Edwards, Richard. Contested Terrain : The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, 1979.
Richard Edwards’ 1979 book Contested Terrain argues that there have been three stages of development in capitalists’ systems of control over labor, and that these go along with the developments in American business practices over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These three stages, so-called simple control, technical control, and bureaucratic control, still define the range of control methods available to capitalists today.
According to the Marxist labor theory of value, profit comes from the transformation of labor power to actual labor. In order to maximize production, and therefore profit, capitalists needed some means of control of the labor they had purchased. Therefore, the job of management in American industry has always been about controlling the labor process, rather than simply coordinating it. Over the history of the development of business from the small, individually- or family-owned shop to the monopoly corporation, different forms of control have developed to suit the changing needs of firms.
In the nineteenth century, small shops with fewer than one thousand laborers made up the vast majority of business in the United States. Those firms were privately owned, geographically consolidated, and subject to the charisma of the owner entrepreneur, who inspired and demanded loyalty. The small number of laborers in these firms and their location in a limited geographic area meant that the owner could observe their work directly and had a personal relationship with most workers. Control in this environment tended to be arbitrary and personal.
As firms got bigger after 1898, the number of employees increased to the point where the simple style of control became impracticable. Capitalists established control over workers through a hierarchal system in which laborers were supervised by foremen, who were part of a hierarchy of managers. Employees no longer had direct connection with the owners of companies. The greater organizational distance between capitalists and laborers, and the wider lifestyle gap between them led to the attenuation of personal ties to the firm and emphasized class differences. The change was not in the nature of control, but the organization of that control. In many cases, the arbitrary and personal nature of rewards and punishments distributed by the foremen meant that this hierarchical system was one of the primary causes of strikes, including the Pullman Strike of 1894, and the US Steel Strike of 1919.
The clear failure of the hierarchical system led capitalists to try other forms of control in the early twentieth century. Using welfare capitalism after 1900, firms provided specific benefits, including company subsidized housing, some health care, and pension funds to workers who broke with unions and promised not to strike. From the turn of the century to the 1920’s many firms also deployed Scientific Management, which involved time and motion studies in the attempt to design control directly into the definition of each job. Workers, though they valued corporate benefits, remained willing to slow down work or strike for many reasons, including the introduction of Scientific Management techniques, which they perceived as an attempt by management to exclude them from control of the production process.
In the first two decades of the Twentieth Century, American business conducted a process of unprecedented consolidation which led to monopolization in various industries after WWI. In order to control the even greater sized workforces now under their control, the great monopolies now turned to technical control of workers by designing production systems in which workers were only attendants at machines that were integrated into the production process. Reduced reliance upon skilled labor, meant a greater labor pool to draw from, making disciplinary threats such as dismissal very real. However, this also generalized the workforce, and encouraged the formation of industry-wide trade unions which could challenge the organization and power of the monopoly firms.
After 1920, the search for a system to replace technical control, and the growing number of nonproduction workers who also needed controlled led firms to develop bureaucratic control methods by applying institutional style policies to all employees of a firm, such that rules operated as functions of the firm, rather than of management. The establishment of bureaucratic control effectively subdivided workforces, and firms reinforced that subdivision with specialized training, an increase in supervisory jobs, and multiple pay grades and work locations. This made possible the eventual victory over mass unionism, as laborers within an industry no longer shared similar goals with regards to the firms they worked for.
The net result of bureaucratic control has been to remove the conflict between labor and capital from the shop floor to the political arena, where corporations have less control, and where they have to face what may be a decentralized opposition in the form of various social, cultural, issue-oriented and ethnic groups, but an opposition which does have a loose common interest in opposing capitalism. As in the other cases, the new method of control may have sewn the seeds of its own demise.
Jeffery Haydu of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkely stresses that what Edwards has provided is a potential new typology for methods of control in the workplace, but he says Edwards fails to provide convincing evidence, and gives an unclear chronological structure for his argument. Haydu also disputes some of Edwards’ facts, and says that he is missing the point of view of laborers themselves.