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Apprenticeship and De-skilling in Britain, 1850–1914*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

William Knox
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The publication of Harry Braverman's seminal study – Labor and Monopoiy Capital (1974) – marked a turning-point for labour and social historians. Since then they have increasingly concerned themselves with the nature of the labour process in industrial capitalism. Central to this concern has been the debate on de-skilling and the destruction of craft control over the labour process and its subordination to the needs of capital. Braverman has been heavily criticised for the one-sidedness and simplicity of his account of this development. Among the weaknesses identified in Labor and Monopoly Capital is the omission of any mention of class struggle, or worker resistance to technical change; the failure to grasp how de-skilling can be mediated and, therefore, modified through labour, market and product particularisms; the lack of a detailed analysis of the transformation of formal to real subordination (in the Marxist sense) of labour to capital – the process seems to occur automatically; and, the failure to realise how formally skilled workers can continue to occupy a privileged position in the workforce through either the mechanism of custom, or by their strategic placing in the production process, or both.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , August 1986 , pp. 166 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1986

Footnotes

*

Much of this article is based on my unpublished Ph.D. thesis, “British Apprenticeship, 1800–1914” (Edinburgh University, 1980). I would like to thank Andy MacDonald. Bob Morris and Christopher Smout for their helpful advice and perceptive comments on previous drafts of this paper. They, of course, bear no responsibility for the content.

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31 Ibid., pp. 59–60. This presents a rather different picture of the employers to the altruistic one painted by Joyce, “Labour Capital and Compromise”, loc. cit., and More, Skill and the English Working Class, pp. 151–52.

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