Mollona Made in Sheffield

An Ethnography of Industrial Work and Politics
1. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-1-84545-902-4
Verlag: Berghahn Books
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 212 Seiten, Web PDF, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 228 mm

In 1900, Sheffield was the tenth largest city in the world. Cutlery “made in Sheffield” was used across the globe, and the city built armored plate for the navy in the run-up to the First World War. Today, however, Sheffield’s derelict Victorian shop floors and industrial buildings are hidden behind new leisure developments and shopping centers.
Based on an extended period of research in two local steel factories, this book combines a lively, descriptive account with a wide-ranging critique of post-industrial capitalism. Its central argument is that recent government attempts to engineer Britain’s transition to a post-industrial and classless society have instead created volatile post-industrial spaces marked by informal labor, industrial sweatshops and levels of risk and deprivation that divide citizens along lines of gender, age, and class. The author discovers a link between production and reproduction, and demonstrates the centrality of kinship relations, child and female labor, and intra-household exchanges to the economic process of de-industrialization. Paradoxically, government policies have reinvigorated working-class militancy, spawned local industrial clusters and re-embedded the economy in the spatial and social structure of the neighborhood.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mollona, Massimiliano

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
Introduction

Anthropology of Labour
Bourgeoisie and Proletarians
History and Class
Technological Fetishism
Class and Kinship
Notes on Fieldwork

PART I: ARTISANS
Chapter 1. Morris Ltd

The Factory as Socio-technical Space
The Shop Floor
The Market
The Formal Organization
Informal Organization
A Short Social History of the Machines
The Social Distribution of Knowledge in Morris
Discussion about Value in the Break-room
Political Economy
Conclusion

Chapter 2. The ‘Return’ of the Informal Economy in Endcliffe

The Informal Economy Debate in Anthropology
Informal Production
Informal Exchanges
Sex Market: the Elysium Khaled’s
Conclusion

Chapter 3. Working-class Homes

Working-class Families and Poverty
The ‘Post-kinship’ Turn Governmental
Families and New Extended Households
Conclusion

Chapter 4. Welcome to Political Limbo

Local History of Working-class Politics
Folk Models of Class
From Steel Town to Leisure Centre
Cutlers versus Developers
Fish, Fishermen and Steelworkers
Reclaiming the Body: Sickness Benefit
Conclusion

PART II: PROLETARIANS
Chapter 5. Unsor Ltd

The Place
The Production Process and Formal Organization
A Normal Day at the Smelting Shop
‘Every Furnace is like a Good-looking Woman’
Stories of ‘Gods’ and ‘Donkeys’ during Break-times
The Rolling Mill
The Grinding Bay
Health and Safety Politics at Bay 2
Farewell to Manual Labour
Conclusion

Chapter 6. A Divided Proletariat

Charlie Moody: from Working-class to Nursing
The Strange Disappearance of Charlie Moody
Being Italian in Worksop: Antonio Masso
Pepperoni, Lampascioni and Vino Rosso: A Food Journey from the South of Italy to South Yorkshire
Returning ‘Home’
Epilogue
Conclusion

Chapter 7. Community Unionism, Business Unionism – Two Strategies, the Same Phoenix

Transmutations of Labour Representation
The Phoenix Flies on the ISTC Divisional Office
The ISTC in UNSOR
Political Meeting at the ISTC or Community Unionism in Action
The Same Phoenix, Different Trajectories
Reorganization
The AEU Factory
Branch Business
Unionism in Times of Reorganization
Conclusion

Conclusion

Farewell to the Working Class?
Labour and Alienation as Relational Values
Relational Consciousness as the Basis for Class Struggle

Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Mollona, Massimiliano

Massimiliano Mollona has been Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, London, since 2003. After an Italian Laurea in Economics, he received his Ph.D. and MSc in Anthropology from the London School of Economics. He is a co-editor of Critique of Anthropology and Reviews Editor of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI). His recent publications include ‘Gifts of Labour. Steel Production and Technological Imagination in an Area of Urban Deprivation, Sheffield, UK’ in Critique of Anthropology, 25(2) and ‘Factory, Family and Neighbourhood. The Political Economy of Informal Labour in Sheffield, UK’ in JRAI. (N.S.) 11. He has published widely on labour issues and steel production.