>CB: Again on this relations/forces of production thing, I think Marx
considers working classes to be both force and in a relation of production.
But more to the point here, even the instruments and means of production ( which are the other forces besides the working classes) do not develop independently of the class struggle.
No, but it's not necessarily the result of workers trying to make their jobs easier. I think it much more complicated than that. Just take a look at David Noble's _America by Design_. Innovations in the forces of production are also things like the technologies the manufacturing line or even the routinization of service work, which Robin Leidner investigates in _Fast Food, Fast Talk_ which highlights my point and I think will flesh out a long standing disagreement between Carrol and I which we discussed offlist briefly: contemporary service work reconfigures the relationship between labor and capital in an historically specific way. And, moreover, I'd say that it's something we need to account for in our meanderings about organizing AND something that illustrates the relationship between forces of production and social relations of production, terms that get bandied about but not much is said in terms of how they are related. It is an example at the heart of the mission of the list which tries to bridge the gap between those who "do" culture and those who "do" economy.
[I hope Hanley and Remick and Woj, cupcake, read coz I've felt impelled to do a C. Wright Mills to show that it's quite possible to engage high falutin' theoretical discourse in plain language. Grade Shett to fill out at the end!]
As we know, a significant portion of the pop. in the US now works in jobs that deal directly with clients and patrons and do so in relations of subservience. [We have #s on service labor, but I don't have at hand numbers on subservient service labor, though they can be disentangled using the Occupational Code] A significant part of a service workers daily life is spent thinking of those clients/patrons as "the enemy". This is reiterated over and over again in new mgmt technologies that litter the contemporary firm, a discourse which conceives of us all as workers dealing with "internal" and "external" customers. Interesting confluence eh? Moreover, it is often the case that workers in these positions ally themselves with management. Why not? The "rules" managers are constantly making up to regulate the workplace, to control worker behavior, to ensure the maximization of profit, are rules that workers take refuge in so they can, effectively, tell the client/customer to take a hike if they don't like the service/product they're getting. Workers take refuge in routinized work, in the rules, and do so actively as part of a strategy of resistance against that which they perceive as oppressing them: the customers/clients/patrons. The rules are a Good Thing.
In Leidner's ethnographic study of McDonald's and door-to-door insurance sales work she reveals the concrete specifics of what it means to say that our consciousness is shaped by the conditions of our labor. She also engages in a relatively brilliant attempt to draw on Weber's [and Frankfurt School/Habermas's] rationalization thesis by examining the organizational or firm level of the rationalization process. In other words, she asks how rationalization is not just a cultural process [Weber's focus] but one that manifests itself through the standardizing, routinizing technologies [forces of production] of contemporary capitalism. Following the lead of scholars like Noble, Braverman, Richard Edwards' _Contested Terrain_, and Burawoy's _MAnufacturing Consent_ she asks how rationalization shapes workers' consciousness. She shows how these technologies move beyond the workplace and are also part of the social relations of production because they manifest themselves in our very identities and cultural understandings of ourselves and others, a theme also explored by Hochschild in _The Managed Heart_.
Anyone who's had dinner at a chain restaurant or listened carefully to the spiel of a cold-call sales rep hears the routinized pitch. We cringe in one of two ways, typically. WRT, McDonald's workers we think: "How awful that job must be. I'd never want to do that and for such miserable pay! They must feel like robots" The worker at McDonalds has replaced the proverbial ditch digger in our lexicon which means that McDonalds workers and others like them often get treated poorly if they are even "seen" or noticed at all.
Furthermore, we are also annoyed at being treated like a anonymous number. We are, in effect, on an assembly line: a cog in the consumption wheel to be shuffled along on a routinized "line" that demands that we react in our own routinized ways, on cue. Walk into McDonald's and the first thing you hear is an impatient, "Can I take your order please?" And you know s/he's pissed when you don't know what you want yet! You are routinely solicited to upgrade your order, "Supersize that?" "Would you like a warmed over apple flavored hunk of plastic called "Apple Pie" right?" Then you eat in spaces purposefully designed to get you in and out in a specified time. Taylorite principles are deployed in the ergonomics of chair and table design, color schemes that make you hungry or disturb you so that you want to leave after a certain time. Ditto for the acoustics and music. We, the patrons, are Taylorized, routinized, standardized and trained to take on our appropriate roles.
The result is that the relationship between worker and patron is one, often enough, of antagonism. As a trainer at Hamburger University told Leidner, "We want to treat our customers as individuals, in sixty seconds or less" [30 seconds for drive thru]. He said this without any acknowledgment regarding the absurdity of what he'd said. For the trainer, it was quite possible to treat customers as individuals even as they treated as things to be shuffled in and out.
In 1951 C. Wright Mills, heavily influenced by the Frankfurt school, argued in _White Collar_ that "the real opportunities for rationalization and expropriation are in the field of the human personality". Now, we typically imagine that service workers at McDonald's must suppress their "real" selves so that absolutely nothing about what they do is unique or original or a reflection of who they are. Indeed, the more sophisticated of these chains script and routinize the element of variation by instructing employees to try to appear spontaneous and to vary their routine by using different scripts. But it's still all scripted! Braverman and those interested in the deskilling of labor have often assumed that deskilling would encourage resistance, if not out right rejection and rebellion. However, Leidner argues that, while there is resistance, such resistance is not in the service of calling into question the routinization of work. Rather, workers actually embrace the script because it protects them from the indignities they suffer on the job. Knowing full well that people not only don't think much of them, but often treat them as if they don't exist, service workers actively engage the scripted routines because they can protect their "real" and "authentic" selves from the indignities they suffer daily by saying, "This is not me; it's a role I must play." The routinized script is a haven, a screen that protects their selves. In turn, the script is also used to psychologically assault patrons who service workers feel are treating them in less than dignified ways or to make miserable those who are perceived as haughty members of professional middle class. By embracing the routinized script, they can exert control over them. The "may i take you order please" is delivered brusquely and impatiently. The request for special treatment is denied on the grounds that it's against the rules.
As Leidner argues, and I've noted here many times, the conditions of subservient or interactive service labor shape our consciousness, our understanding of our selves and others; they extend beyond the workplace [into culture, the social relations of production beyond the workplace]:
"Sociologists of work typically see relations of inequality at work as affecting the broader society through their impact on workers' economic power and consciousness, both individual and collective. Sociologists of culture tend to downplay workplace relations and instead to concentrate on other means by which economic elites exert social control. But when the principles of routinization are extended to interactive service work, an additional dimension of cultural influence becomes available to employers. Because routinized service work orders the behavior of service recipients as well as that of workers, employers' strategies for controlling the labor process themselves affect the cultural milieu. The Marxist arguments that consciousness is shaped at the point of production is applicable here, but *service-recipients* are also affected. Service-recipients are enmeshed in relations of production on their own time, and the boundaries separating production, consumption, and sociability break down. <...> Routinized service interactions extend the logic of instrumental rationality to more and more aspects of the self and to ever additional kinds of social relations" [229-30].
It is not only that we are increasingly employed in occupations that directly and formally involve "protective services" [guards, police], we are also increasingly employed in work in which we police our selves, our emotions, our interactions as workers and *as workers* we regulate and police the behavior of patrons. Deskilling and even taking on the regulatory gaze of the employer aren't necessarily rejected by workers because they seem to actively embrace the routinization of work to protect them from assaults on their dignity and to preserve and protect their "authentic" selves from such assaults. People adopt an instrumental attitude toward their selves, their identities; that is, they manipulate their selves which, in the context of the organizational workplace, is a thing to be reshaped to meet the various demands imposed on them.
And we wonder why the cultural fascination with self-ironic detachment? And we wonder why no one can see the enemy?
Kelley ps., charles, this is what I mean when I say that it's sometimes a mistake to view people as being manipulated. Taking a different approach, as Leidner does here [following others, notably Burawoy] reveals that people actively manufacture their own consent to something that would appear as a form of coercive ideology imposed on them against their will. Rather, what is done above is to use and expand on Gramsci's concept of hegemony in which power operates in far more complex ways.