Oral Presentation by Leon Höfer¹, Daniel Roose¹, Thomas Höge¹, Severin Hornung¹
¹ Universität Innsbruck, Austria
TIME: Tuesday, 14 July, 10:30 – 12:00
LOCATION: Room 3
Session: 3
Abstract
This paper proposes a re-examination of Labour Process Theory (LPT) and German Critical Psychology (GCP) sensu Holzkamp through a relational perspective. Classical LPT, especially in the tradition of Braverman, conceptualizes the capitalist labour process as a structurally antagonistic relation between capital and labour, mediated by ownership, control, and the managerial imperative to transform labour power into labour. While this perspective remains indispensable for understanding workplace control, it has been criticized for insufficiently theorizing the standpoint of the acting subject. To address this limitation, the paper suggests 1) supplementing LPT with GCP, particularly its concept of Handlungsfähigkeit – understood here as the socially mediated capacity-to-act – and 2) employing a relational perspective: both LPT and GCP share a Marxist foundation and can be connected through their common focus on social relations between humans, objects, and institutions. Drawing on the concept of modes of relating (Adamczak), the paper argues that capitalist management practices do not merely regulate individual workers, but organize specific forms of relations between workers, management, co-workers, customers, technologies, tasks, time, or the self. This argument is developed through the example of key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are interpreted not as neutral instruments of measurement, but as mediating devices that reorganize the labour process. They transform direct supervision into datafied accountability, cooperation into comparison, practical judgement into measurable output, and skill into self-monitoring. From an LPT perspective, KPIs can be understood as technologies of control responding to the transformation problem. From the perspective of GCP, they become part of workers’ concrete conditions of action, shaping meanings, constraints, and possibilities for restrictive or generalized capacity-to-act. The paper therefore argues that a relational perspective offers a productive way of bringing LPT and GCP into dialogue in the analysis of capitalist management practices. The example of KPIs demonstrates how this perspective can be used to examine how such practices mediate concrete modes of relating within the labour process, while simultaneously structuring workers’ subjective possibilities for action.