Taylorism and Alienation in Labour Process: A Case of Amazon Warehouse in the UK

Abstract This study investigates how capitalist production relations systematically generate worker alienation, with Taylorist management control systems (MCS) serving as instrumental mechanisms in this process. Focussing on Amazon warehouses, it examines how scientific management principles operationalise the commodification of labour, transforming workers into factors of production optimised for capital accumulation. Rather than framing worker dissatisfaction as a managerial issue requiring ethical correction, the study conceptualises alienation as the structural outcome of production relations that subordinate human potential to profit imperatives. The study develops a Taylorism-Marx Alienation Framework to map how MCS intensify antagonisms between capital and labour. Employing qualitative methods, it shows how Taylorist principles separation of conception and execution, standardisation of tasks, fragmentation of labour, and managerial surveillance—reproducing Marx’s four forms of alienation in contemporary warehouse operations. Workers experience systematic alienation from 1) product, operationalised through the division of conception and execution, where workers produce but excluded from knowledges/decisions regarding products; 2) process, intensified through target-driven task standardisation under algorithmic surveillance; 3) species-being, resulting from deliberate labour fragmentation that reduces human creative potential to measurable productivity units; and 4) other human beings, institutionalised through hierarchical control systems that formalise class antagonisms and transform potential collaboration into disciplinary surveillance. These findings demonstrate that MCS are not neutral efficiency tools but sophisticated mechanisms for surplus value extraction. The study contributes theoretically by linking Taylorist MCS to structural alienation, showing that contemporary control systems are technological evolutions of longstanding methods of labour subordination. It concludes that addressing alienation requires transcending rather than reforming management systems embedded within capitalist production.