De-industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-narrative for Post-war British History

Tomlinson, Jim

doi:10.1093/tcbh/hwv030

Cited by 49 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Both disputes were conditioned by collective workforce and community grievances over the closure of a profitable plant by a multinational, which is a standout feature in recent UK industrial closures (Jenkins, 2017;Gall, 2018). Caterpillar and Vestas were heavily contextualised by Britain's drawn out deindustrialization which has unfolded over the previous five decades (Tomlinson, 2016). As in other developed Western European economies (Clarke, 2011), industrial workers have become increasingly invisible or viewed as an anachronism (Clark and Gibbs, 2017).…”

Section: Concluding Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Deindustrialization was a key factor in shaping the economic conditions within which factory occupations have occurred in the UK during the last five decades (Tomlinson, 2016). Strangleman Factory occupations have implicitly radical overtones that challenge control over investment and production (Gall, 2010).…”

Section: Factory Occupations As a Form Of Industrial Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mobilizing solidarity in factory occupations: Activist responses to multinational plant closures

Gibbs

Kerr

2020

Economic and Industrial Democracy

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Factory occupations are rare and sporadic events which shed light on the processes associated with the collective mobilization of workers’ power. This article utilizes Kelly’s agential and Atzeni’s structural explanations of worker mobilization to examine two disputes which took place during Britain’s long experience of deindustrialization: the occupations of Caterpillar’s tractor factory in Uddingston, Scotland, during 1987 and Vestas’ wind turbine plant on the Isle of Wight during 2009. Each occupation shared the context of multinational divestment and collective workforce grievance based on a common perception that their plant was economically viable and vital to the local economy. However, contrasting sources of leadership mobilized this sentiment in each case: union stewards from within Caterpillar, socialist activists from outside at Vestas. The article concludes that an effective explanation of occupations must synthesize structural and agential factors, emphasizing the coalescing role of activist networks and workers’ perceptions of their labour’s social utility.

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Section: Concluding Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Factory Occupations As a Form Of Industrial Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobilizing solidarity in factory occupations: Activist responses to multinational plant closures

Gibbs

Kerr

2020

Economic and Industrial Democracy

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“…Whilst this term perhaps underplays the resilience and resistance of communities to deindustrialization, industrial ruination is useful in conceptualizing the multitude of personal and collective material, social, and cultural traumas inflicted through deindustrialization (Gibbs & Phillips, 2018). Jim Tomlinson (2016), echoing earlier arguments by Avner Offer (2008), states that deindustrialization has been "so significant in effects, economic, social, and political, that it should be central to our narratives" (p. 77).…”

Section: Of 14mentioning

confidence: 99%

Geographies of deindustrialization and the working‐class: Industrial ruination, legacies, and affect

Emery

2018

Geography Compass

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Sections of the post‐industrial working‐class have made a notable return to media and political discourses in the context of the rise of populism across Europe and the United States. These narratives, which exclude women and BAME working‐class people, suggests the (white, male) working‐class are angry and resentful of being left behind by increasingly globalized political economies, nostalgic for the industrial ordering of work, home, and community. It seems that the political and media establishment are, selectively, understanding what has long been realized by researchers of deindustrialization. In the first, this paper surveys and critiques recent discourses on the post‐industrial working‐classes. The paper then traces the development of industrial ruination as an interdisciplinary area of academic focus, highlighting the themes of memory and temporal factors that have come to dominate the literature. The next section reviews contestations surrounding the affordances of landscapes and industrial ruins for the analysis of memory and history. Finally, the paper proposes interrelated ways to advance future study which historical–cultural geographers are well placed to carry forward. Here, I call for greater attention toward the affective and embodied dimensions of classed experience and the intersectionalities of race and gender in working‐class subjectivities. Further, I suggest there is an imperative to a deeper understanding of constitutive “affective” histories to mediate enduring social inequalities and their political and socially divisive mobilizations.

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“…Consensus, of course, was in part a nationalist myth with limited power to reshape the ideological character of established institutions (Prasad 2006;Garland 2012;Davies 2017;Moyn 2018). Curiously, the decades since the advent of Thatcherism have also been marked by a steady increase in government spending on cultural programmes and institutions of all kinds; the problem is that instead of spending its money on bolstering its own capacity to provide services, the state in Britain focuses on bolstering a parasitic class of private and charitable 'providers' that it expects to operate in competition with each other-indeed, it frequently enforces that competition as a control mechanism (Offer 2008;Tomlinson 2016). Insofar as neoliberalism has ever corresponded with a coherent set of policy positions-an unwise bet considering that the neoliberal ethos is to evade policy at all costs (Harvey 2005;Cahill 2018; Zamora and Behrent 2019)-it has manifested predominantly as a strategy for empowering and harnessing cultural and economic interests 'from below' (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005;Prasad 2006;cf.…”

Section: Periodising Neoliberalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contemporary Music and Its Futures

Valiquet¹

2020

Contemporary Music Review

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extraterrestrial colonisation. The miraculous tesseract turns out to be the work of the future people whose advanced intelligence is the implied result of that colonisation process. Note that, despite the prominent thematisation of inter-dimensionality here, linear causality and intentionality in the universe of Interstellar still seem to work as humans would normally expect: without at least some basic abstractions it would be difficult to produce fiction at all. 1 The film's message seems to be that the solution to the catastrophe of global degradation is to be found not in the knowledge we have now, but 'out there' in one of many possible futures. Justice and peace, the trope implies, are matters outside of history: all humanity can do now is try to stay competitive and keep up the appearance of progress. The power of this plot device lies in the way it politicises the present. In Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred, for example, a mysterious force shuttles the protagonist inexplicably between past and present. The book's narrative follows what is in effect a kind of fold in history, linking relationships of care and moments of trauma across two intersecting plot trajectories. The fragmented present forces the reader to confront the horror of slavery not as a bounded, finished historical event but as a process working at the level of the protagonist's genetic code; slavery transposed to the level of metaphysics. Hypothetical changes enacted in the past enable the reader to encounter an apparently harmonious present in the subjunctive, to consider the ways that things could be going differently, and thus arrive at a better understanding of the necessities and contingencies which constitute the now of everyday experience. The name for this imaginary time of hypothetical resolution in French is uchronie. The term comes from the title of an 1876 novel by Charles Renouvier, a central philosopher of history, religion and law under Napoleon III, and an important influence on the pragmatist thinking of William James (Renouvier 1988). In a lengthy preface, Renouvier leads his reader to understand that the core of the text has been passed down in secret by a scholar fleeing the inquisition in the years following the execution of Giordano Bruno. The fictional author of this text finds himself intellectually hamstrung by the church's failure to reconcile the new empirical science with its metaphysical commitment to a single, personalised Absolute. If Europeans in the past had chosen to remain polytheistic, he asks, would they today be better equipped to accept the pluralist metaphysics that the new sciences seem to demand? What, for example, would have happened to philosophy if the Roman empire had chosen not to back Christianity? Renouvier's novel is both the answer to that question and an experiment in the kind of critical history that he saw his pluralist metaphysics as making possible. It treats the Absolute as an event like any other, a specific node in a chain of relations with no necessary outcome at any given time...

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De-industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-narrative for Post-war British History

Cited by 49 publications

References 16 publications

Mobilizing solidarity in factory occupations: Activist responses to multinational plant closures

Mobilizing solidarity in factory occupations: Activist responses to multinational plant closures

Geographies of deindustrialization and the working‐class: Industrial ruination, legacies, and affect

Contemporary Music and Its Futures

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