ABSTRACT

While the shift from craftsmanship to modern factories increased productivity thanks to wide-scale production, it also introduced the concept of control of the labor process. From past to present, labor control regimes have changed in line with the social, political and economic characteristics of every era. However, the control of the capitalistic labor process within the context of certain purposes is a continuous phenomenon. Today, the control of the labor process is rather expressed by the term “workplace monitoring”. The current practice, however, systematizes the monitoring phenomenon by taking it to the extent of discipline. New production/management models such as Just-in-time JIT and Total Quality Management TQM , stand out with technical aspects such as stockless production, total quality control, zero defects and productivity. Accordingly, to achieve these results, they create a hegemonic control procedure in the labor process. The JIT/TQM regime, whose objective is to adapt the organization of the production process to the instant changes in the market, includes, to a great extent, the ‘market despotism’ mentality. On the other hand, the entry of computer automatization in the production processes, despite increasing productivity, is building up managers’ despotic control on the labor process. In this article, while the rising technological control in the JIT/TQM regime will be examined within the context of despotic labor regimes, corporate culture perspective will be dealt with within the context of hegemonic labor regimes. Therefore it will be scrutinized how the labor supervision regimes whose route is from despotism to hegemony, take form of ‘hegemonic despotism’ within the production/management processes that have been adapted to current market conditions.