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What is This?
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49
I
N THE FOLLOWING DISCUSSION we argue that the manner Introduction
in which some social scientists seek to ‘return to the
employee’ exacerbates rather than resolves the problem of
‘absent labour’. We suggest that this shortcoming, though
intelligible in its own terms, is best understood against a wider
failure in the treatment of labour in the sociology of work,
including Industrial Relations and Human Resource
Management which in the main have worked on problematical
notions of the relationship between individualism and
collectivism. By contrast, we argue that the latter relationship
is better understood by rooting it within the problem of what
Marx termed the collective worker—the necessarily co-
operative character of the capitalist labour process in which
valorization depends upon collective functions of individuals
where ‘it is sufficient for [a worker] to be an organ of the
collective labourer, and to perform any one of its subordinate
functions’ (Marx, cited in Carter, 1985: 61). This structural
feature of the capitalist labour process always confronts
management and is addressed today through a range of
strategic alternatives exemplified by the individualizing
practices of, inter alia, HRM.
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50 Capital & Class #62
Does the solution, in other words, not lie with a ‘return to the
employee’ in the workplace rather than an emphasis upon
subjectivity? This is the view put forward by Thompson and
Ackroyd (1995), which we examine below.
It is our contention that the problem of the disappearing
worker in labour process debate is to be located (following
Carter, 1995) in the problem of absent labour in the guise of
the collective worker. By collective worker we mean the
conditions and circumstances of workers producing surplus
value in the context of the ‘real subsumption of labour under
capital’ (Marx, cited in Carter, 1995: 60). Under these
determinate conditions of the capitalist mode of production
work is never an individual process despite worker
experiences to the contrary. It is the appearance of
individualism, given precedence over the realty of collective
participation in the capitalist labour process, which often leads
to confusion regarding cause and effect. Moreover, this
confusion could be said to lie at the root of the accounts we
examine below where individualized employee experience is
mirrored in new managerial strategies which are driven into
the workplace—viz., individual experience is taken as the
starting point in the assault upon collectivism. Citing Marx,
Carter points out that since all value is determined collectively,
work is correspondingly defined collectively even whilst,
paradoxically, employees may understand their individual
contribution as sufficient unto itself (ibid: 60-1). 1 This is
important because it allows us to shift the discussion about
individualism versus collectivism (in the accounts below) from
an exposition of management/ trade union strategies aimed at
substituting the former for the latter as if the problem of the
indeterminacy of labour can be resolved to management’s
satisfaction through the reduction of worker collective action.
This certainly helps capital in a limited historical sense but the
broader problem for capital is how to deal with the
consequences, in Marx’s terms, of collective work processes
and specifically the typically unforeseen counter-politics and
ideologies, not to say new progressive gender and ethnic
relations between workers, which arise out of the changing
conditions of the collective worker. The broader problem for
capital is to develop strategic workplace identities and
alliances which seek to mitigate the consequences of the
structural nature of the capitalist labour process—for sure,
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54 Capital & Class #62
…in so far as the ‘labour process’ has been colonised from the
shores of subjects like organisational behaviour and
management studies it is not [surprising] that it should have
been exploited… selectively. As is well known colonialists often
do develop peculiar views of the countries that they invade. A
token of this is perhaps that references to ‘the capitalist labour
process’ threaten to become nothing other than an intellectually
pretentious way of saying ‘work’. (1991: 12-3)
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56 Capital & Class #62
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58 Capital & Class #62
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The Paradox of Labour Process Theory 61
(iv) Such ‘new agendas’ within the workforce are giving rise to,
albeit as yet uneven, dialogue within industrial relations
generally concerning the experience and effects of new
management practices together with the limits of traditional
regulation.
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The Paradox of Labour Process Theory 73
that the problem of modernity is alive and well in the daily lives
of many people. Furthermore, the identification of
collectivism/collectivist identities with organised collectivist
institutions, in the form of trade unions, leads to a reduction-
ism that fails to account for the new collectivist discourses at
work and their evolution as sites of struggle. For Thompson
and Ackroyd, the origins of this lie in the leitmotif of
‘misbehaviour’—their device for restoring the employee as the
proper object of analysis in labour process debate. However,
the consequence of this is to make it virtually impossible to
locate individual action, in an era of innovatory management
practices, as anything other than the outcome of individual
employee responses to the exigencies and rigours of the new
workplace. In short, Thompson and Ackroyd rediscover the
employee but at the expense of labour in the form of the
collective worker. In our view it becomes very difficult to
account for the complexities of employee collectivism whose
origins lie in the social relations of the capitalist labour process.
______________________________
Acknowledgments We would like to thank Bob Carter, Sarah Jenkins, Rob MacKenzie and the
three anonymous referees for their critical and helpful comments in the
preparation of this article.
______________________________
Notes 1. According to Marx, the collective worker is constituted by the capitalist
labour process in the following manner:
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The Paradox of Labour Process Theory 75
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The Paradox of Labour Process Theory 77
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