Marx in Management and Organisation Studies: Rethinking Value, Labour and Class Struggles

149 Pages·2022·1.632 MB·English

by  Frederick Harry Pitts

Marx in Management and
Organisation Studies
This book introduces new approaches that deploy concepts from Marx’s
critique of political economy to renew the study of labour, value and social
antagonisms in the broad area of management and organisation studies.
Exploring established and emergent strands of Marxian theorising
inside and outside management and organisation studies, it delves into,
beyond and behind the ‘hidden abode’ of production to examine a range
of issues including the relationship between the workplace and the market;
the relationship between conflicts at work and wider social and political
movements; the role of class, gender and race in capitalist society; and the
interconnection of work and labour with the environmental crisis.
The book will be of interest for academics, postgraduate students and
researchers interested in radical perspectives on work, organisation and
economic life. Representing both a critical introduction to existing theories
and a theoretical contribution to the development of the field of study in
its own right, it condenses challenging ideas into a short, readable volume
without losing their complexity or sophistication.
Frederick Harry Pitts is Senior Lecturer in Work, Employment, Organisa-
tion and Public Policy at University of Bristol, UK.
Routledge Focus on Business and Management
The fields of business and management have grown exponentially as areas
of research and education. This growth presents challenges for readers
trying to keep up with the latest important insights. Routledge Focus on
Business and Management presents small books on big topics and how they
intersect with the world of business research.
Individually, each title in the series provides coverage of a key academic
topic, whilst collectively, the series forms a comprehensive collection across
the business disciplines.
Organizations and Complex Adaptive Systems
Masha Fidanboy
Managing Complexity in Healthcare
Lesley Kuhn and Kieran Le Plastrier
Work Organizational Reforms and Employment Relations in the
Automotive Industry
American Employment Relations in Transition
Kenichi Shinohara
Qualitative Management Research in Context
Data Collection, Interpretation and Narrative
Bruno Américo, Stewart Clegg, César Tureta (eds.)
Marx in Management and Organisation Studies
Rethinking Value, Labour and Class Struggles
Frederick Harry Pitts
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Focus-on-Business-and-Management/book-series/FBM
‘Value has long remained absent or at best marginal in critically oriented
organisation studies. In this timely book, Frederick Harry Pitts argues that
we cannot avoid addressing this notion to confront the current multiple crises
of capitalism. He then guides us into recovering Marx’s critique of political
economy to grasp how objects, people and relations acquire worth (or not)
under capitalism. This exciting journey into valorisation, class composition,
metabolic rift and social reproduction sets up a renewed intellectual and
political agenda that no organisational scholar committed to struggles for
change should miss’.
Patrizia Zanoni, Professor and Chair in Organisation Studies,
Utrecht School of Governance, the Netherlands

Marx in Management and
Organisation Studies
Rethinking Value, Labour and
Class Struggles
Frederick Harry Pitts
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2023 Frederick Harry Pitts
The right of Frederick Harry Pitts to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
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registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pitts, Frederick Harry, author.
Title: Marx in management and organisation studies : rethinking value,
labour and class struggles / Frederick Harry Pitts.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series:
Routledge focus on business and management | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022017302 (print) | LCCN 2022017303 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032057248 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032057262 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003198895 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Marxian economics. | Value. | Labor. | Organization. |
Management.
Classification: LCC HB97.5 .P5128 2023 (print) | LCC HB97.5 (ebook) |
DDC 335.4—dc23/eng/20220602
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022017302
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022017303
ISBN: 978-1-032-05724-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-05726-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-19889-5 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003198895
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
1 Introduction: From critical management studies to
the critique of political economy 1
2 Into the hidden abode: From the labour process to
the valorisation process 20
3 Beyond the hidden abode: From class composition to
the crisis of value 48
4 Behind the hidden abode: From primitive accumulation
to the metabolic rift 82
5 Conclusion: From the politics of value to the politics
of work 115
Index 134

1 Introduction
From critical management studies to
the critique of political economy

Introduction
Crises throw into stark relief the underpinning material and economic
dynamics driving capitalist society—including, today, that of value as the
category through which worth is placed on people, things and activities. The
question posed in this book is to what extent Marx’s critique of political
economy (CoPE), and in particular Marxian value theory, can help man-
agement and organisation studies comprehend and critique these dynamics.
Much of the work on the chapters that follow was completed prior to the
upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequently, in the context
of the COVID-19 crisis—itself in effect a continuation of the long period
of market and political turmoil that began in 2008—there was an increas-
ing interest in the topic of value and the different objective and subjective
processes that articulate its relationship with production and organisations
within and beyond the workplace.
This extends to the commanding heights of Western capitalism. At the
tail end of 2020, the former governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney,
delivered the British Broadcasting Corporation’s prestigious Reith Lec-
tures.1 As the world endured the continuing consequences of the COVID-19
pandemic, Carney chose a topic that to a general audience might have
seemed somewhat obscure: theories of value. The lectures, subsequently
published as a popular book, criticised mainstream neoclassical theories of
value based on the subjective appraisal of the utility of different goods,
services, government priorities and forms of expenditure.2 These subjective
approaches, Carney argued, see value as relative, not absolute, resting in the
eye of the beholder and expressed via the medium of market price.
He suggested that such a concept of value had driven poor public policy,
causing or exacerbating the key crises of our time. Undervaluation of care
work and underinvestment in health services constrained the response to
the COVID-19 pandemic. The valuation of increased economic growth
DOI: 10.4324/9781003198895-1