Work now: The forces of production

The forces of unleashed capitalism are far-reaching in their effects. The world of work has experienced their full brunt. Work has historically been understood and experienced as a complex arena of social and cultural practices as well as of economic action. Workers produce sociality as they produce goods. Contestations over the regulation of work; over the interests, rights and duties of its actors and stakeholders have long been fierce even as working-class interests were equally long and violently suppressed. In the mid-twentieth century those contestations reached unprecedented settlement. The social institutionalization of deep conflicts mitigated their antagonisms and enabled movements toward fairer, and more rationally legitimate, negotiation over the relations of production. The industrial relations systems of Western European countries more or less instituted practices of collective bargaining, of representation, of more social regulation and distribution of work and production. The pressures of neo-liberalism have now fractured and dispersed those institutions and obligations in the social regulation of work. The institutional reforms brought about by the neo-liberal macroeconomic

policy turn that began its sweep in the 1980s and 1990s very specifically targeted the activities of production, organization, management, employment relations and labour organization. The reforms, in sum, demanded and achieved a powerful recalibration of capital and management relations with labour and a wide-scale reconfiguration of the world of work. The subsequent institutional arrangements currently set the prevailing contexts of work and labour markets and conditions for workers. There is little doubt that the technological acceleration has been of immense influence, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. The Fordist production regime appears ineluctably to have buckled under that tide of change. But what is often accorded less salience in the forces of change and recalibration of production relations is the role of the firm: its shareholder interests, its managerial agents and its organizational prerogatives. The collapse of the Keynesian compromise was abetted and succeeded by a resurgence of private, collective interests in economic institutions, most saliently those of the corporate firm. The technological acceleration, the restored powers of the firm to exert its privileged interests in organizational practices, employment relations

and labour markets, the political-economic liberalization of financial markets, the drive for a highly competitive knowledge-based economy in order to stimulate the innovations conducive to new profit regimes combine to set the political economic context of contemporary work. This chapter examines more closely the economic and political forces that

shape the dominant conditions under which work and production occur in contemporary advanced economies. Aspects of national varieties of capitalism still do remain visible and effective. But within that variety general trends of increasingly convergent neo-liberal forces of production and work are observable across industry sectors and national economies. A vibrant field of scholarship discusses many aspects of contemporary practices of production and work. My approach in the following discussion casts a sociological gaze over key overarching patterns and imperatives generally occurring in work and production organization. An analytical approach that focuses on general patterns and trends always runs the risk of inattention to specific national or regional and industrial sector institutional variations, pace of change and degree of counter-movement to general trends. However, in order to delineate and explicate significant general elements, patterns and responses, that risk is cautiously taken here. The approach taken is also necessarily limited in its attention to other important levels and concerns1 in working life and to industrial and employment legislation.2 It must further be noted that a critical analytic view of the overarching power relations to which workers are subjected does not, of course, ignore the irrepressibility of the human spirit that inspires people to make the best of their work and job situations. But neither, of course, ought a spirit of amelioration be expected to acquiesce to an elite expectation of toleration of new, quieter, forms of exploitation and injustice. The discussion below identifies three clusters of imperatives. Discussion of

these imperatives takes as extant the technological acceleration that has been extensively discussed in the literature. These imperatives occur in interactive and intertwining rather than clearly sequential ways. It is the combined effects of these imperatives and their institutional effects that produce the particular dominant patterns and forces of work and production in the advanced economies observable in the early twenty-first century. Had any one of these elements been subject to substantially different political and social forces, a different pattern of consequences might well have resulted. The forces described are not of themselves able to include limits to their action. They cannot, without social and civil intervention, deliver the qualities of fairness, respect, justice and society-building solidarities and reasoned contestation.