In the capitalist system , the reasons why workers work so hard and how the interests of employees and managers are negotiated are questions that the Anglo-American sociologist Michael Burawoy has addressed by adopting a Marxist theoretical framework.
Between coercion and consent
According to Burawoy, the interests of the labor and capital are in clear opposition, but modern business management is currently oriented towards converging the workers' consent towards greater productivity. Burawoy rejects the vision of Marx according to which workers are simply exploited and forced to work to the maximum of their possibilities. With the affirmation of the sindacati and workers' organizations, the recourse to power by leaders – which once took the form of abuses to the detriment of employees – has significantly reduced. Within every organization there are both forms of coercion both of consent: what has changed are the relative proportions and the methods of implementation. Today, managers seek to exercise control over workers by creating restrictive social relationships and corporate structures that favorillusion of choice, but which ultimately have the function of concealing and perpetuating unequal power relations.
Production games
Burawoy worked in a factory called Allied Corporation, where he conducted research on his production game theory which took place within the workplace, such as collective bargaining (negotiating wages and working conditions), promoting internal worker mobility, and a piecework pay system, which provided for a wage increase if the expected production quota was exceeded. This is a system which, according to Burawoy, favors theillusion that work is a game: workers become players who participate in a competition of making out, which involves exceeding fixed production quotas. Job satisfaction is ensured by mastering the intricate and often subtle informal strategies that allow employees to excel in the game under different production conditions. Burawoy argues that these games should not be interpreted as attempts to reduce job discontent or oppose management, as lower-level managers often swell the ranks of participants, helping to consolidate the rules of the game. Participation in production games, on the contrary, builds consensus among workers on the underlying norms and, perhaps more importantly, on the structure of the social relations (owners-managers-employees) underpin the rules themselves. Furthermore, both managers and workers are involved in the game, obscuring the numerous competing interests that define social relationships between the two categories. limiting conflicts At a minimum. According to Buroway, these methods of producing and achieving cooperation and context demonstrate greater effectiveness than the coercive measures of early capitalism. Buroway's work has inspired many subsequent studies, including those of social thinkers Paul Blyton and Stephen Ackroyd, who focused on opposition and coercion in the workplace.
Gianni Broggi
