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Abstract

The article explores the system of management control and worker compliance in a unionized industrial workplace. In a four-year participant observer study, the researcher found workplace rules to be an ambiguous framework within which supervisors negotiated or enforced compliance. The findings supported criticisms that Braverman underestimated the impact of worker resistance upon strategies of workplace control and the problems of direct control. Coercion still played an important indirect role in management control, suggesting limits to Burawoy's generalization that U.S. workers no longer feel the "whip of the market." Workers' compliance was pragmatic, based upon existing power relations. Possibilities for change are discussed.

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Rules and Compliance in the New York Subways

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