Worker Resistance and Taylorism in Britain

In: International review of social history, Volume 42, Issue 1, p. 1-24

Abstract

SummaryWorker resistance and employer conservatism in Britain are said to have combined to retard British economic development and frustrate the emergence of modern managerial structures based on Taylorism and/or Fordism. However, the notion of worker resistance is a deeply unsatisfactory one because it fails to distinguish different forms of resistance and their implications for the labour process. And if British employers were slow to abandon older tools and techniques, they nevertheless did so. Worker resistance secured better terms and conditions of employment but was incapable of altering in any fundamental way the new methods of organizing work and managing production.