Fragmented Labours

Abstract

This is an exploratory contribution which has to be seen as one fragment of a wider project. In it I shall raise issues not yet discussed widely in the labour process debate. My concern is to seek to understand the British context in which Labor and Monopoly Capital was received in the mid-1970s and to suggest that it is a text in the ‘Modernist’ tradition. What I shall try to explain is why Braverman’s theoretical structure came to the attention of so many British writers concerned with the analysis of industry and why they then set to with a will and energy to dismantle it (Storey, 1985; Thompson, in this volume). In other words, whilst some attention has to be paid to the content of Braverman’s approach, the emphasis here is not upon providing an internalist account of the book’s strengths and weaknesses but upon providing one type of externalist account of the debate it engendered. No serious attempt will be made to explain the progress of the debate by linking it to changes in the material base of the social sciences although, of course, this is a necessary dimension in any full appraisal of Braverman’s impact.

Thanks are due to Sylvia Shimmin, Alan Whitaker and Hugh Willmott for very helpful comments on this paper.