According to Williams, the Isotype charts used in the book are ‘not introduced for decoration, though their colours do certainly enliven the page’. She continues: ‘if you look at them with attention you will find that they suggest all sorts of relationships between different bits of our complex society that probably would not jump so vividly into your mind simply from looking at rows of figures or reading descriptions of facts’ (1945: 10). Visual sociology in a nutshell!

The charts that stuck me most were two entitled, ‘The Changing Home’. The first, immediately below, represents a pre-industrial world in which the home is centre-stage. With the establishment of schools, and the extension of production including food production beyond the home and for more than subsistence needs, there is an overlap in what takes place ‘Inside the Home’ and ‘Outside the Home’ by the ‘19th Century’.

In the second chart (below), the first half is devoted to ‘Today’ (as in 1945). There is a strict and persistent gendered division of labour and recognition of work performed in different socio-economic modes and spatial contexts inside and outside the home: childcare and education, cooking and baking, laundry, making clothes, and food production. What is especially fascinating is Williams’ exploratory representation of ‘The future?’ (in the second half of the chart below) imagined in a context of the scarcity of workers (1945: 110–111). It shows an ever-increasing shift to all activities (except cleaning) taking place outside of the home, with men and women equally positioned in the public sphere. We might also read her chart to imply that the vacuum cleaner is an autonomous object, the agent as well as the instrument of its work!

What we now know is that there are many combinations of the activities in Williams’ charts taking place as paid or unpaid work inside or outside of the home, as formal employment or as informal activities undertaken by friends, family or voluntary workers (Glucksmann, 1995, 2005). Perhaps what Williams didn’t fully anticipate was the complexity and variety of these relations — or the ongoing gender segregation in who does what, wherever it takes place.

References
1. Glucksmann, M. (2005). ‘Shifting boundaries and interconnections: extending the “total social organisation of labour”’, in L. Pettinger, J. Parry, R.F. Taylor and M. Glucksmann (editors) A New Sociology of Work? Oxford and Malden, MA.: Blackwell Publishing/The Sociological Review.
2. Glucksmann, M. (1995). ‘Why “Work”? Gender and the “Total Social Organisation of Labour”’, Gender, Work and Organization 2(2): 63–75.
3. Williams, G. (1945) Women and Work, London: Nicholson and Watson.

As the day has gone on, I’ve been struck all the more by what a considerate, even ethical gesture this was. If the sale had been completed – the country clothing dispatched and my account debited – and I had realised this some days later, I think the bank would have taken the hit, so there was no purely economic need for the kind saleswoman to look any further. It suggests an empathy with the customer, and pride in the job, bound up with a business practice that rests on a notion of just exchange rather than profit maximisation at any cost.

As soon as the conversation with the country clothing company is over, I call my bank. They cancel my card and the fraudulent transaction. A couple of hours later, I get a security alert from them. They have blocked another payment – genuinely my expenditure this time – so I try to get it reinstated. It was to a large, corporate online photo service and I’m keen to avoid uploading my photos again. The bank refuse to sort this out, constrained by their own irrevocable decisions. The large bureaucracy deals only in absolutes and the unfortunate person on the other end of the line has no autonomy to act in this situation, even in the face of its own stupidity.

I call the photo company, explaining the sequence of events to at least two different people (there are different departments for photobooks, canvases, and prints…). Eventually, a woman says: But your order was dispatched yesterday. Oh, I reply, so what do I do about the payment that’s been blocked? We’re not able to take payments over the phone, she responds, we don’t even have a machine for it! There is a short pause: You know what, just forget it, she continues. She’s actually telling me not to settle my account. It’s for a small amount after all we both agree, and well, someone can always chase me later, if they even trace what’s happened, she laughingly comments.

The organisation that’s evoked in this last exchange is, like the bank, a rigid, bureaucratic and mindless machine. There is no identification with the company on the part of the saleswoman, and no concern for doing the right thing in line with a particular business practice. Unlike in the bank however, the worker sidesteps the bureaucratic impasse in the interests of the customer, leaving the lumbering market to figure out its own inconsistencies – as the clothing company worker does but in a very different spirit. The photo company worker may have a disregard for the company – disaffection perhaps – but this is not extended to the customer. I get the feeling that she is putting herself in my place, and making a level-headed judgment call. She might be motivated by the satisfaction of being helpful or simply know that it’s best not to try and fight the insurmountable failings of the system. Still, it’s a win-win scenario for us both.

What all this shows however is the different extremes under which workers (except for those employed by my bank it seems) exercise autonomy and demonstrate empathy – both in a small personalised business and a giant faceless corporation. Using their intuition and judgement based on the information at hand, and going beyond what that information literally tells them to make better sense of the situation, they find a resolutely human way to make a living.

It’s the afternoon rush hour on the London tube. There are at least three people asleep in the row of seats opposite me, the physical impact of work (I’m assuming) visible in their faces and postures. It’s already been a long day.

Tuesday night in North London. The pub is already shut despite 24-hour drinking. We head to a Tescos Extra store, bright lights and bustle whatever the hour. Late evening shopping has peaked but the place is still busy. It’s workers rather than shoppers that predominate now. In the first isle, music is blaring, helping to maintain the rhythm of the work required to replenish the shelves. As we head towards the far side of the store, we see men and women, mostly middle-aged, putting cans, boxes and packets in their places. The ‘Beer and Wine’ aisle is almost fully occupied by trolleys packed with tomorrow’s drinks. We squeeze by to make our selections then move towards the checkouts. But they are almost completely obscured by more trolleys piled high with stock (as in the image). The night-time shift in the character of the space from one geared to consumption to one geared to work is clear. It’s mostly self checkout at this hour.

A few months ago, I posted a piece on the website about work undone. A fire destroyed some trees, a fence, a shed and a car opposite my mother’s house as the neighbourhood watched. After a while, we got used to seeing the blackened fence (what was left of it) and the exposed trunk of one of the burned fir trees. Then a few weeks ago, driving up the road, I noticed the straight lines, sharp edges and fresh colours of a new fence. Work redone, and a nice job too. The past removed — except for a scorched tree still standing.

At work

Forty years on, Davide is running the place. He’s the third generation of his family to do so. The Old Coffee, in the Castello area of Cagliari, Sardinia, was originally set up by his great uncle more than 100 years ago. In due course, Davide’s father took over, and then after the death of his mother, Davide gave up his studies to work alongside his father. He remarks on how it was one of those decisions that you make at the time and don’t see the way it’s shaping your life.

‘So what’s it like to work here?’ I ask him repeatedly on my visits to the caffè, trying to fathom the combination of constraint and autonomy that mark his life. ‘L’amo e l’odio. I love it and hate it.’ It’s a line he uses often. It’s demanding, first, in terms of presence. Someone has to be there. It’s almost always him although occasionally he is helped by a nephew. ‘If I want to go somewhere, I can just close up,’ he says. Of course it’s true in principle but it’s difficult to follow through in practice. He always needs to be ahead of himself too, managing stock for what’s happening next week and into the future. But he also has to think of today, to be ready for the rhythms of coffee consumption, panini at lunchtime, apertivi and so on. He’s open from 9am to 9pm in the week, closing for a few hours on Saturday afternoon, then all day on Sunday. Plus he needs to be present in a different kind of way, available to listen to customers who come in for a moment of contact and perhaps some understanding. Even if he doesn’t always feel like it, he sees this as part of his role.

It’s very visible to the stranger’s eye how well he takes care of the place. Some of the original furnishings are in tact and the built-in display cabinets are especially unusual. Not only are they beautiful in themselves but Davide has filled them with an extraordinary collection of objects. ‘Will you tell me something about what’s here?’ I ask, pointing to a wall of cabinets, dark wooden doors at the bottom, and glass-panelled ones at the top. ‘They are things I like,’ he explains. ‘Look, here are some sweet jars like the ones we used to have. And this, well this was my grandmother’s.’ He opens a door and takes out a cup and saucer from a coffee service. It’s complete, he points out, including small plates, a jug and sugar bowl, and is around 130 years old. I hold a cup – carefully. It’s quirky and beautiful with an uneven decorated rim that would make it impossible to drink from!

If some of the objects in the caffè are living connections to the past, a past which is both Davide’s personal history, memories and relationships, and the history of the caffè itself, others have come to be there more directly from the former life of the caffè: old drinks signs and trays, as well as some pictures and photographs. There is a third kind of object there too: things that Davide has ‘lived’ that he likes to see in the present. There is a set of old records (vinyl), and various collections from hobbies and interests, for instance radios and cameras. This all adds up to the caffè being a repository of other lives and other dimensions of life as well as an everyday workplace and a space of consumption.

‘What of the future then?’ I ask at some point. Davide’s sons are established in their own fields of study and work and there is, at the moment at least, no one in line to take the place on when the time is right. He does not know what will happen. In the meantime though, Davide has made this place his own, whilst maintaining this family tradition through his work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.