Deskilling and changing structures of control1

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Abstract
Braverman’s concept of deskilling has four dimensions: first, the process whereby the shop-floor worker loses the right to design and plan work (that is, the divorce of planning from working); second, the fragmentation of work into meaningless segments; third, the redistribution of tasks among unskilled and semi-skilled labour, associated with labour cheapening; fourth, the transformation of work organization from the craft system to modern, Taylorized forms of labour control. All these processes are linked; however, in this chapter I will focus primarily on the fourth and will examine the structures of shop-floor control in late nineteenth-century British industry and the slow transition to a semi-bureaucratized labour process.

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