Network-based control

The previous chapter looked at direct worker controls within the workplace, namely: targets, monitoring and surveillance; job insecurity; bullying and mobbing; and excessive hours. The purpose of this chapter is to profile indirect forms of worker control within the workplace. This is in recognition of the fact that employers may use various mechanisms to produce and reproduce what they recognise as ‘good’ and ‘better’ workers but that within these mechanisms there may be elements of obfuscation with respect to both the visibility and origins of control.

This is an important recognition because under the advanced capitalist system power and control has evolved in sophisticated ways. There has been, quite simply, a broad and largely progressive shift away from coercion:

In other words, power is now gained and maintained more subtly and skilfully than in the past. Controls still exist but they are as likely to be felt as to be seen. At the same time, beneficiaries are likely to be equally evasive with power veiled to a degree not evident in previous phases of capitalism.

The main implication of this is that the capitalist constellations underpinning contemporary accumulation have become complex, multifaceted and multi-dimensional. We see this in the way in which product supply chains are contingent upon sub-contracting and the use of labour market intermediaries. However, while ‘circuits may be disconnected, capitalism is neither dead nor disorganised’ (Thompson, 2003, 372). On the contrary, the networked dispersion of capitalist functions is about the maintenance of control through indirect means. This enables capital to maintain power but to not be as directly accountable for the implications of this maintenance. In terms of labour, this causes workers to experience distance and dislocation from the mechanisms controlling their time and actions. Most obviously, a worker may be employed by an agency on a temporary contract to work in a firm sub-contracted by a larger company that in turn supplies an even larger organisation.