Management, Labour Process and Agency

This paper is motivated by an unease that a labour process approach to managerial work, if it is to be based upon simplistic assumptions that management itself is a labour process will actually obscure many of the contradictions which exist within managerial capitalism and which a true labour process approach should be concerned to expose and analyse. To that end Braverman's treatment of management as a labour process is criticised and shown to be inconsistent with his own analysis of the fate of productive labour in monopoly capitalism. The paper then argues that the core feature of management within capitalist social relations of production is the agency relationship. This is shown to contain contradictions between the inevitable dependence of employers and senior managers on trust and the fact that this is expensive, which gives them incentives to dispense with it, so far as is possible, in favour of the deskilling and monitoring of management work. This inbuilt contradiction creates a micro-political and historical dynamism within capitalist management organisation which makes broad-brush sense of many of the developments which have occurred over the last century and which promises much for more detailed analysis.