Labor process theory

Labour process theory (LPT) is a Marxist theory of the organization of work under capitalism. It observes how people work, who controls their work, what skills they use in work, and how they are paid for work. Researchers in critical management studies, organization studies, and related disciplines have used LPT to explain antagonistic relationships between employers and employees in capitalist economies, with a particular focus on problems of deskilling, worker autonomy, and managerial control at the point of production.

Background

In Marxian economics, the "labour process" refers to the process whereby labour is materialized in use values. In this context, labour is an interaction between the person who works and the natural world, the elements of which are altered in a purposive manner. The labour process is three-fold: first, the work itself, a purposive productive activity; second, the objects on which that work is performed; and third, the instruments which facilitate the work.

The natural world – the universal material for human labour – is available to humankind independent of it and without any effort on its part; value is created in separating those resources from their natural elements. To this point, Marx gives examples of fish captured from water, timber derived from trees in a forest, and ore extracted from veins. The labour of alteration renders these objects into raw material. According to Marx, this transformative process is bidirectional:

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and nature participates and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates and controls the material reactions between himself and nature. He opposes himself to nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body in order to appropriate nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature.

The labour process is purposeful activity aimed at the production of value, either because an output is useful or tradeable (typically because it is useful). A surplus – an enhancement of the value between inputs and outputs – is generated in the labour processes. Because humans seek to improve their material conditions, labour processes exist in all societies, capitalist or socialist; their organization and control is indicative of the type of society within which they exist.

Modern applications

A key element of LPT is an analysis of the local systems of management and control, and an examination of how these are used to reduce the power of sections of the working class who hold work skills that are not reproducible by unskilled labour or machine power.

LPT critiques scientific management as authored by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early 1900s and uses central concepts developed by Harry Braverman in the 1970s. It can be used to explain workers' bargaining power under contemporary global capitalism, and has developed into a broader framework for examining exploitative management strategies. In Labor and Monopoly Capital: Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Braverman updates Marx's critiques of the capitalist labour process by questioning bourgeois accounts of work in the industrial society. Although Braverman's primary focus is the degradation of work in the twentieth century, which he associates with the relentless tightening of management control, he also outlines developments in the wider organization of monopoly capitalist societies, examining changes in their occupational and class structures.

Braverman posits that under capitalism, management steals workers skills, decreases the pleasurable nature of work, reduces worker power by controlling production, reduces wages by deskilling, and increases the exertion required from workers. He also examines class consciousness, acknowledging his inability to attend to working class self-emancipation. Others have criticised Braverman’s deskilling thesis as non-universal, and observed working class resistance to the imposition of Fordism.