extracts surplus value from members of an employee class. And within this set of
relations lie the seeds of the capitalist political economy’s eventual destruction. The
people working for a wage or salary eventually come to realize that they share the
objective position of being exploited. They reject the ideologies that misled them
into accepting their situation and they abandon a ‘falsely conscious’ appreciation of
their place in society. They consequently ‘rise up’ and throw oVtheir oppressors.
This may seem so unlikely to any observer of the contemporary scene that they are
tempted to dismiss out of hand such a way of looking at organizational structures
and class processes. However, the underlying insight may still be valid: just because
contradictions do not seem likely to lead to capitalist failure in any foreseeable
future, it does not mean that the underlying fault lines are not there and do not
need to be taken account of in any realistic organization theory. And as Desai
( 2002 ) has pointed out, there are characteristics in the dominant forms that
capitalism is coming to take in the twenty-Wrst century that are far from incon-
sistent with the long-term analysis in Marx’s writing.
Marxian thinking has perhaps had its greatest impact on organization theory in
the analysis of trends in the shaping of labor processes in modern organizations
(Grugulis et al. 2000 – 1 ; Spencer 2000 ; see also Chapter 8 below). This analysis of
trends in the design, control, and monitoring of work activities by managers
(acting as agents of the capital-owning class to extract surplus value from the
labor activity of employees) was stimulated by Braverman’s ( 1974 ) argument that
the logic of capitalist employment relations has led to a general trend towards the
deskilling, routinizing, and mechanizing of jobs across the employment spectrum.
In his inXuential book, he wrote of the role of people like personnel managers as
‘the maintenance crew for the human machinery:’ ‘personnel departments and
academics have busied themselves with the selection, training, manipulation,
paciWcation and adjustment of ‘‘manpower’’ to suit the work processes’ ( 1974 : 87 ).
Subsequent thinking, however, whilst working within the same radical tradition as
Braverman, has recognized that capitalist interests are better served by upgrading
work in some circumstances and by downgrading it in others (Friedmann 1977 ;
Edwards 1979 ). This insight can be incorporated into broader critical thinking
about HRM by considering ways in which HR strategists will tend to lean towards
‘low commitment, direct control, human resourcing practiceswhen employee
constituencies are perceived as creating low strategic uncertainty’ and towards
‘high commitment, indirect control, human resourcing practiceswhen employee
constituencies are perceived as creating high strategic uncertainty’(Watson 2004 : 458 ).
Marxist thinking has perhaps not had as signiWcant a direct impact on theorizing
about HRM as it has had on academic industrial relations (Hyman 1989 ). But its
indirect inXuence is there in all those approaches which pay attention to the
indeterminacy of employment relationships and to the structural conXicts of
interest which pervade them (e.g. Boxall 1992 ;CoV 1997; Evans and Genadry 1999 ;
Purcell and Ahlstrand 1994 ). Marxist thinking also informs the ‘currently popular
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