245
See also: Karl Marx 28–31 ■ Michel Foucault 52–55 ■ Pierre Bourdieu 76–79 ■
Anthony Giddens 148–49 ■ Harry Braverman 226–31 ■ Robert Blauner 232–33
WORK AND CONSUMERISM
contends that modern management
now manufactures and channels
workers’ consent to work harder.
He rejects Marx’s explanation
that workers are simply exploited
and coerced into working as hard
as they do. The rise in the power
of labor unions and workers’
collectives has done a lot to curb
the use of power by managers,
which was once exerted through
the bullying of workers. Burawoy
acknowledges that within any
organization there is always
coercion and consent but their
relative proportions and mode of
expression have changed.
Management, he claims, now
seeks to control workers by creating
restrictive social relations and
organizational structures that give
them the “illusion of choice,” but
that ultimately serve to mask and
maintain unequal power relations.
Workplace “games”
Burawoy worked in a factory
called Allied Corporation, where
he researched his ideas about
the “games” played within the
workplace, such as collective
bargaining (negotiation of wages
and conditions of work), ensuring
internal job mobility for workers,
and the piece-rate pay system, in
which workers are paid more if they
produce above quota. This system,
he says, gives the illusion that
work is a game; the workers are
the players and compete with
one another to “make out”—surpass
their expected production quotas.
Job satisfaction is achieved by
mastering the intricate and often
devious and informal strategies
workers use to “make out” under
various production conditions.
Burawoy claims that the games
workers play are not attempts to
reduce job discontent or oppose
management, because often lower-
level management participates in
the games and the enforcement
of their rules. Playing the game
creates consent among workers
about the rules upon which
workplace games are based—and,
crucially, the arrangement of social
relations (owners–managers–
workers) that define the rules.
Moreover, because managers
and workers are both involved
in playing games, the numerous
opposing interests that define the
social relations between the two
are obscured, ensuring that
manager–worker conflict is kept to
a minimum. Burawoy claims such
methods of manufacturing and
eliciting cooperation and consent
are more effective than the coercive
measures of early capitalism.
Burawoy’s work is a seminal
contribution to the sociology
of industrial relations and has
inspired follow-up studies,
including those by British social
thinkers Paul Blyton and Stephen
Ackroyd, focusing on workplace
resistance and coercion. ■Michael Burawoy
Michael Burawoy is an Anglo-
American Marxist sociologist
at the University of California,
Berkeley. He obtained his
first degree in 1968 in
mathematics from the
University of Cambridge,
England, before going on
to complete his doctorate in
sociology at the University
of Chicago in 1976.
Burawoy’s academic career
has changed direction and
focus over time. His early
work involved a number
of ethnographic studies of
industrial workplaces in the
US as well as in Hungary
and post-Soviet Russia.
In the latter part of his
career he turned away from
the factory floor to focus
on raising the public profile of
sociology by using sociological
theories to address prominent
social issues.
In 2010, in recognition of
his considerable contribution
to the discipline, and in
particular to promoting
sociology more widely to
the general public, Burawoy
was elected President of the
International Sociological
Association (ISA) at the
XVII ISA World Congress
of Sociology. He is editor
of Global Dialogue, the
magazine of the International
Sociological Association.Key works1979 Manufacturing Consent:
Changes in the Labor Process
Under Monopoly Capitalism
1985 The Politics of
Production: Factory Regimes
Under Capitalism and
Socialism
2010 Marxism Meets BourdieuConflict and consent are
not primordial conditions
but products of the
organization of work.
Michael Burawoy