The Critical Study of Work: Labor, Technology, and Global Production (review)

Baldoz, Koeber, and Kraft attempt to give the sociology of the labor process a shot in the arm by focusing readers' attention on new and unconventional work arrangements. This edited volume is the product of a conference at SUNY-Binghamton in May 1998 titled "Work, Difference and Social Change," involving participants in critical reflections on the continued relevance of Harry Braverman's Labor andMonopoly Capital (25th anniversary edition, 1998). The overall quality of the contributions is outstanding and Baldoz, Koeber and Kraft deserve high marks for assembling work that will interest scholars and stimulate undergraduates and learned nonspecialists.

The Critical Study of Work is global in scope. The reader is taken from direct-selling networks in Taiwan (Lan) to factories in Hungary and Russia (Burawoy) to supermarkets in Brazil and Quebec (Soares) to South African manufacturing and mining (Webster), globalized apparel manufacturing (Bonacich), and different varieties of computer hardware and software production (Chun, Sharpe, Mieksins, Whalley, and O'Riain). The essays are organized into four parts covering labor process theory, new research on service sector work, new research on industrial work, and research and reflections on high-technology work.

The new insights from this book are many (too many to mention here), but they come from thoughtful scholars who have spent a good deal of their own working lives critically examining the labor process. The opening essays by Burawoy and Haydu provide critical and insightful reflections on the present state of labor process theory, and each essay calls for an expanded horizon of research on actually existing systems of production and the problematic class relationships these encompass. The essays in part 2 (by Glenn, Lan, and Soares) address service sector workers and highlight (in drastically different settings) the roles that racial and gender domination inside and outside of the workplace contribute to the globalized division of labor. Part 3 of the book returns to more familiar ground for labor process research (industrial production) and features essays by Chun, Bonacich, Rinehart, and Webster. Each essay highlights different ways that flexible despotism is manifested in work circumstances that belie the usual, stereotyped appearance of exploited immigrant women of color laboring in intense heat on assembly lines. Finally, in part 4 of the book, Sharpe, Meiksins, and Whalley, and O'Riain each deal with professional and technical work in globalized high technology production. This represents the "new frontier" of research in the sociology of work, and each of these essays highlights ways that struggles for control by managers and autonomy by workers has shaped software development and engineering.

Though the essays are uniformly strong and of very high quality, several stand out for their unique and potentially important insights. Haydu problematizes the managerial project of workplace control, highlighting the problematic nature of intraclass relationships among employers. Burawoy's essay points to the contradictory nature of our labels for different systems of production and calls for comparisons between actually existing alternatives to the capitalist and state socialist labor process. Glenn's most innovative essay highlights how the globalization of production has led to an "international transference of mothering" as different parts of the world "produce" children and reproduce the labor force that the globalized market economy uses and exploits. Bonacich offers some practical ideas for community organizing that would hold corporate conglomerates more responsible for the labor processes among their subcontractors. Finally, Meiksins and Whalley lead us to question whether flexible production and subcontracting always represent a system thrust on the powerless by the powerful.

Though all these essays reflect notable advancements in labor process research, there are a few issues that are unaddressed or overlooked that would have strengthened this already strong volume. I can only list these as important issues worthy of future research: (1) The authors pay very little attention to larger political contexts. As labor process research...