Industrial Work and Life

An Anthropological Reader

Massimiliano Mollona, Geert De Neve, Jonathan Parry, Massimiliano Mollona, Geert De Neve, Jonathan Parry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781847880741, 9781847880765
• eBook ISBN: 9781000182101
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Industrial Work and Life: An Anthropological Reader is a comprehensive anthropological overview of industrialisation in both Western and non-Western societies. Based on contemporary and historical ethnographic material, the book unpacks the 'world of industry' in the context of the shop floor, the family, and the city, revealing the rich social and political texture underpinning economic development. It also provides a critical discussion of the assumptions that inform much of the social science literature on industrialisation and industrial 'modernity'. The reader is divided into four thematic sections, each with a clear and informative introduction: historical development of industrial capitalism; shopfloor organisation; the relationships between the workplace and the home; the teleology of industrial 'modernity' and working-class consciousness. With readings by key writers from a range of backgrounds and disciplines, Industrial Work and Life is the essential introduction to the study of industrialisation in different societies. It will appeal to students across a wide range of subjects including: anthropology, comparative sociology, social history, development studies, industrial relations and management studies. Includes essays by: E.P. Thompson, Aihwa Ong, Jonathan Parry, Thomas C. Smith, Harry Braverman, Michael Burawoy, Huw Beynon, Françoise Zonabend, James Carrier, Leslie Salzinger, Ching Kwan Lee, Ronald Dore, Tom Gill, Carla Freeman, Max Gluckman, James Ferguson, Chitra Joshi, Lisa Rofel, Geert De Neve, Karl Marx, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Robert Roberts, June Nash, Christena Turner.

Part 1:
Industrial Time and Work Discipline

SECTIONAL INTRODUCTION

It is a truism that England’s early Industrial Revolution broke with household-based cottage industry by centralizing production in factories. A new kind of differentiation between workplace and home, and between ‘work’ and ‘leisure’, was created. A sharp temporal division overlaid the spatial one. The argument of E.R Thompson’s much-cited essay, around which the other readings in this section are grouped, goes further. Factory production led to the diffusion and institutionalization of a new attitude to time and demanded a new form of work discipline. In the (for Thompson ‘more humanly comprehensible’) pre-industrial world, work is task-orientated, and governed by the rhythms of nature and the religious calendar. It is the tide that determines when the fisherman puts to sea; the weather and season that determine when the harvest is gathered. The working day expands or contracts according to the task in hand, and life is not rigidly compartmentalized into work and leisure, or ruled by the clock. Bouts of intense labour alternate with long periods of idleness. True, the Puritans had delivered endless homilies on time, which must be spent wisely for the sake of one’s soul. True also that wage labour makes a significant difference to the way in which time is regarded. When wages are paid, time is money and employers have an interest in ensuring that workers don’t waste it. But the revolutionary change is brought about by large-scale machine production. The working day becomes increasingly regular and repetitive, and is increasingly governed by the clock. So pervasive would the new work discipline become that its ethic is sometimes applied to leisure pursuits (Moorhouse 1987).

Though he emphasises the historical specificity of each case, for Thompson industrialization everywhere requires workers to accommodate themselves to the discipline of the clock, and the implication is that this will almost inevitably cause friction. Factory production demands a new kind of time discipline because, Thompson stresses, it requires the elaborate synchronization of tasks: a requirement that becomes increasingly insistent with increases in scale and in the division of labour. Technology seems to be key, consistent with which he notes that ‘factory time’ was stubbornly slow to take root in the English potteries, which lacked ‘the aid machinery to regulate the pace of work on the pot-bank’. What is at issue in his essay, however, ‘are not only changes in manufacturing techniques which demand greater synchronization of labour and a greater exactitude in time regimes in any society; but also these changes as they were lived through in the society of nascent capitalism’. The context of ‘industrial capitalism’ is underlined by his title; and, though not made explicit, the taken-for-granted background is presumably the compulsion to return a profit and to keep the plant in constant operation in order to yield a dividend on the enormous capital invested in it. In what measure technology is determinant and in what measure the capitalist market, is not however explored. Are the bitter conflicts over time reported from some industrial settings in planned economies, for example Haraszti’s (1977) account of a socialist-era Hungarian factory, principally the consequence of tendencies endemic to industry, or of the intrusion (in that instance palpable) of market incentives and principles?

Subsequent writers have pointed out that the imposition of clock time was less than Thompson might lead us to suppose (e.g. Whipp 1987; see also Parry, this volume). In fairness, however, it should be acknowledged that he was clearly aware of variation between industries, drawing explicit attention to its early introduction in textile mills and engineering workshops, andto the irregular rhythms of work that long persisted in the docks and potteries (one of Whipp’s main examples). He also considered the possibility, on which Pun Ngai (2005) recently elaborated, that the sexes might be differentially attuned to clock time. A related criticism is that Thompson supposedly accepts too easily the omnipotence of capital and the extent to which it is able to control labour and inculcate a new attitude towards time (especially in craft workers used to self-regulation). Roberts’s (1992) discussion of drink and industrial discipline in nineteenth century Germany shows how the bosses’ ability to impose their will was in fact rather limited; while Gutman (1988) argues that in the United States the transition to an industrial work culture was more prolonged and problematic than Thompson implied.

Though one reading of Thompson would identify machine technology as that which necessitates a new work discipline, it may be the other way round: technological and organizational innovation is sometimes the result, not the cause, of a desire to discipline labour. The Ford assembly line is an instance (Beynon 1984: chapter 1; Miller 1992). That was a business decision, but the impetus behind the introduction of a new work regime on the Mombasa docks in colonial Kenya was, Cooper (1992) shows, political and ideological. No interest was ever taken in whether it was economically more efficient. In the early days, dock labour was flexible but relatively well paid casual labour that could be hired and fired as demand fluctuated and was largely recruited from the rural hinterland. It still had one foot in the agricultural economy and was relatively independent. In time, this system came to be identified with labour indiscipline and political subversion. Above all it challenged the colonialist’s conception of what a modern industrial labour force should be like and their idea that ‘work should be steady and regular and carefully controlled’. The solution was to de-casualize dock labour and ensure that it became fully committed to the urban economy. Dockers would only be properly disciplined when they feared loosing livelihoods that exclusively depended on well paid, relatively secure employment and the housing that went with it. De-casualization was above all about producing a predictable and pliant labour force; its consequence was the creation of an enclave of secure, highly paid and industrially disciplined workers cut off from the rest of the workforce. The result was the dualism found in many Third World settings between an aristocracy of labour and the labouring poor.

The two chapters that follow Thompson’s address the stark contrast it draws between pre-industrial and industrial work regimes. In the(pre-1868) Tokugawa period, Smith tells us, Japanese ‘peasants’ already had an acute and morally loaded sense of time as something fleeting and precious, of which good productive use should be made. Peasant agriculture (like Thompson’s factory) required an elaborate synchronization of tasks and farming manuals enjoined the painstaking planning of agricultural operations. Crops had to be carefully matched to the soils of particular fields, and this demanded meticulous scheduling to ensure that crucial labour intensive operations did not overlap. Diary evidence suggests a work regime of great regularity, rather than Thompson’s ‘alternating bouts of intense work and leisure’. These pre-existing notions about the value of time, Smith argues, and the routinized work discipline to which peasants were already inured, allowed neophyte Japanese factory workers to adapt without much friction to the factory regime. Time discipline never became the bone of contention that it did elsewhere.

The chapter by Parry relates to a more contemporary world: an industrial urban complex in central India that has grown up on a green field site around a gargantuan public sector steel plant. As his informants see it, the fields were never so happy, nor the mills so dark and satanic, as Thompson’s picture suggests. Agricultural labour is now so deeply disliked that even unemployed youngsters, for whom it is emblematic of the benighted world of their illiterate “thumb-impression” fathers, determinedly avoid it. Even their elders agree that factory work is preferable to the back-breaking toil of ploughing the fields, and transplanting the paddy in the monsoon rain. In terms of time discipline, a job in the steel plant is hardly exacting. Time keeping is flexible, tasks are intermittent and there is plenty of opportunity to socialise. Though some jobs are extremely demanding, the proportion of the day spent on them is not, rarely more than two or three hours in a shift, often much less, and then one’s time is effectively one’s own. Manning levels are sufficiently generous, and the disciplinary powers of management sufficiently constrained, that workers have wide latitude to organ-ise their own informal duty rosters and some are persistently absent. The tyranny of the clock is not so oppressive, and ‘industrial time’ is not experienced as qualitatively different from ‘peasant time’. That’s the Indian public sector, many would say; but Parry’s comparison with private sector factories suggests that the difference is not always so marked as is popularly supposed. Much industrial production inevitably proceeds in a stuccato fashion and continuous work-flows are difficult to sustain. Different types of industrial process are associated with different intensities of labour and impose work disciplines of different degrees of rigour. Thompson’s stark contrast between work in the fields and the factory tends to homogenize both in a misleading manner.

Discussing the way in which industry is represented by villagers who live on the edge of another company town in central India, Pinney (1999) points to the paradoxical fact that it is ‘those who do not clock-on in the factory that are most concerned with its dreadful consequences’. These are mainly high caste landowners whose antipathy to industrial development is not unconnected to their present difficulties in obtaining agricultural labour, the higher rates they must pay for it, and the shorter hours (now governed by the distant sound of the factory siren) for which it works. Those who experience the factory personally, who were at the bottom of the old village hierarchy, have a rosier view. The wages are better, the work is easier, and the job has liberated them from the subservience and repression of the old rural order - a judgement that is not significantly qualified by the demands of the factory clock.

In a now classic monograph, Ong (1987) offered an analysis more in tune with Thompson’s contrast. Her study was of young female factory workers of rural origin employed by multinational factories in Malaysia’s Free-Trade Zones; and her focus was on the periodic epidemics of spirit possession on the shop floor that disrupted production. In the traditional village, Ong reports, the labour of young women in the fields went largely unsupervised by men, was task-orientated and paced by the Muslim calendar, and lightened by the camaraderie of the female work group. The spirit possessions of the factory she interprets as a kind of ‘ritual of rebellion’, ‘a weapon of the weak’ which these young women deploy against the time regime and disciplines of industry administered male supervisors, mainly ethnically alien Indians and Chinese. Put differently, pre-capitalist beliefs and values provided workers with the tools for a critique of the dehumanizing aspects of modern manufacture. Nash (chapter 22) and Taussig (1977) had earlier drawn attention to this ideological potential, the latter decoding two key pieces of Columbian plantation worker folklore as a critical commentary on capitalist relations of production and on the mystery of capital accumulation, an analysis from which Ong was concerned to differentiate her own. For her, the problems of which these spirit afflictions are symptomatic are not capitalism and class, but rather the inhumanity of factory work and the inequalities of gender. This picture is, however, qualified by other South-east Asian ethnography that convincingly argues that young female factory workers do not experience a sharp disjunction between work in the fields and the factory, that they see an industrial job as the best option open to them and that such jobs provide them with a new sense of self-worth (Wolf 1992).

Originally published one year after her monograph, Ong’s chapter in this volume shifts the analytical emphasis. Though it does not explicitly evoke the world of peasant agriculture, nor single out the oppression of factory time, spirit a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• General Introduction
• Part 1: Industrial Time and Work Discipline
• Part 2: Industrial Work: Skill, Control and Consent
• Part 3: ‘Work’, ‘Life’ and Gender
• Part 4: The Road(s) to Industrial ‘Modernity’
• Part 5: The Industrial Working Class?
• Appendix of Sources
• List of Series
• Index