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8. CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS AND ORGANIZATIONAL SOCIOLOGY: E. P. THOMPSON APPLIED TO CONTEMPORARY CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS
- University of California Press
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8 Class Consciousness and Organizational Sociology E. P. Thompson Applied to Contemporary Class Consciousness Introduction By class consciousness we mean the tendency of people to think of their position in the larger society in terms of their position in an employing organization. Workers are class conscious when they think of their grievances at work and their interests in politics as both derived from their employment relation to particularorganizations. The central role of organizational position in class consciousness means that such consciousness is a legitimate subject of organizational sociology. But the fact that class consciousness is a conception of one's relation to the larger society means that it also falls within political sociology. Chapter 7 was about how employers find out about workers and how that shapes the large structure of the labor market. Here the crucial point is that the whole object of an incentive system is to communicate to workers where their interests lie. Only if workers' interests can be connected to some sort of performance measurement will the incentive system motivate attentiveness, improvement of routines, physical effort, concern for profits, and the learning and teaching of skills. The information conveyed to workers about where their interest lies makes the system run, or makes it fail. Since performance measurement is problematic , as we showed in Chapter 7, what the incentive system communicates to the worker about his or her interest is subject to cultural interpretation . Aparticularkind of interpretation with large social and political consequences is class consciousness. Our first task in this chapter is to define class consciousness. To do so we reanalyze E. P. Thompson's great work on the development of class consciousness in England, supplemented by some of David Lockwood's observations on the importance of employers' creation of categories of workers who have identical labor contracts. The result is a definition that 274 Class Consciousness I 275 takes into account the fact that class consciousness is a projection of organizational position on the interpretation of the larger economic and political order of society. Thus it involves both organizational and political consciousness. The problem we immediately confront in deriving a theory from this definition is that people's relation to a larger society is determined by that society as well as by their organizational position. There are enormous variations in the relation of class consciousness to politics in various societies. Our second task in this chapter is therefore to describe that variation, and to isolate the main variables predicting variations in the type of class consciousness societies show. The two categories of forces we isolate are political and organizational,corresponding to the two components of the concept of class consciousness. The political variation is the way working-class citizenship comes to be established, with the three main subvariants being definition of workers ' citizenship by soviet-style revolutions (e.g., Russia, China), mobilization of disenfranchised workers in liberal societies (e.g., England, Scandinavia), and enfranchisement with little worker mobilization (e.g., the United States, Japan). Before the industrial revolution virtually no employed workers were citizens; after that revolution they were generally citizens as defined by one of these three subvariantdefinitions. The organizational variation is the growth of employment of large numbers of workers with identical labor contracts, such as craftsmen all hired at an occupational wage rate, or semiskilled workers hired as assembly-line tenders at a wage determined by a category in a bureaucratic wage system, (The importance of categorical determination of the labor contract was argued in Lockwood 1958.) The proposition is that class consciousness is maximized when workers have had to be mobilized to achieve enfranchisement and when large groups of them are employed at uniform wage rates to do similar work. Before the industrial revolution few workers were employed as members of categories of workers having identical labor contracts; after the industrial revolution many were either artisans or factory semiskilled workers. The organizational factor—that there are standard contracts for groups of workers so that the worker enters a predefined structural "slot" when taking a job—is the main way class consciousness is connected to industrialization. Factories and skilled trades in manufacturing cities produce groups of workers who fill slots in a previously organized production system on standard terms. Societies basically do not have workingclass consciousness before industrialization. But the problem of negotiating the position of groups of slot holders [54.147.17.95] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:12 GMT) 276 / Class Consciousness is defined differently in different political systems...