Law, Institutions, and Labor Control

This chapter offers a synthesis of historical institutionalism and historical materialism in a top-down approach to analyze the place of the law in labor control regimes. The aim is to develop a macro framework for the analysis of capitalist institutions that fits with the bottom-up perspective of labor process theory. It makes a case for the materiality of the law, and the ways in which institutional inquiry demonstrates how the embedding of labor control in juridical power. The chapter considers how local contexts were consequential in this process. It concludes by providing an historical development of English master and servant law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the use of the law in Victorian England.

Aesthetics · Control (management) · Economics · Historical materialism · Law and economics · Management · Marxist philosophy · Materiality (auditing) · Perspective (graphical) · Political science · Power (physics) · Servant · Sociology · Engineering · Labor Movements and Unions · Law · Philosophy · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Political Economy and Marxism