Page 172 - Mediterranea-ricerche storiche, n. 48, aprile 2020flip

172 Roberto Rossi

and to extract labour power from inmates. In outlining the two hospices
history, the research relies on the focus of labour process theory, more
precisely that the organisation and performance of work involves a basic
conflict of interest between capital and labour. Such conflict was
regulated through an organisational growth and technological change
that produced a technical control of the labour process . At this stage,
1
the managing of work was typified and dominated by new technical
processes based on accountability which imposed more systematic and
regular work activity. In this way, workers performances were
systematically measured while discipline became more structured .
2
The poor asylums and workhouses have been usually studied as tools
of the disciplinary society generated by enlightenment and development of
capitalism. For this reason the foucauldian approach is the main
theoretical apparatus to understand and deepen the organization and
structure of such disciplinary bodies. Furthermore, poor and work houses
are also work places where work and capital interact. Work becomes the
principal instrument of modelling “extra-social bodies” (poor, vagrants,
insane, orphans, etc.) to the requisites of enlightened society and new
mode of production based on a different organisation of time and space.
This means that beyond the idea of disciplining in order to make the
“others” accountable and acceptable by the society, it is important to
consider the role played by the capitalist mode of production.
The research will focus on the labour process theory, specifically that the
organisation and performance of work involves a conflict of interest between
capital and labour while create value extracted by capitalist . The idea is to
3
test the theory not with an entrepreneurial case but with a hybrid case
signified by two charities. The workhouses could represent a peculiar
example of work extraction and organization outside typical capitalist
institutions, providing clues to support the thesis that different models of
capitalism may exist. The starting hypothesis is that government – which
played a dominant role in XVIII century economic development – represents
capital and legally expropriated work from convicts. Capital and labour – and
consequently convicts and state – shared a wide number of relationships;
between these the central one was their employment. Such relationship
disclosed the dynamic of antagonism characteristic to all extraction of labour
effort from labour power (the capacity of workers to produce).

1 P.S. Adler, The future of critical management studies: A Paleo-Marxist critique of
Labour Process Theory, «Organization Studies», vol. 28, n. 9, 2007, pp. 1313-1345.
2 «Simple managerial control is increasingly replaced by bureaucratic control to
coordinate production activities that are larger in scale and denser in interdipendance»,
ivi, p. 1325.
3 P. Thompson, Adler’s Theory of the Capitalist labour Process: A Pale(o) Imitation, ivi,
pp. 1359-1368.

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XVII - Aprile 2020
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)