Lou --Thelonius Monk-- Proyect (straight no chaser) wrote
a really interesting post. I was going to point to Mann's work as well, but more so I could talk about the contemporary issues, below
>We must assume, however, that the white-collar worker in Germany
in the
>1920's was still relatively high up in the class hierarchy since
his or her
>work had not been mechanized or routinized to the extent it is
today.
>Therefore, a clerk in an insurance company or bank would tend to
identify
>more with management than with workers in a steel-mill. Even
under today's
>changed economic conditions, this tends to be true. A bank
teller in NY
>probably resents a striking transit worker, despite the fact
that they have
>much in common in class terms. This must have been an even more
pronounced
>tendency in the 1920's when white-collar workers occupied an
even more
>elite position in society.
With regard to empirical extensions of Braverman, Marx, Weber:
Vicki Smith, (sorry Lou, she worked with that awful Marxist-Weberian-Braverman hybrid M. Burawoy) alludes to this phenom a bit as it occurs under contemporary conditions. I've explored it a bit more in my work. Smith's works suggest that, because some service work tends to bring workers in contact with middle- and upper-middle class white collar workers and professionals, service workers often see their customers as the enemy and their employer/managers as 'on their side' They may become more willing to enact management practices if they think that this might piss off a middle class professional or two. Greta Paules', _Dishing it Out_ (waitresses), too, showed that waitresses could be real sticklers about silverware, napkins and sugar packets if this meant that they could put an ornery customer or two in their place. In this case, mgmt policies about policing the clientele were enacted w/o question, b/c it served their interests or, at least, they thought it did. (Though, at other times, waitresses told mgmt where to get off w/ regard to other policies, like having to perform the ritual of suggestive selling on *every* single customer (e.g., "How 'bout some of our nice apple pie? ( to top off the 14 oz steak you just devoured")
Robin Leidner's _Fast Food, Fast Talk_ (McDonald's/door-to-door insurance sales) also reveals how even McDonald's workers can actually come to appreciate and even welcome their de=skilled work because it allows them to control those nasty customers--as if they were parts on an assembly line--who come in actually expecting them to wait on them. Move 'em in and move 'em out.
A few years ago, I looked at this w/ regard to cafeteria workers in a well unioned factory There, cafeteria workers sided with mgmt policies whenever these policies enabled them to make their customer's lives a bit more difficult and perhaps their work easier. All of this was exacerbated by anti-unionist sentiments in general, and a kind of resentment among cafeteria workers that the unionized factory workers were relatively well-paid and had the all important bennies, as well as the protections against managment abuse of overtime, blatant disregard for labor laws and the like. Then, of course, there is the gender issue: factory workers were mostly men who saw themselves as a notch above in the social order;cafeteria workers, were largely women and resented that fact. In this particular case, the antagonism became so great that each 'side' was spying on the other, perfectly willing to rat each other out to management.
Race, too, might be an issue, something that Smith addressed a bit, but I couldn't because it wasn't an issue in this particular case study.
All micro-social, social psych stuff, to be sure, but it fleshes out what I think you might be suggesting. It is the micro-politics of everyday life where these sentiments get played out and practiced, forming a base upon which to build the pro- or anti-managment sentiments which results in intra-class warfare of a sort.
> In the United States, where their
>composition tends to be heavily Black or Latino, also back
progressive
>politics.
Why, necessarily, does their ethnicity suggest a progressive politics. Not that they weren't progressive in this instance, but do you think that ethnicity necessarily results in progressive politics among working class Blacks and/or Latinos?
> But in Germany in the 1920's, it should come as no major
surprise
>that some public sector workers joined Hitler or Mussolini's
cause.
Another student of Burawoy's examined the case of social welfare workers and whether they supported unions or not. Again, their political positions on unionization depended on the degree to which the workers dealt with the public on a regular basis and why (e.g., educational background, expertise, bureaucratic processes of de-skilling. (The case study is a chap. in Burawoy's _Ethnography Unbound_ Alice Burton, "Dividing up the Struggle")
>These are the sorts of issues that Marxists should be exploring.
Michael
>Mann is a "neo-Weberian" supposedly who also finds Marx useful.
Max Weber
>tried to explain the growth of capitalism as a consequence of
the
>"Protestant ethic".
Well no, not entirely. He also talked about the concommitant rise of bureaucratic forms of rule through a system of rational accounting that was, in the end, the way in which the Protestant Ethic became secularized and most insidious. Here, the Protestant Ethic wasn't so much about the work ethic as some sort of system of ideas that ruled one's attitudes toward work. Rather, it was more an analysis of the micro-level of social practices of work. A secularized PE gave rise to or at least helped fertilize the growth of daily social practices that made some kinds of firms more successful than others: rational procedures of cost-benefit analysis, bookeeping, an emphasis on precise measurements of time, weights, lengths. These practices shape the social conditions of labor in rather material ways and thus shape workers thinking. Scientific managment, then, is very much an outgrowth of this focus on technical rationality and it shapes the social conditions under which one works in very concrete, and I'd say, important ways. In that sense, Weber's insights lend themselves quite nicely to Braverman's work on de-skilling. In closing his study, Weber made reference to the ways bureaucracy would be deployed under market conditions. While Weber certainly can be viewed as an anti-marxist, I don't think that you necessarily have to posit the two as completely anti-thetical.
These, it seems to me, are the social conditions of labor--on a rather micro level to be sure, but does that mean we need to dismiss them as mere consciousness?
Snit