Employ Respons Rights J (2009) 21:253262

DOI 10.1007/s10672-009-9116-4

Waving, Not Drowning: Explaining and Exploring

the Resilience of Labor Process Theory
Paul Thompson & Chris Smith

Published online: 10 June 2009

# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009

Key words labor process theory . labor power . control . skill . resistance . political economy
Labor Process Theory (LPT) in its modern postBraverman (1974) form has for over
30 years influenced, to varying degrees and in different places, industrial sociology,
industrial relations, labor history and organizational analysis. From the early 1980s it
became the dominant approach to the study of work and the workplace in the United
Kingdom and remains influential there, and in parts of Europe, Australasia and Canada.
What accounts for this intellectual durability? Institutional supports such as an annual
international conference (now in its 27th year) and a large scale publishing program (21
volumes in various labor process series) have helped. But LPT has had to have had
something to say and a capacity for both innovation and resilience, as for over three
decades it has been deployed and expanded to produce critical perspectives on trends in
global workplace developments. In some countries, notably the United States, it retained a
narrow commentary on skill formation and destruction, but in Europe and Australasia
especially, it has been the key touchstone for theorizing workplace reforms and innovation.
In accounts of the chronology of LPT it is common to refer to a number of overlapping
phases or waves of labor process research and writing (Thompson and Smith 1999;
Thompson and Newsome 2004). Beyond the early period of application and testing of
Bravermanian precepts (deskilling and singular management control regimes especially),
the second wave (mostly during the 1980s) involved a serious period of theory building in
which different typologies of control were developed along with the argument that
resistance is inseparable from control, and secondly that consent is always part of human

P. Thompson (*)
Department of Human Resource Management, University of Strathclyde, 50 Richmond Street, Glasgow,
Scotland G1 1XU
e-mail: p.thompson@strath.ac.uk
C. Smith (*)
School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK

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labor processes. The work of Richard Edwards, Friedman, Burawoy are significant and
later in that decade attempts to specify a core theory was made by mainly British scholars
(especially Paul Edwards, Thompson, Littler) who aimed to pull together the outcomes of
these extensive research programmes (see Knights and Willmott 1990).
These second wave studies shared a similar sense of scope of analysis, seeking to
elucidate patterns of management control by making connections between a number of
levels of action: workplace, the state, informal industrial relations and wider production
regimes. Part of the purpose was to make clear that particular outcomes, such as
deskilling and Taylorism were not laws of capitalist development, so much as
tendencies and historical patterns typical of some but not all capitalist societies. More
generally we could say that Labor and Monopoly Capital had undervalued the way the
labor process is embedded within socio-cultural contexts which lay out differing ways
of putting together the employment relationship and the organization of the labor process.
A core theory aimed to identify strong tendencies deriving from the structural properties
of capitalist political economy but leave open to empirical investigation what particular
mechanisms and outcomes were operative in particular conditions. So for example, the
core refers not to deskilling, but to the tendency for competition between capitals to
result in pressure for the cheapening the costs of labor and the continual transformation of
labor power. This may or may not create pressures to replace skilled workers with less skilled.
The result of this theorizing was to advance a more contingent relationship between
capitalism and labor-management regimes. As the introduction to a recent Canadian volume
of labor process-influenced writings has noted, during an incredibly fertile period of
analysis, critical studies of work succeeded in pushing debates about work in advanced
industrialized nations in new directions, thereby ensuring a more nuanced, textured and
dynamic understanding (Shalla 2007: 4). This was especially evident in a new
generation of theory-led case studies of the workplacefor example, Nichols and
Armstrong (1976), Nichols and Beynon (1977) as well as historical essays on the
development of the labor process, as collected in Zimbalist (1979), and industrial relations
fieldwork case studies, best exemplified by Edwards and Scullion (1982). There were other
historical and industrial relations case studies, as in the two edited volumes by Wood (1982;
1989). Also important were feminist voices that critically drew on Braverman to explore the
gendering of work, especially manufacturingPollert (1981), Cavendish (1982), Westwood
(1984), and Cockburn (1983).
Despite these empirical gains, by the end of the 1980s LPT was already in a more
defensive mode theoretically, attempting to defend its ground against a number of
paradigm break perspectives that associated its propositions about Taylorism/Fordism
with the old economy. In a post-Fordist new world, traditional managerial controls and
work organization were inimical to new forms of competition, and as such LPT associated
with these controls was also increasingly deemed to be old fashioned. Rule based and
technical controls diminished or became softer as values became fashionable and skills
and knowledge increased in a new economy. Industrial relations were replaced with
human resource management, mass production with flexible specialization, lean
production and high performance work systems as the purpose of employer strategy.
More importantly post-modern and post-structuralist variants of paradigm break
arguments tended to emphasize the diminishing significance of work itself and of
conflicting interests in the employment relationship. Reflecting the general cultural turn
in theory and practice, the focus of attention shifted from work to identity and
consumption. We will examine the reaction to these moves and how LPT continued to
advance in reaction to these trends.

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Corrections and Complaints

The supposed need for skills in the new economy and paradigm shifts in production and
markets were seen to have positive implications for workers in the labor process. Team working
in production implied a broadening of skills, and devolution of job discretion from management
to workers; congested mass markets, required product differentiation and accompanying
upskilling of workers to match a more bespoke product markets; and new economic activity,
especially ICTs and creative industries, increased demand for flexible and skilled workers, not
detailed and skill-diminished ones. In the face of these challenges for much of the 1990s labor
process research fought a necessary, if somewhat defensive battle to analyze the continuities and
constraints inside the reality of lean production, flexibility and other new management
practices if not the hype. In contrast to the optimistic claims of workplace transformation that
remained stubbornly persistent in much of the managerially orientated literature, a wealth of
qualitative case study research inspired by LPT from North America (Parker and Slaughter
1988; Milkman 1997) and the United Kingdom (Garrahan and Stewart 1992; Elger and Smith
1994; Delbridge 1998) emerged to illustrate the dark side of these lean production regimes.
These accounts, heavily reliant on the control/resistance framework for their theoretical
resources, reviewed the opportunities these new workplace regimes present to actively extend
labor control. Far from providing a replacement to the mind-numbing stress of mass
production, evidence suggested that flexibility systematically intensifies work by finding yet
new ways to remove obstacles to the extraction of effort. Moreover by restoring an emphasis
on the experience of employees, such research also demonstrated that workers continue to
adopt an array of resistive responses to this extension of control.
Burying the positive claims for lean and flexibility did not mean that upskilling optimists
disappeared. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things is that such scenarios periodically
reappear, often in the same forms that Braverman originally critiqued (see Adler 2007). In
other words, they are reliant on proxies (such as qualifications or occupational shifts) for
their optimistic claims. This has been particularly true for proponents of the knowledge
economy, dependent to a large extent on the quantitative assertion that the proportion of
knowledge is rapidly increasing, and as such so are the skills of so-called creative
knowledge workers. Labor process theorists have been in the forefront of refuting such
claims (Fleming et al. 2004; Warhurst and Thompson 2006; and various papers in
McKinlay and Smith 2009), pointing to the large increase in routine service sector jobs
reliant largely on social competenciesan issue that we return to later.
As we indicated above, the other major challenge faced by LPT flowed from the cultural
turn in social theory and was manifested in two main ways. First through the growth of
consumption and the spread of a service-based society in which production is sociologically
displaced analytically and work is negated empirically (Bauman 1998). Other research (e.g.
Pettinger 2006) pointed to the continuing materiality of intangible services, from the
scripted interactions and shelf-filling of typical jobs, to the chain of tasks that link the
production, distribution and sale of commodities. As Warhurst et al. (2008, 101), observe,
Recent research of interactive services, particularly call centre, retail and hospitality work,
whilst analyzed through the paradigms of emotional labor and, more recently, aesthetic labor,
draw extensively on LPT to explain how and why such work is organized and controlled. In
other words, the penetration of capital into new areas of personal life and the globalization
and integration of information and communication technologies into work and leisure has
extended and deepened controls not diminished them.
Secondly, issues of culture and identity became the focal point of workplace dynamics in
this culture turn, with managers in search of culture change meeting employees desirous of

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secure identities in an unhappy middle (Willmott 1993; Casey 1995). Labor process
research had, in fact, anticipated from an early stage the idea of a shift to soft(er) and
sometimes indirect forms of control. In the previously-referred to research on lean
production regimes, emphasis was put on attempts by management to pay increased
attention to the normative sphere in order to by-pass trade union representation and
encourage worker identification with the company (Danford 1999). Drawing from the core
concepts of the indeterminacy of labor and the structured antagonism between the interests
of capital and labor, LPT questioned the idea that the new wave of normative interventions
by management was actually successful in achieving significant levels of employee
commitment (Leidner 2006). Rather, normative controls remained as contradictory as any
other form of control situated within a capitalist labor process, evidence of underlying
structural antagonisms that are latent, even within the most consensual of labor
management regimes.

Core LPT Contributions

In sum, as capitalism and work were changing, LPT offered the critical study of work the
analytical and empirical tools to maintain the historic interest in the dynamics of work
relations and the connections between workplace and the wider social system. However
within a largely defensive discourse, there was limited theory building beyond the second
wave, but rather an insistence on the importance of core propositions: tools for analyzing
the transformation of work that put labor power and capitalist political economy at its heart.
Even so, LPT did not present itself as paradigmatic, as a theory of everything. But rather,
against the wave of paradigm break theories, writers within a labor process discourse
sought to ring fence the autonomy of the capitalist labor process and institutional
distinctiveness of the employment relationship. Hence the idiosyncratic and innovatory
nature of second wave theory was facilitated by the concept of the dynamic of workplace
regulation having a relative autonomy (Edwards 1990) where the separation of capitals
meant in each workplace workers and managers had, to an important extent, to work out or
enact labor process organization. Thus despite the increasing global scale of the capitalist
production, the workplace remained a site of autonomous action that the strong tradition of
case study research continued to expose. But such action needed to be relocated within
more layers of economic and institutional structure, because production and markets were
increasingly stretched across this wider canvass. The upside of this perspective on
workplace autonomy was the critique it provided to grand claims of either permanent
deskilling or upskilling; the downside was to drift away from a systematic description of the
relations between the labor process and structural trends in capitalist political economy. We
will return to this issue later in the paper.
The new core theory also sought to retain a privileging of analysis of labor power and
the capital-labor relationship, without the burden of traditional Marxian assumptions about
class in the wider societal terrain. As one of us recently put it:
This does not mean a universal privileging over (for example, gender relations and
the family), but for an analysis of the dynamic interactions between political economy
and workplace change. In this sense, LPT is more accurately described as a form of
critical labor studies, but without the teleological emphasis on labor as a universal,
liberating class destined by its location in the process of production to be the
gravedigger of capitalism (Thompson 2009: 107).

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Capitalism requires labor power in order to expand; and labor power is a special
commodity unlike fixed capital or raw materials, because: i. it is embodied within human
beings; ii. it cannot be stored or banked; and iii. it has to be extracted through control and
consent in effort or wage bargains over the sale and conditions of sale of labor power as
the unique property of the worker. Labor power was sometimes noted by Marx to be the
property of the workerbut it is property which is not like capital, as the latter has an
objective identity independent of the capitalist and appears in different forms. Rather labor
power is part of the person of the worker, who must internally divide or alienate his or her
existential self from the commodity labor power that he or she possess when entering
capitalist employment and work relations. Thus the worker is internally divided because of
the material inability to completely externalize the commodity labor power, which is within
him or her as a purely latent force that requires a labor process to manifest or externalize
from his or her self. There is an essential duality to labor power.
Given these features we can say that labor power is indeterminate (i.e. not fixed, settled
and predictable) and in two senses: i. labor power has to be extracted from workers as
effort, and in competitive conditions this is through bargained consent and is therefore
open-ended; and ii. free mobility of workers, creates uncertainties over labor supply to
ensure the daily and extended reproduction of labor power fit for productive use, which
creates mobility bargaining opportunities and threats for both employers and workers
(Smith 2006). LPT is principally concerned with exploring employer and worker struggles
over effort and mobility powers as two dimensions of labor power within capitalism as a
political economy.

New Wave LPT Contributions

LPT has retained this emphasis on the core features of the dynamics of labor power, whilst
seeking to apply them to the changing conditions of capitalist production. These can be called
new wave contributions and we have identified four themes: new forms of skill and labor power;
new forms of control; new forms of agency and new forms of capitalist political economy.
New Dimensions of Skill
Whilst it is important to point out the persistence of the trend towards the production of
relatively low skill jobs in the contemporary economy, it is also necessary to recognize that this
has been accompanied by significant shifts in the definition and nature of skills. At the heart of
these shifts has been the rise of generic or soft skills such as communication, adaptability
and cooperativeness; often associated with the relentless rise of service work. There have been
legitimate concerns raised about the status and depth of such characteristics, indeed whether
they should be considered skills at all. It is true that they are more akin to attitudes, social
predispositions and character traits rather than technical skills or expertise. The expanded
conception of definition of skill also benefits capital more than labor. Employees or the
education system are given the responsibility for skill development and maintaining
employability; social skills carry no wage or other premium in the occupational hierarchy;
and mobilizing the whole person rests on a qualitative intensification of labor.
However, the limitations of Bravermans craft-oriented understandings of skill remind us
that we need to maintain a focus on how the major economic actors seek to transform and
utilize labor power, rather than read skills through a particular time and template. It is also
difficult to deny that, together with the mobilization of employee tacit knowledge through

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practices such as team and project work, they are central sources of new labor power and
productivity. LPT has been at the forefront of research into these new sources: building on
earlier concepts of emotional labor and emotional effort bargains (Bolton 2005, 2008), as
well as exploring how the body and aesthetic labor becomes a focal point of employer work
initiatives (Witz et al. 2003; Wolkowitz 2006).
New Forms of Control
The idea that there has been a shift in control regimes away from traditional Taylorism,
Fordism and bureaucracy towards those in which management use value-based practices to
shape employee identities has been associated with wider claims about a cultural turn. At
one level such arguments can be seen as a radical version of the mainstream argument in
the business and management literature that culture and the management of commitment
have displaced control and bureaucracy. The outcome that individuals buy into the
system is held in common, but the explanation is sought in processes of seduction,
surveillance and self-discipline. In this version of LPT, identity rather than labor becomes
the site of indeterminacy. Post-modern perspectives in the labor process debate have also
been developed through Foucault-influenced case studies on work organization and new
management practices (Barker 1993; Sewell 1998).
However, case study research within LPT has addressed the issue of shifts to softer or
more indirect controls in both the service sector and manufacturing, whilst emphasizing that
new practices were mainly added to traditional ones (see Thompson and Harley 2007). A
further generation of researchers have been in the forefront of studies of call center work,
noting the trend towards integrated systems of technical, bureaucratic and normative
controls (Callaghan and Thompson 2002), intended to create an assembly line in the head
(Taylor and Bain 1999), within a characteristic high-commitment, low-discretion model
(Houlihan 2002). As Leidner (2006) notes, the mistake of post-structuralist perspectives has
been to take for granted that the identities held out by employers are attractive to workers
and would uphold their sense of themselves as autonomous individuals. This raises issues
of agency and resistance.
New Forms of Agency
We have already referred to the post-modernist view that subjectivity is no longer a
significant source of resistance and that worker and managerial identity orientations stifle
dissent. In countering the post-modern view, the kind of traditional qualitative, case study
research undertaken by labor process researchers reminded us of the resilience of labor
agency, but little was added to the traditional control, resistance and consent framework of
second wave theory.
That was provided initially by Ackroyd and Thompsons (1999) work on organizational
misbehavior. This involved a systematic and distinctive mapping of worker action and
agency based on four distinct loci of struggle for the appropriation of working time, effort,
the product of work and identities. The goal was to extend the argument made in LPT that
workplace resistance was analytically distinct from class struggle and ratchet it down one
notch further (Ackroyd and Thompson 1999: 165), making more visible a further realm of
more informal worker action. This is clearly influenced by the previously discussed view of
the workplace having a degree of relative autonomy. The fact that issues of identity and
micro-level dimensions of action were fore grounded, opened up lines of communication
with more sympathetic post-structuralists writing about irony and cynicism in the face of

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managerial discourses (Fleming and Spicer 2002), as well as encouraging labor process
scholars to explore new understandings of issues such as sexual misconduct and workplace
humor as a form of cultural subversion (Taylor and Bain 2003). Similar approaches were
also developed in the United States by Hodson (1995, 2001), though utilizing the idea of
dignity at work as well as resistance. Taken together, the effect of new approaches has been
to reassert the idea that employees remain knowledgeable about management intentions and
outcomes and retain the resources to resist, misbehave or disengage, as well as expanded
the conceptual and empirical repertoire of employee action.
New Types of Political Economy
The Canadian collection referred to earlier describes labor process and related contributions
as a political economy approach, concerned to develop a more complete and adequate
explanation of the complexities of work and its transformation in the post-industrial era by
identifying, analyzing and critiquing the power structures and social relations at work as
well as the larger political economy (Shalla 2007, 10). However, as we indicated earlier,
these connections tended to be underplayed as a result of the emphasis on the relative
autonomy of the labor process and the ultimately arid nature of many debates with poststructuralists and other paradigm warriors.
More recent writing within LPT has been seeking to restore these connections. Part of
the effort has been focused on re-conceptualizing contemporary political economy as a new
form of financialized capitalism rather than the more optimistic accounts of a new or
knowledge economy (Thompson 2003). This is compatible with wider critical accounts of
the rise of shareholder value growth regimes that rely on capital market metrics and measures to
enforce ever increasing rates of dividend payments and appreciation in share price as markers of
financial performance (Lazonick and OSullivan 2000; Henwood 2003). Whilst the credit
crunch or financial tsunami has focused attention on the general nature and contradictions of
such economies, where LPT has added something distinctive is on the destabilizing effect of
the pursuit of shareholder value on the management of work and employment relations.
Shareholder value as a growth regime focuses on asset management and anticipated revenue
streams. With perpetual restructuringmanifested in downsizing, merger and acquisition and
delayeringthe norm in many sectors, it has become more difficult for management to
pursue or sustain local bargains or investment in firm-specific assets (Thompson 2003;
Jenkins and Delbridge 2007). Labor is required to give the high performance, without capital
supplying the system to sustain it. Given the potential damage to the traditional social
compact (or psychological contract in mainstream management terms), this creates fertile
conditions for conflicts of interest between capital and labor in the current period.
A second set of re-connections to a wider political economy derive from the shrinking of
the world, with production and markets being integrated on a scale never previously
witnessed. This means objectively that the worker on the assembly line in Guangzhou is
linked to the worker on the assembly line in Detroit. As such, analysis of the workplace
requires integration to keep pace with changes in the political economy of capitalism, but
without reducing or privileging either space, or moving to an institutional perspective of
capitalism that over-emphasizes the specificity of national variants, but without any sense
of the singularity of the systemic features of the system as political economy (Smith and
Thompson 1998; Smith and Meiksins 1995; Elger and Smith 2005). In these geographical
shifts, we have witnessed writers connected to LPT for a long period, such as Paul
Edwards, call for fusion of workplace research with critical realism, to enact multi-leveled
analysis to face the more multi-layered world (Edwards 2005).

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Conclusion
We have argued in this short contribution that LPT has shown considerable resilience to renew
and develop itself in response to practical and intellectual challenges. At the heart of this
resilience and capacity for innovation is a focus on the dynamics of labor power within
capitalism. The central problematic of labor power is the inability of the employer to access this
commodity without going through the person of worker. This is the basis of conflict because
there is no stable agreement between worker and employer over the quantity and quality of labor
power that can be expended in a given period. This is a constantly changing equation given
competition between capitals; competition between workers as owners of labor power; the
conflict between technology and people; and the more or less constant striving after new ways of
extracting more labor power through employers strategies of different typesdeskilling,
upskilling, automation, movement of capital, substitution of labor, industrial engineering,
ideological or hegemonic struggles over identity/culture/values and many other means.
Theoretically, as we have noted, there is no imperative to degrade skilled labor to less
skilled since the purpose of hiring labor power is to expand capital and if skilled labor is
more productive, then there are clear incentives to retain it within the firm. Of course one
strategy for expansion might be to cheapen the costs of labor power by reducing the labor
time necessary for its reproduction. But equally another strategy is to move into new
branches of industry with more skilled labor power and earn more surplus through
innovation. But given that the labor process can also enhance the external market value of
the commodity labor power-through training, specialization, access to new information and
knowledge (through the arts and skills of the occupation as well as access to new work
through social networks formed in the workplace) then there is a more or less permanent
struggle between workers and employers over the valuation of labor power, which is also
another way of describing the issue of employer control and worker resistance.
In contemporary industry, skill formation takes many forms-through occupational jurisdictions; internal labor markets within large organizations; social networks tied to particular places or
industries; employers banding together to share training burdens (Crouch 2005). Bravermans
thesis on skill degradation through the continued separation between head and hand (conceptual
and operational skills) misses new areas of accumulation that are constantly innovated within
capitalism through its international expansion and technological dynamism. One key area, as
we have noted, is the qualitative intensification of labor through more flexible and expanded
use of worker capacities and tacit knowledge. More demanding work (Green 2006) is a
fundamental and often inequitable shift in the effort bargain, particularly as the elastic
nature of employer demands increasingly leak into traditional private and domestic spheres.
In this paper we have hopefully removed any sense of LPT being associated with one
control strategy, or one elevating one type of resistance or ideal workplace, and demonstrated
that it is an intellectual resource that continues to expose new management fashions to critical
interrogation. We stressed the importance of some core conceptssuch as the indeterminacy
of labor power and the dualism of labor within capitalismand have noted that the
interaction between these new trends and the re-mapping, remaking and recalcitrance of labor
power remains central to the development of capitalism.
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