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DOI: 10.1177/030981680408300108
2004 28: 179 Capital & Class
Myths at Work

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by Pepe Portillo on July 30, 2014 cnc.sagepub.com Downloaded from by Pepe Portillo on July 30, 2014 cnc.sagepub.com Downloaded from
179 Book Reviews
BOOKS
Revi ew
Section
edited by Andrew McCulloch
The sociology of work is now amongst
the least popular of areas for many
students despite the fact that many more
of them work part-time than ever before
in order to survive at university and keep
debt levels to something approaching
manageable proportions. The study of
work is considered as boring and old-
fashioned and cannot compete with
courses on consumerism, identity and
the body. The low levels of open and
direct workplace conict since the mid
18os defeat of the miners and other key
groups are part of the explanation for
this image in Britain. The result has been
a shift in the focus of sociology and
industrial relations from conict, and
workers as active subjects, to managerial
perspectivesexibility, consensus and
team-workingwrapped in a frame-
work of the need to become more
competitive in a globalised world. This
excellent book sets out to redress the
myths that sustain most current views
of work, academic, political and more
popular. In doing so it will hopefully help
puncture the ideological claims that have
done much to demoralise workers and
dispirit potential students of work and
employment relations.
The book explores eight myths that
in many ways are in many ways mutually
sustaining. These myths are those of
globalisation; lean production; non-
standard employment; the female take-
over; technology and science as the
solutions to workplace problems; the
skills revolution; the death of class; the
end of trade unionism; and the econo-
mic worker. The common claims in
these areas are myths in a double sense:
they are partial descriptions of actual
processes of change at work, but also
explanations that encourage particular
decisions to be made and accepted. The
common and eective method used to
examine and debunk these myths is rst
to establish the potency of the myth
through an exposition of leading
exponents, followed by evaluations
using extensive references to secondary
works and the detailed knowledge of the
authors, gained through extensive case
studies. There is some emphasis on the
importance of the last, the authors
believing in the need for inclusive case
H. Bradley, M. Erickson, C. Stephenson and S. Williams
Myths at Work
Cambridge: Polity Press, zooo, x + zpp
isnN 0-7456-2270-4 (hbk) o.oo, isnN o-;(6zz;1-z (pbk) 1(.
Reviewed by Bob Carter
by Pepe Portillo on July 30, 2014 cnc.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Capital & Class #83 180
studies and representative eldwork
(p.16) as a way of countering the
volume of research that relies merely on
managerial voices to establish dominant
trends. A central concern of the authors
is the desire to give workers a voice in
order to locate continued resistance to
the imperatives of capital accumulation
and to stress the continuities with past
practices as well as the nature and
unevenness of contemporary change.
Despite this stress on case studies,
however, there is an equal awareness of
the need to critically examine the wider
social and economic relations and role
of governments in structuring the con-
text in which case studies are located.
Not all of the myths identied have
the same status and this is reected in
the designation of some of them as meta-
myths in that they structure and rein-
force some of the other myths examined
in the book. Globalisation is one such
meta-myth. Against an account that
details the various positions that con-
ceive globalisation as a universal and
inevitable process forced upon states and
weakening the power of labour, the
authors posit a perspective that stresses
elements of continuity and the continued
importance of locality. It is arguable that
they place too much emphasis on
locality.
While there certainly is no universal
homogenisation of workers conditions
as a result of employer strategies, and
there has been insucient emphasis on
mediation and interpretation, it would
be equally wrong to emphasise that
resistance and place totally determined
outcomes. In many instances, it is not
only place, but also sector, that is
important in determining outcomes of
struggle: that is, for instance, not
Sunderland schoolteachers, but teachers
in Sunderland.
Given the wide range of focus it
would be surprising if readers did not
nd ideas and conclusions with which
to take issue. The role and inuence of
politics and governments are raised, for
instance, but the state is inadequately
conceptualised. State employment is
seen as a bulwark against globalisation,
with the implication that the state can
hold o globalisation, rather than being
integrally linked to the process. There
are other claims that are perhaps
insuciently established. Within the
attempt to give an original, coherent
theoretical position, for instance, there
is an unsubstantiated claim that the later
Marx considered work as a purely
economic category. The contribution
of Marx and later theorists have made
to labour process theory is left largely
unexamined and, indeed, at one point
the book maintains that recent attacks
on the perspectives from Foucauldians
and social constructionists are laudable
having broken the hegemony of labour
process studies (p. 1).
Finally, the account is overly
defensive of trade unions, anxious to
show resistance and the continued
existence of robust unionism. The
classical Marxist analysis of the nature
of trade unions perhaps needs no
rehearsal here, but its continuing
relevance to the ineectiveness of
unions is not acknowledged nor applied
in the book.
Within the wider achievement of the
book, however, these are minor criti-
cisms. The book deserves to become an
indispensable aid for those interested in
what is happening to work, labour and
employment. It would make an ideal
undergraduate text book. But it is also
far more than a textbook, reviewing not
only other works but also having a strong
base in the authors own research.
by Pepe Portillo on July 30, 2014 cnc.sagepub.com Downloaded from
181 Book Reviews
Moreover, rather than homogenizing
dierent contributions into a bland
mixture, dulling readers interests, it has
a very denite, coherent and consistent
purpose throughout, carried out suc-
cessfully and with assurance.
This book is an introduction to Felix
Guattaris ideas, aimed particularly at
people interested in the political
signicance of the outpourings of his
fertile, conceptual imagination. Gua-
ttari emerges here as a highly prescient
thinker who seems to have had, in 18,
a stronger sense than most of the
colossal changes that lay ahead for
society in the 1os and beyond. He
anticipates the demise of the Soviet
empire, the rise of a global society based
on information processing and digital
communications technology, and the
main lines of social and political division
that correspond to the latter. He passio-
nately endorses a politics that is both
individualistic and solidaristic, and
which anticipates many aspects of the
anti-capitalist and hacktivist move-
ments that have emerged in the past
decade. In doing so, he develops a
vocabulary with which we might dene
the problematic that unites these move-
ments, and determine the character of
self, society and nature for the future.
For Guattari, these three entities are
not discrete but interlocking elements
in a system thatincreasingly domina-
ted by what he calls Integrated World
Capitalism (iwc)is going seriously
awry. The symptoms of this can be seen
Felix Guattari (translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton)
The Three Ecologies
Athlone Press, London and New Brunswick, NJ, zooo, 1;( pp.
isnN o(8oo6o81 (pbk) 1(.
Reviewed by Graeme Kirkpatrick
in each of the three ecologies of the
books title. Our experience of selfhood
is increasingly dependent on mass
media, which reduces us to the narrow-
ness of a subjectication based on
passivity and repetition. As a society,
iwc stymies creativity in favour of
Sartrean seriality we are each focused
on the same objects, but have no
common project that denes us as active
and creative beings. The eects of this
line of social development on the natural
world are the subject of a erce polemic
on the destruction of the planets animal
and plant life in the pursuit of prot.
Guattaris alternative to continuing on
this course is not dened in terms of a
single political project. Rather, it is sig-
nalled by a refusal of subjectications in
multiple strategies of personal creativity
which, in the course of forcing them-
selves into being, can open out onto new
congurations of desire, social reality
and nature that exceed current limita-
tions. Paradoxically, by being more
experimental with ourselves and in this
sense more individualistic, we can escape
the pseudo-individualism of iwc, and
move into a constellation where experi-
ence is not pre-coded by the binary oppo-
sitions of individual/group, conscious/
unconscious, and culture/nature.
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