Work, Locality and the Rhythms of Capital

Material Inheritances: How Place, Materiality, and Labor Process Underpin the Path-dependent Evolution of Contemporary Craft Production

“…This necessarily draws analytical attention to labor process -the "immediate site and material medium of the relation between capital and labour" (Gough 2003, 4), which encompasses "the material processes of production, the allocation of workers to production tasks, the control of workers by management within these tasks, and -crucially -the interrelations between these" (Gough 2003, 3). Matters of the changing process and composition of work have featured strongly in labor geography (Coe 2013;Warren 2014), and in creative industries research (Gibson 2003;Banks, 2010), and are mainstays of research on the shifting fortunes of manufacturing in industrial cities and regions (Gough 2003;Rutherford and Holmes 2014). The growing literature on embodied experiences of work is a related point of connection (Watson 2013; Pratchett forthcoming).…”

“…However, thus far in evolutionary economic geography labor process has been less extensively theorized than firms, Craft-based forms of manufacture have evolved through long-run transitions in labor process -in the case below, from craft to factory, and back again. Each of these shifts reflects intersecting forces of investment, capital mobility and strategy, technology and labor struggles (Gough 2003). Typically, such shifts have profound implications for the uneven spatial division and distribution of labor (Massey 1984) and for how individual workplaces are organized in ways to govern workers' bodies and extract value from labor (Barnard and Shapiro 2014;Guéry and Deleule 2014).…”

“…To understand emergent, craft-based forms of production requires a focus on place-and path-dependent histories and materialities of labor process (cf. Frances 1993;Gough 2003), with that in turn shaped by political economies of workplace organization and production method, the stability of product design, and affordances of necessary input materials (Hatch 2013). Notwithstanding entanglements with seemingly immaterial knowledge and financial flows, and information technologies, such craft and maker scenes rely upon material elements: they nest in particular urban or regional spaces (with built landscape features and visceral memories of industrial heritage), extract value from the fleshy bodies of workers, use configurations of labor and technology in the physical production process, emphasize quality materials for which provenance is a source of distinction, and ultimately trade in completed physical objects (Warren and Gibson 2013; Patchett forthcoming).…”

Machine-made lace, the spaces of skilled practices and the paradoxes of contemporary craft production

“…This includes employing women in traditional men's roles. As Gough argues, these occurrences draw attention to 'the material processes of production, the allocation of workers to production tasks, the control of workers by management in these tasks, and-crucially-the interrelations between these' 91 . The vignettes above demonstrate that the development of potential skill, skill re-allocation by management, and the need to constrain/maintain their workforce operate in response to both the local and the wider social and economic situation of the industry.…”

Commentary on Bryan Palmer’s “Approaching working-class history as struggle: a Canadian contemplation; a Marxist meditation”

“…Furthermore, while I concur with Palmer that class struggle cannot be simply reduced to those at the point of production, some spaces are more strategic in worker struggles than others. The wage relation and the workplace remain a critical arena for labor's exploitation and the development of class consciousness (Hudson 2001, 124-141;Gough 2003). Because work under capitalism is by necessity a collective endeavor, there are always possibilities of common worker identity and resistance (Martinez Lucio and Stewart 1997;Gough 2003).…”