From the Margins to the Centre

Cultural Production and Consumption in the Post-Industrial City

Justin O'Connor, Justin O’Connor, Derek Wynne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138416130
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351935326
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

The title of this book, From the Margins to the Centre, refers to three related themes that have run closely together in the debates on the city in the 1980s and 1990s. Firstly a process of restructuring in which activities previously deemed peripheral to the 'productive' city have now moved centre stage; that is, a concern with culture, consumption and image. Secondly, the notion of gentrification, whereby a reversal of the movement out of the city centre by the affluent classes results in a re-centralisation of previously marginal areas of the city centre. Thirdly, a process whereby previously marginal groups and their activities have been made central to the city - and have made the city centre central to themselves. Each of the chapters in this volume derives from recently conducted research grounded in an attempt to examine some of the issues posed in what can be described as postmodernist theorising on the nature of the contemporary city. A strong current of such thought has placed the multiple uses of city spaces at the centre of its claims for the construction and deconstruction of identities. The prolification and fragmentation of patterns of cultural production and consumption, it is claimed, makes the city a complex field of conflicting activities whose juxtaposition undermines traditional cultural hierarchies. Across this field identity becomes fluid in a way that uncouples its connection with the fixed categories of class, gender and ethnicity. While such positions point to a dominant role for culture in contemporary society, there has been little discussion or investigation of the social practices whereby this is effected. This book attempts an investigation of such practices. Implicit in the very conception of the book, and running through each of the contributions, is the view that contemporary popular culture is crucial to the understanding of the transformations to which we refer, and that the investigation of this popular culture needs

1 Fordism, post-Fordism and the contemporary city

Phil Mole

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the nature of urban economies in the early 1990s, in the light of the recent arguments in the social sciences about New Times (Hall and Jacques 1989) and postmodernity. While this is its central objective, it is also aims to provide a conceptual framework for analyzing the empirical findings of recent research into Manchester’s ‘cultural’ industries, its clothing and fashion industries, and so-called ‘green businesses’, conducted by the Institute for Popular Culture at MMU and its PCFC research team (see other chapters in this volume). Manchester thus provides the empirical foundation for the discussion below, but the central theoretical question concerns the character and dynamic of the contemporary urban economy, especially but not exclusively in the UK.

It is important to emphasize the exploratory nature of the chapter, which acknowledges the complexity and scope of the issues involved, and the controversy surrounding the debates around postmodernity. The chapter does not accept some of the more ambitious claims of postmodern theorists, like Lash’s assertion that the ‘cultural’ has become the most decisive moment in both economic and social life (Lash 1990). Its aim is much more modest: to examine some of the specific claims of postmodern theorists about the economy, and the light they throw on Manchester’s current experience. To support this modest intention, I list below the tentative hypotheses which organize the chapter, so that the reader can assess how far it is fulfilled.

1. Of the various conceptual frameworks available for theorizing recent transformations in Manchester’s economy — de-industrialization, post-industrialism, late capitalism, and Fordism/flexible specialization — the latter is the most useful;

2. that Manchester’s economy, up until the late 1960s, was the centre of an industrial region which can usefully be described as Fordist, although this Fordism should be seen as an unsuccessful and short-lived response to industrial decline rather than a stable regime of accumulation and regulation;

3. that, unlike other cities and regions in Europe, and until recently, Manchester has failed to develop a sustainable post-Fordist economy, although certain elements of such an economy are now emerging;

4. that this failure was due to the particular patterns of ‘embeddedness’ of Manchester’s economy, in an institutional matrix which perpetuated its crisis and prevented its resolution;

5. that the emergent elements of a post-Fordist, flexibly specialized, economy are not the result of some immanent postmodern logic, but the effect of a concerted neo-liberal attack on the City, and the stimulation of private consumption for electoral purposes;

6. and, finally, that Manchester will be unable to develop a sustainable post-Fordist economy without fundamental changes in policy and social institutions.

The political economy of postmodernity

It will not be the purpose of this chapter to examine the extensive literature which now exists in the social sciences on the political economy of contemporary western societies (see Piore and Sabel 1984; Urry and Lash 1987, and 1994; Harvey 1990). It will suffice merely to remind readers that there are a number of different, if partly overlapping, conceptual frameworks which have been put forward to characterize and explain the various developments in political economy over the last 20 years; among which the terms de-industrialization, post-industrialism, late capitalism, and Fordism/post-Fordism have been the most prominent.

The object of these conceptual frameworks is a set of apparently deep-seated and structural problems in western political economies which emerged in the early 1970s. After nearly three decades of economic growth, stable prices, rising living standards, increasing world trade, expanding welfare programmes, and full employment, the statistical indicators of economic well-being began to go into reverse. Of course, there were exceptions to these trends: the economic cycle still produced up-turns and down-turns, and some countries — notably Japan, West Germany (as it then was) and Italy — seemed to cope with the ‘crisis’ better than others. Looking back over this period in 1994, however, while some countries (notably the UK) seemed to continue to decline, and others changed their places in the capitalist pecking order, the overall picture looks decidedly grim.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the traditional metropolitan centres of the advanced industrial countries, especially in the UK. Once the dynamic hub of manufacturing, commerce and administration, and the focus of population growth over many generations, cities have — since the 1970s — lost population, businesses and jobs, tax revenues and vibrant public services. No longer the privileged site linking local populations to national and international markets, many traditional cities appear to have been sidelined by some inexorable logic of multinational capital. Visible signs of economic collapse, physical decay, and social decomposition are everywhere evident: dilapidated buildings, derelict land, homeless people, begging, rising crime, racial tensions, riots, and much else besides.

De-industrialization

In the 1980s, many geographers like Champion (1989), Young and Mills (1983), Hall (1988) and Robson (1988), and social scientists like Blackaby, and Rowthorn (1986; 1986) attributed these problems to processes of ‘de-industrialization’:

... urban economic decline is no localised phenomenon, but part of a massive and continuing shift in the spatial structure of the economies of industrialized nations ... to place the local changes ... into a broader international and national context enables us to set aside the question of the impact of policies and programmes upon the urban economy, for ... that impact is unlikely to be significant and can hardly be expected to reverse the tide of urban de-industrialization (Young and Mills, p.2).

Companies were quitting the city and relocating production and employment elsewhere, and urban population decline inevitably followed: ‘urbanization has ceased in most of Western Europe and ... counter-urbanization is in the process of emerging as the dominant force’ (Fielding, quoted in Young and Mills, p.35).

While this de-industrialization thesis may have appeared plausible in the 1980s, there are several grounds for questioning its validity as a conceptual framework for understanding the political economy of the contemporary city. Does it do anything more than describe what cities have self-evidently experienced in the last 20 years, the departure of companies and people? Does it offer a serious explanation of this phenomenon, except the truism that companies and people have sought to locate and live elsewhere? More importantly, perhaps, does it provide anything other than a purely negative conceptual model of the contemporary city, that it is no longer ‘industrial’ in the traditional sense? And finally, is it not simplistic in giving such priority to traditional industrial activities, while ignoring the wider institutional context within which economic activity is always embedded?

Post-industrialism

For many social scientists, urban de-industrialization has come to be seen as merely a staging-post on the way to the ‘post-industrial’ city. This term, first worked out by Daniel Bell in the 1960s (1974), looks at first sight a useful corrective to the purely negative model of the city implied by the term de-industrialization: in place of manufacturing activities come service activities, servicing people and companies takes the place of the production of products, information and cultural capital replaces physical capital. In his Presidential address to the Institute of British Geographers in January 1993, the UK government’s leading advisor on urban policy, Professor Brian Robson, enthusiastically embraces the concept of the post-industrial city:

Much of this, of course, is to spell out the elements of the post-industrial city for which I have argued for many years. At its simplest this involves the creation of the city as a forum ... with specific new aims: for information; for face-to-face decision making; for producer services; for HEI-linked hi-tech activities; for entertainment and leisure (Robson, 1993).

Here again, however, the concept of the post-industrial city appears purely descriptive, of the dominant economic activities in the city. It tells us nothing about how these activities are organized, why they have become dominant, and how such a city is integrated into the world of ‘goods-production’, since it apparently does not produce material products itself. Indeed, the core concepts of ‘postindustrialism’ have been vigorously criticized ever since they were first formulated by Bell in the 1960s, notably by Gershuny and Miles (1983), by a variety of Marxists (Callinicos, 1989) and by neo-Keynesians (Reich 1978; Hutton 1994). The belief that UK cities in particular, and the UK in general, could flourish on the back of service industries, was a widespread prejudice among Government ministers — notably Chancellors Lawson and Howe — in the 1980s, leading to a devastating decline in the UK’s manufacturing base, and an unsustainable trade deficit.

If the most obvious weakness of the post-industrial thesis is its (flawed) empiricism, its central theoretical deficiency is (as with the de-industrialization thesis which preceded it) the priority it gives to disembodied technical and economic phenomena, to which all else in the social is subordinated. Its overt evolutionism automatically discounts questions of individual and collective agency, social and political contradictions and struggles, and the different forms that social arrangements take across time and space. Characterizing contemporary Manchester as a post-industrial city, for example — either as reality, or ‘in the making’ — obscures the precise location of Manchester in its regional, national and international setting, and the arguably complicated processes which link its present to its past. There is no sense of the way Manchester’s character and identity has been forged out of the interaction between a variety of constraints and possibilities, both external and internal to it.

Fordism and post-Fordism

At first sight, the concepts of Fordism and post-Fordism — or flexible specialization — might appear to suffer from the same kind of evolutionism criticized above. But since these concepts refer not just to production regimes, but also to consumption patterns, cultural forms, individual and collective identities, and patterns of social and political regulation (regimes of regulation and accumulation, as the French school describes them (Aglietta 1979); so the scope of analysis widens, and the worst dangers of evolutionism (determinism, formalism, functionalism) can hopefully be avoided. More specifically, since the concepts of Fordism and post-Fordism entail a recognition that economic activity is always ‘embedded’ in networks of social institutions and practices, and in ‘space’ and ‘time’, it would seem likely that their deployment should result in a greater understanding of Manchester’s specificity.

Manchester as a Fordist city

Insofar as the concept of Fordism has a common-sense meaning, it lies with the notion of mass production — of standardized products, for homogeneous markets, on a global scale. In this particular sense of the term, Manchester has long been in the forefront of Fordist cities (perhaps the world’s first), as the centre of the Lancashire cotton industry, which dominated world markets throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. The entire industrial archeology of the region — its mills, warehouses, canals, terraced houses, valleys, town halls, market places — still reflects this stupendous domination; and the economic history statistics document it in all the major indicators: output, exports, investment in buildings and machinery, employment etc.

If Fordist mass production characterized the output of the cotton industry, the typical enterprise producing the output also displayed some major Fordist features. Although most remained quite small in employment terms — in 1890 the average spinning firm employed only 155 workers — enterprises tended to specialize in only one stage of the production process (spinning, weaving, finishing, merchanting), and seldom integrated different stages: with expanding demand, they were preoccupied with economies of ‘scale’ not of ‘scope’. Technological innovation and product design played a limited role in the industry’s development, which was driven mainly by simply adding capacity (more mills, more looms, more spindles).

While there was no assembly line, speeding up and deskilling work and worker — that characteristic of Fordism associated with Henry Ford himself — the machinery was ‘dedicated’ and inflexible, and required great concentration but little skill of the textile operative. The pace of work dictated by the machine was intense, and the division of labour correspondingly strict, overladen with rigid gender divisions between skilled and supervisory males, and semi-skilled females.

Cottonopolis

If Cottonopolis — as Manchester has been called since the 19th century — displays many classically Fordist features (mass production, economies of scale, hierarchical and rigid divisions of labour, semi-skilled labour, inflexible machinery, impersonal global markets etc.), the cotton industry did not stand alone. Alongside it grew a vigorous textile machinery industry, a clothing industry, a warehousing and distribution network, and a banking system to match. A tradition of textile and textile machinery production provided the foundation for mechanical engineering, and later, electrical engineering: both producing on a mass scale for world markets.

By the 1920s however, the domination of world markets by the Lancashire cotton industry had come to an end, displaced in the high income markets of the USA and Europe by indigenous producers able to defeat the Lancashire competition by new technologies, new products, on price and on quality. Employment in spinning and weaving fell from nearly 800,000 in 1912 to under 500,000 in 1937 (Singleton 1991); unemployment among cotton operatives reached 43% in 1931. Forced out of the European and American high-income markets, Lancashire cotton became increasingly dependent on the protected markets of Empire; but even here Lancashire faced the rising, low-cost, textile industry of Japan, and new low-cost competition from India, Egypt and China. By the end of World War II, Manchester’s textile Fordism had been in headlong retreat for nearly half a century.

To conclude from this summary account, however, that it is 19th and early 20th century Manchester that was Fordist, would involve a gross misuse of the term. Of course, the mass production and export of homogeneous textile products (and textile and other machinery) to an impersonal world market, on an immense scale, impressed itself deeply on Manchester’s social and cultural forms. But the concept of Fordism cannot simply be reduced to the existence of mass production industries, however dramatic or durable their dominance was. For Fordism involves (whether one takes the concept from the American institutionalists like Piore and Sabel, or from the Marxist French regulationists) a p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Fordism, post-Fordism and the contemporary city
• 2. Left loafing: city cultures and postmodern lifestyles
• 3. Regional variations: northernness and new urban economies of hedonism
• 4. The interchangeable roles of the producer, consumer and cultural intermediary The new ‘pop’ fashion designer
• 5. The ecstasy of urban regeneration: regulation of the night-time economy in the transition to a post-Fordist city
• 6. The space that difference makes: negotiation and urban identities through consumption practices
• 7. The city as a site of ethical consumption and resistance
• 8. Capitalist enterprise as a moral or political crusade: opportunities, constraints and contradictions
• 9. Shouting in the street: popular culture, values and the new ethnography