Power in the Workplace: The Politics of Production at AT&T

Steven Peter Vallas

Jan 1993 · State University of New York Press

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This book presents a systematic case study of the hi-tech communications industry that reveals many trends in managerial authority in the workpace. Vallas reveals the mechanisms that enable advanced capitalist firms to achieve and maintain control over the workers they employ. He demonstrates that the spread and integration of automated technologies place lower level human labor in positions of declining power. The new regime does not deskill workers and need not lead toward what some have called electronic sweatshops. Nevertheless, Vallas concludes that increasing managerial control over production poses a major challenge to those who advocate labor participation in the management of American industries.

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Steven Peter Vallas is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is coeditor, with Kai Erikson, of The Nature of Work: Sociological Perspectives.