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This paper locates labour process theory in broader sociological debates concerned with the action-structure dualism before examining three broad programmes for research that have emerged in response to the question of subjectivity and agency. Whereas the 'orthodox' school tends to re-assert the structuralist and economistic features of Marx, the 'anti-realist' or deconstructionist position invites the abandonment of analysis that has traditionally been orientated by the polarities of 'structure' and 'agency'. We identify and develop a third, 'hybrid position', one that is informed by poststructuralist insights but does not neglect or reject established traditions of 'modern' sociology and labour process research. Critical examinations of two recent studies of 'subjectivity and the labour process' -- Mike Sosteric's (1996) case study of a night club and Douglas Ezzy's (1997) paper on 'good work' -- are undertaken to show how poststructuralist insights may offer an instructive way of understanding how subjectivity is co-implicated in the accomplishment and reproduction of capitalist employment relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theory and case study of the formation of public professional radicalism. Theories of 'new class' and 'middle class' radicalism are criticised for neglecting the experiential context in which political consciousness is formed. A similar critique is made of Offe's analysis of the political contradictions of the welfare state. It is suggested that public professionals resolve their contradictory experiences of welfare capitalism into forms of rhetoric and action that combine 'non-market' and 'pro-market' values. This process is identified as the formation of ideology. Interviews with anti-racist educationalists in London and Tyneside are introduced to exemplify this argument. Five ideologies are discussed. Three (the notions of anti-racism as 'good education', as an exercise in 'consciousness raising', and as part of 'the Black struggle') were articulated in both study sites. Two others (the notions of 'local sensitivity', and 'the gentle approach') were distinct to Tyneside. The paper concludes by noting the salience of a geographically sensitive approach to the analysis of public professional radical consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a brief examination of neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian arguments it is demonstrated that the class nature of the new middle class has yet to be established. The paper goes on to show that as well as differences arising out of material conditions (i.e. class differences), inequalities based on expectations of entitlement or norms are also significant in capitalist society. Weber's treatment of status has not encouraged an adequate understanding of the concept, and an alternative is outlined. The paper then argues that the differences between the so-called new middle class and the working class are reasonably understood on a number of criteria as differences between status groups which form part of a single class. Not only does this approach remove a number of difficulties from accounts of the salariat, it also helps explain the different political alignments of social collectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues against the dominant tendency in social theory to speak of "the state" It distinguishes two types of state: the capstone state sitting on top of societies, blocking alternative sources of power, and the organic state allowing and encouraging the co-operation of different power sources, which is held to be characteristic of European development. The main argument of the paper is that the latter type of polity was a necessary feature in the complex that allowed the endogenous creation of a broadly capitalist dynamic in the Occident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Braverman and his followers have been useful and influential in reviving a sociology of work. However as well as stimulating debate, the Braverman model has also created impediments to further analysis. This paper discusses some of these limitations and argues that, in part, they result from a particular reading of Marx which neglects crucial Marxian categories. In part, they result from weaknesses and ambiguities in Marxian theory. The second part of the paper focuses on the concept of control, and makes a plea for a revival of interest in the pre-Braverrnan sociology of the workplace. It is suggested that such work conjoined with that of recent theorists provides a more adequate basis for theory of capitalist labour processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main object of this paper is to separate several strands in the relationship between the works of Marx and Max Weber. Max Weber has rightly been regarded as Marx's most profound intellectual critic. But there has been much confusion in subsequent literature over the nature and validity of Weber's critique of Marx. This perhaps stems, in part at least, from a failure to distinguish a number of different, although interrelated, themes in Weber's writings. Weber wrote not simply as a critic of Marx, but also in response to the writings and political involvements of the prominent Marxists of his day. Three partially separable aspects of Weber's views thus may be isolated: (a) His attitude towards Marxism in the shape of the main Marxist political agency in Germany, the Social Democratic Party. (b) His views upon the academic contributions of Marxist authors to history and sociology. (c) His views upon what he considered to be Man's own original ideas. These three aspects of Weber's thought may in turn be distinguished from the analytic problem of how far Weber's own understanding of Marx's theory of historical materialism was in fact a valid one. Some of Marx's posthumously published writings, unavailable to Weber, allow us to form a clear judgement on this question. The historical changes in the social and political structure of Germany from the middle to the latter part of the nineteenth century form an essential background to the whole of the paper: Weber's attitudes toward Marx and Marxism cannot be understood out of this context. Weber's work was written not solely in response to a wraith-like "ghost of Marx", but also in response to a force--Marxism--which played a vital political and intellectual role in Imperial Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the cultural and social consequences of the new forms of work organisation variously described as engineered workplace culture, flexibilisation, teamwork, employee involvement, quality circles and post-Fordism. Some celebrate the new form of worker this creates as a consumer of organisationally provided meanings. However, the choices are quite limited for workers in engineered cultures, and for the self-discovering subjects of consumer capitalism more generally. The language, norms and values of engineered cultures become internalised and dominate employees' subjectivity. Further, a sociological analysis of institutional structures of consumer capitalism, and engineered cultures in particular, points to how they encourage workers to develop moral frameworks that are individualistic, with little concern for other people. Simone Weil's studies of the workplace are used to argue that a culture that encourages an ethical orientation of respect for the other is at the heart of good work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the possible patterns of crime and control in the twenty-first century, drawing on an analysis of current and recent developments. These suggest a dystopian prospect of permanently high crime rates, and control strategies that reinforce social division and exclusion. Current 'third way' policies for crime reduction may achieve modest success, in part because they indirectly encourage agencies to manipulate statistically recorded outcomes to their advantage. They do not however tackle the underlying sources of crime in the political economy and culture of global capitalism, offering only actuarial analyses of risk variation, and pragmatic preventive interventions to reduce these. In the absence of any broader changes to the social patterns which generate high-crime societies the prospect is of marginal palliatives for crime, which themselves have the dysfunctional consequences of increasing segregation, distrust and anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary focuses on the article, Might Britain Be a Meritocracy?, by Peter Saunders, published in the 1995 issue of Sociology. The model of social mobility under conditions of perfect meritocracy used in Saunder's paper assumes that all the service-class fathers in Goldthorpe's sample have IQ greater than those of all the fathers in the other classes. This commentary has shown that if, as seems likely, this assumption is incorrect, the consequence is that a model which assumes meritocractic recruitment to the service class predicts a percentage of sons of service-class fathers as attaining service-class occupations, which is smaller than the actual percentage as observed by Goldthorpe. Put simply, if the crucial assumption is incorrect, and hence the mean IQ of the service-class fathers is less than 123, a suitably amended version of Saunder's model demonstrates that many of the sons of service-class fathers do not merit the service-class occupations that they have attained. The model presented in this commentary is, like Saunder's model, a crude and over-simplistic one. The empirical estimates of the mean IQ of the various classes presented in this commentary are also flawed, since they are based on an unrepresentative sample that did not use the class categories used by Goldthorpe and Saunders.

While capitalism is increasingly organised on a global basis, effective opposition to capitalist practices tends to be manifest locally. The traditional response of the labour movement to global capitalism has been to try to forge international links between workers' organisations in different countries. This strategy, despite some successes, has generally failed and the paper argues that the relationship between the labour movement and the New Social Movements requires further analysis in terms of the local and the global. The rationale and characteristics of such an analysis are discussed in the context of opposition to the practices of the transnational corporations, the transnational capitalist class and its local affiliates, and the culture-ideology of consumerism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a number of problems with labour process accounts of worker subjectivity. They are manifested as ambiguities about the meaning of worker behaviour, and have their origins in conflicting ideological requirements of Marxism and assumptions of immanence. We argue that it is these theoretical precepts, rather than cumulating empirical knowledge, which have driven debates on the labour process and interpretations of behaviour in the workplace. We show how essentially similar activities are construed as either reproducing capitalist relations or resisting them, according to the theoretical needs of the labour process pardigm. Compounding this interpretive problem is the insistence of labour process theorists that the point of production is the key source of worker consciousness in capitalist society. We conclude that labour process is incapable of theoretical growth because of its non-cumulative circulation of explanations and fixation on the workplace. In its place we advocate more inductive empirical approaches to the study of consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most analyses of the connection of safety legislation to the capital/labour relation are organised around the question of the failure of safety legislation to prevent injury and death at work. However, these accounts are problematic in that they rely on a necessary relationship between the imperatives of capital and the actions of owners and managers. This paper uses a case study of the Queensland (Australia) coal mining industry to argue that a connection between safety legislation and the capital/labour relation can be found by starting, not from the question of failure, but from an exploration of the effects of the apparatus of safety. By approaching the question from this direction it allows a significant change within the mining labour process to be traced. The apparatus of safety operated both to differentiate the manager from the miners as labourers and to constitute the manager as the (partial) site of co-ordination and discipline. Thus the new category was aligned with capital and a prior condition for the real subsumption of labour was set in place. In this form of analysis the failure of safety legislation and the reforms which it engenders appear in a new light. They are no longer organising principles of analysis but parts of a strategy which was continually aiming at a shift towards a more capitalist labour process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues (a) that some of the present difficulties experienced by the sociology of development can be overcome by a macro comparative historical focus on the qualitative differences between the long term development of the capitalist centre and periphery, as well as on the strikingly different developmental trajectories to be seen within the third world; (b) that Marxism in general, and the dependency approach in particular, although more suitable than alternative paradigms for such a historical comparative task, present certain limitations that can only be dealt with by the creation of new tools for the study of the non-economic spheres (particularly the political). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores two distinct frames of meaning used by managers in an industrial enterprise. One is taken to be derived from the traditions of the industry and is consequently particular to it. The other is taken to be derived from conceptions of the professional management of organizations and is universalistic. In looking for explanation, the background to each frame is elucidated, in terms of Giddens' 'structuration', and attempts are made to relate them to the divorce of ownership and control and the associated development of capitalism. A change of control in the enterprise, resulting from the latter, is used to highlight the frames of meaning and suggestions are made as to the possible connections between the emergence of finance capital as the power in capitalism and that of a financially-dominated form of management in the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marshall argues that the experience of Scotland vindicates Weber in relation to his claims about the links between Protestantism and the emergence of capitalism. Marshall claims that, once we are clear about what Weber actually said and what constitutes relevant evidence to evaluate his arguments, it can be shown that in Scotland the 'Protestant Ethic' fostered the 'Spirit of Capitalism'. Marshall's conclusion is disputed in this paper, where it is argued that he presents no relevant evidence to substantiate the view that the 'Protestant Ethic' and the `Spirit of Capitalism' ever existed in Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on peripheral capitalist societies which (a) acquired their political independence relatively early and had already in the 19th century adopted parliamentary forms of political representation; (b) experienced a considerable degree of capitalist industrialization during the inter-war and post-war periods. A fundamental dimension for understanding the structure and functioning of political institutions in the above societies has to do, not only with the mode of expansion and structure of industrial capitalism but also with its timing: with the fact that in all these formations the transition from oligarchic to broader forms of political representation precedes rather than follows their industrialization. Three distinct forms of transition are identified: urban populism from above (the Latin American Southern Cone pattern), peasant populism from below (the pattern in interwar Northern Balkan societies) and political inclusion through a transformation of clientelistic networks (the Greek pattern). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Max Weber's 'The Religion of India' and places it in the wider context of his work. It tries to show in detail how Weber's study of India formed pan of the comparative analysis of world civilizations which was the natural result of his interest in the causal antecedents of the rise of industrial capitalism in the West. With this background correctly understood, it is possible to appreciate why Weber approached Indian religion in the way that he did, and to avoid some common mistakes. Weber is summarized on the most important aspects of Indian religion and a brief attempt is made to state how valid his remarks still are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent attempts by British writers to give sociological accounts of inflationary processes suffer from the defect that they fail to distinguish clearly between factors which are inherent in all capitalist societies and those that are peculiar to British industrial development. Hence their discussions make it unclear whether the `British sickness', which includes high inflation, is likley to be prototypical of all capitalist societies. This paper begins by examining how `sociological' factors enter into economists' explanations of inflation and goes on to outline a distinctively sociological model of inflation. The model has four elements: the extent to which economistic values are held by different groups of income-receivers; the existence and strength of any normative system which might restrain the pursuit of such values; the structure of power between groups of income-receivers; and the structural capacity of the socio-economic system to meet the demands placed on it. It is suggested that two different configurations of these variables are empirically more likely to occur. One being highly likely to promote inflationary tendencies, the other being likely to mitigate such pressures. Finally, it is argued that Britain's particular pattern of industrial development means that she corresponds to the first type, whereas other capitalist societies with different historical paths may correspond to the second type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN a recent paper, Berger et al argue that traditional concepts of honour and reputation have been eroded as a consequence of subjective adaptations to modem industrial society. However, historical analysis of English libel laws suggests that honour and reputation are ideological elements whose contents are broadly specified by distinct modes of production. Thus feudal honour was an aristocratic class ideology which was necessarily transformed by the rise of commodity relations, Moreover, subsequent commodification of honour in English law derives from and reflects the emergence of capitalist forces rather than more general forces of modernization. The corollary of this observation is that in modern socialist laws, honour and reputation differ substantially from the parallel concepts in English and United States law, strongly reflecting a specifically socialist ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to identify those structural conditions which are conducive to the rise and maintenance of industrial paternalist capitalism within Britain. Following Newby's discussion of the nature of deference industrial paternalism is defined as the specific form taken in Britam by economic and political structures in which the unequal distribution of resources is legitimated by tradition. A key factor in the maintenance of such systems of traditional authority is the nature of the owners of local productive capacity. Two features are emphasized; the extent to which local assets constitute the bulk of all capital owned by the local bourgeoisie and the existence of historical links between such owners of local capital and the area. Empirical measures of the nature of local labour markets are used to identify those areas of the country which contain the structural features most likely to support industrial paternalism. It is suggested that such areas can be characterized as relatively isolated local labour markets which are dominated by single companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that worker participation has not evolved out of the humanization of capitalism, as is usually suggested, but has appeared cyclically. These cycles are traced over more than a century and are shown to correspond to periods when management authority is felt to be facing challenge. Participation is thus best understood as a means of attempting to secure labour's compliance. However, the framework of common interests upon which participation is premised is untenable, and m practice the efficiency of such schemes in Britain has been for the most part severely attenuated by the realities of structural conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two current approaches to the study of white-collar unionism are identified: a) the 'sociological' approach, which relates patterns of white-collar unionism to the class situation of white-collar workers, b) the 'industrial relations' critique, which rejects the association of class situation and union activity and argues instead that job regulation is the crucial independent variable. Whilst the approach developed in this paper is firmly within the `sociological' tradition, I argue that the neo-Weberian class analysis from which this tradition is derived gives an incomplete understanding of the location of the `white- collar' or `new middle' class in the class structure of advanced capitalist society. I outline an alternative strategy for the analysis of the `white-collar' class situation, drawn from Marxian principles. The essential ambiguity of the white-collar class situation is stressed, and this ambiguity is then related to patterns of white-collar representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]