Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labour Process Under Monopoly Capitalism

Since the 1930s, industrial sociologists have tried to answer the question, Why
do workers not work harder? Michael Burawoy spent ten months as a machine operator
in a Chicago factory trying to answer different but equally important questions:
Why do workers work as hard as they do? Why do workers routinely consent to their
own exploitation?

'Manufacturing Consent' is unique among studies of this kind because Burawoy
has been able to analyze his own experiences in relation to those of Donald Roy,
who studied the same factory thirty years earlier. Burawoy traces the technical,
political, and ideological changes in factory life to the transformations of the
market relations of the plant (it is now part of a multinational corporation)
and to broader movements, since World War II, in industrial relations.