Event Details

Professor Chris Land from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge will present in this seminar.

Post-industrial melancholia: gender, identity, and resistance to hegemonic imaginaries of the future of work in a European manufacturing SME

Chris Land and Jana Stefan - ARU

The European vision of Industry 5.0 promises a sustainable, resilient and human-centric future of work for manufacturing, achieved through a twin (digital and green) transition. A key element of the European industrial strategy, this vision can be understood as a performative ‘future of work’, supported by policy, regulation, and financial investment to research enabling technologies, build skills, and remove barriers to realising the vision. This paper draws on ethnographic research in a manufacturing SME in the industrial heartland of the German Ruhrgebiet to better understand resistance to this future of work. Our findings suggest that gender, class, and regional histories of deindustrialisation and political change constitute powerful psycho-social investments and resistance to digitalisation and sustainability.

Empirically the paper focusses on contested understandings of meaningful work and skill, which code particular activities and technologies as gendered, and embed work in a broader cultural context of values, meaning, and identity. These presented quite surprising, loci of resistance to the digital transformation of the company, in which nostalgia for the heyday of manufacturing in the region played a significant role both in the company, and in its wider social context.

Theoretically we analyse this as a kind post-industrial melancholia, contributing to broader discussions of deindustrialisation, nostalgia and futurelessness. Although Germany remains the most industrialised country in Europe, the imaginary of Industry 5.0 did not align with what research participants thought of as real industrial work, creating a sense that the identity of an industrial worker was no longer valued. This generated reactionary identity investments, structured through gender, class and ethnicity, fixating on an industrial past that was widely recognised to have been unpleasant, with industrial diseases and physically difficult labour processes making early death and injury commonplace. This nostalgia presented a kind of fixation, or stasis as a source of resistance to change. Given that the promised change was little more than an upgrade of what we already have – Industry 5.0 as a successor to 4.0 – and is embedded in a kind of techno-fetishistic solutionism, the paper suggests that this melancholic ‘stuckness’ might offer some interesting points of resistance to the kind of non-change of an infinite series of Industry upgrades, whilst recognising the very real difficulties that nostalgia present for a progressove political contestation of the future of work.

Chris Land is Professor of Work and Organization at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, where he is co-director of the Centre for Business and Society (CBS). His research is currently focussed on contested imaginaries of the ‘future of work’, with particular attention to skills, digitalisation, and sustainability. He is currently writing up work from a three-year, Horizon-EU funded project on skills and Industry 5.0, using ethnographic methods to investigate the social and managerial factors shaping digitalisation and skills in the European manufacturing, with cases in Italy, Sweden, Germany and the UK. Although primarily anchored in the sociology of work and organization, this research is increasingly drawing inspiration from more psycho-analytic registers to better understand contradictory structures of feeling, affect, and desire in sociological analysis. His work has been published in journals including Sociology, Organization, Organization Studies, ephemera, Management Learning, and Human Relations. His most recent book is the co-edited Handbook of Organizing Economic, Ecological and Societal Transformation.