Additional Information

Instruction Mode: In Person
This course is a survey of theories of the labor process exploring how employers organize work, how workers respond to these efforts, and how this shapes industrial labor relations. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution scholars from Marx to Taylor considered how the design of the labor process impacted not only profit but workers’ subjective experience of their work and their resistance. In the 1970s, led by Burawoy and Braverman, there was renewed interest in the labor process to explore the organization of work both before and during the subsequent decline in the traditional New Deal industrial labor relations system. Coalescing around the notions of coercion and consent to explain employers’ construction of the labor process these theories explored how the reality of the workplace was shaped by the broader political economy. The last two decades have again seen significant changes and upheaval in the nature of work—gigification, digital surveillance, and the disruptive specter of generative AI—raising interest yet again in the study of the labor process. In exploring the wide range of theories, perspectives, and implications of how work is organized this course seeks to interrogate the historical context of these contemporary debates and shed light on the potential impacts to workers and industrial relations.