Like many newcomers to China before me, I struggled to comprehend the scale and ferocity of the productive forces that have changed Dongguan forever. According to my travelling companions, a young academic and four young female labour activists, Dongguan’s 10 million inhabitants form one physically indistinct node along an urban corridor that stretches for hundreds of kilometres beyond Guangdong province and across south China’s manufacturing heartlands. Perhaps as recently as 20 years ago, the broken concrete pavements upon which we walked and the broad roads along which our minibus rattled would have hosted fertile agricultural lands producing some of the region’s most cherished rice crops. Instead, the descendants of the villagers that once worked this land have found a new and on occasion spectacular source of wealth in the rents derived from the arrival of the factories and their workers.

The scale of what I surveyed was matched by a sense of its brutal functionality. These factories are no dark satanic mills but rather stark utilitarian places of labour, austere physical units of production barely indistinguishable from one another; and possibly from thousands of others in East Asia. Buildings both cheap and quick to erect, and fenced in by high block walls topped with broken glass and barbed wire, there was little visible to betray any effort to create some sense of corporate identity, pride or purpose beyond that conveyed by an occasional national flag fluttering in the warm breeze or by the Spartan, sometimes tatty corporate signage.

Perhaps this functionality could be equally understood in terms of instability, as Dongguan’s current predicament hints at an underlying impermanence. The 2008 financial crisis hit the area hard as orders were lost and the factories let workers go. Since then, according to my companions, few of the factory’s workforces have returned to pre-crisis levels and continuing labour shortages now besets Dongguan. Among the most visible signs of this, for me at least, were the numerous billboards, posters and leaflets pasted to factory walls and doors, or tied to street signs and lampposts proclaiming opportunities for employment. Work, these advertisements announce, is readily available for healthy workers aged 18 to 40 and the pay on offer for a 40-hour week is well above the local minimum. In the most conspicuous examples, the large lettering and bright eye-catching colours also seek to tempt itinerant workers with promises of social insurance and paid holidays, alongside vistas of the seemingly model factory beyond the high walls and the varied entertainments on offer to its workers. And yet the factories of Dongguan continue to struggle to recruit. Wages remain insufficient to meet the spiralling costs of rent and sustenance, the living conditions inside and outside the factories are lonely and unwelcoming, and the work insufficiently engaging. Labour turnover, I am told, can be as much as 50% each year. It is to deal with this labour ‘problem’ that some of Dongguan’s factories, themselves no more than a few years old, are looking to relocate to other parts of mainland China where labour is more plentiful and cheaper.

For the time being at least, the workers still muster a conspicuous presence on the streets of Dongguan’s industrial enclaves. Leaving the factories for lunch or when their shifts end, they spill onto the streets looking for somewhere to eat, refresh themselves, watch TV, telephone a loved one or simply escape their workplace. The ‘uniform’ of this new working class is the ubiquitous polo shirt, its youthful, preppy western signification reconfigured into a utilitarian industrialism that attributes the workers to their factories, and thus to the products that they make, according to the shade of blue, mauve, yellow or orange that they are wearing. To my eye, the bearers of these bright colours are young; some look very young indeed. And perhaps it is only the young that are willing and capable of uprooting themselves from families and friends in order to traverse China’s vast distances in search of a better life in Dongguan’s industrial districts.

Work gains immateriality in two directions: not only because its goal is not oriented to the production of something concrete, but also because it’s based on a service relation which, as Adam Smith already pointed out, “they perish in the very instant of their performance” (cited in Corsani et al, 1996: 227). Consequently, work is becoming intangible: hardly quantifiable, barely standardizable and scarcely identifiable by the consolidated categories of sociology of work (Gallino, 1998).

What does it mean for the people who live by knowledge work everyday?
I will now present an analysis, which starts from a group of pictures made in the context of the fieldwork for my thesis. These are provided by some of my interviewees (55 consultants in Italy, both employees and freelancers), who were asked to complete their interviews with pictures of bodies, objects and spaces of work.

The most direct consequence of work’s intangibility is related to the loss of body and the physical work, because its content is mostly mediated by e-supports and deliver in the virtual shapes of texts, data, imagines in the liquid space enclosed by our own laptops. Communication allows the performance of a work, which gains sociality: the economic value of services and knowledge is strictly correlated to the fact that we share our information with other people.

Sempre in viaggio

Secondly, work is immaterial because it escapes the sense of topos, which can be highlighted in the loss of oneness and meaning of workplace.This is started by the diffusion  of ICT technologies, which allow performing work everywhere and every time, and risks a domestication of working activities, which erodes the separation between working life and private life. As we can see in this image, consultants are always travelling, itinerant experts with a “widened workday” [John, 32, M]; they steal moments of work in the interstices between one journey and another, in hotel rooms, on planes, trains and taxis, they are real inhabitants of the non-places which modernity has built for knowledge workers.

The third evidence concerns the model of project organization, which is built on the achievement of tasks by the creation of single-goal teams, whose life ends with the final performances, exemplified by powerpoint presentations. Teams live just for the time of their goal and they will melt down once their performance is consumed. Defined by some scholars as cellular organization, traditional walls of structure and hierarchy are broken down; such way of organizing work pretends that worker care about those assignments (like client management, goals supervision, new business research), which were in the past saved for entrepreneurs and freelance workers.

As we can see in these images, the contents of work projects are formed on temporary boards, always-modifiable post-its; liquid anchorages for a content, which is by its own definition always in continuous transformation, ready to be cast aside when a new project arrives to substitute it.

Last but not least, the subtlest suggestion is precarity (Bourdieu, 1997; Sennett, 1998). Precarity is not only understandable in terms of contracts and instability in labour market integration, but becomes the lifestyle of consultants. The dogma of mobility and mobile careers puts in question the chance of building a shared memory in the spaces of work: the demand for autonomy, professionalism and entrepreneurship — a direct consequence of project organization — rewards freelancers who are able to create individual careers, browsing around different organizations, eroding the devotion to work as a profession, “because as I understood you must not grow too much fond of… on a profession and then professions change, isn’t it?” [James, 43, M].

Precarity is evident in the temporary workplaces: in the piece of paper shoved under the table leg to try to stop it from wobbling, in the multiple adapters to which the laptop is connected, in the pieces of paper left there by someone who knows why, who knows when. Short term as a work style creates a double privation of sentiments and memory: it questions the creation of a shared heritage between workers, well exemplified by post-its omnipresent in consultants’ images.

To conclude, immateriality muddles up the traditional sociological categories for work and breaks the schemes connected to the static world of work in the industrial age: the opposition between work and no work, between dependency and self-employment, between work life and private life. Assets like property, knowledge and organization, in the past making us think of workers (entrepreneur, freelance and professional), are now a cross-sectional dimension to work in the era of the knowledge workers, who embody in their own selves the ideas I spoke about in this post. Knowledge workers are vulnerable workers, even when they’re employed in the top management classes and drive the post-industrial transformation.

References

1. Bourdieu, P. (1997) Contre-feux. Grenoble: Ed. Liber Raisons d’agir.
2. Corsani, A., Lazzarato, M. and Negri, A. (1996) Le bassin de travail immatériel (BTI) dans la métropole parisienne. Paris: L’Harmattan.
3. Gallino, L. (1998) ‘Su alcune trasformazioni del lavoro’, in A. Varni (editor) Alla ricerca del lavoro. Tra storia e sociologia: bilancio storiografico e prospettive di studio. Roma: Nuova Italia Scientifica.
4. La Rosa, M. (2005) ‘Immateriale, produzione, lavoro’ Sociologia del lavoro, 99, 25–30.
5. Lazzarato, M. and Negri, A. (1991) ‘Travail immatériel et subjectivité’ Futur antérieur, 6.
6. Ranci, C., Di Maria, L., Lembi, P. and PAVOLINI, E. (2008) ‘Come cambia il lavoro autonomo tra vecchi e nuovi profili’, in A. BAGNASCO (editor) Ceto medio. Perché e come occuparsene. Una ricerca del Consiglio Italiano per le Scienze Sociali. Bologna: Il Mulino Editore.
7. Sennett, R. (1998) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York – London: Norton & Co.

International Visual Sociology Association: http://www.visualsociology.org/

British Sociological Association Visual Sociology Study Group: http://www.visualsociology.org.uk/

Visual Sociology, A Field Guide: http://visualsociology.wordpress.com/

Sociological Images: http://sociologicalimages.blogspot.com/search/label/work

Josh Packard’s take on visual sociology: http://joshpackard.com/research/visual-sociology/

Visual Collections and Photographers

LastStop! is a visual record of the London Routemasters’ final months, including images of workers, workplaces and passengers: http://www.routemasters.co.uk/

Lost Labor is a collection of photos from the US from 1900–1980 of jobs that no longer exist: http://www.lostlabor.com/

Images from the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike: http://www.strike84.co.uk/

Masters of Photography: http://www.masters-of-photography.com/

V&A Exploring Photography: http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/photography/index.php

Issue magazine: http://www.documentography.com/issue/

Rogan MacDonald: http://www.roganmacdonald.co.uk/

Paul Halliday’s London project: http://www.paulhalliday.org/

London Independent Photography: http://www.londonphotography.org.uk/

Maurice Broomfield’s photographs of industrial Britain: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2f60ef04-1b6c-11df-838f-00144feab49a,dwp_uuid=a712eb94-dc2b-11da-890d-0000779e2340.html

Places and Projects

The Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University includes material on worker portraits and working-class literature: http://cwcs.ysu.edu/

Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths, University of London; http://www.gold.ac.uk/cucr/

The online Gallery of the Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University, contains images and information about projects on work: http://www.workinglives.org/gallery/gallery.cfm

Discussions

The Case for Working with Your Hands: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=1

Other Interesting Stuff

Exhibition: Striking women: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/News/Press/Pages/StrikingWomen.aspx

New occupations in 2020: http://sciencesowhat.direct.gov.uk/future-jobs/future-jobs-what-might-you-be-doing