ABSTRACT
Members of the modern working class are subordinated both as individuals and as a class within corporate society. In the industrial setting, Taylorism represents an historical development within corporate form in which the mental, control, and creative aspects of work are steadily stripped from the workers and relocated within a new class of middle managerial, professional, and technical specialists. The broader hypothesis suggested by the phenomena of social and political Taylorism is that productive arrangements between individuals and classes initially formed within the producer corporation have spilled over to create analogues in society and politics. The concept of the collective worker carries the implication that the corporate working class as a class is shaped and controlled by corporate society. In sharp contrast, the most familiar and popular views both of Marxist and of conventional social science have tended to emphasize that the shaping and controlling of the working class is primarily a matter of shaping and controlling individuals.
