Review

Reviewed Work(s): Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly
Capitalism. by Michael Burawoy
Review by: Anthony Giddens
Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Jul., 1981), pp. 192-194
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2778550
Accessed: 07-10-2017 16:47 UTC

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 Book Reviews

Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly

Capitalism. By Michael Burawoy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1979. Pp. xvii+267. $20.00.

Anthony Giddens
King's College, Cambridge

Manufacturing Consent is one of the most significant contributions to the

sociology of industry in many a year. The book is based on research ma-
terial the author collected while working as a machine operator in the
engine division of Allied Corporation. The observations Michael Burawoy
made when he began working there struck him as very similar to those
made some three decades earlier by Donald Roy in his well-known articles
on output restriction. Burawoy was led to look up Roy's original disserta-
tion, the source of those articles. Extraordinarily enough, he had unknow-
ingly been carrying out his research in the same factory that Roy had
studied 30 years previously. This provided him with a chance to compare
his findings with Roy's and to investigate the changes that might have
occurred in the nature of work in the factory over the intervening period.
Roy's work, Burawoy argues, was closely involved with the assumptions
of industrial sociology of the 1930s. Roy was concerned to show how
workers limit output on the shop floor, and his writing bore the strong
imprint of the views of Elton Mayo. Burawoy reverses the question that
guided his predecessor's research. Instead of asking, "Why is it that the
workers restrict output?" he poses the question, "Why is it that the work-
ers work as hard as they do?" If one examines Roy's descriptions of the
labor process, he suggests, one finds that they actually portray a picture
of hectic and unrelenting activity. This remains true today: Burawoy was
impressed with the apparently furious pace with which the workers apply
themselves to their labor tasks. Indeed, he found himself drawn into the
same phenomenon: "It wasn't long before I too was breaking my back,"
he avers, "to make the quota, to discover a new angle, and to run two
jobs at once, risking life and limb for that extra piece" (p. xi). The
Marxist researcher found himself, to his own disquiet, driving himself to
increase Allied's profits.
Why should this be so? Burawoy rejects the homilies of orthodox in-
dustrial sociology, which presumes that workers and management share
common objectives in working as hard as they possibly can. But he also
questions two perspectives associated with Marxist views. One is the con-
ception that the hegemony of capital is sustained above all by institutions

Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from
the author.

192 AJS Volume 87 Number 1

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 Book Reviews

outside the workplace-the family, schools, the media, and so on. In con-
trast to this standpoint, Burawoy wants to show how class relations are
reproduced within the process of production. However, he also diverges
from those-most notably Braverman-who, while accentuating the cen-
trality of the labor process, tend to treat workers as passively incorporated
within a division of labor organized from above, thus increasingly intensi-
fying management control.
In the factory he studied, Burawoy tries to show, the organization of
work relations on the shop floor is dominated by "making out"-a sort of
competitive game workers play with the rules governing the labor task
as laid down by management. The labor process is experienced by the
worker as an encounter with technology and regulations that are imposed
externally and impersonally. But workers do not confront these imposed
conditions of labor as passive objects; they actively seek to manipulate
them as players do within the context of the established rules of a game.
Some workers, those who do tasks that are strategically important for
the activities of the rest of those on the shop floor, are particularly im-
portant in this respect: they are frequently called on to do "hot jobs."
Making out means meeting the production quota assignments: in this
there is often an element of risk, and the operator will have to balance
the chances of turning out scrap or breaking tools against the possibility
of attaining production targets. Where operators deem that making out is
unlikely or impossible, they will forgo the attempt and take things easy,
because they receive their base earnings in any case. This is one form of
quota restriction, "goldbricking," to which Roy refers. A second type is
where a ceiling is placed on output. When Burawoy was working in the
factory, this was fixed at 140%, where base earnings are 100%. Workers
consider, correctly, according to the author, that turning in more than this
would lead to cuts in the real rate of their earnings per job batch. But
this is not really an "output restriction" because operators routinely pro-
duce more than 140%, although they never deliver more than this figure:
they keep the remainder as a fund to use in operations where making out
is difficult.
The dominance of making out in the culture of the shop floor has re-
mained largely unchanged, Burawoy says, over the period from Roy's
study to that of his own. Its very continuity, across times involving various
sorts of technological change, demonstrates the hold that it has over the
workers; and both Roy and Burawoy found themselves drawn into it
almost against their will. Playing the game serves various ends: it inhibits
boredom, provides challenges, and links the workers in relations with one
another. These relations are not, however, ones of consensus in opposition
to management. Far from it: making out both produces and helps to
absorb a range of "lateral" conflicts that cut across worker-management
confrontations. It may even lead to circumstances, Burawoy tries to show,
where workers actively clash with management in order to defend condi-
tions of profitability.
Among the most important changes the author detects in the factory

193

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American Journal of Sociology

between 1945 and 1975 is an alteration in the focus of worker-management

conflicts. In 1945, operators on the shop floor were closely supervised by
time-study men-the agents of Taylorism, as it were. But these men have
now been replaced by industrial engineers who are located in offices away
from the shop floor and who only rarely venture onto it. More hostility
is directed by workers against those who try to bust rates or otherwise
go against the "rules of the game" than against the planning personnel.
Whereas conflict in the former situation had a "political" dimension, in
the sense that it led workers into clashes over the very nature of the in-
dustrial authority to which they were subject, the newer conflicts are
both more sporadic and confined to "economic" issues. Burawoy relates
these changes to the broader backdrop of the transformation from com-
petitive to monopoly capitalism. Marx correctly anticipated the demise
of "classical" capitalism but did not foresee that class struggle could not
only be contained within a transformed capitalist system but could also
become an essential stabilizing element in it. "Class struggle was not the
gravedigger of capitalism but its savior" (p. 195).
Although I have reservations about some of Burawoy's more general
arguments, Manufacturing Consent is an outstanding study. It is bound
to stimulate controversy, but its mode of approach and conclusions con-
form closely to two other major pieces of work that have appeared recently.
In studying men on the shop floor as active, knowledgeable individuals
rather than as mere "dupes" of the wider institutional system (yet re-
taining an overall awareness of that wider system), Burawoy's book has
affinities with Paul Willis's brilliant Learning to Labour (Lexington, Mass.:
Lexington, 1977). The arguments that class struggle on the level of day-
to-day practices on the shop floor is not given sufficient prominence by
Braverman and that such struggle has opposite consequences to those pro-
jected by Marx are made in Andrew Friedman's Industry and Labour
(Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1977). The second of these books
supplies a possible corrective to some of what Burawoy has to say. The
workers studied by Burawoy have won a position of what Friedman calls
"responsible autonomy," in which management concedes a considerable
amount of control of the labor process to employees in exchange for
cooperation in reaching production targets. But there are other sectors of
industry where management still applies strategies of "direct control"
(Taylorist techniques, involving the close supervision of the labor task).
These tend to be sectors in which the labor force is composed largely of
women, ethnic minorities, or immigrant workers. Varying types of man-
agerial strategy can here be connected to the analysis of segmented labor
markets and to the relation between different types of internal and ex-
ternal labor markets.

194

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