The Changing Worlds and Workplaces of Capitalism

Felix Behling, Eoin Flaherty, Seán Ó Riain, Rossella Ciccia, Felix Behling, Eoin Flaherty, Seán Ó Riain, Rossella Ciccia

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137427083
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones internacionales

The contributors investigate how the large scale structures of capitalism and the local social relations of workplaces and organizations shape each other. They argue for a new integration of political economy and the sociology of work and organizations.

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Changing Workplaces, Changing Capitalisms

Seán Ó Riain, Felix Behling, Rossella Ciccia and Eoin Flaherty

1 A world in flux

Recent decades have seen momentous shifts in the organisation of capitalism, including the range of transformations captured under the grand labels of globalisation, financialisation, liberalisation, and post-industrialism. Not surprisingly, the national forms of capitalist political economy are themselves in flux – even though significant differences remain between social democratic, Christian democratic, and liberal economies (among others) the internal dynamics of each of these models of capitalism are being transformed in important ways (Thelen 2014). At the same time, the experience of work in these worlds of capitalism has undergone dramatic changes. Workers often have more autonomy, work more closely with colleagues within and outside their employer’s company, and can exercise more flexibility in organising their work. However, the pressures of work are often more intense, employment is insecure, rewards are uncertain and likely to depend on competition with others, and a general sense of precarity is widespread.

These developments have largely been studied in isolation from one another. Macro studies of capitalist economies typically made passing reference to workplaces but assumed that employer and worker interests could be read off a number of key indicators (skill, sector, gender, etc). Micro studies of work and organisation sometimes characterised their workplaces as examples of national work organisation but rarely directly brought the institutional and political features of the national context into the analysis of work itself. The context for the workplace was capitalism itself, conceived as an abstract set of relationships and not as concrete relations taking particular institutionalised forms.

This separation of fields was understandable in light of the demands of research and the classic difficulties of bridging macro and micro levels of analysis. While global and national capitalisms and systems of production were relatively stable, the separation was merely unfortunate. However, at a time when economies and workplaces are both under severe pressure and in flux, a new dialogue between political economy and the sociology of work and employment is needed in order to shed light on both these pressures and on the possible recombinations of actors, interests, practices, and institutions that can underpin new and better models of work and economic organisation.

2 The missing dialogue between work and comparative political economy

Given the proliferation of studies and typologies comparing different kinds of capitalist economies, it is easy to forget how prevalent linear notions of modernisation and capitalist development were in mainstream social science through the 1960s and 1970s. However, this underwent a dramatic shift in recent decades as first, Esping-Andersen’s three worlds of welfare capitalism and then Hall and Soskice’s ‘varieties of capitalism’ came to dominate the social scientific study of capitalism. Neither, unfortunately, integrated work and the workplace into their approaches.

2.1 The three worlds of welfare capitalism

Esping-Andersen’s (1990) classic contribution identified three worlds – liberal, socialist, and conservative – that constituted welfare capitalism. Further work added additional clusters – Mediterranean (Esping-Andersen 1999), Antipodean (Castles 1985) and a number of Central and Eastern European forms (Bohle and Greskovtis 2012). Work on the welfare state was rooted in Polanyi and Marx, this body of work incorporated a strong analysis of how institutions of the welfare state reflected patterns of class struggle, primarily shaped by the power resources of employers and workers. This was about capitalism, class, and the distribution of capitalism’s riches. Later critiques added gender, age, and a variety of other critical dimensions of stratification (Orloff 1993; Quadagno 1994). All these elements were potentially crucial for the comparative study of capitalist workplaces but the approach left aside the politics of work itself.

These comparative literatures were immensely valuable, but they rarely if ever opened the black box of the workplace – whether to characterise the different ways that work was organised across these worlds of capitalism or to explain those differences. Work was identified with commodification – it was the arena where both the difficulties that welfare must address and the economic growth to finance those measures was generated. While the general approach connected to discussions of corporatism and industrial relations, this literature largely operated at the level of formal bargaining in the macro-economy and the key contribution of Esping-Andersen’s analysis of how welfare shaped interests, as well as reflecting them, was never applied to the workplace.

This meant that the comparative welfare state literature was able to ‘park’ the study of work, instead focusing on the welfare state as the primary arena for class and gender politics of capitalism. This would have been less problematic had it not lead to significant misunderstandings of the words of capitalism that it described. Social democracies, for example, contained strong elements of commodification (Huo, Nelson, and Stephens 2008) and empowered actors within the market as much as protecting them from it (Pontusson 2011). Liberal economies relied most heavily on mechanisms of regulation and control over market mechanisms – including ‘job control’ strategies of industrial relations (Ó Riain 2014).

2.2 Sociology of work and organisations

A vibrant sociology of work had emerged largely separate from the welfare state literature, particularly following Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital in 1974. The ‘labour process’ literature was most widely developed in Anglo-American social science, though it rarely paid attention to that comparative context of liberal political economy. In this respect, it echoed the earlier organisational studies of bureaucracies from the 1960s. In the labour process literature, the most obvious context was often the sector, but even sectoral differences were rarely systematically compared and key sectors came to be taken as iconic and implicitly representative of the most significant trends in capitalist work – factories (especially autos) in the 1970s and 1980s giving way to call centres in the 1990s. Burawoy (1985) opened the door to an integration of micro-studies with the macro context – exploring how relations in production (sociology of work) intersected with relations of production (political economy). However, his comparative focus was primarily on differences between capitalist and non-capitalist political economies so that, although possible in principle, insights into comparative capitalisms were not pursued (Burawoy 2001).

Over time, a richer comparative literature developed including studies of systems of production and ‘new production concepts’ (often in Europe) from the 1970s and of industrial districts and global production chains (from the 1980s). These studies provided rich insight into the micro- and meso-organisational features that shaped the dynamics and politics of the workplace. These could be assembled into patterns of national differences in work and employment relations – with significant literatures on ‘flexible rigidities’ in Japanese alliance capitalism (Dore 1986; Lincoln and Kalleberg 1991); ‘diversified quality production’ in Germany (Streeck 1991), ‘socio-technical systems’ in Sweden (Berggren 1993), industrial districts in Italy (Piore and Sabel 1984), and management led systems in the US and UK (seen variously as stuck in a low skill equilibrium (Finegold and Soskice 1991) and as sources of innovation (Hall and Soskice 2001)). Indeed, the debate on lean production in the auto industry often explicitly compared national differences in work organisation and how they transferred across national borders. However, these fields never found their ‘Three Worlds of Capitalist Workplaces’ to provide an integrative framework on how we might best characterise the various national systems.

This missing dialogue was unfortunate. Welfare and other contexts were left out of workplace studies, for the most part – some excellent studies paid attention to labour market contexts (Lee 1998) but these were not widespread and in any case said relatively little about how these labour markets were shaped by policy regimes. The structure and substance of the welfare state clearly has a strong influence on workplace dynamics, through both the social protection available to workers should they want to leave a workplace (or be fired) and through the levels of ‘social investment’ in workers’ skills and capabilities. Furthermore, the employer from a system of diversified quality production would clearly have different ‘interests’ in national bargaining than an employer embedded in a low skill strategy, or even a representative of a decentralised industrial district – as noted in Swenson’s (2002) study of Swedish employers’ partial but important support for the welfare state.

2.3 The varieties of capitalism framework: opening up dialogue and closing it down

The influential literature on the ‘varieties of capitalism’ (Hall and Soskice 2001) promised to overcome this separation between production and welfare. At its core was a distinction between two main forms of organization of capitalist economies – coordinated market economies where government played a central guiding role and which had generated growth in Germany, Japan, and other European and Asian economies, and liberal market economies where free market mechanisms played a more central role in organizing labour, the workplace, capital, and university-industry relations. It placed the organisation of production and the process of economic growth and capital accumulation at the centre of the field once more. Moreover, the temptation to pose a single logic of capitalist production and economic organisation was resisted and the central role of institutions and politics in shaping the organization of different economies was re-affirmed – even if the worlds of capitalism were reduced to just two.

However, having opened up the dialogue between production and welfare (or work and comparative political economy), the Varieties of Capitalism (VOC) literature immediately closed the issue down. In the realm of production, VOC made an influential distinction between workers who relied primarily on skills that were specific to particular firms or industries, versus those workers with general skills that were more easily transferred across institutional contexts. The interests of workers were linked directly to their skill profiles – general skills workers were more likely to favour market organisation as it expanded opportunities for their skills, while specific skills workers had a much stronger interest in social protection offered by both firms and states. In welfare regimes, the institutional contexts in which workers and firms found themselves were defined largely in terms of whether states provided social protection against the risks of the market – with workers with specific skills having a stronger interest in welfare state protections (Iversen 2005). The form of the capitalist economy (coordinated or liberal), the organisation of production (around specific or general skills, promoting incremental learning or radical innovation) and the scope of social protection (extensive or weak) were mapped on to each other one to one. The complexities of contingent and creative interactions across levels of analysis – or even of institutionally rich accounts of the various clusters of production, welfare and macroeconomic regimes – was closed off in favour of a parsimonious but ultimately thin binary distinction between liberal market economies and the rest. Given, as outlined above, that comparative evidence often showed greater levels of ‘coordination’ in the workplaces of liberal political economies, this could also be deeply misleading. Indeed, even the key distinction between general and specific skills – which effectively serves in the VOC framework to represent the contribution of the sociology of work – is lacking (see Streeck 2011 for a detailed critique). Ultimately, the apparent unification of political economy and work is only a shell.

3 Putting work and political economy together: social systems of production

While many criticisms have been levelled at the Varieties of Capitalism approach, articulating an alternative remains a significant challenge. However, there is a more disparate tradition that attempts this unification of work and political economy through a more historicised account of changes in capitalism. What might broadly be called the ‘social systems of production’ approach comprises a variety of different perspectives that share the sensitivity to diversity and political contingency of the comparative welfare literature and the goal of the Varieties of Capitalism school to link economy and workplace.

Most basically, Wilkinson (1983) argues that production cannot be understood as a simple function within the overall system of the economy, but as involving a system in its own right. This system involves the complex coordination of multiple actors – not only as individuals but also as collective actors which are potentially internally fragmented and involved in conflictual external relationships. Therefore, ‘the institutions of productive systems are structured by mutual interests and relative power. ... [and] securing mutually beneficial cooperation in production requires resolving distributional differences’ (Wilkinson 1983: 413). While structured by power relations, institutions play a central role in accommodating varying interests and power differences into working productive systems.

Boyer (2013) and others in the regulation school put some meat on the bones of these productive systems, through an account of the shifting historical paradigms of the organisation or ‘regulation’ of capitalism, which importantly links the wage bargain to the overall macroeconomic model. The focus of such analyses is firmly at the level of historical systems and is focused primarily on the macro-level shift from Fordism to Post-Fordism (Boyer 2013). This approach adds an account of historical change in capitalism to the theoretical concepts of Wilkinson’s ‘productive systems’, focusing on the de-standardisation of the employment relationship and wage bargain. However, despite the potential for comparative analysis of the varying combinations of labour market and macroeconomic institutionalised bargains, it remains largely underdeveloped within regulation theory itself (but see Boyer 2013; Jessop 2014).

A number of frameworks have been advanced from within the sociology of work and employment to understand precisely this diversity of forms of workplace and economic organisation and formal and informal bargains under capitalism. Smith and Meiskins (1995) advance the ‘societal effects’ perspective on workplace organisation which contrasts (primarily national) societal influences on work and employment with system imperatives. Where system imperatives can be traced to both techno-economic trends and the power of dominant actors within transnational capitalism (Frenkel and Kuruvilla 2002), societal effects are shaped by national configurations of power resources, institutions, and (to a lesser extent) culture. Rubery and Grimshaw (2003: 47) argue for a more dynamic notion of societal effects and emphasise the interactions among national societal systems of employment, outlining four primary mechanisms – the role of multinational corporations; the diffusion of ideologies, culture, and patterns of consumption; international competition and system pressures; and international governance and dominant country effects.

This approach provides a framework for analysis of the interaction of societal forces and workplace dynamics. It treats production as shaped by societal contexts ranging across culture, institutions, and political ‘exchange’. However, it requires the integration of frameworks from outside of the workplace studies tradition to fully enrich its analysis of the diverse, variegated forms through which capitalism is organised at various levels. In particular, it needs conceptual mechanisms that can link the micro and macro in ways that go beyond a perspective based primarily on rational action within institutional constraints. We point here to three such frameworks. The first two relate primarily to the formation of the key actors in capitalism – ‘labour’ and ‘capital’. These are not simply ‘constrained’ by institutional politics, they are constituted by them. The third relates to the interaction of these two key actors in various arenas of political contestation and cooperation.

Looking first at the constitution of labour, the comparative welfare and social policy literature is an important resource. It sheds particular light on the conditions under which labour enters the labour market; the context of social reproduction within which labour forces work – and negotiate their conditions at work; and on the boundaries between paid and non-paid work, or between production and social reproduction. Recent emphases on ‘human capital formation regimes’ (Ó Riain 2011; Iversen and Stephens 2008) direct particular attention to the role of welfare state regimes in forming labour itself and influencing its composition, its resources, and its ‘interests’.

Similarly, ‘capital’ cannot be taken as an undifferentiated actor which arrives on the political terrain in pure, unsullied form. For a number of decades an ‘organisational turn’ in political economy has focused on the variety of ways in which firms are organised. For example, Hollingsworth, Schmitter, and Streeck (1994) identified five organisational forms of governance – markets, hierarchies, state, networks, association – that were distributed highly unevenly across capitalism. Each implies a quite different definition of key categories of business organisation – including authority, management, efficiency, power – and implies a highly varied set of forms of legitimate authority in the workplace.

Whitley’s (2007) notion of ‘business systems’ fills in some of the detail under these forms. Its central focus is the variety of business strategies and how they are associated with varying forms of work and labour market organisation – often incorporating different combinations of the organisational logics outlined by Hollingsworth et al. Both approaches also emphasise the importance of sectoral differences in work organisation, alongside continuing national differences.

This leaves the question of how these actors interact in the various levels of the political economy. Workplace studies document this in detail but largely in isolation from institutional contexts and rarely generate categorisations of such interactions that can serve to enrich macroeconomic bargaining analyses. Here there is a need to connect these workplace studies to the historical institutionalist analyses of recent years that have documented the critical role of institutional configurations in shaping the social accommodations possible in certain places at particular times – including resources and laws, networks and patterns of alliances, and ‘softer’ institutional fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Changing Workplaces, Changing Capitalisms
• 2  A Varieties Approach to the Varieties of Capitalism
• 3  The Variety of Polanyian Double Movements in Europes Capitalisms
• 4  Classifying Labour Regimes beyond the Welfare State: A Two Dimensional Approach
• 5  Reforming Welfare States and Changing Capitalism: Reversing Early Retirement Regimes in Europe
• 6  A Precarious Future: An Irish Example of Flex-Insecurity
• 7  Institutionalisation of Trade Union Activity: Four Indexes and Their Ability to Explain Cross-National Differences in Strike Rate
• 8  Welfare beyond the State: Employers as Welfare Providers in Germany and the UK
• 9  Multinationals of Industrial Co-development: Co-creating New Institutions of Economic Development
• 10  Beyond the Flexibility/Security Divide: Skills, Work Organisation, and External Employment in the German Knowledge-Based Economy
• 11  Work-Life Balance, Working Conditions and the Great Recession
• 12  Integrating Work and Political Economy
• Bibliography
• Index