Labour Processes

Abstract

Visual analysis makes it difficult to disentangle the organisation of relationships and activities on the shop floor from the structured environment within which they occur. In this chapter, I examine the organisation of production and workers’ experience and attitudes towards wage work by attending to patterns of communication and interaction in the case study enterprises. For it is modes of command, the distribution of tasks amongst workers, and the supervision and checking of their work, as well as remuneration, which really sharpen workers’ sensitivity to the extension of managerial control over production and the appropriation of profit in the work place. These are central to workers’ consciousnesses of class relations (Friedman, 1990, p. 193).