Workers Power And Society

The book addresses how power and power resources remain important analytically as well as empirically dimensions for analysing contemporary capitalism. It provides a theoretical framework for studying, understanding, and explaining changes in the world of work and how that leads to changes in contemporary capitalist societies. Changes in the world of work are closely related to increasing inequality, growing social unrest, and societal polarisation. Hence the book seeks to deepen our understanding of how developments in the sphere of work have implication far beyond the direct impact on workers. The book focuses on how workers and unions utilise their various power resources to off-set the power advantage of employers and capital in the sphere of labour politics, which have crucial linkages with both cultural life, politics, and the market. Although workers’ and unions’ power and influence have been declining almost universally across the world, the argument in the book is that they still hold power resources that can challenge and sometimes alter outcomes in another direction than what employers and capital wants. Hence the theory can help understand the possibilities that workers and unions still have and how these resources affect the outcomes of the labour-capital struggle. A core contribution of the book is that it develops theoretical propositions about power resource theory, provides clear definitions of the core concepts as well as apply the power resource theory to a range of new or emerging topic fields like global value chains, minimum wages, and migrant workers.

Over the last sixty years many radicals have had their eyes opened by the writing of Maurice Brinton. The most prolific writer of the British Solidarity group, which existed from 1961 to 1992, his work slaughtered countless sacred cows of standard leftist thinking. For Brinton, “actually existing socialism” did not, in fact, exist. He wrote with passion, clarity, and consistency on behalf worker self-activity and self-management and to decry those who reinforced passivity, apathy, cynicism, pecking orders, and alienation among workers. This oppressive behavior was, to him, as prevalent among state socialists and communist parties as it was among capitalists, because it enabled rulers, and would-be rulers, of every political stripe to deceive and manipulate those in whose name they claimed to act. Today, when a new crop of so-called democratic socialists are seeking state power, allegedly on behalf of working people, Brinton’s work is more relevant than ever.

Work is, and always will be, a central institution of society. What makes a capitalist society unique is that it treats the human capacity to engage in labor as a basic commodity. This can be a source of dynamism, as when innovative firms raise wages to attract the best and brightest. But it can also be a source of misery, as when one’s skills are suddenly rendered obsolete by forces beyond one’s control. Jeffrey J. Sallaz asks us to rethink our basic assumptions about work. Drawing on cutting-edge theories within economic sociology and through the use of contemporary examples, he conceptualizes labor as embedded exchange. This draws attention to issues that all too frequently are overlooked in our public discourse and private imaginations: how various forms of work are classified and valued; how markets for labor operate in practice; and how people can challenge the central fiction that their work is simply a commodity to be bought and sold. This readable and engaging book is suitable for both graduate and advanced undergraduate students. It will be of interest to economic sociologists, scholars of labor, and all of those who find themselves working for a living.

A discussion of the power relationships between employers, workers and their organizations in capitalist societies. It looks at the patterns of dominance and subordination determined by capitalist structure, gender division and occupational hierarchy, and outlines the egalitarian strategy.

Examines the ways in of organising work, rank, compensation, and promotion inside a large Japanese company in Hong Kong, and its spiritual training, to reveal the socio-economic base of managerial control. A must for anthropologists and Japanologists.

Workers and Capital is universally recognised as the most important work produced by operaismo, a current of political thought emerging in the 1960s that revolutionised the institutional and extra-parliamentary Left in Italy and beyond. In the decade after its first publication in 1966, the debates over Workers and Capital produced new methods of analysis and a new vocabulary for thousands of militants, helping to inform the new forms of workplace, youth and community struggles. Concepts like 'neocapitalism', 'class composition', 'mass-worker', 'the plan of capital', 'workers' inquiry' and 'co-research' became an established part of the Italian Left's political lexicon. Over five decades since it was first published, Workers and Capital is a key text in the history of the international workers' movement, yet only now appears in English translation for the first time. Far from simply an artefact of the intense political conflicts of the 1960s, Tronti's work offers extraordinary tools for understanding the powerful shifts in the nature of work and class composition in recent decades.

Much of the debate on the future of work has focused on responses to technological trends in the Global North, with little evidence on how these trends are impacting work and workers in the Global South. Drawing on a rich selection of ethnographic studies of precarious work in Africa, this innovative book discusses how globalisation and digitalisation are drivers for structural change and examines their implications for labour. Bringing together global labour studies and inequality studies, it explores the role of digital technology in new business models, and ways in which digitalisation can be harnessed for counter mobilisation by the new worker.

First published in 1975, Workers’ Participation in Industry provides a fresh perspective on a highly significant issue. Its principal argument is that developments in workers’ participation and control cannot be satisfactorily understood except by reference to broader questions concerning the exercise of power in industry and in society at large. The book’s approach is sociological and explanatory, and it is written for the general reader as well as for students and specialists on both sides of industry.