Between Utopia and Anti-Utopia: Labour Process Analysis and the Collective Struggle to Transcend Managerial Domination

Abstract

This article engages with two central preoccupations of Michael Burawoy’s work: public sociology and labour process analysis. For Burawoy, sociology is constituted by three moments: (1) the utopian moment, when a sociologist imagines a better world; (2) the anti-utopian moment, when the sociologist develops an empirical analysis of barriers to the realisation of social change; and (3), the sociologist may develop a tentative vision of an alternative, exploring the potentialities for what Erik Olin Wright called ‘real utopias’. The third moment is what enables sociology to become ‘public’, demonstrating the possibilities for building a better world within empirically observed constraints. Ironically, given Burawoy’s central role in the development of the tradition, this article argues that labour process analysis has generally stalled at the second ‘moment’: highlighting the limits on emancipatory projects but failing to explore the possibilities within those limits. Manufacturing Consent, Burawoy’s classic labour process study, formulated a fundamentally pessimistic view of the capacity of workers to challenge the frontier of managerial control, as a gamified work process induced workers to consent to their own exploitation. A similar, implied pessimism pervades much of contemporary labour process analysis, which has documented an extensive catalogue of novel managerial control techniques but only developed a limited discussion of potential alternatives. This article highlights several strands of labour process analysis which have attempted to develop an alternative debate through deep strategic engagement with workers and unions, and argues for these to be extended to help develop our understanding of collective struggles for real workplace utopias.

Introduction

Work is undergoing a significant reorganisation, driven by a combination of rapid technological advancements (Krzywdzinski et al., 2025; Lloyd & Payne, 2023), the escalating ecological crisis (Dupuis et al., 2024; Harry et al., 2024), and the reconfiguration of global supply chains in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and recent geopolitical shocks (Butollo & Staritz, 2022; Snell et al., 2022). These forces have the potential to fundamentally alter how work is structured, organised and performed across industries and institutional jurisdictions. The cumulative impact of the changes occurring promises a profound disruption – understood by Streeck (2016, p. 39) as a ‘destructive and even violent discontinuity’ – to the working lives of countless people. But as multiple scholars have argued, the trajectories of work reorganisation are not predetermined, and are instead subject to a range of contingencies and political contestation at various levels (Howcroft & Taylor, 2023; Wajcman, 2022). In the context of substantial change, the role of sociologists of work and employment is brought into sharp focus. In addition to deepening our understanding of the relationship between individual experiences and the broader social and historical forces that shape them (Mills, 1999), this article asks about the role sociologists have in informing and shaping worker responses to the disruptions they face.

For Burawoy (2004, 2007, 2021) the practice of sociology is constituted by three distinct moments. First is the utopian moment, when a sociologist imagines a better world – more free, more equal, more solidaristic. Second, the sociologist confronts empirical reality, and through scientific analysis develops a systematic critique of the structural barriers towards realising a better world: the anti-utopian moment. Third, the sociologist may develop a ‘provisional, experimental, and tentative’ (Burawoy, 2021, p. 3) vision of an alternative world, exploring the possibility for what Wright (2010, p. 5) called ‘real utopias’. The third moment, Burawoy argued, is what enables sociology to step outside academia and become truly ‘public’, by demonstrating the possibilities for social change within empirically observed constraints.

Labour process analysis can be understood as the study of how work is organised and controlled in order to translate workers’ capacity to labour into actual work, highlighting tensions between mechanisms of managerial control and patterns of worker resistance. Ironically, given Burawoy’s central place in labour process scholarship, this literature has only partially engaged with the idea of ‘organic public sociology’ (Stewart & Martínez Lucio, 2017; Thomas & Turnbull, 2021). Many studies in this tradition stall at the second ‘moment’: highlighting the limits on emancipatory projects but failing to ‘expos[e] possibilities within limits and thereby expanding the limits of the possible’ (Burawoy, 2021, p. 214). This was evident in Manufacturing Consent, Michael Burawoy’s auto-ethnography studying patterns of coercion and consent in a Chicago factory, in which he formulated a highly pessimistic view of workers’ capacity to challenge their domination at the hands of management.

This article argues that much of the contemporary labour process literature has fallen into a largely descriptive pattern, cataloguing innovative systems of managerial control and novel production regimes but generally failing to go beyond them. Though a less appreciated strand of scholarship has highlighted continuities in patterns of managerial control across space and time (see Jenkins & Blyton, 2016). Taken together, however, a significant portion of labour process scholarship, while normatively committed to the amelioration or elimination of worker domination and subordination (Thompson & Pitts, 2023), has remained encased in agendas and practices set by management, offering criticisms but few alternatives (Martínez Lucio, 2010). Labour process analysis has been handicapped in this regard by a theoretical tendency to reify managerial strategic capacity and obscure or minimise the potential for collective worker resistance. For example, labour process scholars have sometimes emphasised individual or atomised worker responses to managerial initiatives (Martínez Lucio & Stewart, 1997), a tendency sharpened by the recent empirical focus on gig-economy work, where workers have little structural or associational power.

When collective worker responses are examined, scholars have often emphasised the ineffectiveness of trade union efforts to push back what Goodrich (1975) called the ‘frontier of managerial control’ (see Delbridge, 2000; Thompson & Bannon, 1985), though some have documented impactful union strategies (Danford, 2005; Dupuis, 2025; Murphy & Cullinane, 2021; Taylor & Bain, 2001). Instances of non-union collective worker resistance are also frequently neglected or obscured (Atzeni, 2021). The relative neglect of collective worker agency has prevented labour process analysis from moving beyond mirroring the agendas of management to highlight possibilities for workers to shape the future of their work collectively, in the vein of Burawoy’s third sociological moment.

The central contribution of this article is to elaborate how Burawoy’s ‘organic public sociology’ and Wright’s ‘real utopias’ can be deployed to complement and extend labour process analysis. Wright (2010, 2013) developed the idea of ‘real utopias’ as a mechanism for social scientists to envision and move towards emancipatory social change. He used this term to describe viable, achievable alternatives to the existing social and economic systems that address issues of inequality, exploitation and oppression. Deploying this framing, this article will examine several strands of scholarship in the labour process tradition (occasionally drawing on the broader radical literature in sociology of work) that have examined ways in which workers have challenged or renegotiated the frontier of managerial control, including worker cooperatives, worker-control in socialist states and formal management–union partnership arrangements. While these examples provide indicative lessons to those concerned with the democratisation of work, I argue they face prohibitive barriers in their efficacy or widespread achievability. Instead, this article suggests that studies of bottom-up collective worker resistance to the frontier of managerial control on the shopfloor offer a window to viable and achievable models of the significant humanisation of work. None of these studies provides anything approaching a definitive path to the emancipation of workers from capitalist domination. They are suggestive, however, of an approach to the sociology of work that goes beyond merely cataloguing managerial tools of control. Wright’s ‘real utopias’ offers a framework for building on this tradition and extending labour process scholarship towards a more public facing sociology including through action research and engagement with unions on questions of collective worker strategy.

The Sociological Division of Labour

As outlined above, Burawoy’s (2021) vision of sociology entails three moments: first, the utopian moment where the sociologist imagines a better world; second, the anti-utopian moment where the sociologist confronts the empirical barriers to the realisation of a better world; and third, when the sociologist demonstrates the possibilities for building a better world within empirically observed constraints that can be communicated with various ‘publics’. At different times and in different contexts, different sociological orientations – which place different emphases on these different moments – will be emphasised. Burawoy defines these orientations as: professional, critical, policy and public. These four orientations, or the ‘sociological division of labour’ (Burawoy, 2021, p. 36), are distinguished by their audience and their purpose, or ‘for whom and for what do we pursue sociology?’ (Burawoy, 2007, p. 34). Here, sociological audiences are defined as either academic or extra-academic, while the purpose of a particular orientation to sociological enquiry is to generate either instrumental or reflexive knowledge.

First, professional sociology is orientated towards an academic audience and is instrumental in nature in the sense that it is aimed at solving puzzles or answering questions in research programmes. This sociological orientation generates knowledge that is ‘theoretical/empirical . . . that follows scientific norms whose validity is based on correspondence to reality and evaluated by and accountable to peers’ (Burawoy, 2021, p. 37). Critical sociology is also for an academic audience but generates reflexive rather than instrumental knowledge. In this way critical sociology is geared towards interrogating the ‘foundations of professional sociology within the academic community’ (Burawoy, 2021, p. 36). As will be discussed in the following section, Burawoy (2021) classifies much labour process scholarship, including his own Manufacturing Consent, as critical sociology which aims to challenge the instrumentalism of conventional sociology of work as ‘an arm of management’ (p. 87). Third, policy sociology is oriented towards influencing and informing government or corporate policymaking by providing concrete insights that serve clients.

Finally, public sociology also addresses non-academic audiences, but rather than generating instrumental knowledge for policymaking elites, it aims to generate reflexive knowledge that faces ‘multiple publics in multiple ways’ (Burawoy, 2005b, p. 4). ‘Organic public sociology’ involves the sociologist working with ‘a visible, thick, active, local and often counter-public’ such as ‘a labour movement, neighbourhood associations, communities of faith, immigrant rights groups, human rights organisations’ (Burawoy, 2005b, pp. 7–8). In this way, public sociology engages in a two-way dialogue with the relevant public to help organisations or social movements understand the possibilities for, and barriers to, social change. It is here, Burawoy argues, that sociologists can realise his third sociological moment.

In the wake of Burawoy’s first effort to articulate his conceptualisation of the sociological division of labour several scholars raised concerns about the desirability or achievability of certain aspects of the schema – especially public sociology. For example, Brint (2005) emphasised the risk of oversimplification that accompanies orientating sociology to an extra-academic audience. Similarly, Tittle (2004) raised concerns about the potential for a more public orientation to undermine academic rigour (and ultimately the academic standing) of sociology as a discipline. Others point to practical (Turner, 2005) and institutional (Brook & Darlington, 2013) barriers to achieving public sociology in a highly professionalised academic context.

However, some of the criticisms of Burawoy’s sociological division of labour respond centrally to his emphasis on the importance of ‘public sociology’ which he argued had been neglected. In other words, these criticisms tend to elide the fact that Burawoy stressed that all four sociological orientations are necessary and desirable. He argued that while these orientations may be in short-term tension, in the longer term they generate a necessary synthesis and help curtail the ‘pathologies’ of other orientations. Professional sociology without reference to broader publics can become ‘self-referential’; critical sociology without empirical and theoretical groundings risks becoming ‘dogmatic’; without the other orientations policy sociology can be ‘captured’ by clients; and without professional and critical groundings public sociology can become ‘faddish’ (Burawoy, 2021, pp. 38–39).

Burowoy’s division of sociological labour developed in part through his work alongside his long-time collaborator Erik Olin Wright. In his writing on ‘real utopias’, Wright (2010, 2013) developed a framework for the realisation of Burawoy’s third sociological moment – highlighting the possibilities for social change within observed constraints. Wright (2010, p. 26) summarised the approach like this: ‘the diagnosis and critique of society tells us why we want to leave the world in which we live; the theory of alternatives tells us where we want to go; and the theory of transformation tells us how to get there from here’. Wright’s real utopias spawned a range of studies examining social structures and institutions that could prefigure an alternative to existing social systems including some relating to work and employment.

In his sweeping analysis of Wright’s body of work, Burawoy (2020) divided his friend’s work into two broad tranches. First, his work on class which deployed multivariate analysis to reconceptualise class structures within capitalism. Through this work Wright (1997, 2015) developed the notion of contradictory class locations, where individuals may simultaneously occupy multiple class positions, such as being both a worker and a supervisor, which blurs traditional Marxian class boundaries. Burawoy argues that in the later stages of Wright’s career he moved to study of ‘real utopias’ but left his analysis of class behind. ‘He moves from a class analysis without utopia to utopia without class analysis’ (Burawoy, 2020, p. 69). Here, Burawoy was critical of Wright’s conceptualisation of real utopias as they failed to systematically incorporate class struggle. This article suggests that labour process theory provides the theoretical understanding of managerial domination over workers at the point of production that can be developed into a systematic analysis of viable and achievable alternatives: of ‘real utopias’ that challenge or ameliorate class domination at work.

Manufacturing Consent and Labour Process Analysis

Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent appeared in the wake of Harry Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital. With its publication, Braverman (1974) introduced a Marxian theoretical framework to the sociological analysis of the politics of work organisation at the point of production. Eldridge et al. (1991, p. 204) argue that this was necessary because labour process theory’s predecessor, industrial sociology, had not developed the necessary theoretical tools for analysing the dynamics of conflict and compromise between workers and employers in capitalist workplaces and ‘therefore was not equipped to analyse what was actually happening to industrial societies’. So, Eldridge et al. (1991, p. 204) argued, scholars like Braverman, Burawoy and Richard Hyman turned to ‘a political economy grounded in Marx’. Specifically, Braverman (1974, p. 86) subjected scientific management to extensive criticism, especially the form proposed by Fredrick Taylor, American engineer and management consultant, whose pronouncements he considered to be ‘nothing less than the explicit verbalisation of the capitalist mode of production’. Braverman (1974) argued that it was ‘not the “best way” to do work “in general” that Taylor was seeking . . . but an answer to the specific problem of how best to control alienated labour – that is to say, labour that has been bought and sold’ (p. 90, emphasis added). He emphasised that in order to valorise profits, management was incentivised to strictly regulate the work process by measuring, codifying and controlling workers’ actions in precise detail.

Braverman’s thesis is sometimes misconstrued as a simple ‘deskilling thesis’. It is true that he rued the loss of ‘mastery’ among workers over their previous labour processes and the micro specialisation that came with the application of Taylorist principles (Braverman, 1974, pp. 424–449). But it is more accurate to describe Braverman’s degradation of work thesis as Burawoy (1979, p. 21) observed: as the strong incentive for managers under capitalism to ‘separat[e] the conception and execution of work’. Manufacturing Consent, which was published five years later, built on and extended Braverman’s concern with managerial control of the labour process and how it was achieved. In it, Burawoy (1979, p. 94) accepted ‘the separation of conception and execution, the expropriation of skill, or the narrowing of the scope of discretion’ as the broad tendencies in the development of the capitalist labour process, as outlined by Braverman. However, he argued that ‘Braverman missed the equally important parallel tendency towards the expansion of choices within those ever narrower limits’ (Burawoy, 1979, p. 94). He would go on to argue that it was this expansion of choice within narrowed limits which helped build worker consent to their ongoing domination.

Empirically, Manufacturing Consent examined shopfloor politics at Allied, an engineering firm in Chicago, and asked why workers in capitalist economies submit to their own exploitation and subordination in the work process, or ‘Why do workers as hard as they do?’ (Burawoy, 1979, p. xi). The study was designed as a critique of the foundations of professional industrial sociology which had generally been concerned with ‘why workers do not work harder’ (Burawoy, 1979, p. 33). In conversation with Roy (1952, 1954), who had coincidentally studied the same plant three decades earlier, Burawoy developed the concept of ‘production regimes’ to describe changes to the structured systems of work and control within the factory which had occurred over time. Roy, Burawoy argued, had described a ‘despotic production regime’ characterised by direct and overt control by management over the labour process. This regime was achieved through a strict, hierarchical structure of management that attempted to enforce discipline through direct supervision and punishment. This regime encouraged a highly adversarial relationship between management and workers with little room for negotiation and little to no managerial effort to gain worker buy-in for its initiatives.

Around thirty years later, Burawoy set out to chronicle the changes that had occurred in shopfloor politics at the plant. He attempted to demonstrate that managerial control of the labour process was not maintained through direct or technical control alone as had previously been observed but that workers consented to their own exploitation: a ‘hegemonic production regime’. This consent was achieved, he argued, through the system of ‘making out,’ a gamified method of performance management fostered under the piece rate system and a structured internal labour market in which workers could increase their earnings by producing more than the set quotas. This gamification fostered a sense of participation and engagement among workers, which contributed to building their consent to their ultimate exploitation. ‘The very act of playing a game generates consent with respect to its rules’, Burawoy (1979, p. 81) argued. Drawing on Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, Burawoy examined how capitalist ideology permeated the workplace, shaping workers’ perceptions and interactions with their managers and other workers. This ideological control, he argued, helped to stabilise the labour process and reduce overt conflict. Wood (2023, p. 347) points out that Burawoy later moderated this thesis to argue that consent to capitalist domination can be better understood as an ‘overdetermined’ outcome to a range of factors among which workplace dynamics are central.

Nonetheless, Burawoy ultimately presented a deeply pessimistic outlook for the possibility of workers developing strategies to challenge or significantly mitigate managerial domination. He noted that under a despotic production regime observed by Roy workers had engaged in political struggles ‘whose object is relations in production’ (Burawoy, 1979, p. 177), such as informally organising across production groups to subvert managerial initiatives including formally instituted rules and procedures (see Roy, 1954). However, under the hegemonic production regime he observed during participant observation, these political struggles had largely been eclipsed by economic struggles ‘whose object is the effort bargain’ (Burawoy, 1979, p. 177). He argued that the scope of class conflict had narrowed from control of the labour process to a less politicised struggle around pay and conditions. Burawoy (2021, p. 87) later reflected that he had ‘opposed utopianism’ with an ‘anti-utopian structuralism’. Put another way, he curtailed his utopian imagination of a better world by documenting empirically observed barriers that prevented or constrained the realisation of those ideals. However, Manufacturing Consent offered almost nothing by way of opportunities within those constraints. Burawoy (2021) would later describe the book as a pure example of ‘critical sociology’, aimed at critiquing the foundations of Roy’s professional sociology, and addressed to an academic audience.

Braverman had shared Burawoy’s concern around critiquing the existing literature in industrial sociology but argued that his own book had two sociological orientations. The first was critical, as he aimed to develop an analysis of the capitalist mode of production as a critique of ‘modern social science’ which was inclined to view ‘all that is real as necessary, all that exists as inevitable, and thus the present mode of production as eternal’ (Braverman, 1974, p. 16, emphasis in the original). However, Braverman (1974) was not a professional sociologist, but a machinist and socialist organiser who viewed the task of radical social science as broader than critiquing the work of other writers: he wanted his analysis to also be a ‘weapon’ of working-class struggle (p. 13). This more public orientation can be found in a distilled form in Braverman’s other writing on automation which faced labour movement and socialist organisers (e.g. Braverman, 1955).

In this way, Burawoy and much of the first wave of labour process scholarship represented a significant departure from Braverman and its more public, militant antecedents like operaismo and workers’ enquiry (see Briken, 2023; Thompson & Pitts, 2023 for a recent discussion) as they reorientated to a largely critical sociology. In the years that followed, labour process theory developed a well-defined scope and set of empirical foci which would later be described as a ‘normal science’ (Thompson & Smith, 2024, p.146). The research programme that emerged as the dominant tendency within labour process scholarship increasingly resembled a largely professional sociological orientation, generating instrumental knowledge for academic audiences, and has remained somewhat self-consciously detached from a more publicly engaged stance. In reflecting on this vein of scholarship, Burawoy (2005a, p. 313) would later comment on its ‘unrepentant academic character, both in academic style and substantive remoteness’.

From Labour Process to Labour Movement

Burawoy (2008, p. 372) did, however, note a pivot from some sociologists of work to a more public orientation in what he described as a move from the ‘labour process to the labour movement’. Here, he describes the reorientation of a strand of sociology of work away from techniques of managerial control towards examining organising efforts to rebuild the organised labour movement. Exemplifying this shift Burawoy (2008) points to the work of his doctoral student Ruth Milkman (2006) and other sociologists (e.g. Waldinger et al., 1998), who wrote a series of valuable studies examining the role of immigrant workers in the North American labour movement during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including the ‘Justice for Janitors’ campaign. Focusing on worker organising in low-wage sectors like building services and car washes, Milkman (2006) argued that recently migrated workers, often marginalised and vulnerable due to their immigration status, were playing a central role in the apparent revitalisation of the labour movement in the US. Burawoy argued this body of literature represented a ‘public turn’ in the sociology of work as scholars engaged closely with trade unionists in the new organising efforts. Furthermore, he described this literature as the ‘interlinking of labour process and social movement theory’ (Burawoy, 2008, p. 380).

However, while labour process analysis had everything to do with the intrinsic nature of work – patterns of control and resistance around how work was organised – the new literature on organising mainly focused on extrinsic aspects of labour such as pay, conditions and union recognition. Indeed, Burawoy (2008, p. 381) notes that these scholars were concerned with examining labour organising ‘outside as well as inside the workplace’. Many of the texts Burawoy cites as interlinking labour process scholarship with social movement theory are largely detached from any systematic analysis of politics at the point of production (for a notable exception see Fantasia, 1988) and instead frequently engage with efforts to organise workers around non-work identity categories. While some texts in the union revitalisation and organising literature acknowledge control of the labour process as a key source of historic union strength (e.g. Holgate, 2021), these are generally exceptions to the rule.

This is not to diminish the body of work Burawoy cites, which generated indispensable insights to new patterns of labour organising. Rather, this article argues that in both empirical focus and theoretical preoccupations, it can be better understood as a break from labour process analysis more than its continuation. Additionally, while labour process theory generally took a highly pessimistic view of the prospects for rebuilding collective worker power, the organising literature of the 1990s and 2000s was characterised by a ‘touch of euphoria’ (Burawoy, 2008, p. 380), often painting an overly optimistic picture of the prospects of trade union revitalisation. This article argues that this strand of the sociological study of work moved from labour process analysis without the labour movement, to labour movement analysis without the labour process.

In fact, labour process analysis and the literature on worker organising have remained largely distinct in something akin to what Danford (2005, p. 167) described as the ‘false dualism between industrial relations and the labour process’. Here, the labour process literature has often emphasised individual and disorganised responses to managerial control efforts in the workplace (Martínez Lucio & Stewart, 1997). For example, authors have recorded a catalogue of worker ‘misbehaviour’ in response to managerial initiatives ranging from sabotage, to pilfering, and time indiscipline (Ackroyd & Thompson, 2016). This strand of research represented an important effort to theorise the ongoing presence of worker agency in the context of the declining institutional power of the labour movement and collective worker organisation. But the focus on individual worker behaviour – and unorganised worker responses more generally – has been compounded in recent years by an empirical focus on the gig-economy, where workers have low levels of associational and structural power, and thus little capacity to renegotiate the frontier of managerial control (for an exception see Masikane & Webster, 2025). Generally speaking, in short, the labour process literature and the literature on collective worker organising have not overlapped in sustained ways.

The Viability of Real Utopias at Work

Martínez Lucio (2010) points out that a somewhat neglected tradition within labour process analysis has examined efforts to organise work in more humanistic, democratic ways in contexts that deviate from orthodox worker–employer relationships. In particular, he points to an important group of studies which have examined the organisation of production in non-capitalistic environments, specifically workers’ cooperatives and worker control under state socialism. Atzeni and Ghigliani (2007), for example, examined decision-making processes and work reorganisation in four Argentine factories under workers’ self-management. The study found that because the worker-owned firms were forced to compete in the competitive market, the scope for democratic governance of the firms was significantly limited as power was increasingly centralised with a growing gap between the conceptualisation and execution of work. Cooley (1982) came to broadly similar findings when examining how unionised workers, working with outside experts, developed more socially centred approaches to the work process and the products they produced as an alternative to managerial restructuring. While achievable in the immediate term, the long-term viability of initiatives like the ones outlined here can be undermined by external market pressures or hostile institutional environments that make them generally unsustainable, or undermine democratic processes at work; these were ‘‘islands’ of socialism in a sea of capitalism’ (Martínez Lucio, 2012, p. 39).

A parallel body of scholarship examined workers’ control in socialist economies. This includes work conducted by Burawoy and János Lukács in the Hungarian People’s Republic. Drawing a comparison of the Hungarian sociologist Harazti’s (1977) account of working at the ‘Red Star Tractor Factory’ with his experience at Allied, and his own ethnographic study of a firm referred to as Bánki, Burawoy developed the concept of ‘bureaucratic despotism’. Under this production regime workers had no independent representation as the state, management and the union collaborated to deny workers an autonomous organising capability, closing off space for struggles over the organisation or production (Burawoy & Lukács, 1992).

Other studies, notably in Yugoslavia, documented a serious engagement with workers’ control under ‘self-managed’ socialism. Warner (1975) surveyed the sociological literature on workers’ control in Yugoslavia and found that while there had been a genuine experiment in democratic governance of firms, participation in these initiatives was generally concentrated among highly qualified workers and party members. Significantly for this discussion, he concluded that the available evidence suggested that in pursuit of more democratic workplaces interested parties should build on structures which ‘have historical roots, and which have some continuity’ (Warner, 1975, p. 72) in the relevant society. Here, Warner suggests shop stewards’ committees and workers’ control movements in places like the United Kingdom (UK) which had achieved a level of industrial democracy through militant shopfloor activities represent a viable, achievable model of workers pushing back the frontier of managerial control (see Beynon, 1973; Coates, 2003).

Another strand of analysis has focused on formal partnerships between unions and management in the workplace in the process of work reorganisation. For example, a series of studies examined the wave of formal union–management partnerships in the UK in the 2000s. While some positive outcomes for labour were identified in areas such as shaping work reoragnisation in workers’ interests (Geary & Trif, 2011), authors have generally observed that partnership carries significant distributional and political risks for unions (Jenkins, 2007, 2008; Martínez Lucio & Stuart, 2005). One frequently observed drawback of expanding the scope of union influence into these areas through collaborative partnership arrangements is that it may necessarily involve submitting to managerial (and capitalistic) logics (Richardson et al., 2005). Other studies point out that managers – even when well intentioned – may struggle to deliver on their side of the bargain as local initiatives can frequently be undermined by distant shareholder decisions under increasingly financialised capitalism (Thompson, 2003, 2013). It is worth noting that labour process scholars were deeply critical of the viability of formal labour–management partnerships as a viable long term approach to humanising work long before the advent of ‘financialisation’ (see Harley et al., 2005 for an overview). However, the ‘disconnected capitalism’ thesis outlined by Thompson highlights the importance of workers’ movements developing a deep understanding of evolving business models, strategies and key decision makers when developing ambitious campaigns for things such as greater worker control (Juravich, 2007).

Winning Real Utopias at the Point of Production

Multiple recent studies have examined how workers can collectively organise for control at the point of production using conflictual strategies. Taylor and Bain’s (2001) highly cited paper examined how differentiated trade union strategies towards new managerial technologies resulted in different outcomes for workers in the British banking sector. The paper concluded that trade union success in call centre organising depended in ‘no small measure on their ability to contest and redefine the frontiers of control on terms desired by their members’ (Taylor & Bain, 2001, p. 63). In an action research study, Murphy and Cullinane (2021) examined changes to the labour process for British bank workers under new performance management processes. These scholars worked with workers and their union in the development of a strategy to push back against a new system of performance management. The authors concluded that while unions can acceept the introduction of new managerial control techniques in exchange for compensation in other areas, they can also ‘try to prise open bargaining agendas that extend their influence on these innovations’ (Murphy & Cullinane, 2021, p. 288). These studies, and others in a similar vein (Beynon, 1973; Danford, 2005; Dupuis, 2025; Stewart & Martínez Lucio, 1998), demonstrate that militant union organising at the point of production can represent a viable and achievable path to the significant mitigation of the managerial domination of workers – or real workplace utopias.

In an example of an in-depth discussion of trade union strategy for a wider audience from a labour process perspective, Vidal (2022a, 2022b) argues that unions can engage with and shape the application of lean production techniques with a view to building more democratic workplaces. He contends that many of the technologies and systems developed under capitalism have the potential to be applied in more humanistic ways. Importantly, he suggests that organising workers around matters of work organisation and technological change represents a potential pathway to rejuvenated union structures in the workplace. ‘The path to union renewal and worker control entails fighting for co-management of lean production as part of a broader campaign for workplace democracy’ (Vidal, 2022a, p. 32). Vidal’s (2022a, 2022b) intervention stands out in part because the labour process literature has only occasionally overlapped with discussions of union organising and trade union rejuvenation. This is somewhat counter-intuitive as scholars have frequently drawn on the historical knowledge of radical organisers in the early 20th century for models of structure building (e.g. McAlevy, 2016) yet tend to elide the central role the demand for workers’ control of the labour process played in these struggles (see Hinton, 1973; Stephan-Norris & Zeitlan, 2002). The link between worker control, union organising and workplace structure building, in the vein of Vidal’s (2022a, 2022b) discussion, is suggestive of a potential avenue to a more public labour process scholarship through engagement with unions around these questions.

Of course, not all union efforts to reshape the organisation of work in the interests of workers are successful, and can be limited by both union capacity and structural constraints. Studies have identified a range of failed union initiatives caused by a lack of coordinated campaigns (e.g. Thompson & Bannon, 1985), lateness in the deployment of interventions (e.g. Wilkinson, 1983) and more general union weakness or absence (e.g. Bilsland & Cumbers, 2018). Labour process studies examining efforts to organise precarious workers for greater security, some drawing directly on Burawoy (see Paret, 2024), paint a mixed picture of the viability of such campaigns. By linking the organisation of production to contingent demand for labour (Jankowski, 2024), studies have examined union-led efforts to reorganise production to make precarious workers indispensable to the work process, for example through advocating for the upskilling of workers and industrial recognition of those skills (Nicholson et al., forthcoming). However, other research has demonstrated that even workers whose specialised skills are essential to the production process may be forced into precarity, undermining union organising efforts (Dor & Runciman, 2022). This body of work nonetheless highlights some possibility for worker collective action within structural constraints.

There are obvious limitations to how much work can be organised in the interests of workers in the context of a broader institutional environment geared towards the private accumulation of capital through the extraction of surplus value. It is argued here, however, that the labour process literature is peppered with a set of empirical examples which represent viable and achievable alternatives to the prevailing view of a fixed or impregnable frontier of managerial control over how workers spend their working lives. Rather than grand institutional shifts which, while they may be technically viable, are likely beyond the power of most workers to achieve at the present conjuncture, the literature around worker organising for control at the point of production is indicative of how labour process scholars could pivot to a more public sociology, engaging with workers and their organisations to articulate viable and achievable ‘real utopias’. Without doing so, labour process analysis will likely continue cataloguing managerial control techniques in the ‘absence of any alternative debate’, effectively ‘mirroring the agendas of management’ (Martínez Lucio, 2010, p. 115); or as Burawoy (2005a) argued, the sociology of work will continue to ‘mirror the world it wishe[s] to conquer’ (p. 313).

Public Sociology and the Renewal of Labour Process Analysis

The world of work is changing significantly, and the impacts of this change will, at least in part, be dictated by how changes in the organisation of work, including the implementation of new technologies and changes associated with the climate crisis, are negotiated at the point of production. A significant body of labour process scholarship has demonstrated that, under capitalism, a great number of workers are denied any meaningful say over how disruptions like these will shape the future of their working lives. In other words, the issue of worker subordination to the dictates of their employers will necessarily remain a central preoccupation for sociologists of work. Here, labour process analysis continues to provide us with deep insights into evolving managerial control techniques, and how the relationship of managerial domination of workers is reproduced at the point of production.

This article has argued, however, that this analysis has generally remained cloistered in academia while its empirical ground has generally been dictated by the initiatives of employers and managers. Labour process theory has maintained ‘an implicit shared ethic of being on the side of labour’ (Thompson & Pitts, 2023, p. 182). But as demonstrated above, despite this implicit bias in favour of workers in their struggles with management at the point of production, much of this literature has marched to the beat of management’s drum without developing an alternative conversation around how workers might challenge the frontier of managerial control (Martínez Lucio, 2010).

This article has pointed to a sometimes-latent tradition of more public sociology within the sociology of work examining the achievability and viability of real utopias at the point of production. This indicative literature contains both empirical and methodological insights into how a more public labour process analysis could be achieved. Drawing on this strand of research, this paper argues for a deepening of partisan scholarship through action research (Murphy & Cullinane, 2021; Thomas & Turnbull, 2021) and engagement with unions on strategic questions around organising workers for workplace control (Vidal, 2022a, 2022b). Contributions in this vein prefigure how a more public labour process scholarship can contribute to building achievable, viable alternatives to managerial domination in the vein of Wright’s ‘real utopias’. Through this engagement labour process analysis can grow beyond its critical and professional sociological roots, and branch out into a more public orientation, thus bringing together the two major conceptual and theoretical strands of Burawoy’s scholarship.

By way of finishing, it is worth noting that Burawoy frequently argued that public sociology has much to offer critical and professional sociology. He pointed out how it can prevent professional sociology from becoming purely self-referential and critical sociology from becoming dogmatic. In other words, a strict demarcation between developing sociological understanding and organic engagement with workers’ organisations and their struggles neglects what such engagement can offer the sociological process. In this sense Burawoy echoes Hyman’s (1971) argument when he pointed out that many of the major advancements in labour sociology have been made by those who have been actively engaged in trade union politics, rather than by detached observers. This, he suggested, stemmed from the narrow focus of many academic studies on matters of ‘immediate managerial concern’ while more politically engaged sociologists ‘of necessity confronted the theoretical problems’ (Hyman, 1971, p. 3) posed by workers’ efforts to reshape the workplace in their interests. Deep engagement with workers and their struggles thus point to a path for scholarship that takes labour process analysis beyond mirroring the agendas of management and towards the articulation of ‘real utopias’ in which workers can mitigate or even begin to transcend managerial domination.