Labour process theory and critical management studies

Labour Process Theory (LPT) is conventionally and rightly listed as one of the analytical resources for Critical Management Studies (CMS). Yet, the relationships between the two have been, in the words of a classic of the former, a contested terrain. This is hardly surprising. Even if we set aside the inevitable multiplicity of perspectives, there is a tension in potential objects of analysis. Before CMS burst on to the scene, LPT was being criticised at its peak of influence in the 1980s for paying too much attention to management and too little to capital(ism) and labour. This was sometimes attributed to the location of many of the protagonists (in the UK at least) in business schools, but was, more likely a reflection of wider theoretical and ideological divides

Labour, work and action in the creative process

This paper uses Hannah Arendt's theoretical distinction between labour, work and action to provide ways of characterising different moments within artistic production. Using this model, "creativity", sometimes thought to be radically inexplicable, can be straightforwardly be aligned with the "actional"

Labour and Employment in a Globalising World. Autonomy, Collectives and Political Dilemmas.

This collection of essays provides new insight into the complex realities of labour and employment market globalisation. The pluridisciplinary and multi-faced understanding of globalisation is based upon ground research in ten countries from South to North. Its contextualisation of globalising labour and employment market, perceived as process, constitutes the originality of the book. Globalisation is understood through a single process of both standardisation and differentiation, which also underscores its political agenda. The globalising process incorporates trends of convergent and somewhat undifferentiated Southern and Northern situations in labour and employment. Strong political perspectives thereby emerge to help understand changes in current capitalism and question the longstanding North to South paradigm. As labour and employment markets standardise and differentiate, what other problematical threads can be pulled to strengthen the hypothesis that trends converge within a single globalising process? The comparative concepts and tools proposed in this volume help to answer these queries.Globalisation; Employment market; Labour market;

Spatial relations, histories from below and the makings of agency: Reflections on The Making of the English Working Class at 50

In this paper we propose a conversation between work in labour history and labour geography, in part centring on the formative contribution of E.P. Thompson. We contend that the commitment to multiple and political forms of agency and working-class experience and the positioning of class as process, which are lasting contributions of The Making of the English Working Class, offer resources for re-invigorating debates on agency within labour geography and beyond. The paper scrutinizes the spatial politics at work in Thompson’s account of agency and experience through drawing on critiques of Thompson by feminist and post-colonial scholars. The paper explores the significance of Thompson’s work for asserting a spatial politics of labour and argues for attention to the diverse agentic spatial practices shaped through labour organizing and struggles. The paper concludes by setting out some key aspects of the terms of a conversation between labour geographies and labour histories

Domiciliary Care: The Formal and Informal Labour Process

Domiciliary carers are paid care workers who travel to the homes of older people to assist with personal routines. Increasingly, over the past 20 years, the delivery of domiciliary care has been organised according to market principles and portrayed as the ideal type of formal care; offering cost savings to local authorities and independence for older people. Crucially, the work of the former ‘home help’ is transformed as domiciliary carers are now subject to the imperative of private, competitive accumulation which necessitates a constant search for increases in labour productivity. Drawing on qualitative data from domiciliary carers, managers and stakeholders, this article highlights the commodification of caring labour and reveals the constraints, contradictions and challenges of paid care work. Labour Process Theory offers a means of understanding the political economy of care work and important distinctions in terms of the formal and informal domiciliary care labour process

The resource-based view of the firm and the labour theory of value

The paper argues that the principal components of the Resource- based view (R-BV) of the firm are not a sufficient basis for a complete and consistent theory of firm behaviour. Two important missing elements are governance arrangements and value theory. Whilst these missing elements have been acknowledged separately in the literature, their complementary interaction with the commonly accepted components of the R-BV has yet to be fully explored. This paper argues that there are significant opportunities to develop a more integrated approach, thereby uniting substantial strands of the strategy and economics literatures to produce a unified view of strategy and move towards a resource based theory of the firm. Specifically the paper argues for the inclusion of labour process theory, asymmetric information and the analysis of risk and the classical labour theory of value. The combination of these elements shows that a resource-based theory must unite the process and content elements of strategy, through the simultaneous interaction of labour management processes, the determinants of sustained competitive advantage (SCA), and relations with capital markets. The argument presented shows how value originates in the productive process and is transmitted as rents to organizational and capital market constituents. The detailed assumptions are sufficient to suggest an integrated resource-based theory of corporate strategy. The principal assertion in the paper is not that the labour theory of value is true per se, only that it is at least as good as competing theories, but that only if it is assumed to be true can we progress to construct a consistent resource-based theory of the firm. Without these links to the labour theory of value and labour process theory, and mechanisms of corporate governance, the R-BV remains merely a view and not a theory, because it lacks a consistent basis for asset valuation. The theory also explains that the roots of SCA lie in the labour process, but with the corollary that maximizing the associated investment in tacit knowledge and associated difficult to replicate assets is fundamentally inconsistent with the objective of maximizing shareholder value

Structural change in employment in India since 1980s: How Lewisian is it?

Indian economy shows high levels of growth and per capita income in recent years accompanied by an unprecedented shift of labour from agriculture to non-agriculture during the last decade. Reallocation of labour from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ segments in an economy having large surplus labour was conceived in the Lewisian framework as the process by way of which both accumulation of capital and exhaustion of surplus labour takes place. This paper argues that the structural change in employment in India that results from the exclusionary nature of the growth process hardly approximates the Lewisian trajectory. Finally, in the context of globalisation this paper explains the responses of firms of various size categories in non-agriculture and argues that the shift in employment basically expands the ‘reserve army of labour’ in the Marxian sense instead of exhaustion of surplus labour conceived in Lewisian conjectures.growth, employment, non-agriculture, structural change,reserve army of labour

Labour-Use Efficiency in the Tunisian's Manufacturing Industries: A Flexible Adjustment Model

This paper investigates the process of adjustment in employment. A dynamic model is applied to a panel of six Tunisian manufacturing industries observed over the period 1971-1996. The adjustment process is industry and time specific. The adjustment parameter is specified in terms of factors affecting the speed of adjustment. Industries are assumed to adjust their labour inputs towards a desired level of labour-use. A translog labour requirement function is specified in terms of observable variables and is used to model the desired level of labour-use.The labour requirement is specified to be function of wages, output, quasi-fixed capital stock and technology. The empirical results show that in the long-run, employment demand responds greatest to value added, followed by capital stock changes, and least by wages. The speed of adjustment in employment and the degree of labour-use efficiency show large variations among thesectors and over time.

The labour theory of value, risk and the rate of profit

The paper extends Marx’s law of value to include the effects of risk. It shows how risk has its origins in the labour process and is transferred between labour and capital on an unequal basis and between capitals on a zero sum basis. An empirical test is then presented, which shows that the employment of labour increases risk from the point of view of the investing capitalist. The conclusion is that the employment of labour is a curate’s egg from capital’s point of view. On the one hand it is essential for the production of sustainable surplus value and therefore for competitive advantage and capital accumulation. On the other hand employment of labour renders such accumulation inherently risky and therefore commensurately more costly to the rational capitalist investor

Labour market status of job seekers in regional matching processes

This study examines the matching aspects of local labour markets focusing on the status of job seekers in the matching process, on spatial autocorrelation in labour market conditions of local labour markets, and on differences in matching processes between areas with permanently deviating unemployment rates. The data set is temporally, spatially, and by labour market positions of job seekers highly disaggregate monthly data from 171 Local Labour Offices (LLOs) in Finland over 12 years. According to the results, an increase in the share of long-term unemployed job seekers decreases matches, and an increase in the share of job seekers out of labour force increases successful matches in local labour markets. The matching process does not work in the same way in all areas, but on the contrary its functioning is dependent on the unemployment conditions. Effects of increases in the number of inputs on successful matches depend on the proportional share of that input in the area as well as on the composition of the stock of job seekers. The results also indicate the labour market conditions and matching processes across neighbouring LLOs being spatially autocorrelated.