“the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor-coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarette coupons.”

Priestley, 1984 [1934]: 375

These factory girls were an object of concern and scrutiny, troubling the established categories of class with their outspoken, performed femininity. A new, light, industrial labour force destabilised the established understandings of gender and class. The Bata factory in East Tilbury was staffed, in part, by this kind of woman: making shoes in order to pay for new shoes and handbags and lipsticks. And to keep their families: women’s work is not all about pin money and frivolity, J. B..

There are, or have been, Bata factories all over the world, making shoes for Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, as well as the Czechs. Haresh Khanna, the shoemaker-suitor of Lata Mehra in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy has Bata at the top of his list of preferred employers “I’ve been trying Bata and James Hawley and Praha and Flex and Cooper Allen” (2003: 620). Haresh eventually negotiates his way to taking a supervisor’s position with the efficient Czechs, and stands out from fellow Indian employees by moving into the compound with the ‘Prahamen’ in ‘Prahapore’, pseudonyms for the real Batanagar. In 1932, Bata arrived in East Tilbury, UK (and in the 1940s in Maryport, Cumbria), down at the bottom end of the Essex coast, the dirty part, near where the Thames spews out.

Bata built a new, modern factory, and a new, modern town around it. It brought Czech managers, men, and their families from HQ in Zlin, and recruited local women and men to work the production lines. East European migration isn’t such a new thing. The company wanted a productive workforce, and a productive workforce must be happy. Neat and modern boxes for living in were built, along with leisure facilities – including a swimming pool – a hotel, a bar a grocers and a post office, as in Zlin. Everything you might need, designed for the future.

There are echoes of those nineteenth century paternalists, Cadbury, Salt and Lever, and their company towns, Bournville, Saltaire and Port Sunlight. But with a difference that reflects the mid twentieth century’s “second spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007), where the gambling of the bourgeois entrepreneur gave way to mass production, mass consumption and massive organisation. Management understanding of the benefits of rationality and planning mark the building of the Bata factories and company towns. And what felt like institutional benevolence for those in charge seemed to have a sound footing in science and logic.

The second spirit drew on techniques of scientific management, developed by F W Taylor, and the Gilbreths, amongst others. Workers were measured and assessed to design productivity improvements through rationalising work activity, or replacing human with machine. The production line, with work divided into discrete tasks, is one legacy of this. However, as Eva Illouz argues, rationality was not all-conquering. The new sciences of the emotions, psychology in particular, gave rise to techniques of emotional capitalism. Elton Mayo for example brought the techniques and presumptions of therapy into management. The good manager would listen to his workers, would pay attention to how they felt (Illouz, 2007: 13–15). Bata had vision and ideals. “Friends and fellow workers” said founder Thomas Bata in one of his Mayday speeches…the contemporary equivalent is ‘we’re all in this together’.

So the difference between Saltaire and East Tilbury is not merely in the contrast between brick houses and a Yorkshire stone factory on the one hand, and the square white boxes of East Tilbury’s working and living spaces, but in the understandings of production, work and life that were presumed. Salt’s employees worshipped in the church he built, and it’s not certain whether god or Salt seemed the most powerful. Bata’s employees were freer, to swim in the pool, and to send their children to scout groups. Forward looking international companies in the 1930s managed with science, offering rationalised work and sensible leisure, rather than direct command and control. Scientific management met emotional capitalism. “Work together, live separately” was one of the Bata family slogans, but living in the company town wasn’t such a separation.

East Tilbury Bata was the temporary HQ of the operation during the second world war, and it made boots for soldiers for this time. Production for the domestic market resumed after the war, and generations of Essex girls and boys worked there. Production continued in East Tilbury until 2005, when the factory was closed (Maryport had gone in the 1980s). Now only one of the twenty Bata ‘production units’ are in Europe (8 in Asia-Pacific, 7 in Africa and 4 in Latin America, see www.bata.com. So, like other company towns founded in era of the ‘third England’, the factory building is decaying and some of the houses – still lived in – are starting to bear witness to the long term unemployment or underemployment that can mean a paint job is out of the question. Of Essex’s modernist legacy, these places of work have come off worse than the genteel, expensive houses of Frinton, or the curved splendour of the Labworth Cafe, Canvey Island (Rose, 2012).

Bataville: we are not afraid of the future is an documentary made of an art project by Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope around 2004, just as East Tilbury Bata was on its last legs. Former workers from Maryport and East Tilbury, and a group of ‘others’, travelled by coach through Europe to Zlin, the birthplace of Bata (now based in Bermuda…how times change). They stop in the Netherlands Bata, to see how robots replaced people, and then onto ‘Bataville’ to have a look round.

In the Netherlands, some of the passengers were tearful. These machines, “wonderful to watch”, have replaced people, people who had skills, who prided themselves that they could go “right down the whole shoe”, not just stick on the sole. And of course,” you can’t have a conversation with a robot.” So despite the pace of the line, where a shoe would pass you every 6 seconds and you had to do your operation on it, there was something that felt good in the work.

I liked this film. I liked the planning the artists had done to get the groups of strangers to talk to each other by asking each to provide some entertainment for the long coach. Some told stories about their working lives, now over, others played games or got everyone to make something, and some talked about the things they loved. I liked one of the artists talking about her worries that the people they took on the bus were left behind in plans for regeneration of post-industrial areas like East Tilbury.

The world we live in is one where production is subcontracted by branded firms, one where cheap goods are made by low paid workers, and where all kinds of footloose manufacturing industries leave unemployment behind. We see in Bataville the long historical roots of how the local is captured by the global. Bata might still be the company that counts in Zlin, but its experiments in work-life omnipotence in the UK didn’t hold out against individualised globalised capitalism. The ongoing ruination is not beautiful decay, but an emblem of post-industrial Essex, where the only jobs left for lipsticked would-be stars are not those of making something, but those of selling something.

This is a revised version of a talk I gave to introduce a screening of Bata-ville, at Manchester Metropolitan University on 26th January 2012. The event was organised by Morag Rose, on behalf of The LRM and the Manchester Modernist Society, in conjunction with Manchester Metropolitan University. Thanks to all involved, especially Morag.

References

1. (2006) Bata-ville: We are not afraid of the future A Somewhere project by Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie, developed by Commissions East.
2. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, London, trans Gregory Elliot.
3. Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity Press, London.
4. Priestley, J. B. (1984[1934]) English Journey, Penguin Books.
5. Rose, M (2012) ‘The Modernists’ Guide to Essex’, The Modernist, issue 3.
6. Seth, V (2003 [1993]) A Suitable Boy. Phoenix Books, London.

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.

Dawn Lyon, Pun Ngai, Carol Wolkowitz, Anna Pollert, Miriam Glucksmann

The republication in 2009 of Miriam Glucksmann’s ethnography of factory work, Women on the Line (originally published in 1982 under the pseudonym, Ruth Cavendish) was the starting point for a panel discussion on researching gender and work at the Work, Employment and Society Conference, which took place in Brighton in September 2010. I approached Miriam with the idea for this panel as on rereading Women on the Line, which I first encountered as an undergraduate in the late 1980s, I was struck by how relevant it remains for current understandings of work, including the ways in which configurations of gender, class, race and age make for different experiences of work. The original text is unchanged but the republished book includes a new introduction and additional images. (There is a discussion of the republication with Miriam here.) The photographs taken at the time of the original study indicate how habitual ethnographic practice included photography and a keen attention to the visual ahead of ‘visual sociology’ developing as a novel form of sociological enquiry, and the inclusion of these photographs in the new edition of the book gives the reader glimpses into factory space, and the age and ethnicity of the women workers. In addition, Women on the Line is interesting as a form of sociological writing that is a narrative account of factory life but one that also makes a theoretical contribution ‘between the lines’ to analysing work, and Miriam reflects critically on the gain of formalising sociological concepts in the new introduction.

Miriam Glucksmann

Miriam Glucksmann (University of Essex) started the panel presentations with a reflection on the global changes in women’s work since the publication of Women on the Line. For more than 30 years, she has researched work, historical and contemporary, local and global, and with a range of methods. She remains centrally concerned with how and why work is undertaken in different socio-economic modes (paid, unpaid, formal, informal etc), and the shifts and connections across these modes in time and space. Glucksmann set out the context of understanding women’s work in the late 1970s, and the problem of the women’s movement’s failure to attract working class women which is what prompted her to leave her teaching job and work in the factory she later wrote about (so not something she intended as an ethnography at the outset). With reference to her recent research on ready-made food, she highlighted how class and gender configurations have changed over the past 3 decades, with looser gender divisions in workplaces in the 21st century, and the increased presence of both men and women migrant workers in assembly-line work.

Anna Pollert (University of the West of England), the second speaker, discussed her own ethnography of women factory workers, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives (1981), which was a fascinating counterpoint to Glucksmann’s. Motivated both by politics (socialist feminist) and pedagogy (to respond to the lack of books available for teaching at the time), Pollert’s study was an explicit piece of research, based on (non-participant) observation in which she sought to analyse wider issues of political economy through the micro-level of the workplace. She discussed the unstable, unfolding and contradictory nature of becoming a woman worker through the intersections of class, gender and age, in which there is both subordination and potential for change; and drew attention to the ordinary, the unspoken, and the unheard, themes which remain relevant in her more recent research on vulnerable, low-paid, unorganised workers.

The panel continued with a contribution from Pun Ngai (Hong Kong Polytechnic University), author of Made in China (2005), an ethnographic study of young migrant women engaged in factory work in urban China. Both as a researcher and an activist, Pun’s work has addressed the challenges faced by women factory workers, including the issue of material working conditions. She argued that current conceptualisations of agency that do not adequately grasp real constraints miss the complexity of the lived reality of gender and class, and that gender is central to the making and remaking of class in the present context of urban China. For instance, through the specific and highly gendered ‘dormitory regime’, rural to urban migrant women workers experience both alienation and solidarity.

Carol Wolkowitz (University of Warwick) concluded the panel presentations with a reflection on the role of the body in production, a central concern in her own recent work, notably in Bodies at Work (2006), and a significant if implicit dimension of Glucksmann’s account in Women on the Line, now made explicit in the introduction to the new edition. Wolkowitz had reread Glucksmann’s text through this lens and drew attention to Glucksmann’s use of auto-ethnography and of her own body to access the experience of women factory workers. In particular, she made connections to contemporary scholarship on the ‘feeling of doing’, the embodied person’s ‘haptic apparatus’. She then argued that analytical continuities in understanding work over the last 30 years are stronger than changes, notably the ongoing intensification of labour including in contexts other than factories. However, she also noted differences such as an increase in the performative nature of work, and the implication of the body and the self in aesthetic labour arising from amplified forms of control in the workplace; and the increased place of ‘touch’ in work, itself connected to new and/or more widespread forms of ‘body work’, i.e. work on the bodies of others.

A key area of discussion was the practice of ethnography, picking up on some of the speakers’ comments on the problems of doing ethnography today. The question of access is a very serious one with implications for the production of sociological knowledge about working lives in the 21st century, if researchers do only ‘what is possible’ rather than that which is conceptually or politically compelling. There was a lively discussion about the difficulties posed by institutional processes of ethical approval (which do not equate to ethical sociological practice), and calls for a critical and challenging approach to these constraints!

This was a great session. It was well attended (in spite of the 9am slot!) and its success was confirmed by numerous comments from people in the audience about how informative and enjoyable they found it to be. Thank you to the contributors, the conference organisers, and to everyone else who participated.

Bologna portico

The 2010 International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA) Conference was held at the world’s oldest university, Università di Bologna, in Italy. Bologna la Rossa (named for its red roofs and historically leftist politics) is an utterly beautiful city, with porticos along the streets enabling walkers to wander sheltered from the sunshine. This annual conference is a place for those working in sociology and related disciplines to share and develop their experience and knowledge of working with the visual, and this year the focus was reflected in the conference title: Thinking, Doing and Publishing Visual Research: The State of the Field? This provided an opportunity to reflect on different methodological practices based on photography, video and similar tools. (You’ve certainly never seen so many conference delegates with cameras.)

Valentina Cuzzocrea (University of Cagliari) suggested that she and nowaytomakealiving collaborate to run a panel on work and the visual. At the 2009 conference, Carol Wolkowitz and Phil Mizen (both University of Warwick) had organised two sessions on the theme of ‘Topographies of Work’ which generated interesting discussion of the ways in which work spaces produce particular experiences and representations of work. Our call for papers this year also generated sufficient interest to put on two sessions, the first with a focus on ‘doing work’, the second on work in cultural industries. Given that the dominant topics of the conference were consumption, the city and digital technologies, these panels on work were (inevitably) outliers. If the study of work has lost its foothold in sociology, it is even further from the imaginations of those in cultural studies, media and communications. However, we argue – and demonstrate — that this general absence is not justified (especially in the current economic climate), and that visual sociology has a lot to offer the study of work.

Paolo Cardullo (Goldsmiths College, UK) began by presenting his photography of workers along the Thames at Greenwich. Contrasting the top down vision of residents in the new build flats, Paolo spoke to the all male and predominantly migrant workforce working close up to the river, in the boundary zone of the post-industrial dockside. His photographs of welders seemed to show the man consumed by the job. He described the precarity of work and life for these workers. There’s a small irony in a precarious working life spent addressing the precarity of the material world: fixing the boats, cleaning the rust, welding the gaps. You can view his photobook, Doing Work: Chronicles of the Working River here.

Dawn Lyon (University of Kent, UK) spoke about her ethnography of the refurbishment of a building in Medway, Kent in which she and artist-collaborator, Peter Hatton (also University of Kent), experimented with different ways of documenting and representing the practice of work. Peter fixed his gaze on change over time as seen from specific spaces across the building site, whilst Dawn followed with the camera whatever work was going on at the time of the visit. Through these approaches, it was possible to appreciate differences in workers’ relationships to the building (conceptual, material, embodied), and document how successive layers of the refurbishment served to conceal earlier labour. (Read more here.)

Phil Mizen (University of Warwick, UK), presenting a paper co-authored by Yaw Ofosu-Kusi (University of Education, Winneba, Ghana) decried the vogue for researchers putting cameras in the hands of children as though presuming a self-evident relationship between the images and the reality of children’s lives produced by a ‘pure’ gaze. When reading the images generated by street children in Accra, Ghana he shows how complex is the relationship between seeing and knowing. The substantive aim of the paper was to explore the complexities of informal economic activity by children. Plastic bag selling was often an entry point into the informal economy, with children then moving into potentially more stable forms of work, often patron relationships with street sellers or bus drivers. Phil argued that ideas about skill were not relevant, but the children drew on ingenuity and creativity to make a living.

In the second panel, the focus shifted to work in the culture industries. Terry Austrin (University of Canterbury, New Zealand) presented a paper co-authored with John Farnsworth (CPIT, New Zealand) on The September Issue, a cinéma vérité documentary on the production of American Vogue and a portrait of its editor, Anna Wintour. Terry argued that the film invoked a reconfiguration of culture work as distributed worlds are made and remade across media platforms – as when the documentary cameraman is photographed for the September issue. Terry also drew on Latour to explore how objects coordinate the embodied, affective work of magazine journalism, paying attention to the low-tech whiteboard where the magazine is laid out.

Lynne Pettinger (University of Essex) took a different approach to the role of the object in work, exploring the creative production of performance. She argued that concepts familiar to the sociology of work (aesthetic labour, emotional labour and craft) are productive in making sense of creative work, and used these to read photographs of performing musicians. The photographs reveal the interrelationships between bodies and technologies needed for performance, and the way the working body is transformed. She finished by reflecting on the gains of silence and immobility when exploring multi-sensory experiences.

The perfect macchiato

Viktorya Aleksanayan (Slavic University, Armenia) finished the session with an autobiographical tale of starting work in media production in Armenia. She described the need to develop a wide range of skills when working in small businesses, and of how quickly she had learned how to put together a TV show. There followed a lively discussion of the merits of photography when film and video were so readily available, and we thank our presenters and audience for being part of the conversation. We then finished the afternoon admiring the skill of the local barista and his creation of the perfect macchiato…

The film also has a pedagogic point to make. Most documentaries of the time, including the ones we saw on British TV on the Czech rebellion, worked really hard to make their depictions seem realistic. In the process, they reproduce an ideological ‘reality’, for marxists. One way to show this ideological effect is to break the usual conventions, which is what Pravda does in a determined way. In the most-often quoted scene, some Czech workers appear on screen, speaking Czech. No subtitling or dubbing is provided for the viewer, unlike in the usual documentary – ‘Vladimir’ tells ‘Rosa’ ‘If you don’t speak Czech, you had better learn fast!’

The work scene is also disturbingly unusual (forward to 46min 30 seconds in this version). We see a young man tending a large rotary cutting machine in the Skoda factory (which made weapons as well as cars, the commentary reminds us). The machine cutters move slowly up and down the piece they are working on. We get extremely noisy natural sound. There are no edits or shifts in camera position, and no other sound for 5 or 6 minutes(a very long time in cinema). The worker tends the machine, lubricating it occasionally, but largely just watching it as it does its job. There are no ear defenders, no guard rails, and no other workers to talk to. After a couple of minutes, we are all longing for it to end.

My students often nominated this scene as the most annoying and challenging in the whole of a very unenjoyable film (but it did them good!). That was the whole point, of course. They found 5 minutes enough, so what of the poor guy who spent 8 hours a day doing that?

References

1. Monaco, J ( 1976) New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Arriving at the Port of Felixstowe

A few weeks ago, I went in search of fish at Felixstowe (on the Suffolk coast, UK), took a wrong turn and found myself trying to drive into the Port. In the few minutes it took to ask for directions at the security gate (where the men were very friendly and helpful), several lorries came and went, apparently disappearing into the unending stretch of the Port ahead of me. What goes on in all that space? I wondered, so a couple of weeks later, my friend and I joined the ‘ship-spotters’ at the Landguard Terminal viewing area. I had no idea what a pleasure that could be! You can watch the ships arrive into port (with the help of a marine pilot and tugs), ‘park’ (a process which looks especially tricky), and after a few hours, leave again with a different cargo (or with empty boxes given the discrepancy between imports and exports in the UK). It’s hard to grasp the sheer expanse of the site from any vantage point on the ground – at close to 200 hectares, it’s the size of about 185 football pitches. Still, after driving along the perimeter fence for about 10 minutes and seeing little other than containers (and not a single person!), I did get a sense of this space of the physical redistribution of goods in ‘a flow of dispersion-concentration-dispersion’ (Mark Harvey et al, 2002: 202–5).

It’s worth giving some details about the Port itself to begin to understand its significance, locally and globally. Privately owned by the Hutchison Port Holdings Group, according to the Port of Felixstowe website, Felixstowe is the largest and busiest container port in the UK, amongst the largest in Europe, and ranked 33 by container traffic in the World Port Ranking (2008). In one year, it handles over 3 million TEUs (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units – containers are either 20 or 40 feet long), 4000 ships, and over 40% of the UK’s import and export trade. It’s hard to overstate the impact of containerisation which transformed cargo shipping in the second half of the 20th Century (Levinson, 2006). Felixstowe, with its offer of deep water next to the quay (up to 15m maintained by dredging) and its location close to the open sea, was just right for a container terminal (built in 1966). It usurped Liverpool, London and other urban ports in the UK, as those sites were less convenient and couldn’t handle the size of these new ships. (See Ports of Call for memories of the communities surrounding the Royal Docks in London.)

Transport connections

The minimal cost of transporting goods in containers means that it’s not only cheaper to produce a flat-screen TV in China, it’s cheaper to move it half way around the world to the UK coast than to deliver it from South to North within Britain for example (BBC4, 2010). The spatial arrangements of these complex global distribution networks reflect the current logic of commodity production and consumption where distance is no obstacle since space is overcome by time (David Harvey, 1992). The success of keeping things moving also relies on a broader infrastructure of rail and road and at Felixstowe, some rail lines are owned by the Port connecting with those of other Train Operating Companies in order that boxes can be directly loaded onto trucks or trains. So in addition to shipping lines, the whole process requires rails companies, forwarding and line agents, and logistics and distribution companies.

The history of containerisation is however also a history of the demise of the dockworker, a painful transition whereby metal boxes and software replaced the dockers’ hook and their physical labour. As Marc Levinson puts it,

‘The container made shipping cheap, and by doing so changed the shape of the world economy. The armies of will-paid, ill-treated workers who once made their livings loading and unloading ships in every port are no more, their tight-knit waterfront communities now just memories.’ (2006: 2)

In BBC4’s ‘The Box that Changed Britain’ which aired earlier this month, we see a single person overseeing a computer-allocated process of unloading and reloading by crane, doing what tens of thousands of men (and it is all men in these stories) previously did. This dramatic reduction of labour is also mirrored by the handful of men who now work on the massive container ships themselves.

Another representation of contemporary dock work can be seen in The Wire. Moving freight in containers that generally don’t get opened is a widely recognised opportunity for the informal economy – both in The Wire and in the real life presence of the UK Border Agency at Felixstowe with its designated spaces to examine the contents of the containers. The boxes are all uniquely coded, but at the same time, anonymised and opaque. In the police investigation into irregular practices in Baltimore in the second series of The Wire, it is the computer representation of their movement in space that finally reveals the ‘disappearance’ of boxes and their goods. Albeit a fictionalised depiction, it presents the understanding and practice of the work of managing the physical distribution of goods to the viewer as mediated by how it’s depicted on the computer screen.

Waiting containers

The current Port of Felixstowe is quite a setup, with around 40 shipping lines operating from the site. Open for business 24 hours a day, (almost) every day (see the sailing schedule here), there is a workforce of close to 3000. The range of what they do is striking: there’s lots of engineering of course, plus systems development and planning, rail operations, yard control and stevedoring. And the Port has its own dedicated police, fire and ambulance services. On the Port website (from which this information is taken), the list of ‘ancillary services’ also indicates the variety of associated work activities which wouldn’t happen without it – chauffeurs, marine surveyors and ship repairs, financial services, IT, and many more, plus of course all the domestic labour that must remain flexible to support a 24 hour operation. And the primary activity they are all there to carry out or support is to move things around. That’s really the thing that struck me most; the enormous amount of stuff there is in this ‘holding space’ — and one that many commercial organisations effectively use as a de facto mobile storage facility — that marks the landscape with its presence.

References
1. BBC4 ‘The Box that Changed Britain’, 9 May 2010: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00scpzn.
2. Harvey, D. (1992) The Limits to Capital, Basil Blackwell (Oxford) and University of Chicago.
3. Harvey, M., S. Quilley and H. Beynon (2002) Exploring the Tomato, Transformations of Nature, Society and Economy, Edward Elgar.
4. Levinson, M. (2006) The Box: How the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger, Princeton University Press.

A number of the images are portraits, including of people who are in the public realm, such as Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, and Boris Johnson, Mayor of London (who I happened to see going into City Hall just as I was leaving this afternoon!). In other portraits we can understand work by the context within the image, for instance the policeman standing outside Number 10 Downing Street, or workers posed amongst theatre props. In these types of photograph, the worker and the job are one (for now at least) and the portrait of the person in their working environment carries the idea of what it is they do in their working lives.

The composition of some of the photographs is stimulating for thinking about work sociologically. In one image, a Neon Light engineer, suspended alongside a building, is pictured from below, the sky becoming the backdrop to his working world. He looks alone up there, only tenuously connected to the world as he holds onto the light he is working on, although in another image, someone else appears to be keeping an eye on him from the ground. We can’t see exactly what the light engineer is doing so we don’t get an insight into the activity of work per se but we do get some sense of what his working life is like from seeing him in the sky like that. The stunning picture of the rope access abseiler cleaning the No 1 London Bright Building is equally evocative.

Although the image of statue cleaners is taken peering into a vehicle, what looks like a harness on one of the workers suggests that his work also takes him off the ground. His co-worker, seen snoozing in the background, is taking a moment out, and this draws our attention to the ways in which working routines include pauses, and are shot through with other activities and meanings.

The materiality of work is very present in the photographs too. The cinema projectionist at the Barbican is seen surrounded by and connected to his equipment, as is the fire-fighter, whereas the organ tuner at the Royal Albert Hall must quite literally get inside the object of his labour.

Work is not presented in these photos in the restricted ways we sometimes see it celebrated, mostly of men doing dangerous things, however fascinating images of these worlds are. Bell-ringers – presumably an unpaid commitment – are shown in perfect coordination in a space lit by what looks like early morning sunshine. The hairdresser in a centre for homeless people might be there on a voluntary basis or as an employee. Overall, the collection transcends rigid categories of work, including artisans, gardeners and protestors alongside teachers and engineers. These photographs encourage us to ask questions about the basis on which work is undertaken, and to recognise the enormous range of work that goes on in London.

Overall, this series is a refreshing look at what we do from a young woman photographer. Thank you, Harriet Armstrong.

But during Public Enemy Number 1, despite several more robberies, shootings, a kidnapping and prison escapes, I did start to shift in my seat, yawning. It turns out the mid-life career of a professional bank robber is only little more exciting than the mid-life career of the professional bank clerk. The routinisation of Mesrine’s criminal life serves as warning against crime, not because of the danger, but because of the tedium.

References

1. Hobbs, D. (2006) ‘The Nature and Representation of Organised Crime in the United Kingdom’ in Fijnaut, C. and Paoli, L. Organised Crime in Europe: concepts, patterns and control policies in the European Union and beyond. Springer.

No way to make a living loves it for talking about work. The Wire portrays work in a way that makes sense to people who’ve had a job. It’s not like other shows: the key tension is not who will shag whom, (as in Grey’s Anatomy, which Dawn intends to discuss at length on this site), nor is work a conveniently located site for the continuation of ongoing local stories (like the factory in Coronation Street). It offers a series of workplaces, at varying levels of formality, where people are competent or incompetent, good, bossy, well-meaning, faceless or charismatic; and where the individual is constrained by an organisational structure within which he or she can struggle or shine, and by work colleagues who can enable, intervene and obstruct. The Wire is the best portrayal of work you’ll see on TV and there will be an occasional strand to this blog to discuss …

• Corner boys and starting work; the division of labour
• ‘an inelastic product’ – formal education, skills and employability
• masculinity and the police force
• unionisation and brotherhood
• politics a work
• crusaders and volunteers
• Templetons and how to deal with them.
• Office spaces
• The relationship between inside and outside,
• sociality around work … and so on. OK, I’ll shut up.

I will be talking about some of this at The Wire as Social Science Fiction conference, where Ewen Speed and I are giving a paper on ‘Mutualism and Markets: An Exploration of Moral Regulation in The Wire; http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/Wireconference.html