Call for Papers 2019-Factory History Working Group

Despite many calls to bring anthropology and history closer to each other in the past, interdisciplinary research symposia happen rarely. This workshop on “re-articulating the factory as an object of study” has addressed this paucity of interdisciplinary conversation, in the idea setting of re:work, which hosts scholars from different discipline. The workshop resulted in a productive, rare encounter between labour history and industrial anthropology, two fields that share similar objects of analysis, but are quite apart as for the methodologies and theoretical approaches they deploy. The workshop aimed at gathering state-of-the-art research focus on the factories, to discern the similarities and differences between the two disciplines in terms of research questions, conceptual vocabulary and methodological tools, and to evaluate the potential for collaborative research in the future.

International Review of Social History, 2019

It is an interesting time to write about factories. The once very popular industrial workplace has lost its charm for labour historians with the geographical and thematic broadening of the field. As theoretical interventions encompassing transnational dimensions brought forms of non-wage and non-industrial labour to the fore, labour historians have moved away from the industrial workplace. Just as the large Fordist factory ceased to be the political and cultural reference point for policymakers, employers, and organized labour, writing about factories has largely gone dormant.

Labor History

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.

Labor History, 2020

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.

Based on recent historical, anthropological, and sociological work on factories, this blog series explores new methodological perspectives on factories in the past and present. In particular, we seek to open a conversation on the question of space and scale. We look at the ways in which the shifting political-economic regimes and macro-political developments at the national and global scales interact with shop floor dynamics. On the national level, factories were key sites for entanglements of state-building, class formation, and modernisation. For a good part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the large factory laid a claim to define the most significant aspects of life associated with modernity, and became a site of the construction of ideologies, imaginaries, and structures of feelings. The factory has also been a hub for collaborative projects between global and national actors and institutions. The balance of power within these networks was shaped in part by the shifting contours of the geopolitical and global economic order. Yet, local dynamics at the shop floor level also played a role in shaping the transnational flows of ideologies, expertise, and knowledge.

TRAFO -Blog for Transregional Research, 2021

Based on recent historical, anthropological, and sociological work on factories, this blog series explores new methodological perspectives on factories in the past and present. In particular, we seek to open a conversation on the question of space and scale. We look at the ways in which the shifting political-economic regimes and macro-political developments at the national and global scales interact with shop floor dynamics. On the national level, factories were key sites for entanglements of state-building, class formation, and modernisation. For a good part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the large factory laid a claim to define the most significant aspects of life associated with modernity, and became a site of the construction of ideologies, imaginaries, and structures of feelings. The factory has also been a hub for collaborative projects between global and national actors and institutions. The balance of power within these networks was shaped in part by the shifting contours of the geopolitical and global economic order. Yet, local dynamics at the shop floor level also played a role in shaping the transnational flows of ideologies, expertise, and knowledge.

The present essay strives to capture the shift from a predominantly older, institutional and political histories of trade unions, socialist parties and tendencies, biographies of their leaders to a new ‘bottom up’ labour history, as questions of working class structure, class formation and class culture came to be investigated afresh, which, despite its euro-centric and grossly nationalist parentage, significantly expanded and revitalized the contours of modern labour history. The year 1860 is an accepted watershed in the discipline, not only because it coincided with the foundation of the Society for the Study of Labour History (SSLH) in Britain spearheaded by the likes of Asa Briggs, Eric Hobsbawm, Royden Harrison, and Edward Palmer Thompson, but more importantly, the decades which followed exhibited the increasing acceptance of labour history in universities and academic journals, leading to the formation of labour history associations amongst historians across countires, wherein, needless to say, the SSLH played no small role. The progression was exemplified by the transition from the original Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History to a conventional scholarly journal Labour History Review, in 1996. Of the aforementioned few, Edward Palmer Thompson’s ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ is unanimously credited to have laid the first brick in the creation of what came to be known as ‘new’ labour history, and thus Section I of the essay contends with some of the key issues of Thompsonian historiography which, even after 50 years since its first publication, finds contemporary relevance in shaping and defining present day labour histories. Section II corresponds to the enormous international expansion of labour history which subsequently fostered the evolution of comparative approaches to systematize and explain the peculiarities of national patterns of working-class formation. One of the most fully elaborated recent approaches in this area is the collective investigation by Ira Katznelson, Aristide Zolberg, and associates (1986) which follows the conceptual approach of Jurgen Kocka’s Weberian-Marxist class model minimizing E. P. Thompson’s ‘subjectivist – culturalist’ class notion as being severely restrictive in its comparative applicability. However, Katznelson’s formulation suffers from certain conceptual flaws, one of them being the systematic bias evident in the consideration of cases pertaining only to advanced capitalist countries asphyxiated by ‘methodological’ nationalism and uncompromising Euro-centrism. Addressing some of the deficiencies and neglected continuities of earlier labour histories Section III takes up Marcel Van der Linden’s preoccupation with a ‘global’ labour history project which marks the current frontier of contemporary labour histories. It goes beyond saying that Van der Linden has been central to this move both as a researcher with new ideas as well as an influential organizer of research. The essay concludes by evaluating certain sections of Van der Linden’s ‘Workers of the World’ - a path – breaking manual facilitating development in a global direction.

Labour History Project Bulletin, 2018

Call for Paper for the Factory History Group for the European Labor History Network Conference in 2021 -- Deadline 25th of September

Harry Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital (1974) and Michael Burawoy’s The Politics of Production Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism (1985), opens many debatable extensions from Marx’s Capital. Looking at the process of labour and production of commodities, these scholars have taken difference stance on their analysis. While both stand on different positions to talk about the structure of labour and its varied characteristics, it has to be kept in mind that Burawoy’s work was mainly influenced by that of Braverman and many other thinkers like Gramsci1 and so on. Therefore, much the aforementioned book discusses and critiques the ideas put forth by Braverman and adds more to it. The crux of both the books can be summarized and said to have dealt with labour in the production process. Braverman manages to focus on the instinctual part that differs amongst animals and humans. Human labour not being instinctual, is something more than it and involves intellectual capabilities and pressure. He talks of the labourer as a passive character who is alldominated by different levels of authority in Weber’s analysis (like bureaucracy) in the forms of managerial autarchy, scientific temperaments, Taylorist production process and so on. Capitalist production takes away the labour power of the workers. Burawoy on the other hand, collects the subjugation part of the workers from Braverman but also adds more to it. He introduces the concept of consent within which the labourers participate in a game like situation which increases the efficiency as well as exploitation, example that he specifies is the ‘piece-rate pay’ system. He analyses the condition in different ideal types of factories across nations to understand the politics within the factory as well as the external world.