Slavery

Conceptual Overview

International conventions define the following practices as forms of slavery, according to Bales: loss of free will, appropriation of labor power, and violence or the threat of violence. Bales also distinguished in 1999 between new slavery, in the contemporary world, and old slavery, for example in the 19th-century Americas. The received, but false, logic through which slavery, old and new, is placed outside the boundaries of modern and postmodern organization studies has three interrelated components. The first is the identification of slave-worked organizations as outside the boundaries of modern and late capitalism. For old slavery, this is buttressed by a periodicization as ancient or premodern; for new, its apparent location within the unmodernized developing world. In both cases, this exclusion is sustained by the absence of wage labor. Wage labor is a defining feature of capitalism, so slave organizations are by definition outside it. Second, slavery is excluded from organization studies because of its apparent lack of organizational sophistication. The supposed reliance on coercion and force is assumed to be the only managerial technique needed, a reflection of an absence of organizational complexity. Third, associated with this, there is an apparent absence of organizational hierarchy, and particularly of a managerial cadre undertaking managerial activities.

Accounts of both old and new slavery provide evidence that contradict this three-point logic. On the first, the exclusion of slavery from modernity, Cooke in 2003 pointed to the scale, scope, and central economic significance of antebellum slavery in the United States and its embeddedness within what was even then a global and modern economy. He showed how historians of Atlantic slavery argued for slavery's inclusion within modern capitalism and proved its relation to modern organizational forms and processes. Bales does a similar job for new slavery. He points to the exploitation of slave labor at various stages of global supply chain and provides examples of slave organizations as components of apparently modern economies, including those in the First World. Cases include the people trafficking associated with First and Third World prostitution and with cheap labor in agriculture and in manufacturing. He also shows how slave-worked organizations—for example brothels in Thailand—are held by ostensibly respectable business interests as part of a portfolio of companies. Bales also takes the argument further, making the point that irrespective of whether slavery is or is not part of economic modernity, it is part of the [Page 1419]modern—that is, contemporary—world, and as such its opposition is a moral requirement.

The second point, the apparent lack of organizational sophistication in slavery, fails to recognize the complexity required in organizing slavery per se—in recruiting people into slavery, in forcing them to remain enslaved, in exploiting their labor power for profit, in transporting and marketing enslaved people. Again, in both old and new slavery it is clear that violence, force, coercion, and the threat thereof, combined particularly in new slavery with financial bondage, play an important part in managing the slave labor process. But at the same time there is evidence of a complementary managerial sophistication in organizing slave work, the unpaid expropriation of the labor power of enslaved people, not least in the face of their various attempts to resist the conditions of their oppression. In the present day, this includes the maintenance of institutional and organizational structures and accounting methodologies that ensure continued financial bondage, and the deniability of slavery further along supply chains. Cooke goes so far as to argue that modern modes of organizing now associated with Taylorism and with classical management theory—for example attention to division of labor, clear hierarchies, span of control, and so on—were developed in the United States on slave plantations. These practices were documented in journals on slave management, in which the terms managing and management were specifically and unequivocally used, right up to the late 1850s.

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