Event Details

Prof Rick Delbridge from Cardiff University will present in this OWT research seminar. This seminar is online only via Teams (Meeting ID: 397 128 968 264 / Passcode: jhCpKv).

Title: Reflections on the continuities and contexts of workplace ethnographies

Abstract:

A recently released French film, L’Établi (2022), recounts the experiences of Robert Linhart, an intellectual activist and university lecturer, when he gained employment in a Citroën car assembly plant in 1968. The film dramatizes Linhart’s shopfloor activism as well as bringing to life the nature of assembly line work that is described in vivid detail by Linhart himself in The Assembly Line, published in English in 1981. Watching the film, I was taken back to the time when I myself conducted workplace ethnographic research and indeed read his book. This in turn prompted me to reflect on the similarities and continuities across our factory settings, notwithstanding that they were separated by time and different national contexts. In particular, there were similarities in the experiences of working in mass production systems and the ways in which the social relations of power, contest, control and accommodation played out in capitalist organization. For example, the film shows many of the challengers of worker self-organizing in vivid and engaging detail. The capacity and will of capitalism and its agents to mobilize force, to divide and bribe workers against their interests and the challenges of finding sufficient common ground across the interests and fears of large numbers of workers, particularly when organized labour is weak or ineffectual. What also struck me on watching the film was that Linhart was working in the factory in Choisy barely 20 years before I did my ethnographic research in two British plants. The labour processes - both of manual automated labour through assembly line working and of simple repetitive labour managed through an output or piece rate system - and forms of direct supervisory control depicted are very similar to my cases. But the societal context has changed dramatically in that period from the late 1960s to early 1990s. In the film, there is much talk of the political context of France in 1968, and continual references to political change; revolution is in the air. This was certainly not the case in Thatcher’s Britain in 1990. In the presentation, I will consider the value of historical comparison of ethnographic work over periods of time and the importance of ethnographies that are suitably situated and interpreted within wider structural, political and economic contexts.