Confounded Subjectivities: the Psychic Prison in ‘Labour Process Theory’.
by
Peter Armstrong
Emeritus Professor
University of LeicesterManagementSchool
Paper for Presentation at the 29th International Labour Process Conference:
University of Leeds, 5th to 7th April 2011
Contact Information:
Abstract
Much of the labour process debate in the 35 years following the publication of Laborand Monopoly Capital has been preoccupied with its subjective dimension, an aspect deliberately neglected by Braverman since his priority was to clarify the objective situation of labour to which subjectivity might respond. In what is still the only volume carrying the title ‘Labour Process Theory’, David Knights and Hugh Willmott (both 1990) responded to this challenge by proposing a quasi-existential treatment of subjectivities which has proved of enduring influence, not only in the labour process debate itself but also in its offshoot sub-discipline of Critical Management Studies (Hassard, Hogan and Rowlinson, 2001). This paper argues that these interventions were not soundly based either in respect of the theoretical sources on which they drew or in the interpretations of empirical research which were adduced in their support. It is further argued that progress in understanding the subjective dimension of labour will depend not on the production of more sophisticated ‘externalising’ theories of subjectivity but on a reversion to an earlier tradition of industrial sociology which pays attention to, and respects, the interpretations of their own position in the social order by the workers themselves.
In essence both Knights and Willmott attribute an individualizing tendency to the capitalist social relations of production. This tendency, they maintain, sets in motion a quest for satisfactory and stable identities. In Knights’ version, this search in the case of ‘subordinate workers’ ends either in an a-political privatization or in a passive-aggressive machismo which, because of its inability to accept the legitimacy of ‘effeminate’ white collar and managerial work, is incapable either of an ‘attack’ on capitalism or of constructive co-operation within the labour process. For Willmott the individualizing tendencies of capitalism are held to react with an already-present ontological openness to produce an existential anxiety, the response to which is a ‘fetishism of identity’ founded on the illusions of psychological continuity and stability. In an attempt to shore up these illusions, individuals are said to seek out interpersonal and institutional setting which will confirm the identities in question. In the case of ‘subordinate workers’ the inadvertent result is to perpetuate the conditions of their own subordination.
The paper shows that this portrayal of the working class as locked in a psychic prison of its own making largely follows from certain choices of method rather than from anything in the matters to which these are applied. The first of these is a thoroughgoing methodological individualism, manifest in the dubious attribution of individualizing tendencies to capitalism and in the posit of an individualized response to the aforesaid openness of the human condition. The second is a radical social constructionism in which the subjective response to power is seen as somehow complicit in the constitution of power itself. The third is a persistent tendency to depict the possible responses to wage labour in terms of mutually exclusive alternatives: to suppose, for example, that pride in the identity of labourer is incompatible with a determination to challenge the conditions under which labour is performed.
The paper also examines the manner in which both authors have sought empirical support for these theorizations of subjectivity from some of the major ethnographic studies of the 20th century. Extending over several decades, these attempts, it is shown, feature misreadings of the case material and the straw-manning of the authors’ own interpretations of their data on a scale which entirely nullifies the claimed empirical confirmation.
The paper ends with the suggestion that a more constructive approach to the ‘missing subject’ of the labour process requires a return to - and updating of - an earlier and more reflexive tradition, in which workers are treated, not as the disoriented victims of some hypostasised individualization, but as industrial sociologists in their own right, with their own theories of the social order and of the potentials attached to their own place within it. These theories need to be treated not as static and individual ‘images of society’, but as culturally-produced framings which make sense of, and are modified by, the immediate experience of the labour process as it is acted upon by managers.
1. Making Space for ‘Subjectivity’
On a number of occasions, both Knights and Willmott have represented their deliberations on subjectivity as a response to a consensus within the labour process debate that it stands in need of just such a theory. In furtherance of this impression, they have frequently quoted Thompson’s observation that ‘a full theory of the missing subject is probably the greatest task facing labour process theory’ (Thompson, 1990, p. 114, italics in original; Knights, 1990, p. 207); Willmott, 1990 p. 337, 1997, p. 1344). On this, there seems to be some misunderstanding. Thompson’s interest in the ‘missing subject’, like Braverman’s (1974: 27) albeit with less optimism, concerns the prospects for some challenge to labour process controls on the part of workers, not their capacity for introspection on their being-in-the-world. To be sure, there is a sense in which identity is involved in the process of becoming an active subject, but that is identity as it relates to the social being of others and as that relationship implies an ability to act within and upon the social order. This is a different and larger sense of subjectivity than the individualized ruminations on the self which figure so prominently in the writings of Knights and Willmott (e.g. Willmott, 1997, p. 1346). It could be argued, in fact, that these authors’ over-arching assumption that subjectivities are dominated by an individualized search for satisfactory and stable identities is to write political quiescence and social ineffectuality into the analysis from the outset.
Once the identity of the worker is understood as a potentially dynamic consciousness of self in relation to the social order, the political stakes become clear, and it also becomes clear why it was a question which received a great deal of attention from British industrial sociologists from the 1950s onwards. The research in question ranged from theorisations of the relationship between social imagery and structural location (Lockwood, 1966) to questionnaire studies of attitudes towards work and the social order (Goldthorpe, Lockwood, Bechhofer, and Platt, 1969) to ethnographic studies of the social theories produced by the workers themselves (Nichols and Armstrong, 1976). Perhaps because this considerable body of work appeared under such rubrics as ‘images of society’ (Lockwood, 1966) or ‘consciousness’ (Mann, 1973), Knights and Willmott’s preference for a quasi-existentialist terminology may have led them to underestimate its relevance[1]. On the other hand, there seems to have been an element of intentionality in the omission. According to Knights, the work in question has the common feature of reducing the subjective dimension to an analysis of labour resistance, thereby ‘replacing Braverman’s determinism with a control-resistance dualism’ (Knights, 1990, p. 305 italics in original). By this Knights seems to mean a theorization in which essentially agentic subjects are seen as oppressed by outside forces. It is clear from Knights’ general antipathy towards dualisms that he objects to such a view of things, but it may not be not immediately obvious why. Perhaps he thinks that it is wrong to suppose that people might be oppressed by forces external to themselves, or perhaps that they are deluding themselves in thinking that they might otherwise enjoy a certain freedom. As will presently appear, Knights’ anti-dualism, in combination with a radical social constructionism, does indeed imply something of the sort (page 12).
Meanwhile, Knights (1990, p. 305) provides us with a roll-call of previous work in which he believes that the treatment of subjectivity is fatally flawed by a dualistic preoccupation with resistance. This index expurgatorius includes Aronowitz, (1978) , Palmer, (1975), Elger (1979) and Littler and Salaman (1982), Gorz (1976), Ramsey (1977, 1985), Edwards, (1979), Zimbalist, (1979), Stark, (1980) and Storey (1983). Knights’ list also includes Knights and Collinson (1985) but presumably that is for detective-work on the case for the prosecution rather than as defendants. It also includes Nichols and Beynon (1977) whose work is actually the subject of extended discussion, but that is because it contains ethnographic data which Knights believes can be detached from the authors’ own commentary and reworked so as to provide support for his thinking on subjectivities.
The accusations are wild and inaccurate of course. To take only the case which both Knights (1990) and this paper consider in more detail: Nichols and Beynon (1977) do not reduce the subjective dimension of the labour process to a consideration of resistance. Much of Living with Capitalism, indeed, is concerned with the absence of resistance, as should have been evident even from the title. No is there much discussion of resistance to be found in Goldthorpe et al. (1969) though in their case Knights finds alternative and additional grounds for dismissing their work. In the process of operationalising their concepts for the purpose of conducting a questionnaire survey, he tells us, they ‘reduce subjectivity to attitudes or orientations to work’ (Knights, 1990, p. 310 italics in original). What Knights’ ‘subjectivity’ includes which Goldthorpe et al’s ‘reduction’ excludes is not explained, a particularly culpable omission since their construct of instrumental privatization would seem to be exactly replicated in Knights’ own concept of self-interested individualization. Nor does Knights explain how he would go about operationalising – or even defining - his own concepts of subjectivity and identity. From Knights and Murray (1994, p 42), we learn that the two terms are to be regarded as interchangeable, but not much else[2].
Finally, even if Knights’ objections to the aforementioned previous work were well-founded, it is an ungenerous and not particularly fruitful approach to the literature to insist that it must pass some test of affinity with one’s own thinking before there is even the possibility of its relevance.
2. The Premise: Capitalism and Individualization
One of the difficulties in approaching the writings of Knights and Willmott is that they expend so much of their energy in upbraiding other writers for their neglect of subjectivity, or their failure to theorize it in terms which they find acceptable, that it is not always easy to see what they are proposing as a positive alternative. The nearest thing to formal expositions of their thinking on the subjectivities or identities of the working class, however, appear to be those in the 1990 volume Labour Process Theory (Knights, 1990, Willmott, 1990). This source possesses the additional advantage that the views expressed are unadulterated Knights and Willmott, so to speak, since the volume was edited by themselves.
For both Knights and Willmott the primary characteristic of capitalist society lies not in the exploitation of labour power or the formation of social classes which follows from that, but in its individualizing tendencies. This is fundamental to their insistence on the importance of identity because it is this hypothesised individualization which is held to produce a state of existential anxiety and it is this, in turn, which precipitates a search for ‘stable and satisfactory identities’.
Knights (1990, p. 311-2) first introduces this theme through an exposition of the managerial commonsense on incentive payment systems. ‘Targets and bonus schemes, wage differentials and career systems’, he tells us, ‘all have the effect of separating individuals off from one another and turning them back in on themselves.’ This is an attractively straightforward thesis but it suffers from the unfortunate defect that it is untrue, and has been known not to be true for many decades. Even the isolated and closely-monitored group in the bank-wiring room of the Hawthorne Electrical Company reacted to their group incentive scheme not by pressurising one another to maintain production but according to a ‘logic of sentiments’ which prioritized the integrity of the group (Rose, 1988 p. 111). That was American manual workers in 1933. In the late 1950s, Crozier (1964) encountered a similar ésprit de corps amongst white collar workers in the French financial services sector who were supposedly incentivized by the machinery of bureaucratic career progression. And so the picture accumulates. This is not to deny that some individuals might react as Knights thinks, but the weight of evidence over the years indicates that it is not the general pattern.
Later in the same chapter, Knights supplements his case by arguing both individualization, and the existential anxiety supposedly associated with, it from an extrapolation of Foucault on disciplinary surveillance (Foucault, 1971; Knights, 1990, p. 321 ff.). In Knights’ version, the anxiety is a consequence of the subjects’ uncertainty as to whether or not they are meeting the standards of a normalizing gaze whilst the individualization arises from a competition between them to achieve the ‘very best standards of behaviour and performance deemed to be required by those exercising power’.
It is entirely reasonable, of course, to suppose that surveillance engenders anxiety. There is a question mark, though, concerning the kind of anxiety. That which attends an uncertainty over whether or not one has succeeded in conforming to an oppressively-enforced norm is not the same as the anomic anxiety which might precipitate reflection on one’s identity. The supposition that Foucaultian regimes of discipline might precipitate competition between those subject to them is even more doubtful. Aside from the fact that no such response is mentioned by Foucault himself, how does so resolute a theorist of anti-essentialism as Knights explain a competitive response to a regime whose entire rationale is the production of uniform and docile bodies? And how, if a competitive response exists, does it co-exist with an anxiety over whether or not one has succeeded in conforming?
In Willmott’s exposition the attribution of individualizing tendencies to capitalism is justified by a quotation from Marx. In the 1973 Penguin Edition of Grundrisse there is just one passage which is indexed under the heading ‘individuals’ and that is the one which Willmott quotes. That it is the only passage so indexed should perhaps have served as a warning. It reads thus:
The more deeply we go back into our history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the forms of the family expanded into the clan; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antithesis and fusions of the clans. Only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes. But the epoch, which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. (Marx, [1857] 1973, p. 84. quoted in Willmott (1990, p. 353)
When searching for a passage from an author which will fairly represent their views, it is as well to scan the surrounding text so as to ensure that the writer is not being ironical or voicing a point of view with which they disagree. The foregoing passage is a case in point. It occurs in the introduction to Marx’s discussion of the social character of production – a context which might have served as a second warning. The passage continues:
Production by an isolated individual outside society – a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness – is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other. There is no point in dwelling on this any longer. The point could go entirely unmentioned if this twaddle, which had sense and reason for the eighteenth-century characters, had not been earnestly pulled back into the centre of the most modern economics . . . (Marx, ibid. Italics in original)
It must be allowed that Marx’s meaning in the Grundrisse is ambiguous at points, and the translator’s foreword duly issues a third warning: that the decision to minimise the editorial re-working of his notebooks has resulted in ‘a demanding text to read and a hazardous one to quote’ (ibid p. 24-5). On this occasion, nevertheless, Marx’s recourse to the forthright ‘twaddle’ does rather suggest that he was writing of individualization as an illusion or ideology, one which exists only in the minds of bourgeois social scientists. It is economists which are named in Marx’s text, but the observation is also true of those lawyers whose collective capacity for conjecture has bequeathed us the legal fiction of the individual employment contract. If there is individualization to be extracted from Marx’s text, it is one which exists only in this imaginary world, one in which in which the physical person of the worker and the fictitious one of the company agree uncoerced terms on which labour power will be exchanged for a wage. In contrast to this illusion, Marx’s actual view on the social consequences of capitalism are set out in Ch. 2 of The Poverty of Philosophy:
Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends becomes class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle’ (quoted in Bottomore et. al. 1991, p. 85)
Perhaps, though, this chewing over Marx’s texts misses the main point – that the distinctive feature of capitalist societies is not individualization at all, but the formation of social classes, a process which is recognised not just by Marxists, but by all social historians of any substance (e.g. Thompson, 1968). When, therefore, we are confronted with the bald assertion that, ‘labour processes fragment, atomise and turn workers into individuals rather than members of a class’ (Knights 1990, p. 311), it is mightily tempting to respond with Marx’s ‘twaddle’.
3. The Argument: the Entrapments of Subjectivity
It is a temptation which must be resisted, however. Just because Knights and Willmott err in attributing individualizing tendencies to capitalism per se does not rule out the possibility that such tendencies might co-exist with the processes of class formation. According to Weber, the ‘this-worldly asceticism’ which he regarded as the moral foundation of capitalism and an ‘unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual’ were both historical legacies of Calvinism (Weber, 1930 Ch IV). Let us suppose for a moment that individualizing tendencies came into existence roughly when Knights and Willmott say they did and pick up the argument from that point.