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The Decline of Labour Process Analysis and the Future Sociology of Work Damian O'Doherty and Hugh Willmott Sociology 2009 43: 931 DOI: 10.1177/0038038509340742 The online version of this article can be found at: http://soc.sagepub.com/content/43/5/931

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The Decline of Labour Process Analysis and the Future Sociology of Work ■

Damian O’Doherty University of Manchester

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Hugh Willmott University of Cardiff

A B S T R AC T

Labour process analysis (LPA) is a well-established approach to the sociological study of work which attends to the instabilities of capitalism and, more specifically, to the volatile and contested nature of social relations at work. However, an unreflexive ‘neo-orthodoxy’ has emerged in recent years that is constrained by a series of dualistic and (critical) realist assumptions which inhibit the development of this distinctive sociology of work. This article contends that the potential of LPA can best be fulfilled through a renewal of critical reflection upon the foundational assumptions of LPA that can open up an acknowledgement and appreciation of the embroilment of subjectivity in the reproduction and transformation of production relations. This development is consistent with the central analytical importance ascribed to the ‘indeterminacy of labour’ in LPA but invites the adoption of a negative ontology in order to advance a less narrow conception of its meaning and significance. Studies of the new media and creative industries are engaged to indicate how a revitalized labour process analysis might embrace this ontology as a way of exploring and explaining the radical contingency of organization in contemporary social relations. K E Y WO R D S

identity / labour process theory / negative ontology / relationality / subjectivity

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Introduction uring the 1980s, labour process theory was, according to Brown (1992: 14–15), ‘probably the most popular theoretical point of reference for British industrial sociologists’. At this time, labour process analysis (LPA) was a thriving research specialism. It revitalized sociological studies of work after an extended period in which ‘abstracted empiricism’ (Mills, 1959) had dominated the field. It thereby contributed to the broader development of sociology by offering a powerful corrective to a-theoretical and conservative scholarship. Specifically, it promoted an alternative to the diet of ‘cow sociology’ that took the form of a humanized scientific management. It generated fresh insights into how work relations are structured and de-structured through the machinations of a dialectic of struggle and resistance, mobilized or generated in large part by the indeterminacy of labour power. This concept of an ‘indeterminacy of labour power’ is central to the traditions of labour process analysis and is rooted in a basic Marxist distinction between the capacity or potential to labour (e.g. hiring labour on an hourly rate) and the realized labour in the production of goods or services. The transformation of potentiality – or what remains indeterminate – into realized labour is understood to create all kinds of tensions and disputes in the wage-effort bargain and condemns work organization to an always fragile and provisional ‘working order’ (Batstone, 1984). Following an extended surge of interest in LPA, momentum slowed as analysis became lodged in what we will call a ‘neo-orthodox’ groove established on the basis of a generalized extension of the principles of ‘core theory’ (Thompson, 1989). The loss of momentum has accompanied a reluctance to address the Achilles heal of labour process analysis exposed by Braverman’s critics – namely, how subjectivity is to be addressed (O’Doherty and Willmott, 2001; Parker, 1999). Twenty years ago, the absence of a full theory of the subject in LPA was widely acknowledged, and its development was considered ‘the greatest task facing labour process theory’ (Thompson, 1990: 99). This absence has proven troublesome to remedy as, potentially, it challenges the coherence and integrity of orthodox ‘labour process theory’. Neo-orthodox analysis is marked by a withdrawal from the question of subjectivity rather than its confrontation. Or, better, the subjectivity question is defined and bounded in ways that permit its ‘solution’ within a ‘core theory’ (see below) where unrivalled primacy is given to the distinction between labour power (the capacity to labour) and realized labour secured by management control and inducement (Thompson, 1989). The article begins by recalling and reasserting the importance of the indeterminacy of labour power. It is then argued that the formulation of indeterminacy in neo-orthodoxy is unjustifiably narrow and insufficiently radical, as it is restricted to the (key) distinction between the purchase of labour power and the productivity of wage labour. Notably, the effective naturalization of the category of ‘labour’ has meant that the question of subjectivity has been prematurely answered: instead of opening up this question to scrutiny, reliance upon (critical) realism and its associated dualism of structure and agency has resulted in a

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The decline of labour process analysis O’Doherty & Willmott

minimalizing or marginalizing of the significance of subjectivity. Its restrictive preoccupation with the economistic struggles of wage-effort bargaining is insufficiently sensitive for analysis of emerging modes of capital formation; and the imposition of the structure/agency classificatory grid coarsely separates out what is more hybrid and emergent in the socio-material ‘dynamics’ of social relations at work. In closing off dimensions of struggle, contradiction and contestation made available only by a closer attentiveness to subjectivity, neo-orthodoxy has, perversely, harboured a conservative atheoreticism and endorsed an unnecessarily restrictive and impoverished style of empirical inquiry. To illustrate this argument, we refer to some studies of the so-called new media and creative industries, in which forms of work are emerging that pose a considerable challenge to the categories and assumptions of neo-orthodox LPA (Adkins, 2005; Caves, 2000; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2008; Indergaard, 2004; Pratt, 2000; Wittel, 2001). Our reading of these studies suggests that a fuller appreciation of subjectivity and the significance of identity is congruent with the assumption of non-foundationalism and its associated ‘negative ontology’ (Marchart, 2007). Our belief is that empirical research tends to be more insightful when formulaic categories and dualisms are suspended, thereby permitting an appreciation of the process of subject ‘in-formation’ in ways that are consistent with the assumption of a negative ontology of capital–labour relations. Prior to the separations and stabilization of subject and object, and before the analytical congealing of organization into structure and agent, such empirical work is heedful of a space of entanglement or imbroglio of ‘materialbecoming’, ‘subject-formation’, and ‘emergent-structure’, that extends our appreciation of contingency and volatility in the workplace and therefore opens up a fresh direction for a future sociology of work.

The Rise of Neo-orthodox Labour Process Analysis Labour and Monopoly Capital (Braverman, 1974) introduced a sweeping grandnarrative of historical change powered by a relentless logic of deskilling and degradation. Braverman’s thesis was reworked and revised through multiple rounds of criticism and dialogue by scholars in both the US and UK (Clawson, 1979; Edwards, 1979; Gordon et al., 1982; Knights and Willmott, 1990; Littler and Salaman, 1982; Storey, 1985; Thompson, 1983; Wood, 1982). This resulted in a widespread assessment that Braverman’s critique of established industrial sociology was persuasive and timely but that his account of historical change lacked sufficient sensitivity to contradiction and struggle. Accordingly, Braverman’s critics retained LPA’s distinctive attentiveness to the restless ‘dynamic’ between the forces and relations of capitalist production but gave greater weight to the role of labour in shaping the complex patterns of settlement and accommodation. In so doing, LPA drew in studies of labour which, in attending more closely to power and politics at work, fostered, inter alia, feminist challenges to patriarchy and prevailing gender norms in work organization


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and beyond (e.g. Pollert, 1981). More recently, LPA has extended its analysis to study a diversity of issues, including the complex and contradictory patterns associated with the diffusion of a ‘global Japanization’ (Elger and Smith, 1994), the rise of the east-European ‘transition economies’ (Smith and Thompson, 1992), global trends in flexible labour markets (Felstead and Jewson, 1999), and the challenge of participation and democracy at work (Harley et al., 2005). Burawoy’s (1979) Manufacturing Consent was particularly influential in challenging the objectivist and dualistic assumptions of Bravermanian orthodoxy. In concord with other commentators (e.g. Cressey and MacInnes, 1980), Burawoy commended a closer attentiveness to worker subjectivity and consensus formation in the workplace in order to account for the lack of overt resistance and conflict. The idea of a ‘compensatory logic’ was coined to explain why workers became absorbed in ‘relative satisfactions’ offered by routines and game-playing. Burawoy interpreted these activities as a means of defence or escape from the contradictions and struggles of capitalist employment relations. For Burawoy, this compensatory logic helped supplement and support the reproduction of dominant forms of control and subordination. It is relevant to note that Burawoy’s attentiveness to subjectivity, in the form of game-playing, is grafted on to the basic assumptions of orthodox labour process theory as it is presented as a way of explaining workers’ capacity to endure their (objective) oppression. When framed in this way, there is little recognition of the possibility that subjectivity is integral to the media of struggle within relations of power and inequality, or that it may provide a resource for challenging as well as accommodating the demands of capital and its management. Inspired by Burawoy’s pioneering work, a number of contributors to labour process analysis subsequently sought to interrogate and extend the understanding of subjectivity in ways that might better unpack the contradictions and ambiguities of management–labour relations (Collinson, 1992; Knights and Willmott, 1989; Sturdy et al., 1992). With the appearance of this work, a split opened up between those who believed that addressing the subjectivity question would entail a more profound challenge to prevailing ontological and indeed epistemological assumptions in the traditions of labour process study (Knights, 2001; O'Doherty, D. 2009; Parker, 1999; Willmott, 1997), and others who we are here characterizing as adherents of a neo-orthodoxy for whom the question had become an unwelcome diversion (Spencer, 2000; Thompson and Smith, 2000). For neo-orthodox analysts, a focus on subjectivity suggests a return to preBravermanian subjectivism and bourgeois humanism where, in effect, the study of atomistic individuals is abstracted from the structural ‘dynamic’ of forces and relations of capitalist production. Legitimized by gestures to critical realism, the dualism of structure and agency is taken for granted in this perspective so that the incorporation of subjectivity within LPA is restricted, as in Burawoy’s analysis of game-playing, to accounting for unexpected deviations from the operation of structural dynamics. For poststructuralists, in contrast, subjectivity is not to be conflated with the individual or with agency. That is because ‘there is something deeply shared about what constitutes us as beings …It provides us with a category that helps us to understand how the current socio-historical



condition in which we find ourselves affects our lives’ (Hoedemaekers, 2008: 10). To assume that detailed attentiveness to subjectivity is a distraction with analysis of socio-historical conditions, including contemporary labour processes, is to become a victim of the fetishism of an agency/structure dualism. Anticipating that cracks in the edifice of Bravermanian orthodoxy were liable to become deeper and more damaging, Thompson (1989, 1990) proposed a core theory that would re-establish a credible and sustainable basis for LPA. Thompson identified four underlying principles that provide a template of analytical commitments shared by proponents of the neo-orthodoxy. The first principle, which provides a framing for those that follow, emphasizes the importance of privileging ‘the role of labour and the capital-labour relation’ (Thompson, 1990: 99–100). The second identifies a ‘logic of accumulation which forces capital constantly to revolutionise the production process’. A third principle conceives of labour processes as subject to a general ‘control imperative’. Quoting Littler (1982: 31), Thompson notes that ‘the employer must erect structures of control over labour’, but that in the detail of specific ‘immediate work processes’ this general imperative will be translated into diverse forms. The fourth and final principle is that the social relation between capital and labour is antagonistic, characterized by conflict and consent. Capital cannot simply seek to coerce or control labour but must harness cooperation by investing in the creative and productive capacity of workers. This framework comprises the key elements characteristic of neo-orthodox contributions to LPA (e.g. Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999; Bolton and Houlihan, 2009; Delbridge, 2006; Edwards, 1986; Friedman, 1977, 1990; Littler, 1982; Thompson and Smith, 2000; Tinker, 2002). It presents a structural logic comprised of a set of familiar and mundane objects and categories that has served to orient a myriad of empirical studies presented at the annual labour process conference. When guided by this framework, these objects and categories are mobilized to generate accounts of the workplace in which the question of subjectivity tends to be marginalized or trivialized. That said, subjectivity can be ‘read into’ elements of core theory where, for example, the ‘control imperative’ is, in practice, understood to be translated into diverse forms and where, in particular, the necessity of securing cooperation from employees is addressed. Nonetheless, in neo-orthodox LPA, subjectivity and identity – including the identity routinely attributed to those occupying the positions of ‘capital’ and ‘labour’ – is, at best, selectively invoked to account for unexpected consent or is assessed to be of marginal importance relative to the seemingly impersonal and objective ‘logic of accumulation’ that compels the ‘control imperative’ (O’Doherty and Willmott, 2001). It is to this shortcoming that Burawoy (1985) alludes but fails to tackle when, in departing directly from the fourth principle of core theory, he rejects the assumption of an essential antagonism between capital and labour, declaring that ‘[w]e must investigate the conditions under which the interests of labour and capital actually become antagonistic. In short, we must go beyond Marx’ (1985: 29). Core theory shows its limits whenever it appeals to some version of subjectivity to account for why there is some deviation from the expected


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playing out of structural mechanisms. For example, subjectivity is typically regarded as some kind of resource or object that is somehow used strategically as part of a wage-effort bargaining agenda (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999; Thompson and McHugh, 1995). Identity is described as a ‘social reality through which we transact with our environment’ (Thompson and McHugh, 1995: 327) and as something we seek to acquire for purposes of meaning that can provide a ‘basis to resist external manipulation’ (p. 333). Identities are something to be ‘enhanced’ (p. 333) and labour is deemed to compete for (presumably) scarce resources for meaning with managers: ‘In order to maintain an identity we attempt to control our environment and those in it and to resist those pressures which act to define our identities for us’ (p. 333). In their claim that there is a ‘negotiated transaction’ between ‘organizational strategies of control and individual strategies for securing identity’ (p. 334), proponents of core theory entertain all kinds of reification, dubious distinctions, and analytical inconsistencies. A more recent example of neo-orthodoxy is found in Friedman’s (2004: 573) ambition ‘to develop a more useful approach to subjectivity’ (p. 573) than available in poststructural developments of labour process analysis (e.g. Knights and Willmott, 1989; O’Doherty and Willmott, 2001). However, this approach does not get much beyond a repetition of the idea that workers retain ‘independent and often hostile wills’ (Friedman, 1977: 94). Friedman suggests that a ‘sense of justice or fairness’ and, following Veblen (1899), ‘invidious comparisons’, motivates individuals and collectives into taking action in the labour process (Friedman, 2004: 586–7); the identification of such concerns is then supplemented by passing reference to ‘emotional labour’ as an alternative approach to subjectivity (p. 587). If we may be permitted, the weakness of this position remains, in its own terms, a bit of `strawman'. Subjectivity is assumed rather than thematized so that subjects at work are deemed to be self-evidently ‘labour’ – pragmatic and materialistic agents whose interests and activities are derived and located within the dualism of structure/agent or determinism/free-will (see Friedman, 2004: 587–9). In short, the principles of core theory legislate a narrowing and dulling of empirical sensitivity and analytical enquiry. In the following section we sketch out an alternative to neo-orthodox analysis that builds on the key insight that work organizations are fractured by an ‘indeterminacy of labour power’ but seeks to extend and reconstruct this tradition by engaging a negative ontology. In turn, this provides us with a basis for comparing and contrasting how findings drawn from studies of the ‘creative industries’ are amenable to interpretation within the two frameworks.

Indeterminacy and the Wider Significance of a Negative Ontology One of the most significant and distinctive contributions of labour process analysis has been its attentiveness to the ‘indeterminacy’ of labour power.



This indeterminacy can never be defined or settled and continually provokes management to regulate the productive effort of labour in an attempt to secure the generation of a surplus sufficient to sustain the continuing accumulation of capital. The contract to sell labour is conceived to be inherently ‘open-ended’ as its practical closure is contingent on labour’s willingness to be successfully coerced or consensually incorporated into productive activity. This opens up an irreducible uncertainty at the centre of the ‘capitalist labour processes’; in the words of a leading proponent of neo-orthodox analysis: The idea of indeterminacy also makes management ideology, technique and prescription open-ended and the subject of conflict between capital and labour. This is because competition and the separation of capitals ensure that any standards of effort that emerge (through industry, occupational, company, regional or customary rules) will be of a temporary and uneven nature. New competitors, new techniques, new managers or new ways of organizing work appear and render such institutional standards of effort vulnerable to change. (Smith, 2006: 390)

Indeterminacy is endemic and inescapable because whatever means (e.g. ideology, technique) are developed by ‘capital’ to secure the productive activity of ‘labour’ remain contingent on a continuity of circumstances, and yet the very instability and/or dynamism of market economies has the (contradictory) effect of ‘render(ing) such institutional standards of effort vulnerable to change’. For this reason, Smith (2006: 390) emphasizes that Indeterminacy remains the conceptual key to understanding the material foundation of workplace antagonism between employers and workers. This is because it addresses the structural absence within the capitalist employment contract of a mutual agreement between the two parties over the magnitude of work effort required in exchange for wages.

For us, this ‘structural absence’ is of signal importance because it points to a larger challenge that cannot be adequately apprehended by appeals to the economics of wage-effort bargaining as developed by proponents of labour process ‘core theory’ and practitioners of neo-orthodoxy. The ‘indeterminacy of labour’ indicates that human beings are distinguished by a quality that, in contrast to other ‘factors of production’, lacks a stable identity. This quality makes labour power attractive to its purchasers as, potentially, it makes human beings highly creative and productive. Labour is therefore capable of generating a surplus that exceeds the costs of reproducing labour power and the payments made for other factors of production, thereby expanding capital accumulation through its systematic private appropriation. The indeterminacy of this quality is, however, irreducible to ‘labour’. The indeterminate productivity of workers’ labour power is one aspect, or articulation, of the indeterminacy of subjectivity, albeit one that is indeed of key importance for analysing the dynamics of the political economy of capitalism. What the question of subjectivity opens up, as Burawoy’s appeal to ‘go beyond Marx’ suggests, is a consideration of other dimensions of ‘structural absence’ (Smith, 2006: 390) which complicate the analysis of work based on an assumption that their respective interests are essentially antagonistic.


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The ‘linguistic turn’ associated with certain strands of structuralist and poststructuralist theory (see Sturrock, 1979, for an overview) has served both to heighten awareness of the limitations of established forms of analysis and to offer a remedy for their shortcomings. The interventions of Ryan (1982) in the USA and Laclau and Mouffe (1985) in the UK have been particularly influential in translating insights drawn from poststructuralism into forms of social and political analysis based on the negative ontology of ‘structural absence’ and ‘lack’. For our purposes, and in schematic form, we can illustrate the implications of assuming a negative ontology by reference to the category ‘worker’. In orthodox and neo-orthodox LPA we have seen how the translation of purchased labour power into productive effort is problematic; the category of ‘worker’, however, seems to remain unproblematic. Here ‘the worker’ is restrictively identified as someone who primarily, if not exclusively, is distinguished by the possession of labour power that he/she is obliged to trade in order to subsist. The identity of the worker is thus defined positively in terms of what he/she (really) is or what position he/she (really) occupies, and not negatively against what he/she is not. In contrast, the assumption of a negative ontology suggests that the worker is, in practice, defined negatively – that is, against identities such as ‘capitalist’, ‘manager’, or unemployed. The chief implication of this understanding is that the identity of ‘worker’ is not fixed or clearly defined, but instead is contingent and dynamic as its meaning is constituted negatively from its relation to other identities. When understood in this way, it becomes more readily apparent that the distinctions between ‘worker’, ‘capitalist’, ‘manager’, and ‘unemployed’, are problematic and are established and sustained through discourse that mediates the exercise of political (or value) judgements rather than by the (impossible) reflection of their ‘real’ existence. For the category ‘worker’ (or ‘manager’ or ‘capitalist’) to represent what is real in an empirical sense, it must have spokespersons to ‘fill in’ the content and to define and speak on behalf of what it means to be a ‘worker’. Unions are one important source of collective representation and over time their discourse has helped define what a worker is. As gender, race, age, religion, and ethnicity become recognized as important elements that make up what it means to be a worker, so understandings of ‘worker’ evolve and change. There is no necessary meaning or motivational interests (cf. Burawoy, 1985), no identity or behavioural consistency that once and for all defines the worker; ‘worker’ can therefore be considered a signifier without a fixed signified. Its meaning is historically and socially contingent and must be constantly constructed and reconstructed through political acts of representation and constitution. An ongoing and always emerging construction, the worker mediates an intersection of constitutive networks that render its definition (as de-finite, closed, finished, etc.) radically uncertain. There is, therefore, an absence which haunts the designation ‘worker’, an absence which calls out for supplementary ‘in-filling’, but this supplementarity never fully or permanently completes or satisfies this absence. It follows that reference to the (commonsense) categories of ‘employer’, ‘worker’, etc. or indeed to more analytical categories such as ‘capital’ or ‘labour’ is a matter of political (or politico-ethical) priority rather than representative faithfulness.



Recent studies of the new media and creative industries provide relevant resources for reflecting on this indeterminacy as they invite critical scrutiny of the scope and application of concepts such as ‘work-effort’: is work-effort, for example, determinate in a quantitative sense? In addressing these new forms of work, analysis may be prompted to attend more directly to subjectivity and to afford it greater significance and a more central role. As it de-reifies the ‘logic’ of capital, such analysis unsettles the objectivist and structuralist ontology of neo-orthodox thinking and thereby opens up a multiplicity of sites and times of struggle and contestation. To repeat, the emphasis given to the indeterminacy of labour power remains important but it is extended and qualified by an appreciation of reality and knowledge as indeterminate – a stance which resonates across the social sciences with studies guided by a post-foundationalist negative ontology (Marchart, 2007) and a post-positivist epistemology (see Zammito, 2004).

New Economy: Fact or Fiction? Knowledge work, new media and the culture industries are terms used to designate contemporary fields of work that emerged out of Blairite Third Way discourse associated with a government-sponsored promotion of the ‘creative industries’ and the so-called ‘new economy’ (Caves, 2000; Hartley, 2004; Hesmondhalgh, 2002). Our scare quotes indicate some uncertainties about the reality of these developments. Representation of their reality can never be an innocent or unreflexive description as their effect, and perhaps their intent, is to constitute and legitimize economic life in particular ways. Defining and classifying ‘creative industries’ is a fluid and contested exercise, so estimating the numbers of people working therein is notoriously complicated, especially where the official published data would appears to be a product of considerable improvisation and contingency (DCMS, 2001). The difficulty of estimating numbers is compounded by the contingency and fluidity of organization and work in such fields: the proliferation of part-time, temporary, casual, voluntary, self-employment, and various forms of contract work, including what some commentators call ‘portfolio careers’. Taking account of these difficulties, however, McRobbie (2002) follows DCMS figures to suggest that between 1.1 and 1.3 million people work as ‘creative labour’ in the UK economy. If this construction of the numbers is accepted, ‘creative labour’ forms one of the most important areas of the economy, exceeding the numbers employed, for example, in the car manufacturing industry (although forms of ‘creative labour’ clearly do take place in car manufacturing even if this sector is not recognized in the official data as a creative industry). When interpreted literally, it is rather difficult to find many examples of work that are devoid of the characteristics attributed by the DCMS to creative labour. Neo-orthodox labour process analysis has rightly questioned the idea of knowledge work, creativity, and cultural industries, particularly where its promotion is based on the dubious empirical generalization of exceptional or atypical forms of work (McKinlay and Smith, 2009; Thompson et al., 2007).


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Indeed, mass manufacturing of popular entertainment in the media and television industry is suggestive of the (re)emergence of familiar forms of Fordist and Taylorist production methods (Christopherson, 2008; Collins, 2008) and therefore the continuing relevance and potency of neo-orthodox LPA. Studies have shown how television production increasingly makes use of casualized, nonunionized, low-paid and repetitive deskilled labour. The rise of the ‘reality TV star’, for example, may be credibly interpreted as replacing highly skilled and professionally trained unionized actors with low cost labour (Collins, 2008; Ursell, 2000). The ‘employment’ contracts signed between contestants on a reality TV show and the legal entity which is the production company resemble wage-effort bargains with complicated legal restrictions and exclusivity deals on commercial ‘spin-offs’, self-promotion and post production media exposure. Game show producers and directors might be seen as managers or shop-floor supervisors who attempt to elicit more effort and more emotional labour than the individual is prepared or is able to provide. In many ways, labour processes in the creative industries have parallels with the assembly of a product on a mass production line; but an emphasis on this resemblance risks a gross narrowing and simplification of the ‘work’ that is done. Born’s (2002, 2004) study of the BBC, for example, shows how difficult it is to identify ‘capital’, ‘management’ or ‘labour’ in this complex organization. Specialists work in close-knit teams in which ‘management’ appears to be more fluid and interrelational, a processual phenomenon of collective improvisation, and not one designated by function or job description. Despite individuals not confronting each other as buyers and sellers of labour power, there is, however, plenty of conflict, disruption and disorganization. Born shows how logics of bureaucracy and administration have in recent years led to a proliferation of technical, administrative and managerial ‘expertise’ that further complicates the divisions of labour and multiplies the lines of tension and potential conflict in the organization. Collins’ (2008) work on reality TV shows and Hesmondhalgh and Baker’s (2008) research in an independent television production company are also suggestive of the mutable and intangible qualities of work in these sectors where the processual or emergent nature of subjectivity and identity is evident. Studies such as these indicate how ‘labour’ is discursively, reflexively and experientially produced in action in ways that, we contend, defy settlement or consolidation into a stable or uniform ontological or behavioural entity. The nature of ‘work’ or ‘labour’ in the media industry is multifaceted and ambiguous (see Caldwell, 2008) in ways that seem to exceed the definition and restriction maintained in neo-orthodox LPA. The work of screenwriters or script writing, for example, might be compared to the fruits of physical effort that are measured and rewarded by numerical calculation. The recent 2007/8 strike by the Writers Guild of America offers evidence that can be invoked to confirm the persistence of conflict in a wage-effort bargain between capital and labour and to corroborate the complexity and difficulty of establishing authorship and attribution in what is a collective production process (Walters, 2008). Yet, the script writer is only partially and episodically preoccupied with a wage-effort bargain.



Intangibles and Network Sociality: Subjects-in-formation and Emergent Capital McRobbie’s (2002) study of labour practices in casualized and freelance ‘creative work’ invites us to further consider the question of subjectivity and identity in order to account for the complex mix of aspiration and ambition, self-fashioning and self-disciplining and its consequences for the reproduction of capital. Consider the intern or ‘runner’ on film and television production sets. These jobs are highly sought after despite the low pay, insecure employment, long hours of work, and confinement to the bottom of the pecking order. People choose these jobs instead of the relatively more secure and better paid employment available in other sectors of the economy because, we would suggest, the work is exciting, touched by glamour and seemingly open to circulation within vast social networks of opportunity across the metropolitan capital. Studies of these networks suggest that the dynamics that mobilize subjectivity and identity are more important and complicated than typically allowed in labour process analysis (e.g. Wittel, 2001). It is widely recognized that networks form an important resource for those working in the ‘creative industries’ enabling them to make and renew contacts and to exchange information about job opportunities. However, it is also a disciplinary space in which one is encouraged to be ‘on show’, constantly competing to sell one’s ‘self’ whilst subject to continuous and ongoing judgements about ‘suitability’ and ‘talent’. Network events open up a dynamic and relational field of interactions through which discipline and subject-formation transpire and where ‘personality’ is assessed and ‘traded’. Entering the circulation of network events one becomes a ‘player’ in a game where identity becomes an ever more open and contingent, emergent and indeterminate phenomenon, subject to continuous bouts of construction and deconstruction. This dislocation of identity into extended networks of association that encourage greater reflexivity and attention to display is mirrored in the displacement of the traditional fixed and bounded workplace. The workplace is increasingly becoming less and less a ‘place’ and more and more an ‘intermediary’, a non-place that is not so much located as distributed across and between these networks that circulate capital, people and ideas. This openness is supposed to stimulate creativity that is, according to Pratt (2000), increasingly being reflected in the design of highly aestheticized workspaces which are often modelled on a studio or the artists’ atelier. Designed to reflect and encourage a youthful and highly informal tone amongst colleagues at work, this breakdown in the boundaries between work and play is what McRobbie (2002) alludes to in her analysis of the recent shift from ‘club culture to companies’ that seems to form part of a wider transition in which counter-cultures become ‘mainstreamed’ through new forms of capitalist commodification. When reviewed in the light of such studies, the assessment of these networked individuals as victims of capital or managerial oppression would seem to be a gross and misleading simplification. Nor is it particularly convincing to argue that they are deluded


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by false consciousness or subordinated by naïve and idealistic ambitions. All of these may enter the mix but they constitute only part of a more volatile chemistry of inconsistency and contradiction. Those who participate in these emerging work organizations are part labour, but many of them are also highly motivated self-entrepreneurs, a characteristic creative workers share with other forms of contract labour as illustrated in Barley and Kunda’s (2004) study of high technology ‘itinerant experts’ in the new knowledge economy. Research in the ‘creative industries’ has demonstrated how difficult it is to define work, or to draw the line between work and play, or even between colleague and friend, especially given the centrality of ‘network sociality’ (Wittel, 2001) to the operation of these labour markets. To better understand the dynamics, contradictions and tensions associated with these emergent forms of labour practice, it is necessary to attend more fully to the experiential and existential dimensions of subjectivity and identity. Otherwise, analysis tends to fall back on the simple assertion of subordination and domination (McKinlay and Smith, 2009) as scant regard is paid to the desires and ambitions of those who happily commit 18-hour days to these practices. To overcome this tendency, it is helpful to pay closer attention to studies that show how ideas of radical libertarianism or anarchism, for example, inform and hybridize with new modes of capitalist enterprise in the ‘wired’ dot.com generation (Indergaard, 2004; Pratt, 2000; Wittel, 2001). It is here that Hardt and Negri (2000) chart the conditions of possibility that help account for the emergence of a highly volatile political phenomenon that they call the ‘multitude’. Comprising inter alia workers employed in new sectors of the economy and engaged in the development and application of digital information and communication technologies – whether as internet entrepreneurs, web designers, freelance technology consultants, or software engineers – the multitude is conceived to comprise ‘transversal’ new associations that cut across established class divisions. It is the fluid and creative energies of members of the multitude that inspire and sustain their commitment to experimentation and change which is articulated in novel forms of radical politicization. A heterogeneous combination of hackers and file sharers, digital ‘saboteurs’, pranksters and gamers are collaborating in the development of forms of enterprise and organization that are emerging to shadow or supplement work in the formal world of capitalist economy. It is in this space that the development of ‘free’ communal services such as the ‘creative commons licensing agreement’ and ‘Open Source’ becomes entangled in a dialectical struggle between commercialization/commodification and its resistance. It is this ambiguous double value or undecidable quality that is so intriguing about network sociality and something to which Thompson (2005) in his critique of Hardt and Negri is seemingly oblivious; potentially, these forces and relations are both capitalist and anti-capitalist, generating a contradiction that helps account for much of the energy and dynamism of these communities and associations. In conditions of what we might call ‘pioneer’ or ‘bounty capitalism’ – characterized by premature or immature capital formation – it is possible to glimpse how both ‘labour’ and ‘capital’ are complex and emergent phenomena,



not yet clearly defined or separated. In what Cooper (2006) might call the ‘humus’ of organization, the familiar divisions and classifications of LPA have not yet congealed. In other words, we gain some insight into the indeterminate formation of a tendentially ‘immaterial’ labour process (Lazarrato, 1996) as it is constructed and slowly stabilized out of a heterogeneous set of artefacts and relations, and which seems to resist the ontic settlement of a positive ontology assumed and exercised by neo-orthodox LPA. If we are able to study subjectivity and identity as media and outcome of these forces, we might, however, better trace the lines of constitutive instability that shadow and subtend the reduction and abstraction of social relations into the economics of wage-effort bargaining. Adkins’ (2005) work is helpful in making some sense of this subjectformation in contemporary forms of capital. Her work is useful in showing how knowledge and creativity emerge out of a complex collective that brings together production and consumption in forms that make it difficult, if not in principle impossible, to establish the specific contribution or ‘uniqueness’ of individual creative input. If, following this logic, we understand identity as a malleable and contingent self-construction, in which personality becomes a resource or vehicle of self-conscious strategy, one cannot be alienated as such because the provisional and emergent sense of self is likely to become increasingly apparent to the point at which one cannot assume a substantive foundation or essentialist interiority. Far from helping to stabilize capitalist relations, this de-securing of foundations and categorical integrity proliferates and amplifies what we might call the ‘noise of construction’ as identity increasingly becomes an unstable performance maintained in tension with extended and multiple lines of association and relationality. Adkins shows that the relational nature of knowledge and creativity means that individuals cannot claim ownership based on natural endowment, essence or interiority. When the ownership of ideas, knowledge and image rights cannot be unambiguously claimed there is not only an incentive to establish and assert identity, but also a constitutive impossibility or existential indeterminacy that usurps this desire. Both incomplete and in excess of any disciplinary constitution, identity remains emergent and precarious. As a concept informing empirical enquiry it allows us to think of a multiplicity of radiating networks that constitute and inform what we might call the substantivization or realization of identity out of the indeterminacy of subjectivity. It is helpful therefore to understand identity as a site of struggle and contestation that helps trace the limits of contemporary capital beyond the economistic confines of the wage–labour relation.

Discussion The challenge posed by recent studies of creative work is to attend to subjectivity so that we might more carefully open up the intermediate and relational dimensions of organization through which the ongoing social production of power and inequality is accomplished. Consider the analysis of ‘idle periods’ experienced by people working in the creative industries. In a recent volume of


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neo-orthodox labour process analysis, McKinlay and Smith (2009) equate idle periods with the opportunity for personal investment and the development of wage-labour status. Their analysis verges on the comical when working out in a gym is understood in terms of ‘aesthetic maintenance’: … they have to maintain themselves and their labour power as ‘their’ property ready for the market, which requires, in the case of actors for example, keeping fit, investing in body and aesthetic maintenance, investing in networking and being connected or seen. (2009: 12).

It is difficult to conceive of individuals as ‘transacting’ with ‘the organization’ through the medium of identity, as if identity was something that could be traded in parts by instrumental agents who knowingly turn themselves into objects or commodities to be tendered for sale, bartered, controlled by others, or reserved and held back by its owners. ‘Aesthetic maintenance’ helps understand one dimension of this activity, but it is surely a crude reduction of the ambiguities and indeterminacy which, once opened up for analysis, suspends our categorical and discursive assumptions and impositions to invite the paying of closer attention to questions of subjectivity and identity. It is then possible to notice that distinctions or lines of causality between compulsion and desire, external constraint and internal discipline, or structure and agent, are unclear. In the absence of critical and analytical reflexivity, analysis risks becoming clunky and over literal as it is drawn into over-rationalized interpretations of subjectivity and identity that seem to rely heavily on a conventional utilitarian and instrumental-rational mode of thinking. This engagement and endorsement of a dominant calculative logic is perhaps indicative of the extent to which analysts remain imprisoned within the logic they are trying to diagnose. One way of improving the quality of empirical enquiry in ways that might also re-establish the credibility of a distinctive labour process approach would be to attend more closely to the experiential and affective dimensions of work and labour. It is remarkable how little analysis there is of what McKinlay and Smith (2009) have recently called the ‘content’ of work in the labour process, perhaps because a detailed materialist phenomenology of work would induce an uncomfortable confrontation with the complexity of subjectivity and identity – that is the negative ontology which provides the conditions of possibility and impossibility for the construction and stabilization of work relations in the terms of capital/wage-labour. Citing Bukowski’s writings on the ‘factotum’ and work in the post office as exemplary of writing that has the capacity to convey something of this complexity, Rhodes and Brown (2005) have suggested that autobiographical and documentary forms of literature can be exceptionally rich and revealing of the nature of work in ways that often exceed what has been made available in participant observation studies of work (e.g. Burawoy, 1979). In his deeply impressive account of shovelling coal on board a steamer, Traven (1991[1934]) brings to life the often forgotten or overlooked dimensions of work in which the body and mind become a part of the overwhelming noise and intensity of heat in the engine room. His account provides rich detail of how, in the process of work



degradation, conventional distinctions between body and mind, work and worker, pleasure and pain, seem to become almost irrelevant, particularly where the coal shoveller seems to develop a strange familiarity and even intimacy with the different material gradations of filth and dirt. We see here how work gives rise to novel forms of feeling, thought and consciousness that, seeming to transcend the difference between reality and hallucination, convey a deeper and more complex sense of subjective formation or what we have called the process of subject-in-formation. What is remarkable about such reflections is the insight they offer into the complicated nature of subjectivity and identity, showing how ideas and matter, subject and object, even what sociology would call structure and agent, seem to oscillate and shape-shift to form uncanny and volatile patterns of ‘reality’ as it subsists in its more raw state – emergent, processual, unstable, and always coming into being. A materialist phenomenology of work of course poses considerable methodological and empirical difficulties for the sociology of work, but there are perhaps suggestive elements of how to build such an approach in the recent turn to embodiment and affectivity in organization studies and the social sciences more broadly (Clough and Halley, 2007; Hassard et al., 2001; Thrift, 2008). This raises the stakes of indeterminacy and opens up the labour process to a deeper field of conflict, fracture and dissolution.

Conclusions One of the distinctive strengths of labour process analysis has been the focus on the indeterminacy of labour power and the struggle to realize such potentiality in output and productive effort. Our article has distilled four elements arising from this basic conceptual orientation: the importance of subjectivity and identity; reflexivity; relationality; and negative ontology. These elements hold out the promise of arresting the decline of LPA by deepening and extending its key insight into the indeterminacy of labour in a manner that advances less monochromatic studies of work. To elucidate these elements, we turned to studies of ‘creative industries’ as they are not only suggestive of the (politically) reflexive constitution of reality but are also relevant for reflecting on postindustrial forms of work to which future sociological analysis will, in all probability, be increasingly directed. We conclude by providing a more systematic, though brief, presentation of these elements, which, it may be playfully proposed, offer an alternative to the manifesto of core theory. A distinguishing feature of the post-positivist stance taken here is that mundane distinctions and categories – such as ‘worker’, ‘capitalist’, and ‘manager’, but also ‘subjectivity’ and ‘identity’ – are not concrete features of reality but instead are better thought of as representations established and sustained as reality by the exercise of political (or value) judgements. Accordingly, we understand subjectivity and identity to be contingent on these concepts being imbued with practical and politico-ethical significance by those – ‘managers’ and ‘workers’ – who enact production relations through their frame of reference and/or by


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analysts who study them. Analysis that deploys the capital-labour framework is coherent and justifiable if those who constitute and enact the relations of production are oriented to their interactions as if these are primarily, if not indeed exclusively, capital–labour relations.1 By ‘orient’ we do not imply that this directedness is self-conscious or predominantly cognitive; on the contrary, we take it to be predominantly material, practical and habitual. As our earlier reference to Burawoy signalled, we must ‘go beyond Marx’ if we are not to resort to dubious notions of false consciousness as a means of accounting for the anomaly between an a priori privileging of capital–labour relations and the practical orientation to concerns that are not readily reducible to its logic or dynamic. In favouring a post-foundationalist, negative ontology, we have argued that LPA’s key insight into the indeterminacy of labour should be extended to acknowledge the indeterminacy of reality. This move opens up analysis to other dimensions of indeterminacy to which relations of production are oriented, yet which are irreducible to, even if they are supportive/corrosive of ‘the capitallabour relation’. In this respect we have conjectured that subjectivity and identity are best understood as contingent on their formation and positioning within diverse, cross-cutting sets of social relations at work. Such complexity does not of course exclude the possibility, and even the likelihood, that a particular set of relations will become hegemonic. And yet, as Laclau and Mouffe (1985) remind us, there is always an excess that challenges and subverts this hegemonic articulation. Becoming sensitive to the sites and times in which this excess becomes manifest demands a preparedness to suspend the (critical) realist assumptions that guide the routine application of ‘management’, ‘labour’ and ‘capital’ as key categories of LPA. In other words, it requires openness to rethinking the basic subject and object of enquiry in LPA as a basis for researching the spaces in which the instabilities endemic to socialized production for purposes of private appropriation are played out. In this regard, we commend attentiveness to relational phenomena that escape the grid of intelligibility commended by neo-orthodox analysis. This is a moment where social phenomena subsist in a fissile and unstable process and have yet to be articulated or defined within the terms of conventional distinctions and categories such as that of subject and object. ‘Sellers of labour power’, for example, are also subjects-in-process preoccupied with a multiple series of concerns – existential, political, and social. That these processes do not cohere with a consistency that provides well-defined objects of social scientific research need not be a source of bewilderment or anxiety amongst researchers engaged in social scientific enquiry. Labour process enquiry can be revitalized by drawing inspiration from an attentiveness to the fractious and diffuse energies that effervesce ‘below’ or before their stabilization by ontological divisions and epistemological classifications that, in neo-orthodox analysis, are reduced to the working out of a restrictive logic of wage-effort bargaining. As Traven’s (1991[1934]) account of shovelling coal suggests, there has been a marginalization and desensitization to aspects of the complexity and fragility of settlements that maintain ‘working order’ in employment relations.



The study of creative labour and knowledge work in the new economy reminds us of elements of work organization that mark out the contours of a negative ontology, contours that are largely overlooked in the traditions of labour process analysis motivated by an impatience for representation and political relevance (Knights, 2001). Restricted by a (critical) realist ontology, LPA has tended to disregard the ongoing efforts necessary to maintain the identity of entities that form the familiar fixtures of management and work organization and to prioritize a singular line of division formed around the calculations of a wage-effort bargain. A more sensitive attentiveness to the subjectivity problem helps open up empirical study to forms of contingency and instability that elude neo-orthodox analysis. In this formulation of organization we find that structure is no longer opposed to agency but inheres as part of the reflexive and recursive features of social relations, an understanding of which has the potential to revitalize the emancipatory traditions of labour process analysis and thereby contribute to a radical future sociology of work.

Acknowledgement We would like to thank Peter Fleming for his reading of an earlier version of this article. We would also like to thank the editors of the special edition and the anonymous referees for their help in developing our paper.

Note 1

It is inherently difficult and perhaps impossible, or undecidable, whether ‘workers’ or ‘managers’ are so ‘oriented’. The assessment will always be contingent on the frame of reference of the analyst, which is, in this regard, constitutive of what it ‘reports’.

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Damian O’Doherty Is Senior Lecturer in Organization Analysis at the Manchester Business School in the University of Manchester. His research explores issues of order and disorder in organization and he is currently looking at the management of cities and airports. His work has made a significant contribution to debates in labour process analysis, critical management studies of work, and organization theory. He publishes in a number of internationally recognized journals including Sociological Review, Organization, Culture and Organization and The Scandinavian Journal of Management and sits as an executive board member for the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism. Address: Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, Manchester M15 6PB, UK. E-mail: [email protected]



Hugh Willmott Is Research Professor in Organization Studies, Cardiff Business School. He has a strong interest in the application of social theory, especially poststructuralist thinking, to the field of management and business.With David Knights, he initiated the series of Labour Process Conferences and, more recently, the bi-annual Critical Management Studies conferences. He has authored 20 books and has published in a range of social science and management journals. He currently serves on the board of Academy of Management Review, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies. See http:// dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/hr22/hcwhome for further details. Address: Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Aberconway Building, Colum Drive, Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK. E-mail: [email protected]


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