ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the labour process debates that dominated industrial sociology in the 1970s and 1980s, and the post-Fordist theories of the 1980s and 1990s. It is from within these theoretical frameworks that the subject of skill has been most widely debated. During the 1970s and 1980s the skill discourse focused on the question of whether the labour process under monopoly capitalism was characterised by a linear deskilling of the workforce. In the late 1980s and 1990s the debates have largely centered on the extent to which the alleged shift towards post-Fordism and flexibility has facilitated an up-skilling, or multi-skilling, of the workforce. The subjective perceptions of skill held by workers in the three case study factories are influenced primarily by firm specific structural organisational features, which are themselves related, in part, to wider processes at work in the capitalist system of production.
