At a house-building site, the kettle was abandoned, as was the empty bottle of that Scottish staple, Irn Bru. Work is powered by hot and cold sugary drinks.

Domestic appliances and accoutrements helped my carpenter-friend’s work A hot iron made stikcing things together much easier; cling film over the paint tray stopped it skinning over whilst he took a tea break, and dishclothes wiped up the spills and splashes of paint and varnish.

In these three male worlds of paid work, there existed small moments of domesticity.

1

2

* and so I admit they were not ‘seasonal workers’, properly defined, being employed by the security firms for other events; I used the term ‘seasonal work’ to make the point that many work tasks are not jobs for life.

** a non-commercialised version of Halloween, and (more devilishly) Mischief Night goes way back to a time before fancy dress shops were around to hire out sexy Zombie costumes.

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.

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.

Thursday is bin morning on my street. The rules are: bins out before 7; bins must be at the edge of the property, handles must point the prescribed way to help the loaders grab the bins and manoeuvre them quickly. I obey these rules to the letter, terrified that my bin will be deemed incorrectly placed and publicly rejected. I also sneakily watch the refuse workers on my street whenever I can. This is because their job demands that they run. Run really, really fast.

The bin loaders run down the street, collecting groups of bins together, loading the bins onto the bin wagon, putting bins back onto the road (in a lovely neat row. See image, plus weeds!), and running off – really fast — to the next group of bins. Their pace is set by the driver of the wagon who keeps his (it’s always been a he so far) vehicle moving all the time. This morning I passed as the loaders were heading to the next road. I think sprinting is the best description of their speed between streets.

Sociology has had a great deal to say about time and the control of work, drawing on other disciplines like history and economics too. We can look to EP Thompson’s (1967) seminal work on the introduction of ‘clock time’ into the workplace, with hours and minutes taking over the organization of work tasks rather than the task itself. Sociologists have explored the impact of ‘Taylorism’ and its time and motion studies on how work was organized and experienced in factories, including when the quest for time efficiencies was picked up by Henry Ford and introduced into his car plants via the moving assembly line. Sociologists have carried out some great research into how workers’ experience their work time (such as Miriam Glucksmann’s account of working on an assembly line in her book Women on the Line –first published under her pseudonym at the factory of Ruth Cavendish (1982)). Sociology has been fascinated with the speeding up of our working lives, and it has long asked crucial questions over whether our lives more generally are becoming more rushed or more leisurely (e.g. Veblen, 1963). And, of course, what role does profit accumulation play in any speed up?

Back to bins. My parents have lived in the same house for about 40 years now. They can’t get the wheelie bins out themselves anymore, so they have help from the local Council. So do many of those living along their street. Now, one of ‘the bin lads’ rushes ahead of the bin wagon to open the gates of those properties that are allowed help, to go and get the bins and place them out on the road. He puts the bins back after they are emptied, and closes the gates. Even with this weekly help, my mam and dad don’t know the names of any of the ‘lads’ anymore, not like they used to. ‘They are like whirlwinds these days’, my dad reports ‘in and out’. My parents still leave a tip each Christmas: a couple of pounds on top of the wheelie bin.

This all reminds me of a lovely study by Ian McIntosh and John Broderick. In a 1996 article they discussed what happened at work when Southburgh Borough Council contracted out its cleansing and refuse collections (in 1988). In particular, they detail the increased workload experienced by refuse collection workers and street cleaners. The refuse collection workers saw huge increases in the number of properties that they had to cover each day. McIntosh and Broderick note that the bin wagon now moved constantly in order to complete the routes in time. There was no time anymore for cups of tea from and with householders; no more biscuits, Christmas tips, chats and helping with odd jobs. Currently, Brendan Burchell is carrying out some great analysis of survey data to explore work intensification over the years and also in diverse societies. At the Work, Employment and Society conference in 2010, he reported that one of the questions he is most interested in is how much time we report having to work ‘at high speed’ in our jobs. I wonder what the bin loaders would report.

References

1. Burchell, B.J. (2006) Work Intensification in the UK. In D. Perrons, C Fagan, L McDowell K Ray and K Ward (Eds) Gender divisions and working time in the new economy. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
2. Cavendish, R. (1982) Women on the Line, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
3. McIntosh, I and Broderick, J. (1996) ‘Neither one thing nor the other’: compulsory competitive tendering and Southburgh Cleansing Services, Work, Employment and Society, 10, 3, 413–430.
4. Thompson, E.P. (1967) ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’ Past and Present: a Journal of Scientific History, 38, pp.56–176.
5. Veblen, T. (1963) The Theory of the Leisure Class, London: New English Library Limited (published originally in 1899).

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.

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

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

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

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

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

It seems commercial sex in a striptease culture (McNair, 2002) is mainstream. The liberalisation of sexual behaviour reflects a particular conceptualisation of modern subjectivity as individualised and commodified (Livingston, 1998). This perspective acts as a powerful moral pull in favour of the normalisation of the right to a range of sexual behaviours that might formerly have lain in the domain of the abject. This liberalisation, even a compulsion to speak of sex, retains a hint edge of moral taint, though. In the case of commercial sex, from the everyday erotic labour of bar staff (Boyle, 2007) to market exchange of sexual intercourse, there is a tension between tolerance and taint. On one hand is a powerful drive towards tolerating or accepting sexual practices where those who engage are seen as making legitimate choices as agents in modern society. On the other are arguments that such practices are invariably degrading and inappropriate, either because sex – like other intimacies – ought not be marketised, or because those selling sex cannot make a ‘free’ choice to self-exploit (Barry, 1995). And even those who feel empowered by a (postfeminist) right to speak and act as a sexual subject are, for McRobbie, being interpellated into a dominated subject position (McRobbie, 2009).

What sort of work is this webcam performing? Well, such Live Sex Acts (Chapkis, 1997) might be ways in which workers can maximise the returns from what Hakim calls ‘erotic capital’ (2010): sex appeal, charm, social skills and all-round phwoarness. Prostitution, classically understood is not advertised by JobCentre plus. It is morally outside the pale as it involves the transgression of corporeal boundaries. The webcam performer, however, though their corporeality is central, seems to escape this outsiderdom. They and the customer (the webcam wanker) are engaged in a cyborg reality of sex work. Sight and sound are the senses that matter, not touch and smell and taste. The body is seen and heard; consumed like a tv programme, not consumed like a cake.

© Cammie Touloui, from Lusty Ladies series

The ad says that the job involves “explicit sexual dialogue which may cause embarrassment to some people”. This interests me: the nudity is present in a matter of fact way, it’s the talk that is problematic and may provoke an emotional response. In the exhibition at Tate Modern Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera there are several photographs that explore dimensions of the sex industry. Susan Meiselas’s pictures of strippers and Cammie Toloui’s remind us that there is nothing passive, nothing safe, nothing disembodied about ‘just looking’.

References

1. Barry, K. (1995) The Prostitution of Sexuality. New York: New York University Press.
2. Boyle, K. (2007) ‘The mobilisation of sexuality: an ethnography of the sexualised labour process in the style bar industry.’ Paper presented to the 25th International Labour Process Conference.
3. Chapkis, W. (1997) Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labour Routledge.
4. Hakim, C. (2010) ‘Erotic Capital’ European Sociological Review doi:10.1093/esr/jcq014 .
5. Livingston, J. (1998) Modern subjectivity and consumer culture, in Strasser, S., McGovern, C. & Judt, M. Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the 20th Century: 413–430. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6. McNair, N (2002) Striptease Culture: Sex, Media, and the Democratization of Desire. London: Routledge.
7. McRobbie, A. (2009) The Aftermath of Feminism Sage.
   ]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1027/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/991 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/991#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:27:19 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=991 Two signs photographed in a department store that’s about to close.
   
   

   taken with camera phone

   To the left, big, bold letters and colours: the store is closing down and everything must go, “step right up, bargains galore”. Thrill at 20% off a new kettle. Take home a pottery owl, only £42.99 (down from £59.00). It’s an exciting chance, you consumer monkey. Be seduced by these prices.

   

   taken with camera phone

   The second is a different appearance of emotion in capitalism; this is not the capitalism of the romanticised commodity exchange discussed above (Illouz, 1997), nor quite the cold intimacy of managed emotion in capitalism (Illouz, 2007). It’s the organisation appealing to sentiment, to empathy, to feeling and not sensation. Fevre (2000) suggests this is rare, arguing that the triumph of ‘common sense’ as a form of reasoning means that rationality is imposed in places where it ought not be. That is, an organisation might easily fail to make the case for care, seeing the job losses that result from the store closing as merely the inevitable outcome of recession: there’s no use crying over spilled economic inevitabilities. After all, it’s common sense that unemployment rises in recession, but never mind, there’ll be a recovery eventually. Certainly, it seems that some of the customers have to be reminded to see past this, to connect the bargain to the pain. I can’t help thinking that there’s a few people making decisions about cutting the budget deficit who could do with a copy of this sign in their office.

   References

   1. Fevre, R. W. (2000) The Demoralization of Western Culture . Continuum, London.
   2. Illouz, E. (1997) Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism . Berkeley: University of California Press.
   3. Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity Press, London.
   ]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/991/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/882 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/882#comments Tue, 18 May 2010 08:38:42 +0000 Dawn Lyon http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=882

   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.

   ]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/882/feed 1