Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly CapitalismSince the 1930s, industrial sociologists have tried to answer the question, Why do workers not work harder? Michael Burawoy spent ten months as a machine operator in a Chicago factory trying to answer different but equally important questions: Why do workers work as hard as they do? Why do workers routinely consent to their own exploitation? Manufacturing Consent, the result of Burawoy's research, combines rich ethnographical description with an original Marxist theory of the capitalist labor process. Manufacturing Consent is unique among studies of this kind because Burawoy has been able to analyze his own experiences in relation to those of Donald Roy, who studied the same factory thirty years earlier. Burawoy traces the technical, political, and ideological changes in factory life to the transformations of the market relations of the plant (it is now part of a multinational corporation) and to broader movements, since World War II, in industrial relations. |
Contents
II Changes in the Labor Process | 31 |
III The Production of Consent | 75 |
IV The Relative Autonomy of the Labor Process | 121 |
V The Motors of Change | 159 |
Appendix | 205 |
Notes | 217 |
| 253 | |
| 263 | |
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Common terms and phrases
activities Allied Corporation Allied's auxiliary workers basis capitalist capitalist labor process changes chap chapter class struggle competition conflict consciousness consent Cornelius Castoriadis crib crisis domination Donald Roy drill earnings economic Elton Mayo employees engine division external factory feudalism floor force foremen Geer Company Herbert Marcuse Ibid ideology incentive increase individual industrial sociology inspector interests internal labor market Karl Marx labor power labor process Log experience Log seniority Louis Althusser managerial Marx Marx's Marxist ment methods department Michel Crozier mode of production monopoly capitalism obscuring and securing organization particular patterns pieces piecework political Press problem profit pulleys quota racial rates regarded relations in production relationship relative autonomy reproduction Restriction of Output Roy's rules second shift securing of surplus setup shop-floor small-parts department social relations society structure suggest surplus labor surplus value theory time-study tion transformation union wage York Zambian