CHAPTER 1
Technology and the Social Integration of the Working Class
When England, Germany, the United States, Japan, and the Soviet Union industrialized, they created large classes of factory workers who proved to be difficult to manage. No matter which elite directed industrialization, factory workers were poorly paid (economically exploited) because surplus capital was needed to build more, larger, and more sophisticated factories. Factory managers tried to legitimate their policies in the name of human nature (greed), religious virtue, state glory, or, ironically, a Utopian future for the workers themselves. These attempts were not permanently effective because workers resorted to sabotage, slowdown, strikes, and even revolution to get a larger return from their efforts. In these situations, management's political formula was to make just enough concessions to assure loyalty to the system. But the system has usually been turbulent. Consequently, managers, political leaders, and social scientists have been haunted by the question of whether factory workers would strike out for themselves or whether they would continue to go along with the system.
If the social sciences have agreed on anything, it is that the social cement of traditional societies has been eroded for good or ill by changes emanating from the factory system. Optimists like Marx and Durkheim believed that technological change would eventually produce a new society which would integrate workers into it, but Weber thought that bureaucratic and rational revolutions would reduce societal solidarity. Though divided on the future, theorists have agreed that the shift to industrial society was especially painful for the working class. Hundreds of scholars have commented on the disorganized, segmented, anomic, alienated lives of industrial workers. Like their medieval predecessors, modern scholastics argue endlessly about what these terms "really" mean.
A strong subjective humanist orientation pervades much of the literature on industrial change because social scientists are ambivalent about machines and the factory system. While they applaud the material benefits of the machine age, they deplore the fact that somebody has to tend the machines. Most social scientists, with a simplistic view of the factory as represented by the automobile assembly line, chant a seemingly endless litany on how machines alienate workers from their work, work-groups, societies, and even themselves. The chanting seems inspired by hopes that workers will galvanize their unions to launch political movements which will alter not only factory life but the entire political economy. The spread of industrialism to "underdeveloped" countries is seen as creating an even vaster pool of alienated workers who will join Western workers to bring about a more just world civilization.
While few can argue the need to improve factory life and the desirability for greater equality in income and power in society, little is gained by substituting ideology for empirical studies. Most social scientists have a mushy view of modern technology and how workers respond to it. Either they see technology in Chaplinesque terms as a man (never a woman) so tied to a machine that he cannot make an independent move or they see it as a global ooze enveloping everyone and everything in its path. But modern technology is enormously complex, and human responses to it are just as complex. Even in mass-production industry, industrial employees are not mass men or women. The concept of a mass citizen denies workers their dignity, stereotypes their behavior, and fails to take into account their changing responses to change. In short, I am skeptical of dominant social science views of how technology affects workers' lives, and I shall reexamine these views in a cross-national context.
Three assumptions underlie the research. First, workers are not socially homogeneous before they enter the factory; second, factory technology has variable effects on the social life of the worker in the plant; third, different backgrounds and technological relations of workers produce different participation profiles in the community. In the industrial sector of any society, the most important socialization variables are the educational and occupational backgrounds of the workers. In the factory, the most important factor differentiating social life is the occupational skill of the worker. In the community, the most important differentiating factor is organizational participation. The task of this research is to examine how social background, skill, and community ties relate to each other in the social life of workers in countries which differ in industrialization. Several important questions will be studied.
How great are the stratal differences among workers prior to factory employment and do they change with increasing industrialization of the country?
Does the technology of the factory (in terms of its effects on workgroup formation) undermine or strengthen stratal differences among workers in different countries?
How do different technological relations affect the worker's involvement in the union and do different political ideologies affect this involvement?
How do different work-group and union relationships affect worker participation in the neighborhood, community, and nation?
Does increasing industrialization solidify or stratify the organizational lives of workers inside and outside the factory? What are the implications for working-class social movements?
These important and complex questions cannot be answered by a single study. I have therefore tried to simplify the attack on these questions by studying a single technology which is highly standardized (automobile) but found in countries varying in industrialization. Variation in the technology is assured by selecting in all four plants occupations with different skill demands: assemblers, operators of semi-automatic machines, inspectors and related occupations, and skilled-craft workers. To consider whether technology has an effect independent of its broader industrial milieu, I chose countries with varying levels of industrialization: India, Argentina, Italy, and the United States. A wide range of social systems are examined: family, work group, union, friendship networks, neighborhood, community, and the nation. Finally, I reduced problems of interpretation by accepting what workers say about themselves rather than the views of their self-appointed spokesmen.
Three Approaches to the Study of Industrialization
Technology is the application of nonhuman energy for human purposes. Machines constitute the main nonhuman energy converters in industrial society, but to think only of machines as technology is too simple. In an advanced industry such as automobile manufacturing, many different machines are linked into a vast occupational/organizational system which constitutes the plants' technology; each machine requires particular occupational skills, and the linking of the machines requires a certain type of factory organization. The ecology of the factory (machine placement), its management organization, occupational structure, informal organization, union organization, and many other features make sense only in terms of a particular technological system, but this system does not bear down on all workers alike. My task is to unravel the complicated ways the technological system affects worker behavior and the various ways workers respond to it inside and outside the factory. Although this is an ancient social science question, the industrialization of nonwestern countries today calls for a reexamination of old explanations.
Historians once agreed that, before the advent of the machine revolution, societies were highly integrated, but population surpluses in the countryside and high demand for factory workers stimulated long-term migration to the city. As the economic basis of traditional societies was eroded by new market dependencies, the stratification systems of both rural and urban communities changed. In the city, an occupationally based class system arose, at the bottom of which were factory employees, the so-called working class. This class suffered most from social change because it was cut adrift from its rural heritage and urban institutions had not yet evolved to handle such problems as unemployment, disease, bad housing, and family breakdown. In response to many pressures, urban organizations (welfare, health, education) arose to meet some of the most pressing problems. Factory workers were slow to organize permanent mutual aid organizations to look after their interests. But as they gained experience in how to handle conflict with management, they formed labor unions. Later recognizing that only limited gains could be achieved by collective bargaining, unions tried to expand working class influence by forming separate labor parties or political bodies. Although labor became a part of the political community, it rarely made major economic decisions, and technological change continued to affect it. Today, many industrial workers feel that they cannot shape their work nor influence the main institutions of society (Bauman, 1972). But the aristocracy of labor feels satisfied with its work and societal arrangements.
After World War II, when many new nations launched programs of industrial development, social scientists saw an opportunity to test ideas concerning the way an emerging working class responds to industrial growth. Some expected European experiences to be repeated elsewhere, but this did not typically happen. Today, no completely satisfactory theory of industrialization exists, but three theoretical frames of reference guide most of the research. The "cultural" heavily influenced by anthropology, emphasizes that invading industry must accommodate to traditional cultural patterns; the "industrialism" hypothesis predicts a quick societal accommodation to industry everywhere; and the "development" or evolutionary frame of reference emphasizes that a limited number of institutional responses are possible at different levels of industrialization. The industrialism and development perspectives both stress the independent power of industry to force societal changes, but the development perspective places more emphasis on the different adaptations which societies make at various stages of industrialization. This study generally follows the development perspective, borrows heavily from the industrialism hypothesis, and occasionally relies on the cultural approach to explain specific events.
Before describing and evaluating each theoretical perspective, we may reasonably ask what differences it makes whether one follows one rather than another. Using the issue of the development of a working-class social movement as an illustration, the cultural perspective is conservative; it stresses that social movements will fit traditional power relationships. In Japan, for example, enterprise unionism is a response consonant with the paternalistic patterns in industry which flow from a persistence of feudal relations between owners and employees. An independent working-class movement is unlikely to appear. The industrialism perspective is more radical. It emphasizes the inevitability of conflict between managers and employees whatever the earlier stratification system and the present political economy. Unless suppressed by a totalitarian government, a working-class movement appears quickly. Japanese, American, and Indian unions, according to this view, are more alike than different because they are basically concerned about the distribution of power in the factory and in the society. The development perspective stresses that certain conditions in society must develop before a working-class movement is possible. When present, aggressive politically oriented unions can lead the movement. But if they do that, a separate working-class movement may not emerge as workers become immersed in a system of pluralistic politics. Each theoretical perspective will be described and evaluated.
Culturologists hold that indigenous cultures can block industrial invasion, but if they do not, they force industry to accommodate to traditional institutions. Few social scientists follow this view rigidly, but those who do recognize that cultures may vary in their ability to resist industrialism, but everywhere industry must make some accommodations to local culture. Workers do not become disciplined and committed employees overnight, and many political, religious, and other elites resist Western practices and bend industrial systems to harmonize with their interests and values (Nash, 1958; Kriesberg, 1963). Japan is often cited as a society which forced the factory system to accommodate to its feudal institutions (Abegglen, 1959). Bennett and Ishino (1963: 343) point out that, though paternalism is often practiced in factories of societies at early stages of industrialization, the pattern differs among Latin American, Japanese, and other societies. In Japan, a Active hierarchical kin ideology defines the relations between supervisors and workers, while in Latin America the patron system is carried over in the factory. Okochi et al. (1974) point out that Japan is the only advanced industrial society whose stratification system is based on traditional status relationships and not upon an occupational hierarchy. The cultural perspective is often espoused by social scientists who are area specialists or experts in the social organization of particular tribes, peoples, or regions (cf. Nakane, 1970).
In its extreme form, the cultural perspective is of little utility because it denies the possibility of making transcultural generalizations, a position I cannot accept. The waning of tribal cultures, the passing of peasant societies all over the world, and the spread of the factory system makes the cultural perspective hard to defend. While documentation of how individual factories adapt to local cultures in the early phase of industrialization is valuable ethnographic data, many scientists want to generalize before all the data are in. Yet the cultural approach is needed to meet some problems. In this study some interview questions were modified in each nation to take into account unique cultural meanings. The neighborhood idea presumably does not exist in India. Yet I was interested in local urban relationships, so a conceptual equivalent for the neighborhood had to be found (cf. Straus, 1969). In Argentina, the involvement of workers in the union had to be interpreted in the context of Peronism in the labor movement. In short, culturally relevant data were needed in all countries to interpret some findings.
The industrialism approach is generally known as the Industrial Man hypothesis, a designation I reject because of its sexist bias. Incidentally, in all four countries no women were employed in the departments I studied, an interesting cross-national instance of sex stratification. Kerr and his associates (1960) first elaborated an institutional expression of the industrialism hypothesis, and Inkeles (1960) elaborated its social psychological expression. In both views, the introduction of the factory everywhere shatters traditional institutions and changes workers' perspectives of the world. In the Marxist tradition, both hold that the factory system produces uniform material products, similar institutions, and common human responses. Kerr and his associates note that the organization of the factory is similar everywhere, especially for the same industry. For example, variation in the organization of a steel mill with a given technology is very limited. Moreover, all societies must build institutions that accommodate to the factory: workers must be trained for new jobs, employment bureaus must gather job-market information, organizations must handle mass unemployment and retirement problems, and agencies must settle disputes between labor and management. While the organizational forms devised to provide these services may vary from one society to another, they are limited in number. Labor disputes which inevitably arise must be handled either by a factory department, a labor-management body, or a government bureau. Finally, the factory system exerts powerful secondary effects on social organizations not directly tied to it, such as family, market, stratification system, neighborhood, community, and government. This dynamic industrial pattern (factory system, associated organizations, and societal accommodations) will spread and eventually produce a single world society.
