ABSTRACT
R.C. Edwards's recent work, ‘The Contested Terrain: the Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century’ (1979), involves an attempt to integrate works on American labour markets such as Doeringer and Piore (1971) and Edwards et al. (1975) with contemporary sociological models that characterize class conflict in advanced capitalist societies in terms of an interaction between ‘managerial strategies’ and ‘workers' resistance’. These sociological models have been premised upon a set of distinct but not unrelated economic theories. In the case of writers like Friedman (1977a, 1977b) and the Brighton Labour Process Group (1977), the underlying framework is Marxist, whereas for ‘neo-Ricardians’ like Glyn and Sutcliffe (1972), Wood (1981) and Elbaum et al. in the ‘Cambridge Journal of Economics’ symposium (1979), a less deterministic model is in evidence. Edwards himself opts unambiguously for an attempt to link labour market analysis with Marxist theory and his text represents, therefore, a test of the adequacy of such a synthesis.
