Thompson Work Organisations A Critical Introduction (3rd ed)

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studies within a particular framework. He argues that though challenged by critics, such as Child’s concept of strategic choice (see Chapter 5) and by institutional theory (see Chapter 6), structural contingency theory has provided effective refutations or can cope with the addition of new variables. It is certainly true that most of the organisation theory done during the 1950s and 1960s can be contained under the heading ‘systems rationalism’ (Barley and Kunda, 1992). While not all its components could be described in terms of systems theory, operations research, decision-making theory and process theories of motivation shared an emphasis on controlling organisations through managing the boundaries between sub-units and the interface between inputs and outputs. In such theorising ‘employees were largely absent’ (Barley and Kunda, 1992: 380), which is another way of saying that agency had been squeezed out of the picture.

However, not all of the challenges are easily absorbed. Take the rise of institutional theory. It is true that a key emphasis is on the symbolic properties of systems. Successful adaptation to the environment in terms of legitimacy and resources depends significantly on fit with dominant institutional and state-influenced practices (such as employment policies) and social norms (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). While in one sense this is adding culture as an adaptive variable, institutional theory challenged the way in which efficiency and rationality were understood in the systems approach. As Tolbert and Zucker (1996) observe, organisations and particular structures could survive despite relatively limited efficiency, and rational decision-making is normatively bounded. Despite these advances, such approaches did little to move beyond the determinism in systems theory. Institutionalisation is characterised by habitualised action, largely taken for granted by the actor.

If we examine the theoretical developments since the 1970s, the problem of determinism has been the key factor offsetting Donaldson’s (1998) view that orthodoxy could comfortably contain or incorporate criticism. He is open about the unwillingness or inability to offer explanations at the level of the human actor, preferring to talk of systems imperatives constraining managerial action to a high degree, influencing only the timing of structural change; but he underestimates the significance of a failure to do so. Individual behaviour is seen as ‘determined by and reacting to structural constraints that provide organisational life with an overall stability and control’ (Astley and Van de Ven, quoted in Mills and Murgatroyd, 1991: 5). The new wave of theorising was set to react against these images of orderly entities and passive people.

23 Critical Alternatives

Social action theory

The most significant sign of a major alternative to mainstream perspectives emerged with an attack on the dominant systems theory by Silverman (1970). He brought together elements of an approach described as the action frame of reference, or social action theory. It was not new, drawing on the phenomenological writings of Schutz (1967) and Berger and Luckman (1967). In fact its methods can partly be traced back to Weber’s conception of a social science, rather than his writings on bureaucracy. For Weber, such a science begins from interpreting social action, and the subjective meanings and purposes attached to it. This rests on a distinction between the natural and social worlds, but retains an attempt to situate individual action within material structures. Donaldson recognises another, ‘interpretative’ Weber, and remarks that the approach works by ‘gaining insights into the subjective world of actors and constructing a model of motivated actions of the typical actor in a particular social setting’ (1985: 107). His complaint is merely that those who take this up ignore the ‘structural’, deterministic Weber.

In renewing an action perspective, Berger and Luckman popularised the concept of social construction of reality. Rather than conceiving of people as products of systems and institutions, they view them as ‘actors’ who create these patterns through their own meaningful activity. However it was accepted that the products of their action, for example organisational structures, appear to them as exterior ‘things’ with an independent existence. Social construction was one of the aspects of a dialectical approach discussed in Chapter 1, and it puts a necessary stress on the possibility of change through purposeful reflection and action.

Silverman was able to apply these kind of ideas more specifically to organisations, considering them as social constructs produced and reproduced through their members’ activities. This was largely neglected in systems theory, which regards organisations as part of the natural world governed by laws concerning their structures and effects on behaviour. Hence, as we have argued, they have reified organisations and taken their basic features for granted. Silverman did not ignore structure, recognising that roles, as systematic patterns of expectations, were developed in the interplay between organisations and their environments. His study was largely theoretical, but others were of a more empirical nature, utilising the concept of organisations as negotiated orders (see Day and Day, 1977). By the early 1960s Strauss et al. (1963) had been analysing the negotiated order in hospitals, while other notable studies included those concerned with police and legal practices (Bittner, 1967; Cicourel, 1968), and welfare agencies (Zimmerman, 1971). A recurring theme was that controls exercised through rules in formal organisations were inevitably incomplete and unsuccessful. Any degree of effective co-ordination and co-operation is dependent on constant reworking of rules and goals, and formal

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and informal negotiation processes involving all participants. The subsequent customs and practices in any workplace act as a constraint on management.

The critique developed through action theory challenged the consensual and objective images of organisations that were often based on ‘favoured’ managerial definitions. By focusing on the realities of multiple goals and competing groups, dimensions of organisational life, such as work patterns and practices, could be demystified. It also shed light on why organisations do not operate as they are supposed to. As we saw in Chapter 3, this latter emphasis tied into empirical work by neoWeberians who were also concerned with the bending of bureaucratic rules through the value-systems of employees (Blau, 1955; Gouldner, 1955). Indeed, Silverman utilises some of these studies extensively. He notes, for example, how Gouldner shows that industrial relations in a gypsum mine had been based on an ‘indulgency pattern’: implicit rules rooted in give and take rather than formal codes. When management attempted to introduce changes that clashed with the established values and practices and reasserted formal rules, it generated grievances and strike activity.

In organisation theory as such, the action perspective made its impact through Child’s (1972) concept of strategic choice, which was directed against the environmental determinism of contingency theory, and was discussed in detail in Chapter 5. The theoretical significance is drawn out by Brown: ‘This criticism emphasises “agency” as against “structure”, that is the role of actors – managers, workers, or whoever – in choosing to pursue certain goals and/or follow certain lines of action albeit within constraints set by the actions of others and the context within which they are placed’ (1992: 36).

Meanwhile, during the 1970s Silverman and other writers shifted the action approach in the more ‘radical’ direction of ethnomethodology. Though ‘translated’ as people-centred, it is actually only concerned with the production of a common sense world and eschews any attempt at analysis of causation which would impose external categories. Nor is it concerned with the relation between ideas and interests, or social and organisational structures present in the Weberian tradition. It restricts itself to accounting for the processes through which members construct their everyday life. Structures tend to be viewed at best as temporary patterns created by interpersonal action and based on available stocks of knowledge. While some useful material on the ‘organisational work’ of reinterpreting these stocks of knowledge and routine practices was generated (Silverman and Jones, 1976), it soon became difficult to locate any notion of organisation in the traditional sense. Phenomena such as power or control, which are expressed through relatively durable structures beyond specific situations and face-to- face interactions and meanings, are simply outside its frame of reference.

Though taken to extremes in ethnomethodology, these weaknesses were inherent in action theory. In Silverman’s earlier work he argued, contrary to contingency theory, that technological and market structures were meaningful only in terms of the understandings and attachments of participants. Though structures require the involvement of actors in their reproduction, something like a product or labour market does have a structural existence partly independent from how particular individuals think or act – as anyone who has lost their job, or a fortune on the stock exchange, will testify. Concepts such as ‘role’ that were used to link subjective action and structure are useful but not substantial enough to carry the burden of explaining organisational behaviour. The more disconnected action theory became from wider concerns, the more it became ‘buried in an obsessive concern for the minutiae of “everyday life” as exemplified in the intricacies of organisational routines’ (Reed, 1985: 48). This is linked to a further prob-

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lem limiting its capacity to act as a critical resource. Despite the emphasis on empirical studies, as we raised earlier and as Silverman has admitted, the approach is aimed at providing a method of analysis, rather than a theory of organisations. Nevertheless, Silverman and social action theory continue to be a focus for discussion (Hassard and Parker, 1994) and influence (Tsoukas, 1994c). Empirical studies utilising a negotiated order framework have been undertaken in the last decade with respect to kitchen workers (Fine, 1996) and environmental inspectors (Fineman, 1998).

Social action theory is also a resource for critical psychology, in this case because of the stress on the intersubjective nature of social behaviour as a form of negotiated order. The useful contribution of social action theories is, first, in the methodological emphasis maintained in rooting their work in accounts of subjective experience; and second, in the linking of accounts of how subjectivity is constructed to structures of control, culture and ideology in organisations. In relation to organisational psychology they represent that part of the domain of analysis characterised by subjective, partly rational action processes based on phenomenological, social constructionist models. They provide a link to the ethnomethodological tradition in sociology and to symbolic interactionism that has been influential in both sociology and social psychology.

Symbolic interactionism, following from Mead (1934), has long been the area where an interface between sociological and socio-psychological conceptions of identity has existed. The construction of identity and the social milieu within which individual identity exists is, in this model, dependent on interaction with others and through others with the self. Subjectivity, then, is mainly a product of intersubjective processes and is constructed through the negotiation of social rules and conventions. The social production of subjectivity, though acknowledged, is addressed through an understanding of how the formal and informal processes of culture and ideology impinge upon individual functioning. This phenomenological emphasis on situated meaning in the construction of subjectivity is a necessary methodological focus in providing a reflexive account of organisational behaviour, and informs much of our account of the securing and reproduction of identity in Chapter 21. What it lacks is the framework for understanding the social order that conditions action inside the organisation. Indeed neither critical social psychologies nor social action theories present consistent theories of either subjectivity or its structural location.

Radical structuralism

To escape the limits of an action approach, theory must move beyond how organisations and their environments are subjectively constituted to some kind of structural explanation of the dynamics of organisational development within capitalist societies. This section examines some of the resources that can be found for that purpose by reworking and extending the concepts provided by Marx and Weber. Following Burrell and Morgan (1979), we use the common heading of radical structuralism to signify that such theorising begins from an account of the structural framework of organisational behaviour, but is directed towards a critical explanation of the processes of regulation and change.

Marx and labour process theory

Marx had little to say about issues of administrative or even political organisation, and even less about the specific question of bureaucracy. As Goldman and Van

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Houten note, ‘Systematic study of the sociology of organisations is almost absent in the classical and modern Marxist traditions’ (1977: 110). Those wishing to generate a discussion from Marx have had to rely on fragments of a critique of the Prussian bureaucracy and writings on the Paris Commune of 1871 as a model of the possibility of elimination of bureaucracy through a fully democratic administrative system (Marx, 1984). When he made observations about bureaucracy, they were very Weberian, with references to systematic division of labour, hierarchies of knowledge and mechanisms of formal behaviour (Sayer, 1991: 78). Marxist theory has tended to focus on the dynamics and contradictions of capitalism as a whole, and issues concerning the distribution of the surplus product, neglecting changes in productive processes, organisational forms and occupational structures. Some Marxist concepts have been influential, if often misunderstood, notably his account of the alienation of labour; but they have remained unconnected to any systematic organisational analysis.

However, during the last two decades Marxist-influenced theory and research has had a profound effect on all of the disciplines concerned with work organisation. This trend worries Donaldson (1985: 127), who argues that ‘Marxism is a theory of society therefore it cannot be a theory of organisation’. Clegg (1988: 10) makes the apposite response that applying the same criteria to Weber would place his work on bureaucracy outside the level appropriate to organisation theory. There is a different point to be made. It is not the full apparatus of Marxist theory of history and society that has been influential, but a narrower set of ideas, though these are still central to his account of the working of capitalist production. That vehicle has been labour process theory, set in motion by Braverman’s (1974) reworking of Marx’s analysis of capitalist production. (For a full account of labour process debates see Thompson, 1989; Thompson and Smith, 2000.) We discussed this mainly in Chapter 8 as the framework for an explanation of control. Here we examine the deeper theoretical context.

Though more obviously influential in industrial sociology, labour process theory has provided conceptual tools observable in a wide range of critical organisation writers. Among the first were Clegg and Dunkerley, who began Organization, Class and Control (1980) by defining the theoretical object of organisational analysis: ‘For this volume we have proposed as such an object the concept of organisation as control of the labour process’ (1980: 1). What enables such an argument to be made? Marx may not have been interested in an understanding of organisations per se, but he was centrally concerned with issues of work and its organisation. By this we mean a combined emphasis on work organisations as the site of key economic processes and contradictions, and the meeting place of capital and labour; as well as organisation of work in terms of questions including the division of labour, relations of authority and control, and the distribution of rewards.

Donaldson also rightly observed that ‘To qualify as distinctly neo-Marxian one would need to show the connection between work life in the organisation and change at the societal level’ (1985: 128). That is exactly the strength of labour process theory, which Donaldson misses because the ‘Marxism’ he attacks is an earlier, much more general and less successful application to the sphere of work organisation. Marx defined the form of a society and economy in a manner strongly conditioned by an understanding of work relationships. Each mode of production gives rise to class relations, which under capitalism are based on the sale and purchase of labour power. The partial antagonism between capital and labour as collective classes arises from the exploitation

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and appropriation of the surplus labour by capital, based on its ownership and control of production. This is a far cry from the notion of fair exchange implied in mainstream theory. Work relations therefore cannot be analysed in general, but only as they are shaped by the demands of a specific system of production. As we explained in Chapter 8, the central characteristic of this process is the nature of labour as an active and indeterminate commodity. In other words, when it is purchased by capital, the outcomes remain mere potential. The goal of profitable production may be thwarted by workers asserting their own needs and self-organisation. In many ways this is a more sophisticated account of what industrial relations and other disciplines call the wage–effort bargain, the exchange of effort for reward, which has at its core the employment relationship (Edwards and Scullion, 1982).

The above processes cannot be understood within the confines of one organisational unit. Competition between enterprises and the conflict within the employment relationship create an accumulation process that compels capital constantly to reorganise production. Certain general features of work organisation and organisation of work tend to follow.

1Employers need to exercise control over labour, both at the level of general directive powers and over working conditions and tasks. At the same time it is necessary to motivate employees and gain some level of consent and co-operation. Meeting

these diverse and sometimes contradictory needs is the function of management systems and agents.

2There are constant competitive pressures to cheapen the costs of production, notably labour. This may take place through deskilling, relocation of plant, work intensification or some other means; though it is subject to constraints, including

worker resistance and market variations.

3Control and cost reduction structure the division of labour, involving the design of work and division of tasks and people to give the most effective control and profitability. This is sustained by hierarchical structures and the shaping of appropriate forms of science and technology.

Let us restate this and spell out the consequences with more specific reference to organisations.

1Work organisations are distinct from other organisations and can only be properly understood by locating the labour process within more general trends in the accumulation of capital. This ‘political economy’ is a bigger picture than the mainstream conception of ‘the environment’, but takes into account not just global patterns of ownership and competition, but how markets are shaped institutionally at regional,

national and local level.

2.‘Organisations are structures of control’ (Salaman, 1981: 143). This involves more than control over uncertainty, monitoring objectives or means of getting work

done. They are administrative apparatuses concerned with control over productive activity in order to maximise the surplus. Managerial agency, though inherently variable and multi-layered, develops in this context.

3In advanced capitalist societies large-scale organisations are strategic units acting as mechanisms which integrate economic, political, administrative and ideological structures (Burrell, 1980: 99).

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4Organisational structures and processes; including management and worker organisation, control and reward systems and job design, therefore are shaped by power

relations and involve political issues, decisions and choices.

5Organisations do not embody any universal rationality, but rather contested rationalities arising from the partly antagonistic relation of capital and labour, as well as from other conflicts, notably that of gender relations. Organisational change will reflect the subsequent dialectic of control and resistance.

This is not merely a question of the ‘seamy side’ of otherwise excellent organisations, as Gareth Morgan appears to believe (1986: 316–7). Relations of exploitation and domination are integral to capitalist and other class-divided forms of work organisation. Nevertheless the underlying principles of the relations between organisations and capitalist society are conceptualised at a very general level. Reference to class pertains to relations between capital and labour as workplace actors, with any connections to societal changes being conditional and requiring a broader frame of analysis. Similarly, while radical structuralism shares a language of structural imperatives with systems theory, it does not try to identify specific causal relations between forms of work organisation and environmental variables. Within labour process theory, there are no laws or functional imperatives concerning specific forms of control, organisational structures, management strategies or job designs. While structural imperatives shape and constrain the parameters of action, all these and other matters are empirical questions to be determined by research and the unfolding of real events.

It is true that a reading of Braverman’s (1974) emphasis on deskilling and Taylorism as dominant tendencies can give the impression of determinism. However, second-wave and subsequent labour process theory has made a considerable effort to give a more complex account of structure and agency, in part by identifying a variety of levels of influence on action, including global, state and sector: ‘the objective is to examine structures and actors at different levels, without reducing the workplace to a mirror expression of these processes, or providing over-arching schemas of determination such as the deskilling thesis, post-Fordism or control schemas from earlier labour process research’ (Thompson, Smith and Ackroyd, 2000: 1153).

In more general terms, such thinking parallels frameworks such as Giddens’ (1984) concept of structuration (though see Layder, 1987 and Whittington, 1991b for criticisms). Structures are conceived of as sets of formal and informal rules that generate common expectations and sanctions, and resources consisting of material goods and services that affect life chances. But these are conceived of not as ‘external’ forces, but as things on which people draw in their social interactions. Structures become both the medium and outcome of that interaction. Action is conceived more precisely as agency. Agents deploy a range of causal powers, sometimes on behalf of others who command greater resources, sometimes to bend and break rules, but always purposeful and reflexive.

We can illustrate this way of thinking about the reciprocal interaction of structure and agency through the example of the role of management. As we saw in Chapter 7, there is a tendency in mainstream literature, particularly of the popular variety, to see managers as free-floating individuals, always able to shape the destiny of their organisation. To conceive of managers as an agency of others, as a set of activities locked into structural constraints, goes against the grain. Yet that is the nature of the relations between ownership and control in a capitalist economy. This view, taken in the book, is often caricatured. Weir refers to ‘the vulgar Marxist rhetoric of the inevitable

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polarisation of organisation between the two fundamental classes of bourgeoisie and proletariat. The managers are simply a muddle in the middle according to this way of thinking’ (1993: 16). Or try Watson talking about the managers at ZTC: ‘They were indeed interested in control, but it was control over their own circumstances. . . . Managers were not seeking control on behalf of other groups’ (1994: 85). Such explanation is all agency and no structure. Yes, managers are individuals with their own identities and values, struggling to make sense of their world and fight their corner within it. That makes a difference, but what they may seek and what they can do are often two different things, as Watson’s own fascinating case makes clear. Managers are an agency of control, but the interesting questions start there, because that has to be achieved in the messy reality of particular firms with particular employees, in particular economies, governed by particular parties. A sense of management as agency is not about any simple functional necessities but, as Armstrong’s work demonstrates (see Chapter 8), it is about the struggles of different professional or occupational groups to become the key core group in the workings of the enterprise. Any account of contemporary organisation must be at least capable of illuminating all levels, from the broader institutional constraints, through the sectional conflicts and down to real flesh and blood individuals.

The renewal of Marxist and labour process theory has generated or influenced a tremendous amount of historical and contemporary research at a more ‘micro’ level. These share features of rich description of everyday working life with ethnomethodological and negotiated order frameworks, but seek to situate such action within a broader structural context. (See Thompson and Warhurst, 1998 for a recent collection of articles.) The selective and qualified use of Marx suggested here and by other theorists has inevitably led to accusations that labour process theory is no longer Marxist (Cohen, 1987; Rowlinson and Hassard, 2000). This may be true, though authentic affinity with Marxism is only of concern to those who zealously guard orthodoxy and the sacred text. Even more importantly, even if the resource provided by labour process theory is valuable, there are still many gaps in explanations of key organisational processes. Some of this can no doubt be remedied by further research, but it is important to recognise the limits inherent in the perspective. It sets organisations specifically in the context of capitalist production, which is both strength and weakness. Among the gaps are the following.

1Though the labour process is the core of productive activity, it does not encompass all aspects. Any theory of the role of organisations in capitalist society must deal with the full circuit of capital (Kelly, 1985; Nichols, 1986), including its realisation through the sale of commodities on the market, financial issues and the prior purchase of labour (see Chapter 8 for a full discussion of this). It would be very misleading for any critical theory to proceed on the assumption that organisational processes and managerial activities were based solely on the control of labour, neglecting factors such as sales and marketing, financial controls, supply of components and product quality. Even the employment relationship, though intimately connected to the labour process, is constituted on a far wider basis (Littler, 1982). Institutions such as the state and the family, plus different cultural values and patterns in a given society, shape the distinctive character of employment relationships, as can be seen by observing examples from Japan or farm work. Labour process theory is thus only a partial contribution to such analyses, though paradoxically it is in some ways ideally suited to organisation

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studies, given that the dominant managerial theories are also overwhelmingly concerned with ‘the labour problem’.

2 Not all work organisations are based on commodity production, or are capitalist in character. Those in health, education or other parts of the public sector are, at least for the moment, concerned with services for use, not profit. It is possible to construct a labour process or Marxist-oriented analysis which shows the links between the various types of public and private sector within the totality of capitalist society (Johnson, 1972; Heydebrand, 1977; Cousins, 1987). But it remains the case that not all organisational processes or forms of work activity can be understood solely through a theory whose categories are geared to explaining capitalist production, despite distorted attempts to do so, such as Bellaby and Orribor’s (1977) analysis of the health service.

3 Non-profit-making organisations in capitalist societies, and forms of administration and enterprise in ‘socialist’ ones such as those in China and the former Soviet bloc countries, also show evidence of bureaucracy, power hierarchies and work fragmentation: ‘contemporary socialist societies appear to be at least as bureaucratic and with as much of a self-perpetuating bureaucracy as capitalist ones’ (Dunkerley and Salaman, 1986: 87). This suggests that the dynamic of bureaucratisation is partly independent of capital–labour relations, and that critical theory requires concepts that enable us to focus on that problem.

With respect to points 2 and 3, Weber provides a necessary corrective and additional resource. On the one hand, his work points to the distinctive ethos and ‘regime values’ of bureaucratic public administration, a reflection largely of the political environment within which it operates (du Gay, 2000: 7). On the other, Weber provides a broader account of bureaucratic rationalisation that is a necessary part of explaining its spread beyond market relations. For example, he perceptively predicted that state socialist systems would be more bureaucratic than capitalism, because of the absence of countervailing power structures between the state and markets. In a command economy, the power of bureaucratised management would increase, as would the dictatorship of the official (Sayer, 1991: 145–6).

Radical Weberianism

As Burrell (1996: 643) notes, while a conservative reading of Weber provided the perfect defence of bureaucratic hierarchy, the relevance of a left Weberianism has been largely ignored. Though some defenders of orthodoxy such as Donaldson recognise a radical Weber, many critical theorists, particularly those of a Marxist persuasion, have been hostile to the Weberian tradition (Marcuse, 1971; Johnson, 1980). Their objections relate to many of the points raised elsewhere in this book. This includes the tendency to argue that there is a bureaucratic imperative obliterating organisational differences within and between societies; that there is an inherent rationality of technique; and the identification of rationality with capitalism and the market. Also there are genuine limits to Weber’s own categories, for example the emphasis on the bureaucratic hierarchy of offices has less relevance to shop-floor employees. Nevertheless there are radical Weberian perspectives, and critical writers who aim at some kind of synthesis of key aspects of Marx and Weber’s analysis of work organisations (Salaman, 1979, 1981; Littler, 1982). They rightly point to common concerns with control and domination by management and bureaucratic

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élites: ‘For both Marx and Weber the major elements of the structure of modern large-scale organisations stem from the efforts of those who own, manage and design the organisation, to achieve control over the members’ (Salaman, 1979: 20–1). Despite this, mainstream accounts excluded domination from their reading of Weber (Shenhav, 1999: 8).

From a radical viewpoint, Weber’s insights allow us to focus on a number of key areas. Work organisations operate on different levels, and in some of these, formal control procedures are important. Power is frequently constructed and legitimised through ‘rationalisation’, particularly through the expertise associated with science and technology, and what Weber described as ‘control based on knowledge’. Even where analyses differ in focus and content, they are often complementary. Weber recognised that control rested on the ‘complete appropriation’ of all the material means of production by owners. Whereas Marx provides insights from an analysis of the consequences of the private ownership of the means of production, Weber identified the problem of concentration of power through the means of administration:

The bureaucratic structure goes hand in hand with the concentration of the material means of management in the hands of the master. This concentration occurs, for instance, in a well-known and typical fashion, in the development of big capitalist enterprises,which find their essential characteristics in this process. A corresponding process occurs in public organisations. (Weber, 1984: 33)

In addition, both attempt to explain organisational dynamics within wider social and political structures rather than as independent, isolated phenomena, subject to their own ‘laws’; though clearly the analysis of structural contexts differs. Marx’s account of alienated labour and Weber’s emphasis on the ‘iron cage of industrial labour’ share a concern for the fragmented and dehumanised nature of work. Weber saw that maximum formal rationality favoured economically powerful groups and their ability to use superior resources to dictate terms and conditions in what may appear as a freely-made contract of legal equality (Brubaker, 1984: 42–3). Social tensions and sectional conflicts between different interest groups were therefore inevitable.

Overlaps are less surprising than they appear. Both theorists shared a similar view of the necessity for modernity to sweep away the traditional social relations based on conceptions of natural order, personalised power and patriarchy. Capitalism was a flawed but dynamic system compelled constantly to revolutionise production and all social spheres. The difference, as Sayer observes, was that for Marx, ‘what makes modernity modern is, first and foremost, capitalism itself’ (1991, 12). In contrast, for Weber, ‘capitalism is but one theatre among others where the drama of rationality is played out’ (1991: 134). Weber was surely right in this, but, as we shall see later, wrong in some of the ways he understood the relationship between capitalism, rationalisation and modernity.

Key aspects of work organisation are not reducible to capitalism and its imperatives. As Littler (1982) points out, Weberian categories are especially important in understanding the employment relationship, and the career structure of employees in particular. Bureaucratic procedures and rules are relevant to the analysis of processes such as recruitment, reward and promotion. On a broader canvas, modern states and enterprises involve complex functions, management of competing interests, and performance of problematic tasks according to observable rules and norms. Some of these processes are created by and reflect specific relations of production, as in layers