Reviews for The pleasures and pains of modern capitalism

The average rating for The pleasures and pains of modern capitalism based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-04-11 00:00:00 James Saksa The labour process is one of those things that often makes us shudder - discussions rapidly seem to become arcane, it smacks of old style, unreconstructed Marxism and all in all it seems to become one of those things that we like to pass over in favour of seemingly more engrossing and entertaining topics as we turn our studies and politics to issues of identity, pleasure, culture and the like. Yet, labour and the labour process do not seem to go away. So many of our key political and social issues relate to the consequences of changes in the labour process - that organisation of work where our labour is put to use on the means of production. Consider the debates about ethical trade, about the emergence of low paid, low skill work alongside and in support of high skill activity (just look at the information technology industries - Microsoft or Apple - where a small group of 'glamorous' developers ride on the backs of contract working, low paid software and code writers as well as poorly paid factory workers computer manufacturing plants and poorly paid coltan miners in the Congo). A classically Marxist argument might go so far as to argue that the labour process is at the heart of the organisation of capitalism. Sociologists have long been interested in work - its forms, its organisation, the ways we do our day to day labour and the effects that organisation has on those in and around it. Thompson does two things very well in this now classic text: he takes us through a number of core sociological approaches to the analysis of work and then while maintaining the debate with those approaches takes us into both a classical Marxist account of the labour process but also considers in detail the impact that the work of Harry Braverman (in Labour & Monopoly Capital) has had on how we might best understand work in capitalism. Braverman is at the core of Thompson's case, to the extent that Braverman is seen as changing the character of analyses of work and labour. At the time Thompson was writing - mid 1980s - this was certainly the case, and he covers many of the key issues we debate din both academic and activist circles at the time - the shape and form of new management techniques, the character of resistance, the extent to which we were being deskilled, the problematic place of 'reproductive' labour (in the household and family) in both the sociology of work and Braverman's Marxist theories. Thompson writes well, and the text is accessible - and what is more, 30 years after it was first published (and 24 years after this edition) it remains an extremely good introduction to key issues in the sociology of work and in analyses of work and labour. Although there has been an awful lot published since this book, the is little else that deals with and introduces the issue as well as this, and even amid all that work there is little with the theoretical sophistication and literary accessibility of this text. What is more, the vast majority of the work published since the 1980s has been of the kind Thompson vigorously criticises, and here is little that explores the character of work and the labour process in finance capitalism with such clarity (although some of Andrew Ross's writings since the early 2000s comes clear). Old but still recommended as an introduction or a reminder.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-12-06 00:00:00 Harish Bhatia the nature of work