Between Utopia and Anti-Utopia: Labour Process Analysis and the Collective Struggle to Transcend Managerial Domination

This article engages with two central preoccupations of Michael Burawoy’s work: public sociology and labour process analysis. For Burawoy, sociology is constituted by three moments: (1) the utopian moment, when a sociologist imagines a better world; (2) the anti-utopian moment, when the sociologist develops an empirical analysis of barriers to the realisation of social change; and (3), the sociologist may develop a tentative vision of an alternative, exploring the potentialities for what Erik Olin Wright called ‘real utopias’. The third moment is what enables sociology to become ‘public’, demonstrating the possibilities for building a better world within empirically observed constraints. Ironically, given Burawoy’s central role in the development of the tradition, this article argues that labour process analysis has generally stalled at the second ‘moment’: highlighting the limits on emancipatory projects but failing to explore the possibilities within those limits. Manufacturing Consent , Burawoy’s classic labour process study, formulated a fundamentally pessimistic view of the capacity of workers to challenge the frontier of managerial control, as a gamified work process induced workers to consent to their own exploitation. A similar, implied pessimism pervades much of contemporary labour process analysis, which has documented an extensive catalogue of novel managerial control techniques but only developed a limited discussion of potential alternatives. This article highlights several strands of labour process analysis which have attempted to develop an alternative debate through deep strategic engagement with workers and unions, and argues for these to be extended to help develop our understanding of collective struggles for real workplace utopias.