Kodak Man 1: ‘So have you figured out a way to work the wheel in?

Kodak Man 2: ‘We know it’s hard, because wheels aren’t really seen as exciting technology, even though they are the original’.

Don Draper: ‘Well, technology is a glittering lure, but there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash. If they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in-house at a fur company. This old-pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is ‘new’. Creates an itch. Put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. We also talked about a deeper bond with the product. Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent…

[Projects slides of his children, his wife and himself eating on holiday, a shot of his wife pregnant.]

… Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a space ship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel. It’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Round and round and back home again. To a place where we know we are loved.’

‘The carousel, a time machine, something that takes us to a place where we know we are loved’. These are evocative themes. And Draper’s is a beguiling, seductive performance designed to play on the emotions – the sentimentality – the private memories and desires – of the client.

There is more to say about the scene. It conforms to a particular idea of the creative process in advertising as resting on the insights of unique, gifted individuals and also sets into play the idea of the ‘creative pitch’ as a drama of revelation and the sanctifying of a selling idea. It also suggests that what ad men and their agencies do is to forge connections between material objects and cultural values and ideals. In Draper’s pitch, he is not selling the product per se, but what it can contribute to – in this case, the generation of memories. And he uses a powerful fantasy of private life, of family life, to invoke a set of tender feelings. In doing so, Draper draws upon his own biography and literally the raw material of his own life – the pictures of his wife and family. What is so telling about these images – and this is evident from their context in the wider series narrative – is that they represent a powerful form of wish-fulfilment and evasion on Draper’s part. This is, after all, the man who is a serial adulterer, seeking to relocate himself in the mythology of the ‘happy family’, to use the power of fantasy to negate the more messy reality of his private life and sexual adventures. There is no easily available, positive public narrative for the complexities of his life, so he falls back upon the allure of idealized, conjugal matrimony.

Draper’s subjectivity, and the drama of the advertising pitch, offers some broader clues as to the role played by advertising agencies. I want to use the scene to draw out further insights into the conceptualizing of advertising. In particular, I want to use the scene to test the value of conceptualizing advertising as a ‘market device’. This is an idea associated with the French sociologist, Michel Callon. Capturing the range of market devices – generated from both the supply and demand sides of the market – is central to Callon’s project to produce ‘ethnographies of socio-technical devices’ (see Callon et al., 2002; Callon and Muniesa, 2005; Callon et al., 2007).

Advertising as a Market Device
What are the implications of Callon’s arguments for understanding advertising? I think we can draw on Callon’s work in a number of ways. Firstly, his account of the ‘qualification of goods’, the process which helps to establish and fix the characteristics of goods so that they can circulate gives a large role to what Callon calls the ‘professionals of qualification’. Advertising practitioners fit squarely into this category, along with designers and other market professionals. They are certainly involved, in Callon’s terms, in the associated process of disentangling goods from the world of producers and attempting to entangle them in the world of consumers. In the scene from Mad Men, Draper effectively helps to ‘qualify’ Kodak’s new piece of technology, shifting it from its representation as ‘the wheel’ to the carousel. This shifts its meaning and helps to fix a new set of association around the product.

Developing this argument about qualification and entanglement further, we can see that advertising agencies use a number of different forms of expertise and technologies to perform this role. One device is market research. Market research enables agencies to generate knowledge of the world of consumers; to produce what Miller and Rose (1997) call an immense ‘cartography of consumption’. That is, a map of consumer’ habits, rituals and subjective investments in the world of goods. The knowledge of consumers generated by market research enables agencies to find ways of forging connections between the goods which they are advertising and the practices of consumers. It helps agencies to ‘make-up’ or ‘mobilize’ consumers – to use Miller & Rose’s evocative terminology. In the 1950s and 60s advertising agencies were drawn to deploy a set of psychological knowledge to understand consumer motivations. This knowledge offered new and inventive ways of forging connections between consumers and goods. One of the most celebrated practitioners of this new kind of market research was Ernest Dichter. Dichter deployed in-depth interviews with consumers in order to understand the symbolic meaning of goods and the deeper psychological needs they might serve. His Freudian approach not only introduced a thicker idea of human subjectivity into market research. It also worked to segment consumers less by social class or sex or age (though these categories were often still part of his consumer research), than by psychological disposition.

Dichter’s conception of the psychology of consumers was informed by his own highly positive view of consumer society. He saw the whole process of market research as therapeutic for the consumer and not only useful for the selling of goods. In fact, Dichter was driven by a wholly positive conception of the private pleasures of consumption and saw his work as contributing to the unblocking of feelings of guilt about consumption within the population that derived from the puritan culture of self-restraint. Dichter argued that the central aim of advertising was to give the customer the permission to ‘enjoy his life freely’ and ‘to demonstrate that he is right in surrounding himself with products that enrich his life and give him pleasure’ (Nixon, forthcoming).

This process of mobilizing the consumer, however, also involves other technologies – specifically, the technologies of print culture, poster, TV, cinema and on-line media to reach consumers. It is evident that these are historically specific and contingent means for entangling consumers – with their own histories and genres of representation and they seek to engage consumers and enter their worlds in different ways. What constitutes advertising as a particular kind of market device or assemblage of devices, then, will vary with the media technologies, bodies of expertise and styles of representation that are deployed. This set of market devices, however, is designed to both shape the ‘qualification’ of goods and to mobilise or entangle the consumer.

There is a final theme in Callon’s work which we can usefully draw on to understand the practices of advertising. This is the broad notion of ‘agencement’, a hybrid device combining human and non-human elements. This means that agency within the business of advertising – such as that pursued by Don Draper in the ‘creative pitch’ with Kodak – depends upon a set of material and technical supports. As Liz McFall has put it in describing the development and presentation of advertising ideas, the genesis of a campaign depends upon ‘materials, tools, equipment and organisational settings’. In Draper’s case, it is the office space of Stirling Cooper and the slide projector itself which enable him to realize the communication of his ideas. Draper’s brilliant pitch is not from this perspective, simply the product of a gifted individual, but reliant upon these technical elements.

And yet the assemblage of Draper and a set of technical devices should not blind us to the fact that who Draper is – his capacities and social formation – does matter. The subjective aspects of Draper are not sufficiently well caught by Callon’s approach. The minimalist conception of the human material upon which social processes work found in Callon’s ANT approach resists the possibility that there might be deeper subjective processes at work. And surely, as the fictional instance of Don Draper illustrates, subjective process and desires animate and inform social practice. Human beings project a set of feelings onto the objective world – including the world of goods – and these material objects in turn are set in a realm of human relationships with all their complex psychological dynamics. It is not that this focus on deeper subjective processes fully accounts for the work of cultural production which goes on in advertising or that we should reduce the study of advertising to the subjectivity of its key practitioners. Rather, it is about the articulation between subjectivity, the social trajectories and social formation of individuals and the socio-technical devices that we need to grasp – rather than seeking to privilege one conception or approach to advertising over another.

References
1. Callon, M. and F. Muniesa (2005) ‘Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices’ Organization Studies 26(8): 1229–1250.
2. Callon, M., C. Meadel & V. Rabeharisoa (2002) ‘The Economy of Qualities’ Economy and Society 31(2): 194–217.
3. Callon, M., Y. Millo & F. Muniesa (eds.) (2007) Market Devices, Oxford: Blackwell.
4. Miller, P. and N. Rose (1997) ‘Mobilising the Consumer’, Theory, Culture & Society 14(1): 1–36.
5. Nixon, S. (forthcoming) Hard Sell: Advertising, Affluence and Trans-Atlantic Relations circa 1951–69, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

The photographs in the presentation are extracts from the two works I made. One, “Every Night The Same” reflected the experience of having the same dream, night after night, and the experience of seeing only a part of a place as big as a university: however long I work there, it’s never graspable. I can capture only a glimpse. What I see is repeated, though not replicated elsewhere, in the straight lines of buildings, and blinds, and crushed cardboard. These images were shot on my Canon F1, 50mm lens using Kodak black and white film, 3200iso at ankle height, 13th Feb 2011.

The second work, “Actual Occasions”, used Impossible Project film for a polaroid camera. Polaroid doesn’t make film for its cameras any more, and so Impossible have tried to work out how. They haven’t quite got it right, and so the photos are unstable, full of light leaks and odd shadows. That suits this project admirably, as the properties of the things that are shot are not stable. “Actual Occasions” is taken from Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, which seems to me to argue that events and objects are not fixed and immutable but create moments of time and space, which are then experienced by other actual occasions. These other occasions involve a recurrence of experiences, times and spaces. Objects therefore, have something of a life themselves.

A few other images are present in this slideshow, and they’re interspersed with dreams recorded by staff and students at the university. Even the most nightmarish dream sounds funny written down, and it’s not surprising that many dreams are about work.

Thanks to Michael Halewood for the commission and the curation.

More interesting though are the subtle manifestations of work within the lifeworlds of the people I studied, all British, all playing something loosely describable as ‘Americana’. The project became a photographic one, and in a minute I’ll write a few words about the daftness and delights of exploring the work of a musician using a silent medium. In the meantime, take a look at the clothes worn in the photos below. Style inspiration from Tom Joad: checked shirts aplenty, bought from Top Man or Urban Outfitters in imitation of a homespun Americana, this ‘plaid’ workwear was previously worn by a class of white agricultural workers who’ve since disappeared. The echoes are still seen and heard in the backrooms of pubs and on the small stages of provincial theatres, and have been for some years. Nowadays such check shirts, with their connotations of hard, masculine, manual labour can be seen on the backs of all sorts of folk, not just the musicians. But the Americana revival in Britain has played a role in this fashion, and is tied in with a notional claim to authenticity whereby the aesthetics of clothing suit the aesthetics of the sound.

But you can’t see the sound. Plaid shirts are one of the clues as to what you might imagine the sound is, assuming you have any sense of what Americana might sound like (and if not, there are plenty of recommendations on http://www.americana-uk.com).

(Click on image to see full photograph with analytic notes).

I started taking the photos in order to see differently the forms of work that made up performance: unloading, setting up, sound checking, and the transformation of the body needed to go from hefting amps to winning the attention of an audience. The first shots were in colour, the second and subsequent ones in black and white. Black and white seemed more fitting, given how in using photography (not video, not sound recording) I’d already removed enormous amounts of sense-data anyway. Reduction is the aim of most social research – take the complexity of the social world and make it manageable. Removing colour, movement and sound leaves the focus on the bodies at work, how they move, how they are held. So I built four sets of images of performances, all to focus attention on the body as it works on stage.

“Silence and immobility underpin the authority of the photography” suggests Lury (1998: 173). But I think she’s wrong. It’s impossible not to notice the silence here, and this is destabilising as it makes clear the utter partiality of what a photograph can ever claim to represent. Like all forms of social research, using photography as a way of gathering data and analysing the world produces only a small story of a sort of truth. Any reminder of the partiality of any representation is an important and useful form of humility. Noticing what is missing matters as much as remarking on what is there. And thinking about what might be there in addition to what can be seen is more than a parlour game, it is an act of imagination.

Reference

Lury, C. (1998) Prosthetic Culture: Photography, memory and identity. London: Routledge.

First, there are the nets. The tuna are effectively trapped in an elaborate series of nets, known as a tonnara, anchored at sea. Taken out of their winter storage, the nets must be repaired and arranged ready to be put in position. If the whole process of tuna-fishing is a very male dominated one, women are nevertheless involved in the making and mending of the nets (van Ginkel, 2005). Although the details of the sizes of the sections are tightly guarded secrets, the pieces are numerous: 1,812 in Favignana, calculates Theresa Maggio (1990: 112). Getting this ‘unseen architecture’ (Maggio, 1990: 129) in place at sea is not at all straightforward. Each section of the nets must be secured, which means using anchors that are themselves as heavy as the tuna.

In the model of the tonnara at the Museo Civico di Carolforte in the images above, the nets form a T-shape (seen here on its side). The length of the T (in the large photo on the left) is the section the tuna first encounter which impedes their forward movement. As a result they are channelled towards a series of ‘rooms’ (along the top of the T) until they reach the camera delle morte, the death chamber (shown photographed from above in the bottom right image). The ‘rooms’ that the nets create need to be large (up to 100meters long) so the tuna can move easily, which they must do to be able to breathe and continue to reproduce. Work on the nets doesn’t end when they are in place; they have to be maintained. The adult tuna that are coming up against them are large (more than 100kilos), strong and fast. And there’s the work of counting the number of tuna trapped too — through glass-bottomed buckets, or by the feel of vibrations on a line dropped into the different rooms (Longo, 2009: 143) — until the rais, the head fisherman, decides the time is right…

It’s hard to overstate the significance and status of the rais in this world. He has near-total authority, retains his title and is given ongoing respect into retirement (and beyond the grave, with headstones marked, ‘rais’). He has a profound understanding of the sea and of the tonnara. Indeed, all the tonarotti (the tuna fishers) are highly skilled mariners, learning what to do through a kind of apprenticeship system, and although there is a strong formal hierarchy and division of labour, in practice, the men turn their hands to many aspects of the work (Longo, 2009: 127). It is a highly labour-intensive process, a total bodily and sensory experience of work, and one they talk about in terms of dignity and gratification, as well as hard work (Longo, 2009: 148).

When the rais gives the signal, the tonnarotti gather in specially designed boats around the edge of the camera delle morte. This final chamber differs from the others as it also has ‘floor’. This means that the net can be raised, bringing the tuna closer to the surface. That is when the slaughter of the increasingly tired tuna takes place. It relies on the close cooperation of the tonarotti who kill the fish in a ritualised way (van Ginkel, 2005: 73), accompanied by traditional songs and prayers, and using hooks, gaffs and knives, as in the images here, one old (taken from the website of Isola di Piana), one more recent (taken from Italia a Tavola).

Although it has been criticised by environmental movements, and in spite of the fact that the blue-fin tuna is an endangered species, killing tuna in this way has not been widely contested, in comparison with the whale drive for instance, with which it has a lot in common. In the latter, animal rights have come to trump traditional practices associated with ‘cultural rights’ in public debate (van Ginkel, 2005). Trapping tuna is thought to be one of the oldest forms of industrial fishing still in existence, originally an Arab practice, and at least 1200 years old. Once found all across the Mediterranean, there are now just a few tonnare still in operation. In these cases, people still work and live from the catch. When it is good, as it was last year on the Isola di San Pietro we were told, life improves for everyone. As one of the tonarotti in Theresa Maggio’s study of Favignana explains:

‘You do it because it’s survival. You do it to live. Or you don’t choose this life. You become a banker. It’s not for the violence. It’s not something I do for pleasure, or to please others. It’s survival’ (Maggio, 1990: 127).

Whether or not it’s cruel, the quantity of tuna caught in this way is tiny compared to the industrial scale and methods of fishing: long lines of up to 50 miles, and purse-seines that can catch thousands, even tens of thousands of fish at once. In contrast to the traditional practices, this is highly capital intensive, and the catch needs to be enormous for profits to be maintained (Longo, 2009: 169). However, these methods also catch younger tuna, including those of pre-spawning age, with the effect of hugely depleting stocks into the future. It is the apparent insatiability of the Japanese market that makes fishing them in this way so profitable, at least in the short-term, albeit with the risk of total collapse in the Mediterranean (Longo, 2009). If a fish of less than 30 kilos is amongst those in the traps off the coast of the Isola di San Pietro, it is freed. Most of those killed are mature adult fish in excess of 100 kilos.

Once the tuna is caught, there is other work to do still. Although nowadays a large share of the tuna is sent directly to Japan, some is still gutted, cooked and tinned, and the roe dried in Sardinia. The canning factory no longer exists on the island, but the museum houses a delightful model made by local school children of how the factory — and occupational community — was believed to have been organised in the late 19th century. Fish larger than the people working on them are seen to be gutted and cut into pieces (by men) and cooked (by women). And, today, as then, the roe of the tuna continues to be dried locally by traditional methods to make bottarga.

After the final mattanza of the season, the work of anchoring the nets in place has to be undone. They must be packed away for next year when the process begins all over again…

References
1. Longo, Stefano B (2009) Global Sushi, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Oregon.
2. Maggio, T (2000) Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily, Perseus Publishing.
3. van Ginkel, Rob (2005) ‘Killing Giants of the Sea: Contentious Heritage and the Politics of Culture’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 15(1): 71–98.

I’d been told on a previous visit (at the wrong time to see any fish) that there are different rhythms to the fishing: the smallest boats come in at around 6.30pm and the larger ones which fish at night arrive back before dawn. ‘Are you arriving or leaving?’ I ask a man on a boat with a light on and the engine chugging. ‘Stiamo per partire. We’re just off,’ he replies. But there’s time for a chat.

I’m getting used to the topics and tone of these exchanges. There’s a tension in the air as the boat is readied for departure in the dark, and the weather, which is mild and calm for now, is an ever-present and unpredictable companion. They take the small boat. It’s just one of so many different judgements to be made, even before they set off. The boat is exposed and has just enough room for the two fishermen and a decent haul. ‘We don’t have higher-level qualifications,’ the skipper says, ‘but there’s a lot of skill in all this.’ He talks about the nets and how to manage them, the boat’s instruments and how to interpret them, and of course how to read the weather and decide when it’s time to return to shore, and how to manage the crew in times of danger and ensure everyone gets back safely. Then there’s the difficulty of getting a good price for what you’ve caught, even to get people to appreciate the difference between fish caught like this and those that are farmed or imported. It’s a hard way to make a living, and a dying tradition, he says.

‘What time will you be back in the morning?’ I ask
‘At 4.30 or 5am,’ he replies.
‘I’ll try and come.’
‘Do you struggle to get up early then?’ He’s casually making a distinction between us.
‘In somma…’

Another fisherman who’s not going out that night but who’s hanging around the docks says: ‘I’ll probably be around too. I can’t sleep on land.’

I resolve to make an effort. With an early night, I can manage an early start, I think. I set the alarm for just after 4…

Thursday, 2 December
It takes until nearly half past 4 to drag myself from the bed but I’m back at the docks by 10 to 5. The boats are already in.

‘We came back at 4’, the skipper I was talking to last night explains, ‘I didn’t like what the weather was doing.’ They’re washing octopus, squid, sole, prawns, and the odd scorfano (scorpion fish) on board, then packing them into open polystyrene boxes and lifting them ashore. The sale has already been arranged, and there’s a man waiting. He produces a set of scales from his van, and there’s some mumbled negotiation.

‘So what now?’ I ask the skipper. ‘Is your working day done?’
‘For now’, he replies. His mate will clean the boat. ‘Do you want some sole?’
‘Sure!’ I get given what feels like 2 or 3 kilos. ‘Thank you!’
‘When there’s enough, we can give some away.’
‘So when do you next go out?’
‘Friday,’ he says.
‘Maybe see you Saturday morning then, but a bit earlier I think!’

I go home and back to bed, starting the day again a couple of hours later – a day in which I know I’ll have a good dinner!

Saturday, 4 December
It was pretty windy last night and I wonder if there will have been much fishing. But I decide to get up and go and see anyway. This turns out to be the coldest – and earliest – morning I’ve known since I’ve been here. 5 degrees, a street sign tells me, at 4.30am. I don’t see the boat from earlier in the week but there’s another, larger one just in.

‘How was the night?’ I ask.
‘Fredda. Cold.’
‘How much colder is it at sea?’
‘Un bel po. Quite a bit.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Vicino. Tempo brutto. Close by. Bad weather.’

The man I am talking to looks and sounds exhausted. It was a rough night after at the end of a long week. And the catch was small. It takes less than 5 minutes to load it into the waiting van for it to be taken to the wholesale market.

I’m about to head home when I notice there’s a caffè open on the Via Roma opposite the docks. I go in and order a caffè latte.

‘Do you always open a 5am?’ I ask.
‘No, at 4.30,’ replies a very professional-looking barrista.
‘My goodness, that is an early start every day,’ I remark.
‘You get used to it,’ he smiles.

I drink a perfect coffee then go home, gratefully, and back to bed.

The space at San Benedetto is clearly structured, with solid marble counters and displays arranged in aisles and around the edges of the hall. The floor is very clean and dry, unusually so for a fish market. (For a contrasting account of London’s fish market, see A Day’s Work at Billingsgate.) There is a large variety of Mediterranean fish but to my surprise, some Atlantic fish too, such as sole or salmon. There was local sole too, if a little smaller. It was quite literally still flapping around on the counter. No need to check the eyes to assess the freshness of that! There’s a distinction between sellers of shellfish, wet fish, smoked, and frozen which I assume is part of the regulatory structure (and is common in other places too). There’s quite a range from large to small fish, from what’s considered to be prestigious to the ordinary: swordfish, tuna, bream, bass, gurnard, mullet, mackerel and much more. The shellfish includes local prawns, arselle (a type of clam found locally), small green crabs, the occasional lobster, mussels, and a kind of snail. Plus bottarga of course, the dried roe of mullet (or tuna), something Sardinia is famous for, ground to add to spaghetti, or bought whole then cut into small pieces and dressed with oil and lemon as an antipasto.

When I asked where specific fish came from, I was not only told that something was ‘Sarda’ but that it was caught off a particular stretch of coast at Villasimius or Cagliari for example. There’s a code that’s used uniformly in the displays that explains not only the country of provenance of the fish, but also whether it was caught at sea or farmed. Last week at a smaller market in Cagliari, I bought a local octopus and a squid from the Atlantic, probably near South Africa the fishmonger said, but brought in by air and on ice (but not frozen). (I didn’t ask the ‘where did it come from’ question until afterwards and hadn’t yet worked out the code…) I’m interested in the ‘length’ of the socio-economic process that brings fish from sea to table but hadn’t expected to see the produce of both such a short and a long one literally alongside one another in my local market…

Instead of taking pictures on my first visit to the main market at San Benedetto (it would have felt intrusive and I wanted to just look first), I decided to do a short (one minute) recording while walking around which you can listen to here: san benedetto 1 oct 2010. The recording highlights the presence of three distinct layers of sound that it’s hard to distinguish between when hearing them in real time (Makagon and Neumann, 2008). There is a low murmur of people talking, a collective sound in which it’s not possible to identify specific exchanges. There are knives being sharpened, a high-pitched screech that conjures up the image of a large blade. And there are the fishmongers making their sales pitches, playfully at times, and as much for the amusement of their peers as in an attempt to gain custom it seems. Indeed, humour is an integral part of the life of the market (Porcu, 2005). ‘Venga che imbroglio anche a lei!’ one exclaims provocatively. Come on so I can rip you off too!

There’s already a great selection of photographs of the fish market, the fishmongers and customers here (most of the first half are of the fish section, the rest of other parts of the market). And for close-ups of the fish, click here. And I expect I’ll be writing more about all this after my next visit…

References
1. Makagon, D and M Neumann (2008) Recording Culture: Audio Documentary and the Ethnographic Experience. London: Sage.
2. Porcu, L (2005) ‘Fishy business: Humour in a Sardinian fish Market’, Humour 18(1): 69–102.

I saw the wooden posts photographed in these pictures on a recent visit to Lowestoft (on the east coast of the UK) to research the history of fishing there. They looked strange but established on a small stretch of land between the sea and the main road, in the area north of the town known as The Denes, and I wondered what they could possibly be. A trip to the Lowestoft and East Suffolk Maritime Heritage Museum explained a lot. They were used to dry nets at the end of the fishing season as a damp net would rot in storage. There were hundreds of drifters when fishing was at its peak in Lowestoft, once one of the most significant fishing ports in Britain in terms of the number of boats and the size of the catch. And the nets they used could be a mile or two long. So getting them dry was no mean feat.

Once I knew what they were used for, they seemed very evocative of work that no longer exists, and I tried to imagine what it must have taken in terms of time, the number of people (entire families no doubt), and sheer effort to move the nets and arrange them effectively, as in the (undated) black and white image from Malcolm R White’s website. In the background of the bottom right-hand side image, from 2010, is the Bird’s Eye frozen food factory, a modern counterpart to the centuries-long tradition of fishing in Lowestoft, and part of a wind farm, both very different markers of work in the landscape.

Since then, it’s fair to say that Sheppey has struggled. Although new industry has been established, Sheppey ranks highly on ‘indices of deprivation’ (health, poverty etc). It was hit badly in the 1980s recession, and the situation is mixed today. The steel mill remains a significant employer, as do the three prisons, but the local economy is now dominated by the import business – of cars and fresh produce. Overall, the picture is volatile with a high percentage of people employed in relatively vulnerable industries. Educational attainment is well below the average for the South East. And life expectancy is several years lower in some parts of Sheppey than it is in other areas in the borough of Swale and the South East more widely.

When Ray Pahl carried out research on Sheppey in the late 1970s and 1980s – published in what became a seminal sociological text, Divisions of Labour (1984) – he drew attention to social polarisation between households. Some combinations of work (paid and unpaid, formal and informal) allowed people to ‘get by’ effectively; others did not. There is ongoing concern that current developments (e.g. housing rather than jobs-led regeneration) may further reinforce social divisions across Sheppey.

The Living and Working on Sheppey project explores the recent history and changes in working lives on Sheppey in the last decades of the 20^th Century and into the 21^st. The project, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England through its South East Coastal Communities Programme, is a combination of new research and secondary analysis of Pahl’s earlier data. A first strand is based on interviews conducted by local people with older members of the community about their memories of Blue Town (Sheerness) and the naval dockyard before its closure in 1960 and their experiences of changing times since. A second strand invited young people about to leave school to write essays in which they imagine what their futures will hold in terms of work and family life, a repetition of an exercise undertaken by Pahl 30 years ago.

A montage of Blue Town High Street by TEA

The project team includes Dawn Lyon, Peter Hatton, Tim Strangleman, and Clive Arundell (University of Kent), Graham Crow (University of Southampton), Jenny Hurkett and Alice Young (Blue Town Heritage Centre), the UK Data Archive, the artists group TEA, and Ray Pahl as consultant. The contribution of the artists group TEA is the creation of a short film of a ‘walk’ along Blue Town High Street based on a model constructed from archives, the ‘reality’ in 2010, and imagination — a montage of past, present, and future (as in the image above).

A workshop on Saturday 12 June 2010 at the Blue Town Heritage Centre will present the work of the project and invite comment and discussion about it. This event is free of charge but places are limited and registration is required. Anyone interested in attending – or if you would like any other information about the project – please contact Alice Young, Project Coordinator, Blue Town Heritage Centre, 69 High Street, Blue Town, Sheerness, Kent ME12 1RW; telephone: 01795 662981; email: seccproject@hotmail.com.

References

Pahl, R.E. (1984) Divisions of Labour, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

I think I started to understand women and work a little better when in 2004 I went to visit the Women’s Library in east London with my partner – it’s in a lovely building in Old Castle St, E1 (a converted wash-house, I’ve just found out) in a backstreet within sight and sound of the City, but definitely not on the main drag. A location that seems unpleasantly appropriate, given the cultural hostility to women in the UK financial industries – reading Linda McDowell’s Capital Culture is one of the most disturbing introductions to gendered discrimination or inequality in that milieu. All business school students should read it… anyway, I like that the library is within reach of everyone working in the Gherkin and the other various glass and steel phallic symbols around there.

Being in the library is a lovely sensory experience – quiet, calm, pleasant. (I’m thinking here ‘the way libraries used to be’ but that makes me sound old and grumpy.) In any event, a very nice place for thinking. The impression from reading pieces on this website is that academics interested in the experience of work never switch off their brains — Dawn Lyon in a B&B quizzing an innocent hotel inspector about his work, Lynne Pettinger getting lost and starting to think about work and sound,Tim Strangleman walking around galleries thinking about organizational death. The experience I had in the library that day was similar.

The exhibition was a corker — called Office Politics: Women in the Workplace 1860–2004, it was a brilliantly put together mixture of furniture (with desks designed specifically to ensure women’s modesty and protect men’s marriages – as an antidote, this is good fun: http://www.linux.otherspace.co.uk/officepolitics/), antique office machinery, clothes, self-help books, all sorts of stuff to position women in relation to work, organization, men. So much stuff I didn’t know about. And also, a little paper timeline with key events marked over the 150 year period. One event and date stood out for me – 1961, Barclays removes the marriage bar.

You’ve probably heard of the marriage bar, but I hadn’t. Turns out there used to be a formal rule in lots of organizations that women had to leave on getting married. No question, no debate, no exceptions — marry and you have to go. And the year when the board of Barclays decided this wasn’t really a good idea — 1961 – just 2 years before my mum got married, not long before I was born. Well within living memory. In some organizations you could come back as a temporary employee without any benefits or security (‘Thank you sir!’), but for most the bar was a barrier that couldn’t be jumped or worked around. The Foreign Office was especially reluctant to remove it, waiting until the Sex Discrimination Act in the early 1970s sort of outlawed its implementation. Hmm.

So, marry and go do some domestic and reproductive labour, or stay single and you can stay in your job. With a colleague from Exeter, Emma Jeanes, I started to do some digging in the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, an archive that’s been called a ‘structure of feeling’ rather than a systematic dataset. One diary lodged there, written between 1938 and 1944, tells a wonderful story of a woman working in the civil service. She fell in love with a married man, became pregnant, and told her boss – who promptly asked for her resignation under the marriage bar rules. This woman, who must have been very sparky, refused, on the reasonable basis that she wasn’t married but pregnant, and there was no rule about pregnant women having to leave. Rational argument for a bureaucratic setting! She kept her job, gave birth to twins, and continued to work for the Civil Service, by all accounts doing a very good job (in both spheres of life, work and family – her children are currently editing her diaries for publication, when they can find time — they’re both senior academics, at Imperial College and Oxford). Another diarist, who stayed single and therefore kept her job, was brave enough to call herself a ‘Feminist’ (with a capital F) in her workplace in 1940s Glasgow. (Weirdly, this diarist lived at the top of the hill my mother was born at the bottom of – strange feeling to read her diary, as she describes sitting on the bus going past my granny’s house.) I really like this woman, from reading her diary, because she prods her colleagues all the time about their views on women and work – making trouble, causing conflict, challenging, then writing it all up. She would have made a good academic or researcher. Her brother did, from what she says – he worked at Glasgow University, first in the engineering faculty, then as an industrial psychologist of all things. Whereas his sister seems to have spent her working life as a clerk, writing wonderful diaries and being a Feminist. 

We’re not entirely sure where this research is heading, but it does feel like it’s taking us into interesting areas empirically and theoretically. We’re finding that women writing about their experience of work responded to the marriage bar in very different ways. Some argued for it, telling workmates that it was unethical for a woman to ‘take a man’s job’ when she didn’t need to earn independently; others were strongly opposed, wanting to maintain financial and social independence from husbands. The women report very different responses from their male colleagues, from extremely conservative to relatively radical. Above all, reading the diaries has given us a healthy respect for the variety of human experience and response to regulation. In short, as ever, we’re finding that a societal and organizational desire to impose a norm, to create a divide according to biological sex, was continually contested, circumvented, and undermined.

We’re on the lookout now for people who actually had to leave work because they got married. So if you know of any friends or relatives with this experience who would be willing to tell their stories, please contact either me or Emma Jeanes.