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.

BEEFEATER STEAK HOUSES — I was a barmaid, later promoted to a waitress. I was a vegetarian.
03/01/97 — The first paycheck of the new year. Those two hours of overtime counted as my New Year’s Eve bonus.
HOURLY RATE £3.2800 – not much of a living wage.
DO NOT DESTROY – I took this seriously.

There are plans afoot for a new bureaucracy, an updated computer system enabling ‘RTI’ (Real Time Information) so that deductions are reported by employers to the HM Revenue and Customs as they happen, not at the end of the year – the idea being to avoid over– and under-payment. This new computer system is a new a grey media you wont often think about, but which will re-write your payslip.

It used to be that the newspaper report would say “The police were tipped off about the whereabouts of the gold bullion”. And in Evelyn Waugh’s, Scoop, that sort-of journalist William Boot, who hoped to go to Ishmaelia as a spy but ended up being sent as a journalist, finds that “Now he had something under his hat; a tip-off straight from headquarters, news of high international importance” (Waugh, 2003: 101), Boot might have found a red under the bed.

Tip-offs make the world go round; they are a flow of secret knowledge. Imagine this as a tip-off story: the police tip-off a bunch of journalists about the coming arrest of an ex-journalist for possibly having hacked a phone to get a tip-off to write a scoop. The police employ an ex-journalist who hacked a phone for a tip-off in order to better manage their public presence and this ex-journalist is mates with another ex-journalist who has the ear of the PM. The police know the journalists who know the politicians who know the police. They’re tipping-off to their hearts content, from behind the smokescreens of public relations who keep on saying no-one knows about this tip-off circle.

2. Strategic Ignorance

Murdoch, R., Murdoch J. and Brooks, R. appear before a Select Committee of elected MPs to explain phone hacking. The Chairman and CEO of NewsCorp, the Chief Executive of Newscorp and the Chief Executive of News International and former newspaper editor know nothing now and knew less then. They’re shocked and horrified, but they deny. They employing “strategic ignorance”, Linsey McGoey’s compelling phrase to describe the

“feigning of ignorance — whether deliberately or unconsciously, collectively or individually [which] answers the twin demands of appearing transparent while wielding control over the very information one has an interest in concealing.” (McGoey, 2007: 216–7)

There’s no unequivocal bliss to be had in ignorance though: responses on twitter either mock or are horrified by the vacuum of control implied by the NewsCorp/NewsInternational ignorance position.

3. The Art of Asking Questions

We’re used to interviews now. We’ve all been interviewed: by our future bosses, by our GPs, some of us by the police, and some of us by social scientists (see Mike Savage (2010) for a discussion of how respondents of early interview-based research projects seemed flattered to be asked to give their views). We’re used now to having our views and experience sought out, and there’s no doubt that Yates, Stephenson, Murdoch, Murdoch and Brooks interviewed in Select Committees yesterday have been questioned before.
Fewer of us have experience of asking questions, and not all question-askers are skilled – however many episodes of tv shows about sharp lawyers we might watch. Tom Watson MP and his short, sharp questions based on detailed preparation gave a masterclass in expert interviewing, of pushing the respondent towards revelation. Louise Mensch MP (for example) gave us words, lots of words, assertion and opinion: a grandstanding questioner doesn’t produce excitement .

References

1. McGoey, Linsey(2007)‘On the will to ignorance in bureaucracy’, Economy and Society,36:2,212 — 235.
2. Mike Savage (2010) Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: the politics of method Oxford, Clarendon.
3. Waugh, Evelyn (2003 [1938]) Scoop</> Penguin.

Our experience of watching, for most of us fans, is one mediated by the cameras that scoot alongside the race. The close up shots of the breakaway and of the agony on the face of the climber are produced: this is not Baudrillardian hyperreality, simulations of simulations. There must be a zoom lens near the race, carried on a bike or car travelling at the same speed as the cyclists. Check out the motorcyclist’s pillion rider in this picture (and yes sharp-eyes, this isn’t France, it’s Colchester… it’s the best I can do). He;s facing backwards, holding that heavy camera, gripping the motorbike under him, trusting his driver. This isn’t easy work; it needs a combination skilled camera operation and the tacit knowledge of how to move your body with the moving bike, as well as a fondness for speed.

Stage 9 of the 2011 Tour de France saw more crashes than it should. The most horrific involved barbed wire, Johnny Hoogerland and Juan Antonio Flecha and a French tv car that swerved around a tree and in doing so knocked a man sideways. The other, Hoogerland was tossed into the air and onto a fence.

Drivers who follow the tour are usually ex-pro cyclists, well aware of how to prioritise the man-bike hybrid over the 2 ton car (and given the previous week’s accident where the Danish champion Nicki Sorenson was knocked over by a motorbike, you’d think everyone would be being careful). And so the newsmaker is the news at the moment. You can find pictures of Hoogerland’s flanks torn by barbed wire all over the internet; I have no desire to force you to look.

Sociologists such as Thomas Scheff, have been good at exploring the importance of the “inner contagion” (1990: 76) of shame as a marker of social bonds. We often speak of feelings like shame –and guilt — as individual, not shared, but Scheff argues that shame is a social emotion: something we’re keen to avoid feeling in ourselves in order to justify our belonging and we’d exclude those who were shameful. Guilt shares with shame the sense of being about self and other. After his tears on the podium, getting his King of the Mountains jersey, Johnny Hoogerland said:

It’s horrible, I can blame everyone, but I think no-one did this on purpose. I think the people in the car will have a very big guilty feeling and they will for sure apologise to me … and nobody I can blame for this, it’s a horrible accident and I was in it, and I just say to Flecha, we still alive.

Hoogerland’s understanding of the feelings of the other and the way he avoids looking for responsibility or to attribute cause, are notable. He leaves others to be angry for him, and he understands that he need not express a desire to know that someone else feels guilty; they will feel it regardless.

Reference
Scheff, T. J. (1990) Microsociology: Discourse, emotion, and social structure. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.

Bell is often quoted as describing the service work that characterises post-industrial society as ‘a game between persons’, unlike industrial society which he characterises as ‘a game against fabricated nature’, centred on the relationship between man and machine (1999 [1973]: 17). Interactive service work can readily be imagined as a game between persons: between customer and waiter, there is hierarchy, deference and a complex negotiation over power (see Paules (1996) for interesting discussion of how waiters resist customers’ attempts to denigrate them).

“Michel Roux’s Service” is currently showing on BBC. Here we see another instance of reality TV showing us how to be better workers by training us in the ludic art of personality (I’d rather we learned how to be better customers). Eight unemployed young people are being trained to control body and feeling; to perform authentically;  and to empathise with the demanding customer by denying their own distance from how the customers live. They are to treat customers as their friends, though they are not the customer’s friends. Much is made of how bad the British are at giving service; we’re too uppity and resistant to subservience. So these workers learn how not to notice that they have feelings.

Fred Sirieix trains the recruits in the raw art of talking to customers, carrying plates and so on. (And you shouldn’t laugh at this unless you know how to carry three hot plates across a crowded room without disturbing the arrangement of the food: denying that service work requires skill is a form of symbolic violence). He doesn’t seem to offer much guidance in the many tiny decisions about organising your work that any waiter needs to constantly do in order to keep on top of service (see Gatta, (2002) for a nice description of the complexity of waitressing). He’s keen to point out that the challenge and pleasure of interactive service work makes it noble.

But the interpretation of Bell’s game between persons made by Sirieix is disturbing. In episode 1 he defines the good waiter as a ghost. This ghost is always looking at you — the customer — just in case you need something. It’s sensing you, anticipating you. It’s not a person (anymore), just “a felt presence – an anima, geist, or genius – that possesses and gives a sense of social aliveness to a place” (Michael Bell, emphasis in original, cited in Wynn, 2007). The ghost has no personhood, really; it places plates FROM THE RIGHT and clears plates FROM THE LEFT as though any deviation will materialise evil. All the attention the waiter must pay to his smile, his clothes, his body odour, work to produce him as an absent presence. Having good character here means not really existing. The game is not between persons. It’s between a person and a ghost. Bell’s characterisation of industrial society has more purchase here: the game is to fabricate a human as nature, which means turning person into a machine.

References

1. Bell, D. (1999 [1973]) The coming of post-industrial society: a venture in social forecasting. New York, Basic Books.
2. Gatta, M. (2002) Juggling Food and Feelings: Emotional Balance in the Workplace. Lanham MD: Lexington Books.
3. Paules, G. (1996). Resisting the symbolism of service. In C. Macdonald & C. Sirianni (Eds.), Working in the service society (pp. 264–290). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
4. Wynn, J. R. (2007) ‘Haunting Orpheus: problems of space and time in the desert.’ In Clough, P. T (ed.) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Duke University Press.

[1] A pleasurably cautious subtitle; academic training discourages futurology. Those who took up Bell’s work were not so restrained – see Alvin Toffler (1981) The Third Wave . New York: Bantam Books.

Cary Grant as Walter Burns in ‘His Girl Friday’

This sort of interpretation could easily be made of a friend of mine who works as an economics journalist. He puts the hours in, and he seems to like it. An omnivorous cultural capital enables him to reference Keynes, Donald MacKenzie, Don de Lillo, Enron and The September Issue in the space of the 8 minute dissection he gives me of the current state of the financial crisis. This impresses me, because he has an explanation, and even a position on each of these things, and it amounts to a story worth hearing. It seems that the acquisition of the new is the dimension of governance which he has internalised, and its relentlessness is something quite demanding. Immediacy is one of the dimensions of the professional ideology of the journalist listed by Mark Deuze (2005: 447). To stop, or to slow down even, is to lose track, and possibly to lose status.

But we sociologists do tend to the negative. There might also be pleasure – and virtue — in this immediacy, this quest for knowledge and for novelty, and a satisfaction in using knowledge to produce knowledge. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre describes character as combination of role and personality. Some roles at particular historical moments embody the character of the age: the Prussian officer and the English public school teacher in the late 19th Century. For MacIntyre, such a character legitimates and embodies the moral order of the age. And I wonder, what if the journalist is the Character of our time? The person of virtue in the liquid modern world without grand narratives, filled with uncertainty and, would be the person who steps into the public spaces of incomprehension, masters enough of a story to tell, with quick words and references to now, and always has an eye out for the next tale.

References

1. Deuze, M. (2005) ‘What is journalism? Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsidered. Journalism. 6: 442–464.
2. Du Gay, P. (1996) Consumption and Identity at Work. London: Sage.
3. MacIntyre, A. (1984) After Virtue: A study in moral theory. University of Notre Dame Press.
4. McRobbie, A. (2002) ‘Club cultures: notes on the decline of political culture in speeded up creative worlds’. Cultural Studies. 16 (4): 516–531.
5. Rose, N. (1990) Governing the soul: the shaping of the private self. London: Routledge.

In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, (Sillitoe, 1960 [1958]), Arthur is proud of work, his speed, his skill on the capstan lathe, the secret of his extra fat pay packet, and so he think he’s cock of the pub come Saturday night, where he can down the pints, fall down the stairs and still go home with his married lover Brenda.

He knows Saturday night shouldn’t feel like Monday morning. And he knows that Saturday night demands the pay back of Sunday morning. Sunday morning is no redemption though, it’s hangover and a sprint out the door before her husband comes home, and then perhaps fishing trip, these are the counterbalance to the routine of work and pub.

You may be familiar with the idea that the standard 9 to 5, Monday to Friday working week is less common than once it was. Shift work, part time work and the need for workers to facilitate the consumption activities of those who have a weekend holiday from work are all evidence of detraditionalisation and flexibilisation, although there are those who think the level of change is overstated (Bradley et al, 2000: 51–70). But obviously people work on Saturdays.

I hate working on Saturdays. I used to, my first job was in a lean-to makeshift garage, where I checked for flaws in new clothes. I was 13. Later, I worked Saturdays in a car showroom as the meet and greet girl, and then in a bar. And I liked it sometimes, but I can’t work Saturdays now. Sundays are different. A bit of marking, some reading, I don’t mind. Sundays are dull anyway. But the mythology of the Good Saturday that I like to live with doesn’t permit for this day to let me work. The Good Saturday, however, cannot simply be understood as leisure time, defined as freedom from work (Parker, 1983). Saturday is festival time. Gadamer describes the festival as autonomous time, time which has its own rhythm, which exists not to be spent but to be experienced. Festival time is not unpredictable, or freefloating, only different to the temporality of other days. My manifesto for a Good Saturday does not mean ignoring the norms of work (routine and obligation), but playing with them to make saturday feel like festival time.

My manifesto: the paper, always the same. Breakfast that takes time (this is work). Spontaneity — though spontaneity needn’t mean an absence of order. Putting things in order (this is work). Being surprised. Seeing what happens. A trip out. A pint too early in the day. Noting and remarking on the absence of work. Letting things take longer than they need. These make for an ordinary sort of Saturday festival. The festival, says Gadamer is a community experience (this is why all football matches should start at 3pm on Saturday), but not everyone can share my good Saturday, they have to be willing to let time stretch without apparent end. Who’s free this weekend?

References

Bradley, H. Erickson, M. Stephenson, C. and Williams, S. (2002) Myths at Work. Polity: Cambridge.
1. Gadamer, H. G. (1986) The Relevance of the Beautiful and other essays. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2. Parker, S. (1983) Leisure and Work. London : Allen & Unwin.
3. Sillitoe, A. (1960) Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Pan Books, Ltd, London.

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

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

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

Division of labour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alienation

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

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

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

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

What does this all tell us?

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

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

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

References

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

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

The narrator in Billie Jo Spears’ 1969 country song Mr Walker it’s all Over could have done with some female colleagues like Dolly, Lily and Jane. ‘I don’t like the New York Secretary’s life’, and who can blame her, when it’s too full of men, from the company president on down, with hands ‘reaching out to grab the things that I consider mine’. So she’s heading back to Garden City, Kansas, because ‘the boy next door don’t know it but come June he’s gonna gain himself a wife’. A late-1960s experiment with women working in the big city is here doomed to failure, and an earlier femininity is reasserted.

Step into the Office Baby by Belle and Sebastian is also about office politics and sexual harassment. Here, the roles are reversed, as we might expect in a post-feminist world. She says

We need to talk
Step into my office, baby
I want to give you the job
A chance of overtime
Say my place at nine

He, though, isn’t sure. He’s ‘a slave to work’, he’s ‘only living when I walk amongst office staff’. And he’s not sure that he wants the sort of overtime she has in mind.

She wants him to sharpen up, be a man, complete with retro phallic necktie.

I've got to change my ways
Dress for business every day
A sharp suit and a kipper tie
A big arrow pointing to my fly

It’s not just the inversion of heteronormative expectations that’s notable in the contrast between Mr Walker and Step into the Office, it’s the meaning of private sphere. In 1969, she could escape back home, where her mom and her man will save her. In 2003, he has nowhere to hide: his own place isn’t a sanctuary from work, but a place where work is in his head ‘in bed by nine, my thoughts composed’, and he succumbs to the office affair, goes to her place to ‘take down her little red dress’. The office is no escape from sexual politics.

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

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

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