Christine Wall

Craft versus industry: the division of labour in European housing construction

Two distinct divisions and concepts of labour are apparent from an analysis of social housebuilding sites in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands: the craft form, based on controlling the output of labour; and the industry form, based on the quality of labour input. These are associated with different work processes, skills and training, and also different levels of mechanization and component prefabrication. In the UK, which is craft-based, low levels of mechanization and prefabrication were found compared with Germany and the Netherlands, and the range of activities for the separate trades in assembling superstructure elements was simpler. Labourers are distinct from craftsmen and remain a significant group. Skills are narrow and training provision low. A high proportion of the labour force remains self-employed, under labour-only subcontractors, working to price or output. In comparison, in Germany and the Netherlands labour is employed directly and work processes are more complex, with more specialisms at the interfaces. The division of labour is industry-wide, training provision is extensive, and skills are broad and integrated into the grading structure. Greater speed, higher productivity and lower levels of supervision are associated with industry-wide systems compared with traditional craft forms.

Picturing an Occupational Identity: Images of Teachers in Careers and Trade Union Publications 1940–2000

Visual sources in the form of teachers’ journals and careers literature constitute an important part of the material culture of the teaching profession, and demand examination for their impact on occupational identity. The material allows for a range of interpretations and the approach taken here is speculative, in both methodologies and analysis. This paper examines how visual imagery, as a ‘communicative symbol’ and as a ‘social fact’, has actively contributed to the formation of gendered teacher identities. An analysis of the extensive archives available at the Trade Union Congress Library was central in revealing a set of recurring themes over a period of 60 years. This iconography was then located in its wider historical, pedagogical and cultural contexts and possible interpretations of these gendered representations of the occupational identity of teachers suggested.

Diverse Equality in Europe: The Construction Sector

In this chapter we examine the definition and nature of gender equality cross-nationally and the obstacles to applying a common integrated framework. It is based on research carried out under a NOW (New Opportunities for Women) programme with partners in Britain, Denmark and Spain, which focused on achieving equality in a highly male-dominated sector — the construction industry. ‘Equality’ assumed different meanings in the different national contexts and equal opportunities policies varied significantly.

Representing Identity and Work in Transition: The Case of South Yorkshire Coal-mining Communities in the UK

This chapter explores the changing face of the former South Yorkshire coalfields.1 The place of coal mining in this area was essential to the economy of the region from the turn of the twentieth century, intensifying and consolidating its production following the Second World War. These developments powerfully transformed and shaped the region, embedding cultural traditions and social identities that defined South Yorkshire through the working of both coal and steel.

Tracking the Place of Work Identity on the Rails

The railways provide a different context to both private sector banking and public sector education that will be the focus of the following chapter. The sector was nationalised in 1948, and then ‘sectorised’ from 1982 and finally sold back to private industry from 1992. It throws up very interesting questions about worker identification and alignment, and how such affiliations and commitments, important categories for understanding work identity, survive radical change of this kind.

Something to show for it: The place of mementoes in women’s oral histories of work

Abstract Work memorabilia can include a range of objects from photographs to redundant items of technology. These artifacts breach the secrecy of the workplace and the privacy of the home, making permeable the boundaries between these two distinct social spaces frequently described in opposition to each other and as having distinctly dual characteristics.This article focuses on the oral histories of working life belonging to two retired women and recorded in their homes with their mementoes from work in place as an integral part of the interview process.This approach, combining material culture and oral histories, has the potential for making explicit the complex relationships women have with work over their life course.

‘Nuclear prospects’: the siting and construction of Sizewell A power station 1957-1966.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the siting and construction of a Magnox nuclear power station on the Suffolk coast. The station was initially welcomed by local politicians as a solution to unemployment but was criticised by an organised group of local Communist activists who predicted how the restriction zone would restrict future development. Oral history interviews provide insights into conditions on the construction site and the social effects on the nearby town. Archive material reveals the spatial and development restrictions imposed with the building of the power station, which remains on the shoreline as a monument to the ‘atomic age’. This material is contextualised in the longer economic and social history of a town that moved from the shadow of nineteenth century paternalistic industry into the glare of the nuclear construction programme and became an early example of the eclipsing of local democracy by the centralised nuclear state.

Identity in Question and the Place of Work

Work is declining in social primacy. Social meaning and solidarity must, eventually, be found elsewhere (Casey, 1995: 2). It means everything [teaching], it’s huge, I’m in an amazing position, you know, I count my blessings every day (Andrea aged 26, secondary school teacher). Studies of identity have not centred to any consistent extent on the importance of work, or the place of work in the context of identity formation and practice. Outside the sub-discipline itself of work sociology, or the more technical preoccupations of employment studies, the significance of work identity has been less a focus of attention than that of identity as understood and explored in relation to the importance of race or gender or even — if profoundly diluted since around the 1980s — questions of social class.

Charting Historical Change: Work in the US and UK during the Twentieth Century

This chapter considers some dominant ideas concerning the changing nature of work over the twentieth century, many of which assume that economic growth and technological and occupational changes over the last century have undermined the traditional tensions in the nature of work: between taking pride in work and alienation from it. It sketches some of the empirical historical evidence available for Britain and America with the intention not to give an in-depth analysis and comparison of labour market statistics but more a contextualisation of the debates on the nature of work against a background of evidence and argument on the changing demographics of American and British work.

Teller, Seller, Union Activist: Class Formation and Changing Bank Worker Identities

The occupational structures of advanced industrial societies have been shifting rapidly towards service industries and towards non-manual occupations associated with the manufacture, distribution and consumption of ‘knowledge’ over the last 30 years (Brynin and Longhi, 2007). For some, this evolution has been interpreted as representing ‘the end’ of work (Rifkin, 1996) or of work as playing a key moral role in the creation of class and of social action (Sennett, 1998). Global shifts have led to a supposed corrosion of stable employment, the ending of the ‘job for life’ and the creation of flux and general instability. Contemporary working conditions under post-industrialism have thus been seen as helping produce ‘compliant and conforming subjects of the modern state’ (Bauman, 1998), and as failing to be a ‘source of social cohesion or integration’ (Gorz, 1986). The consequences of this transition have become increasingly important in the social sciences as many of the traditional, often male, industries have collapsed, female participation rates have risen and a growing gap has emerged between the generation whose world views were shaped by the experience of full employment and the generation whose views matured under high levels of unemployment and job insecurity. These arguments, depicting an atomised society with few roots in the workplace, have had a considerable impact, underwriting assumptions of a rise of ‘individualism’ and feeding into explanations of the decline of trade unionism and of social action generally.