(source: cyclingweekly.co.uk via Ewen Speed)

On your hands and knees: your mate lines up the screws, as straight as can be, and you drive them right in. All the way. On any cyclist’s list of the things that matter, avoiding a puncture is up at the top.

Reference

‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’ in Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 225–258

I walked past here a while ago, and amused myself — if not my companion — by pretending that whoever lived at this house was a very active user of the telephone.

This was just a weak joke on my part. These are to be unwrapped and delivered, and someone was going to deliver them. Are they safe outside? Well, no-one’s going to steal something that they’re about to be given for free, are they? And it probably wont rain.

I didn’t meet the person who pushed one through my letterbox that week. But a day or so later, I saw the fruits of their work elsewhere in the neighbourhood, neatly propped up, too big for the letterbox.

Ref­er­ences

1. Stark, D. (2009) The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life Princeton University Press.

“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.

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).

‘I am doing this work because I am a Dalit’

This powerful BBC Radio Today programme interview with a woman latrine cleaner in rural Bihar (and accompanying pics) reminds us just how strong and ‘resilient’ caste and gender are in determining occupation in present day India. The razzle dazzle of modern India, with its call centres and software development firms feel a long way away from here. And when I first studied sociology, everyone thought that, as India industrialised and entered the world economy, caste would be replaced by class. It seems not. Scratch the surface, and we see that many jobs are still caste-related, and that caste and class intertwine. Traditional gender ascriptions and notions of purity and pollution are also caught up in an endlessly reproducing spiral: someone will always be positioned on the bottom.

On a recent visit to New Delhi this October, I was taken aback to learn from colleagues at Jawaharlal Nehru University that caste is alive and well at all levels of employment. Caste restricts access to particular occupations, excludes from others, and blocks entry to high positions. We learned of villages where one caste survives by providing ‘courtesans’ for a neighbouring higher caste, and of ‘traditional’ communities in Rajastan whose sole means of livelihood is sex-work: the women sell sexual services and the men live off them. The women latrine cleaners are just one more sad example of caste determining people’s lives and livelihoods.

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.

Watch him concentrate. The saw moves. The wood moves. The body moves. But his head? His head, his eyes, they scarcely shift. Just once, he looks down. This reiterates the stupidity of a separation between mental and manual labour; he is concentrating on the wood and the saw to keep them steady; it cannot be done without thinking. For the material to move, and his body with it, the gaze must be still.

“The work trousers always go at the zip”, he says.

At least the trousers can be taped. The thumb caught in machinery isn’t so readily fixable.

The Photographic Unit of the Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information took thousands of photographs during the decade from 1935 – 1945. They reflected all aspects of American life in the period, not just work, but the online collection (of over 160,000 photographs) has a ‘search by subject’ facility. The collection includes, for example, Dorothea Lange’s well-known pictures of a migrant worker family’s living conditions.

The New Deal Administration provided much of its relief to the nation’s unemployed in the form of work relief. The New Deal Network has an extensive collection of photographs, searchable by subject or by agency responsible, as well as other primary source material.

Some of the public work schemes allowed white-collar workers, or those in the creative arts, to use their existing skills. Graphic designers were employed to produce ‘public information’ posters, some directly relating to the world of work. There is a detailed index by subject.

The Federal Writers Project for unemployed writers carried out a number of projects with reference to the world of work. For example, they conducted interviews with ‘ordinary’ Americans to capture their life histories, including information on education, qualifications and work. For an account of the Federal Writers’ Project, and a sample of the life histories they collected, see this online collection.

The same project also interviewed many elderly African-Americans who had been born into slavery, thus offering an important window into the experiences of enforced labour.

The Farm Security Administration ran a number of camps for migrant workers, many of whom were attracted to California in the hope of obtaining seasonal work in agriculture. There is an online collection of various sources describing the daily experience of residents of these camps.

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.