1 Introduction

Every enterprise of any size has a hierarchy – a complex system with a “boss,” comprising a number of subordinate subsystems, which also have “bosses” who are the immediate subordinates of the general “boss” of the system.1 Such a hierarchy is inevitable if larger groups of people want to coordinate their activities:

in all labour where many individuals cooperate, the interconnection and unity of the process is necessarily represented in a governing will, and in functions that concern not the detailed work but rather the workplace and its activity as a whole, as with the conductor of an orchestra. This is productive labour that has to be performed in any combined mode of production.2

There are two possibilities. Either the workers appoint the “bosses” themselves through mutual consultation and have the right to recall them if they do not live up to their expectations (autonomy or self-management), or the activities of the workers are coordinated by external agents whom they do not control (heteronomy). From a quantitative point of view, autonomous cooperation carries much less weight than heteronomy. Currently, there are about ten million autonomously cooperating workers across the world,3 while the total number of heteronomous workers (predominantly wage-earners) is approaching three billion.

In this volume, we discuss heteronomous power in employment relations. Much has already been written about this, but most of the literature has significant weaknesses: it tends to neglect the historical dimension and, insofar as it is interested in the past, it is almost completely Eurocentric. Fundamental works, such as Sidney Pollard’s The Genesis of Modern Management, and everything of importance that followed on from this seminal tome, discuss the development of management as a purely European (“industrial”) innovation; they ignore contemporary or earlier trends in colonial countries, or what is now referred to as the Global South. The rise of modern labour-management techniques is, therefore, usually explained in terms of the technological changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution as an isolated event. The colonies, unfree labour, and the Global South are blind spots; they are almost never part of the story. This is not to deny that very important work has been done during the last few decades in the field of management history and that we now understand many aspects of the way in which employers have dealt with their employees much better than we used to.

Throughout the 12 years of its existence, the Berlin-based research centre “re:work” has attempted to open up this historical problématique. How does the coordination of work processes take place? How do supervisors and managers try to control the workforce? And what kind of means do workers use to maintain or increase their influence on labour relations? A number of research fellows have explored various aspects of the issues at hand. This collection presents a selection of their findings.

Power and Counterpower

Heteronomous labour-coordination is always based on specific power relations, on the strategies put in place by those in charge to regulate the behaviour of those who work for them, and on the attitudes of the latter who then either accept that kind of regulation or adjust it (at least partly) to their own needs.4 Behaviour that is considered to be improper is punished and proper behaviour is rewarded. These punishments and rewards can be discretionary (i. e., at the convenience of superiors), or they could be bound by formal or informal rules. The more unfree workers are, the stronger employers’ or management’s discretionary power. Supervisors on slave plantations, for example, could often punish workers at will. But even their power was not always absolute. Already in 1685, the French Code Noir provided a legal framework for slavery. Among other things it stipulated that slaves should not work on Sundays or holidays, that they should have a day per week to work for their own ends, that their masters should not torture, mutilate, or kill them, and that slaves who were not fed, clothed, and supported by their masters according to the law had the right to notify an attorney of this and give him their statements.5 These were, of course, “official” statements, and it is doubtful whether any masters actually obeyed the law, or if slaves – if they were even aware of the Code – would dare to launch formal proceedings if their master breached the law. Much later, during the last decades before the Civil War of 1860 to 1865, the courts in the South of the United States also began to limit the rights of slave owners, preventing them from brutalising slaves and requiring them to provide adequate clothing.

Historically, workers have generally been in favour of restricting employers’ discretionary power as much as possible, and of expanding the domain of rules and meta-rules (rules about the making of rules).6 In the case of “free” wage labour, the sociologist Philip Selznick has spoken about the transition from a “‘prerogative’ contract – according to which the sale of labour power carries with it few, if any, proscriptions or prescriptions on its consumption by management – to the ‘constitutive contract’ and to ‘creative arbitration,’ which does establish procedures and regulations for the utilization of labour.”7 Michael Burawoy adds to this: “Restrictions on managerial discretion and arbitrary rule, on the one hand, and enhanced protection for workers, on the other, reflect not only the ascendency of unions and internal government, but also indirect regulation by agencies of external government.”8 In the case of a highly developed “constitutive contract,” the rules system “ensures the reproduction of relations in production by protecting management from itself, from its tendency toward arbitrary interventions that would undermine the consent produced at the point of production.”9

Between working men and women (which may include “free” wage earners, chattel slaves, indentured labourers, sharecroppers, domestic servants, and many others) and those employing them, there has always been a constant – mostly silent but sometimes overt – struggle concerning employers’ discretionary power and over the interpretation of formal and informal rules. There is a constantly shifting “frontier of control,” that is, an ongoing struggle for control in the workplace, with managers and supervisors time and again using direct and indirect means to try to increase their power over their subordinates, and their subordinates, in reaction, trying to maintain and increase their relative autonomy.10 This concept assumes, therefore, that there is a never-ending conflict between the high and low levels of all hierarchical work organisations. This incongruity is an immediate result of the fact that every labour process represents the transformation of the workers’ labour capacity (labour power) into actual labour. This transformation is then never fully circumscribed until the labour process starts.

The balance of power articulated by the frontier of control could vary widely. Sometimes management mainly used its decision-making power, and sometimes it applied non-decision-making and ideological power. At some worksites, workers had a relatively large amount of manoeuvring space. For example, for the nineteenth-century anthracite miners in the United States, the rule applied that the foreman was not allowed to interfere with the work: “Always sit down when the boss is around” – that is, never work in the presence of a supervisor or manager.11 At other sites, rules would prescribe – down to the minute – when workers had to start their activities, how many times a day they could go to the toilet, how long their breaks were, and so on, with violations often severely punished.

Even under conditions of developed capitalism and formally “free” labour, the frontiers of control remain contested. During the decades after World War Two, the establishment of “standard employment relationships” resulted in a reduction of employers’ discretionary power, both on the shop floor and beyond. Since wage labour was increasingly bound to systems of social security provision, labour law was extended and “social property” expanded (Robert Castel). Karl Marx referred to this as the “silent coercion of economic circumstances,” which reduced workers’ capacity to confront management, lost at least some of its power. This was especially true for the so-called welfare states of the Global North. Under conditions of rapid economic growth, a massive boom in industrial mass production, the ideological competition between East and West during the Cold War, and growing trade union organisation, the position of working men and women vis-à-vis employers was generally strengthened, even beyond the centres of capitalist production. After the end of the postwar boom, employers’ discretionary power tended to increase once again, as unemployment figures rose, precarious jobs spread, and unions lost members and power in many parts of the world.12