary working-class movements in advanced capitalist countries -- the working class has succumbed to blandishments of an affluent, wasteful consumer society. If a challenge to capitalism is to be mounted, it will have to come from the impoverished workers and peasants of the Third World. In conclusion, one can detect a similar view of the working class in the enthusiasm for the early work of Georg Lukacs and for the writings of the Frankfurt school that characterized much of the New Left. For all their emphasis on class consciousness and the revolutionary character of the working class, Lukacs' essays in History and Class Consciousness remain pessimistic; Braverman's concept of degradation of work is unable to describe the concrete mediations between the reified working class under capitalism and its potential as a revolutionary agent. The pessimism of the Frankfurt school theorists was even more explicit. For example, Marcuse's critique of capitalism coexisted with his apparent conviction that the working class was just as much a prisoner of one-dimensionality as everyone else. For this group of the New Left, the prospects of a revolutionary working class in advanced capitalist societies were slim indeed; as such, they had either consciously or unconsciously accepted a major component of the myth of classlessness. Other New Left theorists saw the working class in a rather different light. If one considers the various analyses of the new middle class outlined above, it is clear that all of them implicitly or explicitly regard the working class as politically unambiguous and unproblematic. The argument that the new middle class is politically problematic relies on precisely this assumption. To provide just one example, how could Wright argue that the ambiguity of new middleclass groups rested on their differences from the working class (i.e., on the characteristics they shared with the bourgeoisie or petite bourgeoisie) unless Braverman's concept of degradation of work were implying that the absence of these differences would make them unambiguous For these theorists, it was given that the traditional working class was at least potentially militant, revolutionary, socialist, and so forth. They thus rejected the portion of the myth of classlessness that emphasized the accommodation of the working class to contemporary capitalism. However, this remained an article of faith, an assertion. Little or no attempt was made to ground it in a theoretical analysis or to explore, either empirically or theoretically, the conditions for militancy in the contemporary working class. (Grugulis, 2000, 1-2) Even the major exception to this statement, Braverman degradation of work, has been severely criticized for its neglect of working-class consciousness and resistance. Consequently, New Left social theory has not really developed a systematic response to mainstream sociology's critique of the classical Marxist analysis of the working class in contemporary capitalist society. Bibliography Braverman Harry, (1974), Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work In the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press. Grugulis Irena, Knights David; (2000), Preface, International Studies of Management & Organization, Vol. 30. Rowlinson Michael, Hassard John; (2000), Marxist Political Economy, Revolutionary Politics, and Labor Process Theory, International Studies of Management & Organization, Vol. 30. Read More