The Labour Process Debate: A Theoretical Review 1974–88

Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital was published in 1974. It stimulated a widespread debate in Britain, which gathered pace through the latter part of the 1970s. This debate has extended and diversified, so that now there are three major overlapping currents: (1) Questions about deskilling and the attempt to construct a satisfactory model of skill changes. (2) Questions about labour markets and the attempt to construct a satisfactory model of capitalist labour markets. (3) Questions about managerial strategy and control. This leaves out of account various other strands of the debate; nevertheless the three areas above seem to me to be the core areas and to help to define the parameters of the debate. In this chapter I intend to focus on the third area: questions about managerial strategy and control; this is the area of research which has shown the most theoretical development in the past few years and which has generated heated controversy (e.g. Storey, 1985; Friedman, 1987).KeywordsIndustrial RelationShop FloorLabour ProcessEmployment RelationshipControl RelationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.