Thanks Yoshie. I enjoyed Michael Yates' piece but it reminded me how moribund interest in the labor process became since the mid-1980s.
Braverman has weathered a lot of scrutiny - from labor historians who took him to task for romanticizing pre-capitalist work and who revelled in the details of the formation of the labor process, the comparative types who saw the dynamics of the labor process outside capitalism (aka Soviet-styled industrialization), the sociological debate over deskilling and upskilling, Andre Gorz, debates over proletarianization and embourgeoisement, etc.
Perhaps I haven't kept up with the lit. but the past two or three decades seem ripe for a sequel to Braverman. David Noble's work is good, but I've always thought a more focused treatment of management strategies and practices more generally would net some interesting stuff.
Sometimes a closed theoretical loop generates too many answers and not enough questions. Sometime it does more to protect its theoretical turf. For a time in the 1980s there seem some promising work linking class and the dynamics of formal organization. It was never marxist enough for some and far too marxist for mainstream organizational social science.
Dennis Breslin