Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

This is concerned with the ways in which human labour, working with tools or instruments of production, transforms raw materials into useful products. While any type of working activity (contemporary or historical) is a labour process, the term derives its interest from its centrality to Marx's analysis of capitalism, and the ways in which this has been applied and developed in twentieth-century analyses of work, primarily, but not exclusively, within capitalist society. Marx's analysis emphasized the subordination of labour to capital in production processes (see E xploitation ) which were subject to continual transformations in pursuit of productivity gains. In such transformations, mechanization fragments labouring activity into simple, uniform and repetitive tasks under a strict factory discipline, craft skills disappear, and new hierarchies of mental and manual labour are constructed on the basis of capital's control over labour. Marx provided extensive empirical illustrations of these developments, drawn in the main from mid-nineteenth-century official documents. These developments within the production process were not only noted by Marx. They informed the attempt by Frederick Taylor at the end of the nineteenth century to construct a theory of scientific management. Taylor's aim was to subject the physical actions of workers to the same principles of optimization as governed ... log in or subscribe to read full text