“Trace the changing nature of organisation of work in capitalist society over the years.” (2017)
Capitalism buys labour power, a capacity to work, not a fixed quantity of effort. Every employer therefore faces the indeterminacy of labour: how to turn purchased capacity into actual output. The history of capitalist work organisation is a sequence of answers to this problem, each shaped by technology, markets and workers’ resistance.
1. Putting-out and manufacture (16th–18th centuries)
- Merchants supplied raw material to rural households and bought back the product. The household kept its own rhythm; control was weak and embezzlement common.
- Manufacture gathered artisans under one roof and divided the craft into detail tasks, which Adam Smith‘s pin factory celebrated and Karl Marx (Capital, 1867) criticised as producing fragmented workers.
2. The factory system (Industrial Revolution)
- Machinery, wage labour and supervision in one place; the separation of home from work.
- E. P. Thompson (1967) showed the factory imposing clock-time discipline. Marx showed capital extending and then intensifying the working day.
3. Scientific management and Fordism (1910s–1970s)
- Frederick Winslow Taylor (The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911) separated conception from execution through time-and-motion study.
- Henry Ford‘s moving assembly line (1913) and $5 day (1914) combined machine-pacing with mass consumption. Antonio Gramsci (“Americanism and Fordism”) saw it as a whole social regime producing a new type of worker.
- Post-war Fordism rested on unions, collective bargaining and the welfare state: secure, if monotonous, jobs.
- Harry Braverman (Labor and Monopoly Capital, 1974) read this whole phase as systematic deskilling.
4. The human relations correction (1930s onward)
The Hawthorne studies (1924–32), interpreted by Elton Mayo, found that informal groups set output norms. Management began to cultivate sentiment and communication, a softer form of control.
5. Post-Fordism and flexibility (1970s–1990s)
- Saturated markets and the oil shocks broke Fordist rigidity. Michael Piore and Charles Sabel (The Second Industrial Divide, 1984) described flexible specialisation; Japanese lean production added just-in-time, team work and quality circles.
- John Atkinson‘s flexible firm (1984) split a secure, multi-skilled core from a periphery of temporary, part-time and subcontracted labour.
- Critics found continuity: George Ritzer‘s McDonaldization (1993) extended Taylorism to services, and Anna Pollert (1988) doubted any clean break.
6. Knowledge, networks and platforms (1990s–present)
- Daniel Bell (1973) and Manuel Castells (The Rise of the Network Society, 1996) saw information and networked enterprises displacing the factory.
- Arlie Hochschild (The Managed Heart, 1983) showed service firms managing workers’ emotions.
- Nick Srnicek (Platform Capitalism, 2016) and scholars of algorithmic management show apps allocating, timing and rating workers who are legally “partners”, not employees. Guy Standing (The Precariat, 2011) names the insecure class this creates.
- Remote work after 2020 dissolved the workplace as a container, replacing supervision with digital monitoring.
The Indian trajectory
- Colonial Bombay mills recruited through caste- and village-based jobbers, as Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India, 1994) showed.
- Nehruvian public-sector units offered Fordist enclaves of permanent jobs.
- Post-1991, contractualisation spread: about 42% of organised-manufacturing workers were contract labour in 2023-24 (Annual Survey of Industries), roughly double the share around 2000.
- The Code on Social Security, 2020, in force from 21 November 2025, recognises gig and platform workers, and Karnataka’s 2025 platform-workers law adds a welfare fee and transparency duties on platforms.
Conclusion
Work has moved from the household to the factory, from craft to line, from rigid mass production to flexibility and algorithms. The direction is not simple progress or decline: skill and autonomy grew for a core while insecurity grew for the periphery. What persists is capital’s search for control over labour, now exercised through code rather than the foreman.