Conflict and control in the contemporary workplace: Structured antagonism revisited

• Published date: 01 May 2022
• Author: Paul Edwards,Andy Hodder
• Date: 01 May 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12363

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Conflict and control in the contemporary

workplace: Structured antagonism revisited

Paul Edwards|Andy Hodder

Birmingham Business School, University

of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

Correspondence

Andy Hodder, Reader in Employment

Relations, Birmingham Business School,

University of Birmingham, Birmingham

B15 2TT, UK.

Email: a.j.hodder@bham.ac.uk

Abstract

The concept of a structured antagonism lying at the

heart of the employment relationship is widely cited

but also commonly misinterpreted. The paper firstly

returns to the origin of the concept to locate its

approach to workplace industrial relations. It forms

part of labour process analysis, within which its distinct

emphasis is two-fold: a focus on levels of analysis, such

that the connections between the underlying antago-

nism and concrete behaviour can be interrogated; and

a preference for comparative analysis, which allows the

relevant processes to be identified. In this paper, we

apply these themes to contemporary workplaces such

as those in the gig economy. Recent research demon-

strates substantial empirical and theoretical progress

but can be taken further using the above two ideas. A

methodological checklist emerges to guide a future pro-

gramme of research.

Without being aware of it himself, he was a thorough materialist.(Wilkie Collins,

The Haunted Hotel [1889; Vintage edition, London, 2015, p. 138])

1|INTRODUCTION

The concept of the ‘structured antagonism’(SA) lying at the basis of the employment relation-

ship was introduced in 1986, though its origin was in 1982 (Edwards, 1986; Edwards &

DOI: 10.1111/irj.12363

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distrib ution and

reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2022 The Authors. Industrial Relations Journal published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

220 Ind. Relat. 2022;53:220–240.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/irj

Scullion, 1982). This paper reviews the usage of the concept since that time, for two reasons.

Firstly, given widespread use of the term, we assess its application. We take the opportunity to

spell out the core of the idea, for as pointed out elsewhere (Edwards, 2018) it has been misun-

derstood. A telling example of such misunderstanding is a Marxist-influenced treatment of

power, which cites Edwards (1986) and also Burawoy (1979) as writers who address how class

struggle is shaped by various specific forces, and not that struggle itself (Palermo, 2019).

Burawoy of course went to great lengths to ground his ethnographic studies in a theory of the

specificities of the capitalist labour relation, for example, its contrasts with feudalism; the SA

concept (SAC) operated in a similar way. Secondly, we address the contemporary workplace

and ask two questions. How far does the SAC, developed on the basis of manual jobs in facto-

ries, apply to very different settings such as the gig economy and help us to understand the

nature of ‘control’and ‘resistance’? And how does it help us methodologically, that is, does it

help us to ask specific questions in addition to saying that the SA is built into the labour rela-

tion as a constant?

The paper builds on extant labour process analysis (LPA). While LPA has led to vast

amounts of research, two reviews in particular stand out. The first, by Thompson (2016),

makes two main points. Firstly, he addresses accounts of control and resistance from a

Foucauldian point of view, showing that they tend to treat any form of questioning of a

current order as resistance so that ‘too many things have been lumped and linked together’

under the category (p. 107).

1

LPA, and within in the SAC, by contrast, locates resistance in

the character of the employment relationship. Managers may in some sense resist what

they are asked to do, but they are not engaged in struggle across the effort bargain, only in

relation to the terms of their own role on one side of the divide. We thus treat resistance

as some effort, not necessarily wholly conscious, to alter the terms of the reward-effort bar-

gain in one's own favour, recognising that resistance is not a discrete ‘thing’and that it

emerges from a complex of work relations. Secondly, Thompson provides abundant evi-

dence that contemporary workers engage in struggles over the terms of their labour and

identifies new methods such as social media for organising to do so.

2

He does not, how-

ever, offer any heuristic methods to dissect specific cases. In other words, what questions

should someone armed with the SAC ask in order to characterise and explain a workplace

regime? We look at contemporary studies in light of this question.

The second review, by Joyce and Stuart (2021), lays out a labour process approach and pro-

vides a comprehensive survey of work in the gig or platform economy. They demonstrate, for

example, how workers can respond to algorithmic control by deploying a form of output

restriction—a long-noted practice (e.g., Lupton, 1963). They also draw out distinct features of

control systems such as close methods of measurement and control and information

asymmetries between workers and the platforms (e.g., Veen et al., 2020) and identify three

forms of worker resistance. There are two limitations. Firstly, the authors say that LPA insists

on a dynamic of control and resistance—a point that Foucauldians would gleefully identify as

reflecting ‘dualism’. In fact, as their empirical review shows, studies demonstrate that managers

seek consent as well as control and that workers obey as well as resist, in a complex negotiation

of order. Secondly, it is not the authors' intention to spell out the conditions that, for example,

lead to informal collective action or more organised resistance. It may well be that a range of

evidence is not yet available for such an analysis; generations of prior studies allowed, for exam-

ple, some conclusions about the meaning and causes of output restriction while leaving unan-

swered questions (Edwards, 1986, pp. 269–278). We suggest below how analysis on these lines

might proceed.

CONFLICT AND CONTROL IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORKPLACE221