Closing Moulinex: Thoughts on the Visibility and Invisibility of Industrial Labour in Contemporary France

Clarke, Jackie

doi:10.1080/09639489.2011.610164

Cited by 30 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Many of the most dramatic moments in recent industrial experienceincluding the Rana Plaza tragedy in Bangladesh and the suicides by Chinese factory workershave occurred in and around the factories that outside of such episodes frequently remain peripheral to most westerners' perceptions. This reveals that the factory's 'invisibility' in both current and historical agendas is less an outright disappearance and more a matter of marginalisation and disqualification (Clarke, 2011). Factory history can help raise public awareness and advance current debates within political economy, industrial relations and other cognate fields of study.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the West, the politics of globalization and the changing geography of industrial production have prompted historians to examine the legacy of formerly thriving factories in a context of deindustrialization. The factory has therefore also become a 'site of memory', including both commemoration and public history, that could be studied through the increasingly epistemologically and methodologically sophisticated instrument of oral history (Clarke, 2011;Cowie & Heathcott, 2003;Klubock & Fontes, 2009;Mah, 2012). Despite the common use of death metaphors in relation to factory closures (Arman, 2014), historians have demonstrated that the history of the factory continues after the cessation of its productive aspect as its physical and symbolic existences give rise to contested visions of the industrial past, present and future (Bamberger & Davidson, 1998;High & Lewis, 2007;Modell, 1998).…”

Section: Initial Historiography and Its Achievementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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1956: John Saville, E.P. Thompson & The Reasoner

Laybourn

2017

Labor History

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Factories remain significant sites of employment, crucial to capitalism. In the twentieth century, scholars registered achievements in documenting their history, but since the late 1980s, and for a generation, the field lost impetus within labour history although insights continued to accumulate through work in adjacent disciplines. The factory has not featured on the agenda of 'transnational' and 'global' labour history, but we suggest that it can and should contribute to that broader global project, reinvigorating labour history, not least by contributing a dimension close to workers' everyday experience. KEYWORDSGlobal labour history; factory history; industrialization; post-industrialization; working-class history 'Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face "No admittance except on business." Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making.' -Karl Marx.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Initial Historiography and Its Achievementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

1956: John Saville, E.P. Thompson & The Reasoner

Laybourn

2017

Labor History

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“…As Jackie Clarke observes, much memorial work is 'predicated on the not unproblematic assumption that the industrial world is dead and gone.' 48 Clarke has documented how the rhetoric surrounding individual plant closures laments the passing of a generalized way of life. But this 'language of class death … does little to get to grips with the fact that the people who populated the old industrial order still exist.…”

Section: Postindustrial Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction

Calder¹

2019

Street Theatre and the Production of Postindustrial Space

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Sauver l'usine, c'est sauver la mémoire ouvrière de ce quartier, se rappeler que ce quartier est un quartier ouvrier, que ce n'est pas rien, que les ouvriers existent, sont encore là, même si on voudrait parfois nous faire croire qu'ils ont disparu. […] Quoi faire de cette histoire pour ceux qui sont là, aujourd'hui, que cela leur serve, qu'ils puissent s'appuyer dessus? To save the factory is to save the working-class memory of this neighbourhood, to recall that this neighbourhood is a working-class neighbourhood, that it isn't nothing, that the workers exist, are still here, even if at times one would like to make us believe that they have disappeared. […] What to make of this history for those who are here, today, that it might serve them, give them something to lean on? Stéphane Bonnard 1

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“…In particular, blue-collar workers and their world gradually became invisible through "various forms of marginalization, occlusion and disqualification from the mainstream political and media discourses. " 21 There remained only a few sociologists to contend that the working class was still alive and worth studying. 22 The "erasure" of labor prompted narratives on the steady improvement of working conditions.…”

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confidence: 99%

Dying for a Living: Economic and Moral Restructuring in a French Factory

Marichalar¹

2018

History of the Present

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In 1897, after a decade of intense scholarly work, Max Weber suffered a nervous breakdown 1. For most of the six years that followed, a period which some have called his "lost years," he was no longer able to read or write without great distress. The sociologist "struggled to teach but often could not complete the semester," and "was unable to concentrate on work. " 2 Only in 1904 did he take up a new writing project, which led to him publishing The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the classic study that deals precisely with the mystery of how and why we commit ourselves to work. 3 His explanation involved the enduring legacy of ascetic Protestantism, what he called "the ghost of dead religious beliefs." 4 In 1908, Weber completed this line of thought in a study of worker output in a textile factory-a study that also considered worldly factors such as wages, worker solidarity, and the threat of unemployment. 5 Sociologists have never ceased to be obsessed with the question of consent in the workplace. Conducting fieldwork in the same industrial plant thirty years apart, Donald Roy and Michael Burawoy each dealt with this topic from different viewpoints: "Where [Roy] had been interested in why workers did not work harder, I wondered why they worked as hard as they did," Burawoy reflected retrospectively 6. Burawoy's study, Manufacturing Consent, showed the importance of internal labor markets and what he called the internal state, "whose grievance machine constituted workers with rights and obligations and whose apparatus of collective bargaining coordinated the interests of workers and managers. " 7 This analysis was echoed in 1997 by Pierre Bourdieu in one of his rare pieces that focused solely on work: "The investment in labour, and therefore miscognition of the objective truth of labour as exploitation, which leads people to find an extrinsic profit in labour, irreducible to simple monetary income, is part of the real conditions of the performance of labour, and of exploitation. " 8 Bourdieu stressed the importance of the small spaces of freedom granted to workers, as a conquest or as a privilege.

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Closing Moulinex: Thoughts on the Visibility and Invisibility of Industrial Labour in Contemporary France

Cited by 30 publications

References 7 publications

1956: John Saville, E.P. Thompson & The Reasoner

1956: John Saville, E.P. Thompson & The Reasoner

Introduction

Dying for a Living: Economic and Moral Restructuring in a French Factory

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