Craftsmanship and Skill

Mayo, Gender and the Rise of Psychological Justice

Abstract

How would Braverman respond to a contradiction in the present, where deskilling continues to happen along with an intensified attachment to work? This essay probes this by examining the craftsman. The idealization of craftsmanship had two implications for Braverman’s critique. First, it led to an underestimation of Mayoism. Like other contemporaries, Braverman suggested that management’s turn to therapy had merely created inauthentic forms of workplace harmony. However, what is significant about Elton Mayo is not his success but failure: for it is with Mayo’s failure that management innovated towards inducing more “authentic” attachments to work. This marked the rise of psychological justice in work culture that was missed due to a second issue: a lack of attention to gender politics. Abstracting the craftsperson from women’s culture, Braverman missed how management steadily replaced love for wages—a characteristic core to women’s work. Both lapses illustrate the substitution of psychological for structural justice in the present, a subject that needs invigorated attention if class consciousness is to be politicized.