MANUFACTURING CONSENT

by Burawoy, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780226080383
• ISBN10: 0226080382
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780226217710
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1982-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Since the 1930s, industrial sociologists have tried to answer the question, Why do workers not work harder? Michael Burawoy spent ten months as a machine operator in a Chicago factory trying to answer different but equally important questions: Why do workers work as hard as they do? Why do workers routinely consent to their own exploitation? Manufacturing Consent, the result of Burawoy's research, combines rich ethnographical description with an original Marxist theory of the capitalist labor process. Manufacturing Consent is unique among studies of this kind because Burawoy has been able to analyze his own experiences in relation to those of Donald Roy, who studied the same factory thirty years earlier. Burawoy traces the technical, political, and ideological changes in factory life to the transformations of the market relations of the plant (it is now part of a multinational corporation) and to broader movements, since World War II, in industrial relations.

Author Biography

Michael Burawoy is associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the co-editor (with Theda Skocpol) of Marxist Inquiries: Studies of Labor, Class, and States, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
One From Sociology to Marxism
The Demise of Industrial Sociology	3	(10)
Toward a Theory of the Capitalist Labor Process	13	(20)
Two Changes in the Labor Process
From Geer Company to Allied Corporation	33	(13)
Thirty Years of Making Out	46	(31)
The Production of Consent
The Labor Process as a Game	77	(18)
The Rise of an Internal Labor Market	95	(14)
Consolidating an Internal State	109	(14)
Four The Relative Autonomy of the Labor Process
The Labor Process in a Recession	123	(12)
The Labor Process and Worker Consciousness	135	(26)
Five The Motors of Change
Struggles on the Shop Floor	161	(17)
Class Struggle and Capitalist Competition	178	(15)
From Competitive to Monopoly Capitalism	193	(12)
Appendix Comparative Perspective: Change and Continuity in the Zambian Mining Industry	205	(12)
Notes	217	(36)
Bibliography	253	(10)
Index	263