Goodbye to Supervisors
Liberal theories of post-industrial society and Marxist theories of the labour process tend to converge in their respective accounts of the place of supervisors in relation to putative changes in the organisation of work. A common conjecture is that supervisors are progressively being denuded of their powers and functions within industry. This paper uses data from a national sample survey of Britain to discuss the substance of the supervisory role in modern capitalist enterprises. The conclusion reached is that direct supervision in the workplace is not obviously in decline. The data also raise issues about the categories of employment status used in official statistics as well as those of the Goldthorpe class schema.