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.

In light of this, and my own interest in sound, I began to consider the aurality of our working lives. There is a disparate literature exploring the relationship between music at work, either through music as a cultural aide, as seen in Nissley et al’s (2002) study of company songs, or the role of music in the domination – or subversion – of workspace (e.g. Lanza, 2004; Korczynski and Jones, 2006). However, music is ‘tamed sound’, often intrinsically linked to some form of production (Attali, 2006), and has been created and packaged prior to contributing to one’s sonic environment. In comparison, sound is ‘live’: it can be affected and have an effect the social setting; it is a response and an initiator, improvised or fleeting, imbued with meaning but also transcending a dimension of knowing by having subconscious or other effects at a sensual level. The exciting potentials of exploring these dimensions in relation to work have already been discussed by a few organizational scholars, though published work is rarely found. For example, Corbett (2003) has demonstrated sound and hearing were part of the organizing process as far back as the middle ages, whilst Kociatkiewicz and Kostera (2003: 308) challenge the concept of ‘no sound’ being defined in only negative terms through exploring the role of silence in one IT firm. Such studies not only highlight the inseparability of sound and silence, both being forms of ‘noise’ and reliant on one another, but challenge us to look towards an acoustimology of work.

We only have to reflect on our own experiences to see the potential avenues waiting to be heard. As I write this, I can hear the frantic tapping of my colleague next door (she seems to be far more productive that I am…), the sound of someone in the gents — sometimes, but not always, followed by the sound of water running out of the taps, and the buzz of my faulty lamp that shows little sign of being replaced. Becoming excited about the potential of exploring the aurality of working lives, I decided to ask a number to people to record their day at work. This was met with hesitation: not only did they fear that this might involved some tricky negotiations with their colleagues, but they found the idea of anyone having to listen back to recording of eight or more hours of ‘banal boring blah‘; a form of tedium previously unknown to man. As an alternative, they were asked to record ‘going to work’, setting the recorder running when they started to think about work (for most, as soon as they got up) and switch it off when they decided that they were ‘at work’ (although many chose to leave it running until the digital recording space ran out). After receiving the recording and listening to it over and over, I met up with each of the ‘co-composers’ a number of times where we either listened and discussed the recording together or I asked questions within a more conventional research interaction. Through both aural and qualitative analysis, soundscapes for each ‘going to work’ episode were recorded. Here are two of them: journey to work 1
journey to work 2.

Of course, soundscapes have a long history in research interventions. The work of early pioneers of the exploring sound and the environment, notably R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer and musicologist whose seminal series ‘World Soundscape Project: The Acoustics of the Environment (1971), signalled a new way of thinking about the environment through the medium of music by considering what constituted noise in over 200 communities across the world. Murray argues the ‘acoustic identity’ of people’s daily lives was been taken over by the mass of industrial noise to the detriment of their wellbeing. Cities across the developed world, that have uniqueness in their geography, landscapes, architecture and people are becoming increasingly homogenised aurally, acoustic ‘non-places’, to use Augé’s (1995) term. In order to acknowledge our responsibility within (and to) our sonic environment, Schafer argues we must consider ourselves as the audience, the performer and the composer simultaneously (1977: 205) In order to explore his ideas further, Schafer went on a mission to ‘hear Vancouver’ with an acoustic stroll through the city.

I feel far more attached to my own collection of soundscapes than any other research project. It is tempting (and of course inevitable) that I will have to at some point accompany them with the textual-based analysis that I undertook when composing them, should I wish to extol the virtues of using soundscapes as a medium for exploring working life. However, beyond being a lens through which to explore other phenomena, I have found that the soundscapes have allowed me to not only think about the representation of sound, but the expressive experience of sound, something that now makes me hesitant to erase the noise I encounter in my other research interactions.

References

1. Attali, J. (2006) Noise: The Political Economy of Music, London: University of Minestota Press.
2. Augé, M. (1995) Non-places, introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, London: Verso.
3. Corbett, J.M. (2003) ‘Sound organisation: A brief history of psychosonic management’, Ephemera 3(4): #1
4. Kociatkiewicz, J. and M. Kostera (2003) ‘Shadows of Silence’, Ephemera 3(4): #5.
5. Hopfl, H. (2000) ‘The aesthetic approach in organization studies’, in S. Linstead and H. Höpfl (eds) The Aesthetics of Organization, London: Sage, pp. 13–34
6. Hancock, P. (2003) ‘Beautiful untrue things — Aestheticizing the corporate culture industry’, in A. Carr and P. Hancock (eds) Art and Aesthetics at Work, Basingstoke : Palgrave, pp. 174 — 194
7. Korczynski, M. and Jones, K. (2006) ‘‘Instrumental Music? The Social Origins of Broadcast Music in British Factories, Popular Music, 25(2): 145–164.
8. Lanza, J. (2004) Elevator Music A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening and Other Moodsong. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
9. Nissley, N. S.S. Taylor and O. Butler (2002) ‘The power of organizational song: An organizational discourse an aesthetic expression of organizational culture’, Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science 2(1), pp. 47–62.
10. Schafer, R.M (1977) The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World . Vermont: Rochester.
11. Strati, A. (2000) ‘The aesthetic approach in organization studies’, in S. Linstead and H. Höpfl (eds) The Aesthetics of Organization, London: Sage, pp. 13–34

Women on the Line is often described as a seminal ethnography of 1980s British sociology of work. Its republication in 2009 has attracted considerable interest, especially in the US. How would you describe the reception of the original publication of the book?

The enforced pseudonym and anonymity the first time round meant that I got very little sense of its reception. I couldn’t give any talks or publicise it at all. People wrote to Routledge asking to be put in contact with Ruth Cavendish, and they forwarded everything to me but of course I wasn’t able to reply to anything! Yet for many years afterwards I often met people who knew me, and were familiar with Women on the Line, but were unaware of the connection between us. It kept on happening right up to the appearance of the new edition published under my own name. My sense is that the book was quite widely read both in the UK and abroad, and by feminist and other activists as well as academics over the next few years, especially given the greater interest in studying and campaigning around work during the 1980s.

In terms of ‘method’, although your working at the factory was not intended as research, what do you think about the approach of ‘knowing by doing’ as a way of understanding work, in your case, quite literally working on the line – especially in a context in which the interview has come to dominate qualitative research?

Knowing by doing was certainly crucial, in the sense that my understanding of what was going on in the factory and how it affected the women would have been impossible without experiencing it myself. The ‘doing’ included not only the work itself, but also the numerous interactions with the women around me. The chatting that this involved ranged far wider than what would normally be covered in an interview, and of course I wasn’t determining the course of the conversation either. However, the interpretive ‘knowing’ part of it relied also on my pre-existing knowledge and analytical frames, and all the ‘doing’ was necessarily filtered through and mediated by what was already in my head, and my political preoccupations and questions in doing the job in the first place.

There are more photographs in the republished version of the book than in the original. Can you comment on the place of images in representations of work, and on the relationship between the written and the visual in this book.

I would have liked to include far more photos than the publishers would allow, and in colour. The black and white ones don’t really do justice to the situation and don’t come over nearly as well as the colour ones on the cover. I hope it makes a difference to readers being able to see what some of my work-mates looked like, especially those whose life stories are recounted. Similarly the spatial and physical layout of the shopfloor, and some examples of machinery should help to bring the narrative to life. There are so very few images available of the faces of women doing this kind of work (like the one of Alice who is looking straight at me taking her photo) so the more we can collect the better, especially when the women are engaged in the process rather than being objectified as ‘women workers’. However, these photos were taken during the strike/lockout, so everyone is looking more relaxed and happier than they would have done if they had actually been working!

The covers of the two editions are different. What is the story of them?

Cover of original publication, 1982

I have always disliked the cover of the first edition because it is so misleading. So many of the women came from the Caribbean or Indian subcontinent, yet the picture suggests white women only. The first version was even worse as they were all given long blonde hair. I objected and asked for black or Asian women to be represented. The concession was to give one of them curly hair, but I think she still looks white. Routledge wouldn’t budge further. The portrayal of the line was also misleading showing the women facing it rather than at right angles to it, so contradicting my description of how the spatial layout affected social and physical interaction.

Cover of republication, 2009

So of course I am much happier with the cover of the new edition, which I chose and which uses two of my own photos taken in the factory back in 1977. I was surprised how well the original negatives scanned in especially as it was only a little instamatic camera. In fact these are much better quality than the original prints. So that’s a lesson to keep old negs in a safe place! Now we have older black women on the cover, as well as a very young Irish worker, suggesting the age and ethnic composition, and you can see the line, and all the clutter. The ‘product’ is also clearly visible, and of course this would not have been possible in the 1982 edition.

Roger Barton

He said to call him the day before to confirm. ‘What time should I arrive?’ ‘Between 2 and 2.30.’ He means in the morning. I try to sleep at 9pm and set the alarm for just after 1am. With three layers of clothes, I arrive at the security barrier an hour later. ‘I’m going to work with Roger Barton,’ I say to the guard and we both laugh. I walk up the steps from the car park with the view of Canary Wharf behind – a very different kind of market. I go over to the stand. ‘Ali, give Dawn her coat,’ Roger says within a breath of hello. He turns to the others: ‘Tell her what we’re doing, show her, make her work!’

The so-called ‘new’ Billingsgate market (the site since 1982) is a covered hall with adjacent buildings for additional cold storage, as well as a shellfish boiling room and an ice-making plant! (see: www.billingsgate-market.org.uk.) There are 54 merchants in all, selling from stands organised along three back-to-back rows lengthways with several cross-cutting paths at intervals along them, and from shops around the edges of the hall. There’s nothing but fish and seafood on sale, broadly divided into so-called ‘fresh’ or ‘wet’, exotic, frozen, plus smoked and different kinds of seafood. The floor of the market hall is green and gleaming with water that reflects everything around. There is a whole network of pipes overhead which bring water hoses to the stands. There’s a phone at each stand and plenty of mobiles. In fact, there’s a lot of talking to the world outside. And there’s a lot of moving about. Porters are everywhere, each with their number, either working directly for a stand-holder or ‘freelance’, getting work according to the demands of the day. On the first-floor there are the merchants’ offices, some directly overlooking the market, plus the Clerk and Superintendent’s office, the Fish Merchants Association, inspectors, maintenance, police and first aid, as well as the Seafood Training School which offers courses in fish cookery.

The first thing that’s striking as you enter the market site is the smell, not bad, just there. Even the freshest fish in such quantities smells of something. It’s as if there’s an odour from all the wetness and cold too. At this time, the place is relatively empty, although the two cafes are already doing a good business. Roger tends to set up early, and it can take a small team of people a couple of hours. By the time I’ve moved a few boxes of prawns and look up, there’s already more going on. The activity creeps up on you with cries of ‘mind your legs’, ‘… your legs!’ and the rumble of trolleys. It’s the porters’ space and it’s up to you to get out of the way. I’ve no idea what time it is most of the time I am there. At one point it is still only 4am, at another it is suddenly 7.30.

Everyone works very fast. I know this because I am trying to keep up with them and it’s a struggle. There are a lot of boxes of prawns, at least 7 sizes, all 2 kilos. Some have different coloured labels, sometimes the labels are the same colours but the size is different. You have to read them then put them in the right pile. I find it hard to see where the size is written and keep getting it wrong.

‘Give Mike a hand with the congers,’ Roger says. Yeah, right. 30 kilos a box. I can’t shift them an inch. So someone tells me to lay out the snappers. I start by trying to pick up a 3 kilo fish. By the tail with a hand around its slippery body. ‘Pick the fish up through the eyes,’ I get told. I hesitate for a moment but once I get beyond the idea of it, it’s actually quite easy. You can get a firm grasp though the sockets, the bones are hard there and can take the weight. But only two fish in, I put my bare hand – ‘did you bring gloves?’ Roger had asked like I was supposed to know – into the ice and catch my thumb on the razor sharp gills of the snapper. My coat is no longer white and pristine.

By the time I come back from finding a plaster, the snapper are all laid out and I’m directed to help Jo with the prawns. ‘You need a knife and a marker for this job,’ says Roger. The marker is like a chunky black Pritt stick and the knives are varied. I use the one with the smallest blade and try to imitate the others by making a cross in the plastic packaging which I then tear away. I feel moderately helpful doing this. Then Roger says to take away the rubbish, next to the cold storage area outside. It’s piled on one of the pallets with a hand-held steering device underneath. It’s simple if you know how. I don’t so just pick up an armful of rubbish. ‘Leave it to me,’ someone says immediately. I feel useless again.

There are two clear sections to the stand. One end is run by Billy, Roger’s right-hand man. This is where most of the large fish are – halibut, grouper (brown and spotted), all sorts of snapper, tilapia, red bream, conger eels and salmon. Plus some fish from the Indian Ocean, pomfret and other things I’m not familiar with, such as doctor fish and rabbit fish. At the other end, which faces one of the exits, there’s a big selection of other smaller fish and seafood. That’s where the squid are, and smaller farmed sea bass (10 for £12), plus sardines and all sorts of other things. The effect is of abundance. Between the two is the section with the prawns, then there’s another stretch before Roger’s ‘office’ (a space to write orders underneath the phone) and the ‘till’ (a drawer!). This is my patch for the day.

Everyone sells actively. ‘I want to hear you selling,’ Roger says, ‘not waiting for people to ask you things. So, what’s your pitch?’ Now I’m comfortable, I can do this. There’s a lot of cod, £3 per kilo. ‘I want to see all that gone,’ he says. Then there’s wild sea bass, £12 but I can go down to £10, I’m told. Next to that are chunks of tuna, £12, swordfish, £10, and marlin, £9, all vacuum-packed in clear plastic. In front, there are lobsters, £16. On the side, there’s a pile of razor clams, £5, and along the top, clams, £18 for a 2 kilo box, scallops (out of the shell, £18 for a 1 kilo tub, £29 for a 2 kilo one), dover sole (small, £7, and medium, £12), and packets of crabmeat, £2, and smoked salmon, £5 – but £25 in Harrods as Roger is fond of saying. I write out the prices either on the back of one of the boxes, or on a polystyrene lid as a reminder.

When the customers come, I talk about the eyes and where everything’s caught. I spot the middle-class people and tell them that the sea bass is wild, what a treat it is. I aim the cod at the Londoners, emphasise how it’s a bargain. The quantities are not small. I talk about how you can feed a lot of people with this fish, and realise that I’m saying that more to the tired-looking white middle-aged women and young and middle-aged black women. I emphasise sociality and play on their roles of being a host or provider. None of this is planned, this is what comes out, what I find myself doing when I’m not thinking about it. Of course it’s young and not so young men who want to flirt. Three people say they want to buy me. Yeah right, I reply flatly.

Lots of people seem to buy second time around, after checking out other fish and prices at other stands. A French couple buy the largest Turbot on the stall for £50. Then they come back for 2 kilos of scallops, £29. They know what they want, and don’t treat me as if I might be a source of knowledge. Others do, however. ‘What do you do with those [razor clams]?’ ‘How do you cook a sea bass?’ Now I am really in my element![1] I offer recipes and wise-sounding guidelines: ‘With fish,’ I pronounce, ‘the principle is always not to do too much’, and so on. I am getting into my stride and thoroughly enjoying myself. One man remarks, ‘You’re in the wrong line of work, you should be a TV chef!’ I’ve been laughing at that ever since.

When I think back on the day, I have a strong image of myself swinging a cod! I’m really getting the hang of it after a while and start to be able to feel the weight. ‘This one’s heavy, more than 2 kilos,’ I say to a customer. ‘Yeah, 2.4,’ Roger states after no more than a glance at the fish I’m throwing on the scales. He knows so well through sight and hold over the years he can now bypass the weighing altogether. He’s always right.

I get faster at mental arithmetic quite quickly. The first time something weighs 3.2 kilos I can’t calculate the 0.2. I’m embarrassed by this but own up and Roger gives me a calculator. Then I get the hang of how they round up and down and I more confidently let myself know the price, taking a few moments to check it in my head – or with the calculator if someone is buying several items – while I’m weighing the fish. No one challenges me. In fact, more generally, people treat me like a fishmonger assuming that’s what I do, seeing the role ahead of the person. I’m quite chuffed that I can carry this off, at least to the general public. I’m not selling to other fishmongers, Roger deals with them.

Roger tells me to tidy up at some point as gaps start to appear in the display. ‘Presentation is everything,’ he proclaims after getting out more tuna and swordfish, ‘line those up,’ he says. I do so then repeat the process with the cod and even reach under the stand to rearrange the sea bass. Water drips down my neck. I must smell of fish all through by now. By the end of my shift, the front of my coat and legs are soaked.

It’s gone quiet without me seeing it coming and I’m sorry it’s nearly over. Some of the stands are back to their bare metal frames as some merchants leave as soon as the market officially shuts at 8am. In other places there are large amounts of rubbish and people hosing things down. I’m tired now and a bit frazzled. Roger asks me to count up the money in his drawer, a pile of assorted notes and handfuls of change. At around 9am he says I’ve done enough. ‘So, what are you going to give me for dinner?’ I say. That was the deal. ‘Whatever you want,’ he replies and sounds as if he means it. I end up with 2 large cuttlefish, 4 dover sole, and a kilo of scallops. This feels like a good exchange. I drive home very happy. And grateful that I don’t have to do this every day.

I started taking photos without much of a project in mind at first but soon thought it would be interesting to keep a record of the whole period of the construction. I convinced Colin Samson of the idea and we got into a routine, taking pictures almost every week until Easter, always from the office window and sometimes through the blind. By that point, the structure was starting to emerge. Then we both went on holiday and missed the second floor go on. After that I carried on (Colin had become bored!), taking pictures every couple of weeks or so until I left the University in September 2006. This was before the outside was finished, but fortunately, Lucinda’s Platt’s office was directly above mine at the time and some of the final photos were taken from there by her or by me, the last in February 2007.

I wanted to do something with this but wasn’t sure what. Then when I saw David Hockney’s photo-collages in his exhibition of portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in Autumn 2006, I knew I wanted to make a picture story like them. I love the simultaneity of time and place, for instance, in the moods of competition of The Scrabble Game, and in the gestures of Billy Wilder lighting his cigar.[2]

With some help thinking it all through from Rowena Macaulay, I started putting the pictures together, selecting, cutting, sticking and fiddling about with them. In the end, I made a single large collage composed of several lines of images representing the formation of the building and how it took shape over the time of its construction. The bottom line shows the ground being moved, the next one up is of the laying of the foundations, and above that, the floors gradually appear. As the space gets enclosed, fewer of the building workers are visible in the photos. The building emerges as the product of their work, and at the same time conceals the work which made it.

The original collage can now be seen on the ground floor of the Social Science Building at the University of Essex. The picture of it here in situ has some reflections of the room and the building itself back into it – this wasn’t intentional but I like the sense it creates of the collage as part of the building.

The View from 5A

To finish off the project, I decided (with permission from the UK Data Archive) to photograph the move of the Data Archive into the new building. I spent two days with the removal men, following them around and photographing their trips back and forth across the campus. In the end, they got me to help out. From this I made a series of collages showing the labour of removal, two of which are posted here.

The Move 1

The Move 2

[2] These images can be found online or in various of Hockey’s publications.

I recently co-organised an exhibition work : place exploring the experience of work at the University of Essex. We produced a collective artistic intervention to describes the University on ‘What a Day’, the 18th March 2009. We received almost seventy entries into a competition that asked for an artistic representation of the working day. People submitted photographs, poems, videos and sculptures produced alone or with their colleagues. They are funny, revealing and surprising.

image by Idlan Zakaria

So many occupations are represented at a University; its staff have skills as mechanics, researchers, negotiators, managers, chefs, librarians, administrators. work : place explored how these occupations intersect and co-depend. It made visible the complexity of work in a vast organisation by making visible the employees and how they communicate.

criticising compulsory creativity

One reason for this project was to consider scope for creativity in the contemporary workplace. Whilst universities might well be described as part of the ‘creative industries’, by and large the dominance of a romanticised concept of ‘creativity’ as the act of a free individual (see Toynbee, 2000, ch 2 for a critique), renders creativity as something outside of market or employment relations.

Yet management discourses celebrate and push towards creativity as the hallmark of the successful employee, the value added by the reflexive, self-monitoring worker of the 21st Century: see Bilton (2007) or http://www.creativitycentre.com/.

This sort of thing leads Thomas Osborne to describe creativity as a moral imperative: ‘for who could imaginably be against creativity?’ (2003: 508). He describes a doctrinal ‘compulsory creativity’ as something to stand against, for its promotion of compulsory individualism, innovation, self-performativity and the quest for the new.

Orvar Löfgren offers an alternative critique of the unthinking use of creativity as a new means of production as ‘the striking paradox of trying to domesticate the imagination while at the same time trying to preserve its magic aura of unbridled energy’ (Löfgren, 2003: 246). Here the suggestion is that the institutionalisation of creativity risks making it disappear. So, here are Toynbee, Osborne and Löfgren criticising simplistic accounts of the creative soul; they almost convince me that creativity is overrated; just a step away from exploitation.

‘Leaf Cells’, by Mike Fryer

But on the other hand, I’m a hippy and I think people have great capacity to be creative if they feel like this is within the possible for them. And this was borne out by some of my experience on the work : place project. What surprised me was precisely what Toynbee’s critique of creativity as hyper-individualised might have lead me to expect, had I thought it through: that some people felt they could not participate alone. It was not for them, they didn’t have an artistic bone in their bodies. But let them be in a group, let the group not the individual be described as creative, then all sorts of things became possible.

collaborations

We did not suggest that respondents might submit collectively, but 17 were collaborations from those already working together. Some of the productions were a result of the competition being used as an excuse for management to work on ‘team building’, but there are two I’d like to talk about which came from the work groups themselves, as a form of play interrupting the working day.

The first, To Boldly Go came from a team of cleaning staff in one of the university residences. Here, the youngest of the workers is dressed with the accoutrements of her job, and the poem sits alongside, reflecting the engagement of this group of staff with students and the mess that student’s produce.

ready for work

I’m standing here outside the door and offering up a prayer,
That when I walk inside the flat its not messy everywhere.
Have they had a party with food and lots of drink?
Will the washing up be sky high and blocking up the sinks?
Or could there be a budding cook who made a spag bowl for all,
Then dished it out for all his mates and left mine up the wall.
So now I’ll open up the door, I’ll tell you what I find.
Oh the little darlings have been very, very kind…

The second A Crystal Ball Moment is a photograph of a sculpture made by the course records team. Each worker made a model of themselves out of found office supplies, plastic water cups were chairs and the figures were made from blue-tack. Faces and clothes differ, and one of them is glued to the phone. The piece refers to a (creative) problem-solving discussion about procedure.

A Crystal Ball Moment, by Course Records Team

What both of these, and many others, suggested to me is how the possibility for creativity exists because of the existence of the group; it is not embodied in the individual. Toynbee would probably agree with this, but Löfgren would not approve of the project, precisely because it is the work group who in this instance provides the group identity. Osborne, though somewhat curmudgeonly, might see that creativity is far more appealing — “post heroic” and non-romanticised – when it is not seen as an attribute of the individual.

More on work : place in the future. Thanks to the rest of the project team: Karen Bush, Veerle van den Eynden, Gavin Sandercock, Matt Softly, Richard Stock and Dave Suggett.

references

1. Bilton, C. (2007) Management and creativity: from creative industries to creative management. Oxford, Blackwell Pub.
2. Löfgren, O. (2003) ‘The New Economy: A Cultural History’. Global Networks. A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 3: 239–254.
3. Osborne, T. (2003) ‘Against Creativity: a philistine rant’, Economy and Society 32(4): 507–525 .
4. Toynbee, J. (2000) Making popular music: musicians, creativity and institutions. London: Arnold.

During a holiday spent with my five year old nephew I reluctantly began to become an authority on children’s TV characters. Nostalgically I thought back to my own childhood remembering Postman Pat and Fireman Sam. It struck me how so many popular children’s TV programmes focus solely on the area of work, a theme which has continued with Underground Ernie and Bob the Builder,[1] the latter of which this essay will focus on.

The sociology of work has a rich history of using the visual. Images are useful to us as ‘a point of access’ (Grey, 1998: 131) allowing us to see anew an aspect of the workplace or our attitudes towards work. In the case of BtB, when analysed sociologically, we can view the ideologies which run deeply within it. This kind of analysis has been done previously with the reading of children’s fiction with the claim that ‘in reading fictional representations, it is suggested, we acquire an insight into organizational realities.’ (ibid.). It is this same, often hidden, insight which I wish to gain from my reading of BtB.

Within BtB, ideology can be seen explicitly in representations of co-operation, friendship etc. which most children’s TV programs try to teach children. There are nevertheless deeper ideologies present in the ways in which work is depicted. Conversely, it is important to remember that the transmission of such messages are much more subtle than is suggested by writing them in a stark form (Grey, 1998: 146). Within this essay I am certainly not claiming that specific ideology of work has been deliberately placed within ‘Bob the Builder’ to subvert children. BtB can, however, act as an indicator for how we view or wish to imagine the world of work to be. 

Division of labour

A lack of intrinsic value taken from work has been related to the division of labour which, according to Durkheim, Marx and Weber, has been a feature of work since the industrial revolution. Although often thought about in a factory context (e.g. Hamper, 1991) the division of labour is very much present within many types of work today. I will first look at this from the perspective of the human characters and will then argue that it is the machines which are the best example of the division of labour. From here I will go on to argue that BtB can be read to show the machines to be the ultimate examples of the division of labour and that instead of them being machines which are anthropomorphised, it can be argued that they are rather workers who are dehumanised to the point of becoming their individualised job.

Bob, Wendy and Farmer Pickles are all workers who experience very little division of labour, they are all able to do almost any job they need to. The only experiences of this division between the human characters is the calling in of experts to do the job, e.g. how Bob and the gang get their work, even when it may not be really necessary (such as Little, Sneezing Scoop, 2001) where Wendy and Dizzy put in a washing line for Mrs Potts, a job that most people would do themselves.

On the whole the humans are given lots of autonomy with Bob and Wendy running their own business and having no one to answer to except for the customer. Even in relation to the customer there is a huge amount of sovereignty, e.g. Scarecrow Dizzy, where instead of giving a house a whitewash, Wendy and Dizzy paint it pink but the customer did not seem to mind, luckily.

Within BtB it is certainly the anthropomorphised machines who are the example of the division of labour. First, just by their presence since it is the division of labour which has led to the development of machines which can ‘facilitate and abridge labour’ (Smith, 1862: 20) which is exactly what these machines are doing whilst enabling the human characters to transcend this division — an idea also echoed by Weber’s Technical division of labour whereby there is specialism and the use of machines (Weber, 1947: 219). Unlike the human characters each machine has a set task to do within each project. Their skills are limited solely to that task and they are largely physically unable to learn a new skill. Each machine has been created simply for that repetitive task and no others, if a machine decides to try and change its role then this always leads to difficulties and them returning to their original role as exemplified by Dizzy attempting to become a scarecrow (Little, Scarecrow Dizzy, 1999). So although they are given human characteristics there is a strong machine mentality to this.

From here I will, however, argue that it is very fitting to read BtB from the other perspective, that instead of anthropomorphised machines that demonstrate some division of labour they are workers who have become dehumanised through this division of labour to become represented simply as machines. The idea of a worker becoming simply an extension of their machine due to the division of labour (Ritzer, 2008) is one which is as true today with computers as it would be in the factory setting. It can certainly be argued that for the workers under Bob and Wendy, who have to repeat their sole skill with a machine again and again they have simply become recognised as that skill and machine rather than a human with other attributes.

This reading can be taken further looking at the hierarchies which exist, although there is undoubtedly a hierarchy amongst the machines with Scoop unofficially at the top. The biggest hierarchy which exists is certainly between the skilled workers (the characters depicted as human) and the non-skilled (those shown as machines). The non-skilled are widely treated as children who although keen to learn have no real ability to as there is no progression between shows.

The main area in which this reading does, however, fall down is the relationship between the skilled and non-skilled workers where despite having to be guided, the non-skilled workers are always appreciated and valued. Rather than being viewed as replaceable they are seen as unique. Also despite their unskilled, repetitive work the machines do gain a sense of enjoyment from the work they produce. In the sense of BtB a value is made out of the division of labour as it enables the gang to work together. In doing so the division of labour is viewed in an entirely positive light.

Alienation

As we have seen, the division of labour is viewed in a positive way setting the scene for the lack of depiction of alienation with BtB. Of the main characters only one can be viewed as really experiencing alienation, Spud the Scarecrow.

Bob is still doing jobs for others and so in theory would have little control of the end product he creates, he is also stopped from becoming fully engaged within his work due to the outsourcing of much of his work to the machines. These would normally be seen as alienating factors. There is still a certain amount of freedom that Bob has within the work as shown when a house ends up pink rather than white (Little, Scarecrow Dizzy, 1999). However, this lack of alienation may also be linked back to the cash nexus which Bobsville has managed to escape, this has created a situation where Bob has connections with all the people he does work for. The human characters within BtB still have control over all areas of the work despite having little engagement within the actual physical activity. They are able to control and guide the machines and retain an overview of the project from start to finish.

Nevertheless, the machines appear to be engaged within traditionally alienating work. The division of labour and their inability to fully understand and engage with their work provides an image of workers who would conventionally get little satisfaction, yet the machines are shown as gaining a great deal of intrinsic value from their work. This can be read as a claim that some workers (such as these who cannot completely engage) do not suffer from alienation from such a division of labour, or that group dynamics can help to solve issues of alienation.

This is especially interesting when we consider Spud the Scarecrow, who I have claimed is the most alienated. Spud is a semi-human character who can take part in many different activities although often not very successfully. Spud is extremely alienated by his main job of being a scarecrow which he often views as boring. As such, Spud has a desire to do jobs that the machines and human characters are doing. Although Spud is shown as a liability failing in much of the work he attempts, he does show some ability beyond his set job of being a scarecrow which is more than is demonstrated by most of the machines. It remains unclear if his frustration stems from this or his lack of a community, something which both the machines and the human characters have.

What does this all tell us?

There is certainly an argument that by expressing orderliness in Bobsville and later Sunflower Valley we are attempting to protect children from the insecurities of the reality of working life, and BtB can be seen as an expression of, indeed a cultural manifestation of, certain feelings that we have about work.

The strongest reading presented here is the view of the machines as dehumanised, low skilled workers rather than anthropomorphised machines. Here BtB shows the danger of unskilled work. Only those who are incapable of learning are not alienated by this work. There is a certain condescending tone which the human characters use with the machines as though they are children, yet without the opportunity to mature that alone can tell us a great deal about the way we view unskilled, practical work within a singular area. Although the machines are shown to be happy with their position, a hierarchy between the characters is clear with Bob being placed unmistakably at the top. For most viewers in the audience that BtB is aimed at their desire is to be like Bob rather than being like one of the other characters.[2] BtB can then be read as showing issues of being an unskilled worker who experiences a division of labour, despite these workers not experiencing alienation within themselves perhaps due to a sense of unity with other workers.

For more about Bob, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/bobthebuilder/ and http://www.bobthebuilder.com/uk/.

References

1. Anthony, P. (1977). The Ideology of Work. London: Tavistock Publications.
2. Chichester-Clark, R. (1976). On the Quality of Working Life . In M. Weir, Job Satifaction (pp. 26–31). Fontana: Fontana.
3. Clayre, A. (1974). Work and Play. New York: Harper & Row.
4. Cooper, R. (1976). How Jobs Motivate. In M. Weir, Job Satisfaction (pp. 138–147). Fontana: Fontana.
5. Grey, C. (1998). Child’s Play: Representations of Organization in Children’s Literature. In J. Hassard, & R. Holliday, Organization Representation (pp. 131–148). London: Sage.
6. Hamper, B (1991) Rivethead. New York. Warner Books
7. Little, B. &. (2005). Benny’s Back. Bob the Builder: Project Fix It . HIT Entertainment.
8. Little, B. &. (2001). One shot Wendy Series 4 Ep 5. Bob the Builder . HIT Entertainment.
9. Little, B. &. (1999). Scarecrow Dizzy. Bob the Builder . HIT Entertainment.
10. Little, B. &. (2001). Sneezing Scoop. Bob the Builder . HIT Entertainment.
11. Marx, K. (1986). The Economic and Philosophical manuscripts of 1844. In J. Elster, Karl Marx, A Reader (pp. 35–47). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
12.  Mészáros, I. (1975). Marx’s Theory of Alienation. Whitstable: Whitstable Litho Ltd.
13. Reeves, R. (2001). Happy Mondays. London: Pearson Education.
14. Ritzer, G. (2008). The McDonaldization of Society 5. London: Sage.
15. Sennett, R. (2008). The Craftsman. London: Allen Lane, Pengiun Books.
16. Strangleman, T., & Warren, T. (2008). Work and society. London: Oxon.

[2] This conclusion was drawn from a highly unscientific poll of my nephew and 6 of his friends. Of the 7 asked separately 6 identified with Bob, one with Spud. Obviously other studies need to be conducted before drawing a formal conclusion.

Photography by Stuart Whipps [http://www.stuartwhipps.com/]

One of the main concerns sociologists had in the 1960s and 1970s was how industrial workers coped with the boring monotony of their routine jobs, but ironically within two decades attention had shifted to how these same workers could manage without those very jobs.  Over the last three decades the industrial economies of the West — America, Europe and the UK — have undergone a profound transformation.  Across the world whole industries have been lost, millions of jobs have disappeared and communities are left wondering where to turn to for the next form of employment.  Traditional industries such as coal, iron, steel, and shipbuilding as well as light and heavy manufacturing have been particularly badly hit.

What has been the response to these changes? Well, for some, industrial loss was a cause for celebration, it representing what Joseph Schumpeter had many years ago described as ‘creative destruction’. Schumpeter argued that in order for developed economies to evolve successfully they had to rid themselves of industries and even whole sectors where they no longer enjoyed a competitive advantage over other nations. Certain types of manufacturing or primary industry could and should be sloughed off like some monstrous snake shedding its old skin.  This view was held by many neo-liberals on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1980s and 1990s.  Sure industrial change was painful but was a necessary evolutionary process.

Another strand to the response to change was resignation rather than celebration.  Like the neo-liberals there was an acceptance of the necessity of change; that the West could no longer compete with Japan and the so called Tiger economies of Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore – little was said then about the threat of China. The shift out of traditional industry was blamed, or explained, by reference to the free market and the increasingly globalised nature of the world economy. 

Finally, there is another response, that of lamentation for the loss of industry and the particular heritage it imbued on places, regions and whole nations. As long ago as 1982 American scholars Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison wrote their seminal account The Deindustrialisation of America (1982). In addition to coining and popularising the phrase deindustrialisation, Bluestone and Harrison made the important link between industrial loss and the impact economic change wrought on individual displaced workers, their families and the communities they lived in.

During the 1980s and on into the 1990s one community after another suffered industrial shutdown, or were ‘Worked Over’ to use Doukas’ (2003) phrase, as corporations moved to more benign parts of the country or shifted continent altogether.  In the rest of this essay I want to reflect on the nature of this lamentation, or what some have labelled as ‘smokestack nostalgia’ (Cowie and Heathcott, 2003).  I am interested here in why it is that the loss of industry continues to excite the popular imagination.  What is it about the shift witnessed over the last three decades that continues to provoke and disturb us?  Why are we still interested in the evidence of the industrial past, and, if we are nostalgic, what is at the root of this sentiment?

One of the clearest consequences that the loss of traditional industry brings is a calling in to question of the sense of identity which was invested in an older industrial order.  Sociologists in the post war years were apt to light upon what they called occupational communities, localities that derived their importance, indeed their very raison d’être, from the industry located there. Although not a phrase often on sociological lips at the time such academics were discussing the sense of identity that both place and people enjoyed from a type of work. There was much speculation as to the nature of the culture which was formed by certain industries, coal being the most obvious example.  One of the reasons why there was such attention paid to these communities was the fact that this type of identity was seen to be under threat from various factors, especially the growing post war affluence which threatened to erode traditional working class patterns of behaviour. Away from academic discussions there was a wider sense that industry and types of work were bound up with place, and that the economy of an area was important in understanding its particular culture.  Thus in the UK the North East of England became synonymous with heavy industry such as coal, shipbuilding and steel; the Northwest with cotton, glass and chemicals; the North Midlands with pottery; and the West Midlands with light industry and the automotive sector and so on.  Within each region there was seen to be a distinctive cultural pattern formed out of industrial history and trajectory. Work then was both embedded in place, and place and the people were embedded in their work and industry.  Whole families across generations were formed in one way or another by work; socialised in the factory; subject to an anticipatory socialisation by the proximity of settlement to factory; community life ordered by the shift patterns demanded by employers, seasons or times of day.  The result were patterns of culture, class, language, attitude and gender relations with a particular flavour and nuance.

During the 1990s academics, journalists and other commentators fell on this shift in the economy and began to talk of an ‘end of work’.  This was the idea that a heady mix of globalization and new technology was eroding the foundations of employment.  Where once jobs lasted generations some now argued that shrinking time horizons meant that workers were lucky if they enjoyed more than a few years tenure. In his book Work, Consumerism and the New Poor sociologist Zygmunt Bauman noted that in the past: ‘… work was the main orientation point, in reference to which all other life pursuits could be planned and ordered’ (1998:17).  And goes on to claim that:

A steady, durable and continuous, logically coherent and tightly-structured working career is however no longer a widely available option.  Only in relatively rare cases can a permanent identity be defined, let alone secured, through the job performed (Bauman, 1998: 27).

A string of other sociologists and social theorists have likewise suggested that work, as a viable source of identity at least, is dead. US sociologist Richard Sennett for example talks about the Corrosion of Character by which he means the way in which modern work is marked by a dangerous short termism resulting in an erosion of the strong bonds between people and place, workers and their work.  In the new economy he argues a premium is placed on those workers who are mobile and detached, not bound to place.  To invest oneself in a community and embedded oneself in work is to risk stepping off of the career escalator.  Sennett (1998) suggests that relationships become fugitive and shallow both in and outside work.

While this trend in cultural and social commentary has its focus on the present and future nature of work part of this narrative is retrospectively critical of the idea that work once did provide much over and above purely monetary reward.  The late French social theorist André Gorz welcomed the collapse in traditional industry as a chance to rid ourselves collectively of an attachment to a degraded type of work which offered people little real meaning.  As he wrote:

Even in the heyday of wage-based society, that work [modern work] was never a source of ‘social cohesion’ or integration, whatever we might have come to believe from its retrospective idealization.  The ‘social bond’ it established between individuals was abstract and weak, though it did, admittedly, insert people into the process of social labour, into social relations of production, as functionally specialized cogs in an immense machine (1999: 55).

So we have here the sense that all work meaning and identity is being lost or corroded, and, or, that this type of identity was always a type of false consciousness, an industrial social chimera, which gave people the sense of community and place but was in reality nothing more than illusory.  It follows for these commentators that a regret for the passing away of industrial life is nostalgia in a very simple sense – a lament for a false history. I want to argue in contradistinction to this type of approach that it is possible to find meaning and value in the work of the past.  And that rather than simple nostalgia, if there is a nostalgia here, it is of an altogether more sophisticated and complex kind.

In his 1979 book Yearning for Yesterday American sociologists Fred Davis identified three distinct levels at which nostalgia operates – simple, reflective and interpretive.  At the simple level nostalgia is the largely unexamined belief that ‘things were simply better in the past’.  In second order, reflective nostalgia, a person does more than sentimentalize about the past, they begin to raise questions about truth claims.  Finally, in the realm of interpretative nostalgia the emotion itself is rendered problematic — a person will seek to objectify the nostalgia they feel. Davis makes the point that ‘simple’ nostalgia is actually rather rare in that few people would or could hold to a wholly positive view of history.  In reality nostalgia, when studied, is usually a more critical interrogation of ones’ memory, bringing to the fore critical questions about the past and the part one played in it. For those who bother to actually interview people about their experience of job loss and industrial change the idea that workers are uncritically sentimental for a return to hard traditional work is laughable.  But, equally, what many researchers have found is a willingness to reflect on what that type of work meant to people, and by extension, what implications its loss has for them.

In my own research I have spoken to many former workers from a wide variety of industries. What people always talk about are the strong social bonds which grew up in certain industries. Now at times this is taken to extremes where some workers, and miners are a good example here, say that the only things they miss are their former work mates.  In other groups there is a lament which goes beyond personal connection, one where work and its loss is grieved for[1].  There are many examples of this sort of elegy in accounts of deindustrialisation but I want to draw on two examples here, both from North America.  The first is from Katherine Dudley’s The End of the Line: Lost jobs, new lives in Postindustrial America, where she quotes two former car workers from the closed Chrysler assembly plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  In different ways these passages emphasise the ambiguity of working lives spent in hard blue-collar jobs.  At the same time Dudley deals carefully and sensitively with workers who have lost their jobs and who reflect upon the experience of the loss and the work itself:

The building itself is something I’ll miss.  That building is older than I am.  My whole concept of this city is that this city has been that big factory downtown.  When they tear it down, my whole concept of what this city is, physically as well as psychologically, is gonna be drastically altered.  It’s gonna be this huge gaping hole where this chunk of my life was…literally, just a huge gaping hole (Bill Sorensen, Tool and die maker) (Dudley, 1994: 173).

Another former assembly line worker speaks of the need to remember or mark part of her working life:

When they start tearing [the plant] down, I’m going to go get a brick.  I would just keep it.  My kids know mama spent fifteen year of her life [in the plant] working, and to tell my future grandkids about it.  You know, tell them that it was a place where we worked, and that when they tore the building down, Grandma went and got herself a brick.  For all that I put in there.  I figure at least I deserve a brick (Donna Clausen, Assembler) (ibid.).

Interestingly, Donna here chooses to remember a working life by the collection of a material object, in this case a brick.  It is almost as if memories and the stories they evoke are inadequate for the marking of a working life, instead a tangible link between the past and present is needed to elicit reflection, to somehow valid a story. We could say that the now redundant capital embedded in the brick increasingly embodies symbolic and cultural capital for those made redundant by the plant’s closure.

In Bamberger and Davidson’s (1998) Closing: the life and death of an American factory the authors chart workers coming to terms with redundancy after the closure of a traditional furniture factory in North Carolina.  The book is filled with regret and anger for what has happened to a loyal and skilled workforce, but to describe this account as ‘simple nostalgia’ would again be wrong.  As in Dudley’s writing there is an attempt to understand the contradictory experience of this process.  Interviewees do not remember work entirely positively, there were very real tensions over work, race, class and gender but if there is nostalgia here it is again of a reflective or interpretive kind.  There is here the questioning of what it meant to build a life through work and an exploration of the stability and dignity that such employment gave both individuals and communities. The importance of these accounts lies in their ability to critically examine the past without simplistically replicating a positive/negative dualism.  The workers cited by Dudley and Bamberger and Davidson are active agents engaged in real lives reflecting on change and its meaning.

At the end of Closing the authors’ chose to subtitle their epilogue ‘Does Anybody Make Anything Anymore?  While the chapter is a beautiful reflection on loss and mourning that subtitle, and especially the emphasis placed on Make, offers important clues as to what is at stake in this wider process of economic transition.  It is simply a sense that something tangible and valuable is being lost when plants close.  It is the sense that there is something decadent in the discarding of perfectly efficient factories, communities and individual workers.  These jobs meant something to the people who did them and that that fact is rarely acknowledge.  Often times communities are given too little time to mourn properly for lost industry, and are too close to events to understand what the passing of a way of life really means. There is equally disquiet at the process which leads to the export of jobs elsewhere in the world.  The migration of tangible jobs is mirrored by creation of new employment in the service sector, which often pays less than traditional industry, and is short term in nature. But there is also the sense that these new posts are in intangible sectors, tasks which could be done anywhere.

I want to briefly explore some of these themes through a reflection on Stuart’s photography. Capturing a spirit, a culture or an identity is difficult, and this is especially true in the context of an empty factory. The absence of work and workers seemingly offers little for those looking to understand what work means. But take a longer more reflective look at the images from the redundant Longbridge site and we see a far more complex story.  There is a poignancy in the hastily abandoned semi-completed vehicles left where they stand on their tracks – doomed never to make it to the next part of the production process.   This raises all sorts of questions about the last days, hours and minutes of the factory’s life.  Dig deeper still and we see in many of the images fragments of working life, such as a broken telephone in a dilapidated office.  Human touches are also apparent in the canteen area where a roll of material offers some form of potential comfort to the unlucky fourth person to sit at the Formica table and plastic chairs.

Photography by Stuart Whipps

Photography by Stuart Whipps

Photography by Stuart Whipps

There is though a more tangible sense in which we can think about work within this abandoned site. It is the way work and labour is embedded in the material surroundings and elements of the factory. While it is true that labour of some kind is always embedded in material artefacts Stuart’s pictures force us in to a deeper consideration of its presence and meaning.

Photography by Stuart Whipps

One possible explanation as to why Stuart’s images from China are disquieting is their impenetrability. There is a newness, a freshness to the plant’s resurrection in China. In reflecting on that aesthetic we find a difficulty in the reading of the present and future. It is almost as if we can understand a death, but find the evidence of an industrial afterlife somehow more painful. Fred Davis argued that nostalgia could only experienced if one had had direct experience of the object of sentimentalisation. In the case of MG the new Chinese owners make much of the marque’s heritage and embodied values – the car is, they believe quintessentially English. In building a brand the new owners are explicitly drawing on nostalgia for something that a new audience has no direct experience of. It is almost as if memory is detached from its host and becomes a free-floating symbol, rather than something rooted in an historical past. What is also detached here is the industrial manufacturing culture which created the cars and the people whose lives were spent making them.

References

Bamberger, B. and Davidson, C. (1998) Closing: The life and death of an American Factory. London: Norton.
Bauman, Z. (1998) Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Bluestone, B. and Harrison, B. (1982) The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closing, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry, New York: Basic Books.
Cowie, J. and Heathcott, J. (eds.) (2003) Beyond the Ruins: The Meaning of Deindustrialisation, Ithaca: Cornell/ ILR.
Davis, F. (1979) Yearning for Yesterday: A sociology of nostalgia. New York: Free Press.
Doukas, D. (2003) Worked Over: The Corporate Sabotage of an American Community, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Dudley, K. M. (1994) The End of the Line: Lost jobs, new lives in Postindustrial America. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Gorz, A. (1999) Reclaiming Work: Beyond the wage– based society. Cambridge: Polity.
Sennett, R. (1998) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, London: Norton.

The project aimed to explore labour as a social activity and the forms of work involved in a building refurbishment of this kind; and to explore the building as an object/product of labour that is transformed by it so to map visually the material and spatial changes in the building which is being worked upon, the social/physical construction of place.

The project was based on ethnographic work undertaken in collaboration with Peter Hatton (a visual artist and lecturer at the University of Kent) from March to October 2007, the period during which the building was being refurbished. Photography was central to the methodology but was one of a bundle of related techniques, including informal observation on-site, participation in site meetings, and interviews with the project’s builders, architects and engineers.

The work that people do produces a different kind of relationship to space/place. Builders monopolise the physical manipulation of the building – as process and object. They live and breathe it, quite literally, as its dust and paint and debris get under their nails and skin, and into their hair and eyes. In contrast, engineers and architects know the building as a conceptualised space, through drawings and measurements, reports and schedules, and observed it as a ‘landscape of viewing’.

Lived Space

Conceptualised Space

Building projects are characterised by multiple sequential and co-existent work activities which produce a place such as this building anew, and in which some forms of work are literally covered by others. Indeed, it may be that the product of the labour is the finish that conceals it. Or, the mark of quality of labour is that the finish is unmarked.

When building work was started, the building itself ‘was a complete shell’ comments Michael: ‘We were talking about it the other day, how you can see the end product now.’ Another of the builders, Grant, talks about satisfaction with the job, with the end product as he calls it, since ‘you can see what you’ve achieved,’ he says. As someone who’s in wet trades doing plastering and brickwork, this is true for him. However, this is not the case for all. Ground-workers for instance, never see the end product and their own work is concealed even though it underpins the rest of the project, they’re ‘unsung heroes’ according to some of the other builders interviewed.

This makes us ask: what means of representation can we make use of to hold onto the recognition of the labour involved in the production of place? We came up with the idea of projecting the building back onto itself. The images seek to pull apart what has been remade and expose the building in different states thereby implying the labour of its reconstruction. 

Dado Rail

The juxtaposition of the images below shows co-existent and varied perspectives. It brings different moments into the same moment of seeing (now) and offers a way to re-view what might be taken for granted in a single image. In the second set of images, by stretching and superimposing them in specific ways, our attention can be drawn to what we are not necessarily conscious of in a single image, for instance, the movement involved in the labour in the upper body, and the weight and discomfort of the position of the lower body (kneeling on the wood).

Laying Screed 1

Laying Screed 2

A gain of the visual, especially for the sociology of work, is in getting at elements of complexity it is difficult to grasp with other methods, especially in workplaces that are not familiar to us all, restricted spaces, such as building sites.

Whilst there is considerable innovation in data collection and research practices in visual sociology, there remains reluctance to be similarly innovative in ways of telling and representing research (through image, sound and text). Putting things together in novel ways, e.g. collage, allows us to gain different insights — there is therefore analytic potential in working with the visual as data and representation.

To download the leaflet from the exhibition that was one of the outcomes of this project, go to: http://www.kent.ac.uk/sspssr/staff/academic/lyon/rochester.pdf.