Thoma, Dimitra; (2004) Teachers labour process : proletarianisation and the Greek case. Doctoral thesis , Institute of Education, University of London.

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Abstract

The focus of the thesis is teachers' labour process in upper secondary education in Greece, as this is structured by the introduction of prescribed and standardized curricula. At the centre of our theoretical approach lies the Marxian theory of labour process and its development of the proletarianisation thesis.The theoretical approach, that is adopted by this study, is a critical approach to the labour process theory and its proletarianisation thesis. The labour process theory, we argue, studies teachers' labour process by particularly focusing on the introduction of predetermined and standardized curricula which, as is argued, result in teachers' proletarianisation, that is to say teachers' autonomy is restricted and they are not able to exercise any control on their labour process. Our theoretical reservations, as far as the labour theory is concerned, are related to the way teachers' labour process is conceived and understood. More specifically, we argue, that labour process theory does not conceive teachers' labour process as a production process and consequently does not take into consideration the production relations, in and of production. Hence this study argues that teachers' labour process is shaped, apart from the curriculum, by the parameter "students" and to be more concrete, by "students' cultural capital" and habitus towards knowledge. Without taking into consideration and theorizing the factor "students", labour process theory, we argue, is unable to conceive and understand the "production relations", developed in the classroom, namely the relations developed between teachers and curriculum as relations mediated by students' presence. In short labour process theory has a narrow concept of "skill" and "de-skilling". Finally, we argue, as our findings indicate, that proletarianisation should be theorized and conceptualized not as a homogeneous process but should be seen as a process which is characterized by variations in its modalities, in relation to particular sociohistorical conjunctures.

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