ABSTRACT
The publication of Harry Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital in 1974 seemed to herald a ‘paradigm shift’ in the sociology of work organizations. This was so to the extent that the book set a new agenda for the latter, and provided radically different theoretical tools through which the agenda could be pursued to that found within ‘traditional’ industrial sociology (Thompson 1983). In particular, Braverman’s analysis called for renewed efforts to explicate the intimate relationship between managerial control of social relations at the point of production and the broader structures of class power and domination in which it was located. For Braverman, the causal connection between the imperative of capitalist accumulation and the structure of managerial control in the workplace was axiomatic for the analysis of historical developments in organizational forms.
