Working Life: Renewing Labour Process Analysis, Edited by Paul Thompson and Chris Smith, Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 350 pp., ISBN 978-0-230-22223-6

Each year a volume of essays is published in connection with the convening of the International Labour Process Conference. Usually, these collections are devoted to a specific theme such as skill trends in contemporary economies, work-life balance, creative labour or knowledge management. This volume stands out as one of the periodic paradigm ‘stock taking’ exercises, only the second such initiative since 1990. Thus there is a considerable range to this collection, which covers both familiar topics such as developments in managerial control, as well as new and/or re-discovered initiatives that involve dialogue with other schools of social theory. The book is conveniently divided into three sections: ‘core theory’; old themes revisited; and the analysis of new realities in the world of work. A number of authors in the first section are mainly concerned with formalising what they take to be the core propositions of labour process theory (LPT). Chief amongst these propositions is the inherent indeterminacy of labour in the capitalist labour process. This fundamental condition is taken to lead to a number of other core propositions, including the necessity of management, the relative autonomy of the work site, the existence of structured antagonisms between management and labour and a now commonly accepted anti-historicism in LPT. A number of the chapters in this section, including those by Edwards and Jaros seek to formally delimit labour process theory in terms of what it is capable of doing. For example LPT should eschew venturing into other areas of social analysis such as gender studies, or race and ethnicity, which require their own core theories (Jaros). Presumably, this is part of the “serious theory-building project that has elucidated ‘testable’ core propositions that elucidate patterns and propositions discovered through relevant research programmes” that Thompson and Smith call for in their introductory chapter. I must admit to some reservations in regard to this program. It strikes me that many of the most significant conceptual developments in LPT (e.g. Burawoy’s analysis of consent; Hockschild’s conceptualization of emotional labour) have come through inductive theorising from qualitative, ethnographic data. Perhaps there should be less concern with normalising what it is we think we are doing. Calls to delimit and formalise LPT seem to sit at odds with the expansionary theoretical focus of many of the papers in this volume. Chapters by Thompson and Vincent, Taylor, and Thompson and Smith call for better integration with political economic theory. In Chapter 3, Thompson and Vincent consider the utility of various paradigms, including regulation theory, varieties of capitalism typologies and global value chain analysis. Meanwhile Taylor puts the latter to good use in Chapter 12, which considers the globalization of service labour and the attendant problems of managerial control in off-shore, outsourced custom service work that is exported to India. Other chapters also look theoretically afield to radical geography and spatial analysis (Rainnie et al.), to social constructionist approaches (Hall), to intersectional analyses of oppression (Durbin and Conley), and to the sociology of the body (Wolkowitz and Warhurst). These various approaches are used to redress both old problems in the study of the labour process as well as new empirical developments in the world of work. Under the recurrent issues rubric, chapters on managerial control, skill trends, technological change and resistance make important contributions. Sturdy et al. put forward the notion of ‘neo-normative’ control in Chapter 6. This strategy moves beyond normative corporate cultural control by using aspects of popular culture such as individualism and fashion to control employees who are now encouraged to ‘be themselves’. Although the authors make the important point that various forms of control are most …