Bureaucracy and the Labour Process: The Transformation of United States Industry, 1860-1920

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This book makes the argument, supported by rich and extensive historical research into original sources, that it is possible to revolutionize work so that it can be, in the author’s words, satisfying, creative, and stimulating at the same time that it is materially productive: we can have material abundance along with interesting work. Rather than argue the issue in the abstract, Clawson investigates the development of industrial management in the late nineteenth-century United States, when inside contracting and the craft system dominated production. He examines the way in which the imposition of the factory system increased the capitalists’ control over the labor process, and describes the impact of modern technology on the class struggle, concluding that the struggle is very much alive and remains the only means by which to bring about a future socialist organization of work.