Crawling from the Wreckage: The Labour Process and the Politics of Production

Considerable uncertainty exists concerning the intellectual validity and purpose of ‘labour process theory’. It is now common ground that such theory is in crisis. John Storey (1985a: 194) sums up what he considers to be the general state of play:

It is not perhaps an exaggeration to claim that the labour process bandwagon has run into the sand. Indeed the catalogue of amendments and criticisms attaching to labour process theory has led a number of critics to call for little less than the abandonment of labour process theory. It has served a useful purpose but it is now holed and patched beyond repair.