to work and employment. This is because in an environment where employee skills
and commitment are central to organizational success, it is precisely by giving
employees more that organizations will gain more. HRM is based explicitly or
implicitly on a pluralist perspective of competing, but containable interests among
stakeholders. Successful strategies therefore rely on the ‘principle of aligning
employer and employee interests’ (Boxall and Purcell 2003 : 245 ).
8.3 Labor Process Theory:
Core Propositions
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What equivalent observations can be made with respect to the key claims of LPT?
Since the publication of Braverman’s ( 1974 )Labor and Monopoly Capital, consid-
erable conceptual and geographic diversity means that, like HRM, LPT does not
speak with one voice. Nevertheless, we would argue that there is a core theory—
indeed from theLabor Process Theoryvolume onwards (Knights and Willmott
1990 ), considerable discussion has taken place on what this is (see Jaros 2005 for a
detailed review). The core claims of LPT tend to be abstract rather than contingent.
Or put it another way, whereas HRM claims focus on speciWc changes to, for
example, skill or control, LPT proceeds from higher-order statements about the
structural properties of the capitalist labor process that shape skills and control
(Thompson 1990 ). This is important because many observers wrongly associate
LPT with contingent claims (in this case made by Braverman) such as the deskilling
thesis or the ubiquity of Taylorism as a control system.
So what are these core propositions? The starting point is the indeterminacy of
labor—the unique character of labor as a commodity requires its conversion from
labor power (the potential for work) into labor (actual work eVort) in order for the
accumulation of capital to take place. Incomplete labor contracts are a common-
place observation from a variety of perspectives, but the diVerence is in cause and
consequences. This struggle over ‘conversion’ is located in the constant renewal of
the forces of production under the impact of the competitive accumulation of
capital. Amongst the central consequences is the control imperative. As market
mechanisms alone cannot regulate the labor process, systems of management are
utilized to reduce the indeterminacy gap between labor power and actual labor.
Given divergent positions in the social relations of production and therefore
potentially conXicting interests, that imperative does not go unchallenged. The
notion of the workplace as a contested terrain is a central motif of LPT, which is
often described as a ‘control and resistance model’ of workplace relations. This is
not wholly accurate. It has long been recognized that although the workplace
hrm: labor process perspectives 149