Pub Date : 2024-11-11DOI: 10.1017/s0020859024000579
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Aditi Dixit
This article examines the business strategies employed by early twentieth-century Bombay mill owners in work organization and wage differentiation. The traditionally highly segmented and fluctuating domestic textile markets in India were further complicated by colonial free trade policies, making them highly competitive. This prompted Bombay mills to adopt various strategies, including maintaining a flexible workforce, product diversification, tailoring sales strategies to the Indian market, and increasing labour inputs, related to their heavy reliance on short-stapled Indian raw cotton. Using detailed and disaggregated data reported by textile mills in Bombay during the 1920s and 1930s, this article investigates how employers adopted these strategies in tandem with distinct wage-setting systems as management tools to depress the wage bill. By analysing the motivations behind the adoption of or resistance to these tools across different operations within the production process – such as weaving, spinning, reeling, and winding – the article reveals how gendered and social-class stratifications shaped these strategies and led to wage disparities across the industry. Ultimately, these labour-intensive strategies, conditioned by the broader colonial context in which India's textile industry developed, were at the root of the lower productivity of Indian workers, with long-run adverse consequences for India's general industrial development.
{"title":"“Human Beings Are Too Cheap in India”: Wages and Work Organization as Business Strategies in Bombay's Late Colonial Textile Industry","authors":"Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Aditi Dixit","doi":"10.1017/s0020859024000579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859024000579","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the business strategies employed by early twentieth-century Bombay mill owners in work organization and wage differentiation. The traditionally highly segmented and fluctuating domestic textile markets in India were further complicated by colonial free trade policies, making them highly competitive. This prompted Bombay mills to adopt various strategies, including maintaining a flexible workforce, product diversification, tailoring sales strategies to the Indian market, and increasing labour inputs, related to their heavy reliance on short-stapled Indian raw cotton. Using detailed and disaggregated data reported by textile mills in Bombay during the 1920s and 1930s, this article investigates how employers adopted these strategies in tandem with distinct wage-setting systems as management tools to depress the wage bill. By analysing the motivations behind the adoption of or resistance to these tools across different operations within the production process – such as weaving, spinning, reeling, and winding – the article reveals how gendered and social-class stratifications shaped these strategies and led to wage disparities across the industry. Ultimately, these labour-intensive strategies, conditioned by the broader colonial context in which India's textile industry developed, were at the root of the lower productivity of Indian workers, with long-run adverse consequences for India's general industrial development.","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142598096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-30DOI: 10.1017/s0020859024000348
Bridget Kenny
This comment on Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory discusses how the book offers four interrelated theoretical contributions to the study of labour in the digital economy – redefining the factory, specifying digital Taylorism, materializing its infrastructure, and mapping class relations – through four sites of investigation. The piece discusses the implications of the resulting multiplication of labour and labour relations for reconfigured class relations and resistance and argues that the differentiated social relations across spatial and material contexts ask for a theorization of the conjunctural nature of these relations.
{"title":"Workers Reconstituting the Factory","authors":"Bridget Kenny","doi":"10.1017/s0020859024000348","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859024000348","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This comment on Moritz Altenried's <span>The Digital Factory</span> discusses how the book offers four interrelated theoretical contributions to the study of labour in the digital economy – redefining the factory, specifying digital Taylorism, materializing its infrastructure, and mapping class relations – through four sites of investigation. The piece discusses the implications of the resulting multiplication of labour and labour relations for reconfigured class relations and resistance and argues that the differentiated social relations across spatial and material contexts ask for a theorization of the conjunctural nature of these relations.</p>","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142330094","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-23DOI: 10.1017/s0020859024000543
Chitra Joshi
Power at Work: A Global Perspective on Control and Resistance. Edited by Marcel van der Linden and Nicole Mayer-Ahuja. Work in Global and Historical Perspective, volume 16. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023, xi, 342 pp.
工作中的权力：工作中的权力：控制与反抗的全球视角》。Marcel van der Linden 和 Nicole Mayer-Ahuja 编辑。全球和历史视角下的工作》，第 16 卷。柏林：De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023, xi, 342 pp.
{"title":"On Power at Work","authors":"Chitra Joshi","doi":"10.1017/s0020859024000543","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859024000543","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Power at Work: A Global Perspective on Control and Resistance. Edited by Marcel van der Linden and Nicole Mayer-Ahuja. Work in Global and Historical Perspective, volume 16. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023, xi, 342 pp.</p>","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142306339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-23DOI: 10.1017/s0020859024000567
Fidel Rodríguez Velásquez
Narratives about indigenous labour in the pearl fisheries of the Caribbean, widely disseminated across the Atlantic world since the sixteenth century by Castilian chroniclers, have significantly shaped historiography. These accounts have reinforced a singular narrative about labour within pearl fisheries that overlooks this work's spatial and temporal changes in sea depths. This article examines and reconstructs the labour practices of workers in the pearl fisheries on the islands of Cubagua, Margarita, and Coche, as well as the coast of Cabo de la Vela and Riohacha, highlighting their temporal and spatial transformations. Additionally, it analyses the coexistence of various forms of coerced labour within this context.
{"title":"Navigating Labour Shifts: Early Modern Pearl Fishing in the Caribbean (1521–1563)","authors":"Fidel Rodríguez Velásquez","doi":"10.1017/s0020859024000567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859024000567","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Narratives about indigenous labour in the pearl fisheries of the Caribbean, widely disseminated across the Atlantic world since the sixteenth century by Castilian chroniclers, have significantly shaped historiography. These accounts have reinforced a singular narrative about labour within pearl fisheries that overlooks this work's spatial and temporal changes in sea depths. This article examines and reconstructs the labour practices of workers in the pearl fisheries on the islands of Cubagua, Margarita, and Coche, as well as the coast of Cabo de la Vela and Riohacha, highlighting their temporal and spatial transformations. Additionally, it analyses the coexistence of various forms of coerced labour within this context.</p>","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142306338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-20DOI: 10.1017/s0020859024000555
Xavier Jou-Badal
The cry of “Get married women out of the factories!” echoed across the Spanish industrial landscape at the turn of the twentieth century, driven by two intertwined factors. From a societal perspective, women's place was at home, not in factories. On an economic note, concerns arose over women's lower wages displacing men from jobs. This research delves into a case study of a workers’ claim aimed against women. It aims to illuminate the interplay of social demands and gender dynamics in labour history and business operations. Using as a case study a strike among male workers at the Amatller chocolate factory in May 1890, it seeks insights into gender complexities and women's challenges when joining the workforce. Male factory workers sought better conditions but directed their frustrations at women, influenced by prevailing social discourse. Women joined the factory, but portraying them as victors would be an oversimplification. Their presence was restricted, confined to manual tasks, with few opportunities for advancement.
{"title":"Gender Conflicts on the Shopfloor: Barcelona Women at Chocolates Amatller, 1890–1914","authors":"Xavier Jou-Badal","doi":"10.1017/s0020859024000555","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859024000555","url":null,"abstract":"The cry of “Get married women out of the factories!” echoed across the Spanish industrial landscape at the turn of the twentieth century, driven by two intertwined factors. From a societal perspective, women's place was at home, not in factories. On an economic note, concerns arose over women's lower wages displacing men from jobs. This research delves into a case study of a workers’ claim aimed against women. It aims to illuminate the interplay of social demands and gender dynamics in labour history and business operations. Using as a case study a strike among male workers at the Amatller chocolate factory in May 1890, it seeks insights into gender complexities and women's challenges when joining the workforce. Male factory workers sought better conditions but directed their frustrations at women, influenced by prevailing social discourse. Women joined the factory, but portraying them as victors would be an oversimplification. Their presence was restricted, confined to manual tasks, with few opportunities for advancement.","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142306340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-18DOI: 10.1017/s0020859024000324
Moritz Altenried
This response to the comments on The Digital Factory discusses why and how the concepts of the digital factory and digital Taylorism have been applied in the book, as well as the question of the relationship between digital control and workers' resistance to algorithmic management technologies. While agreeing with the comments that point to the limitations of the concepts used, this response argues that these can be productive precisely by drawing our attention to aspects that are otherwise difficult to bring to light. In terms of the potential for workers' resistance, many collective and individual forms of such resistance remain possible in labour regimes under algorithmic management, as well as in other coexisting labour regimes.
{"title":"Light and Shadow of the Digital Factory: Response to the Comments","authors":"Moritz Altenried","doi":"10.1017/s0020859024000324","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859024000324","url":null,"abstract":"This response to the comments on <jats:italic>The Digital Factory</jats:italic> discusses why and how the concepts of the digital factory and digital Taylorism have been applied in the book, as well as the question of the relationship between digital control and workers' resistance to algorithmic management technologies. While agreeing with the comments that point to the limitations of the concepts used, this response argues that these can be productive precisely by drawing our attention to aspects that are otherwise difficult to bring to light. In terms of the potential for workers' resistance, many collective and individual forms of such resistance remain possible in labour regimes under algorithmic management, as well as in other coexisting labour regimes.","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"64 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142236797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-18DOI: 10.1017/s0020859024000373
Keith Gildart, Ben Curtis, Andrew Perchard, Grace Millar
In 1975, the National Coal Board (NCB) produced a short film, “People Will Always Need Coal”, to encourage recruitment into mining. It was extraordinarily attention-grabbing, presenting miners as cosmopolitan playboys. It defined the industry in hyper-masculine terms, encouraging would-be recruits to “be a miner”. This article uses the film as a starting point for a discussion of the complex interactions between the material realities of masculinity, class, and culture within Britain's coalfields in the period 1975–1983. A critical reading of the film is complemented by archival research and oral testimony drawn from interviews with 96 former miners and their families. At a time when the industry was positioning itself as an employer with a long-term future, mining was presented on screen as a modern masculine occupation that was far removed from the dominant imagery of coal for much of the twentieth century. The National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) victories in the strikes of 1972 and 1974, the drafting of a Government Plan for Coal, and rising living standards, created a short period of optimism before the cataclysmic closures of the 1980s and 1990s. This was a time when masculinity in the coalfields was being reproduced, modified, contested, and subverted. The years 1975–1983 offer valuable insight into such masculinity and the ways it was mediated and challenged through work, the domestic sphere, leisure, and popular culture.
{"title":"“Be a Miner”: Constructions and Contestations of Masculinity in the British Coalfields, 1975–1983","authors":"Keith Gildart, Ben Curtis, Andrew Perchard, Grace Millar","doi":"10.1017/s0020859024000373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859024000373","url":null,"abstract":"In 1975, the National Coal Board (NCB) produced a short film, “People Will Always Need Coal”, to encourage recruitment into mining. It was extraordinarily attention-grabbing, presenting miners as cosmopolitan playboys. It defined the industry in hyper-masculine terms, encouraging would-be recruits to “be a miner”. This article uses the film as a starting point for a discussion of the complex interactions between the material realities of masculinity, class, and culture within Britain's coalfields in the period 1975–1983. A critical reading of the film is complemented by archival research and oral testimony drawn from interviews with 96 former miners and their families. At a time when the industry was positioning itself as an employer with a long-term future, mining was presented on screen as a modern masculine occupation that was far removed from the dominant imagery of coal for much of the twentieth century. The National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) victories in the strikes of 1972 and 1974, the drafting of a Government Plan for Coal, and rising living standards, created a short period of optimism before the cataclysmic closures of the 1980s and 1990s. This was a time when masculinity in the coalfields was being reproduced, modified, contested, and subverted. The years 1975–1983 offer valuable insight into such masculinity and the ways it was mediated and challenged through work, the domestic sphere, leisure, and popular culture.","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142236806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-18DOI: 10.1017/s0020859024000361
Görkem Akgöz
A growing body of literature is challenging techno-fetishistic perspectives on digital capitalism, as well as claims of the start of a new era characterized by total automation. This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the implications of digital technology for the future of labour by reading Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) through the lens of labour history. The use of digital factory and digital Taylorism as integrative tools significantly improves empirical evaluations of different digital labour environments. However, because of their high degree of abstraction, there are a number of limitations when applying these concepts to describe wildly disparate work environments. To illustrate these limits, I use examples from twentieth-century debates on technology and work autonomy, and (1) argue that a labour history perspective warns us against overgeneralizing the effects of technology on labour control and worker autonomy, and (2) broaden the discussion to larger issues of labour control before and during digitalization, incorporating new theoretical questions such as our understanding of classical Taylorism and, by extension, capitalism.
{"title":"Old Wine in New Bottles, or Novel Challenges? A Labour History Perspective on Digital Labour","authors":"Görkem Akgöz","doi":"10.1017/s0020859024000361","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859024000361","url":null,"abstract":"A growing body of literature is challenging techno-fetishistic perspectives on digital capitalism, as well as claims of the start of a new era characterized by total automation. This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the implications of digital technology for the future of labour by reading Moritz Altenried's <jats:italic>The Digital Factory</jats:italic> (2022) through the lens of labour history. The use of digital factory and digital Taylorism as integrative tools significantly improves empirical evaluations of different digital labour environments. However, because of their high degree of abstraction, there are a number of limitations when applying these concepts to describe wildly disparate work environments. To illustrate these limits, I use examples from twentieth-century debates on technology and work autonomy, and (1) argue that a labour history perspective warns us against overgeneralizing the effects of technology on labour control and worker autonomy, and (2) broaden the discussion to larger issues of labour control before and during digitalization, incorporating new theoretical questions such as our understanding of classical Taylorism and, by extension, capitalism.","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142236799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-18DOI: 10.1017/s0020859024000336
Nico Pizzolato
Rapid technological development means that the ground on which recent academic studies and public debates about the future of work organisation are based is shifting too rapidly for predictions to be credible. Organisational studies scholars have provided a counterpoint to this futuristic, speculative debate about the world of tomorrow with studies that contextualise seemingly new trends within a longer history of industrial capitalism. In this article, using Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) as a starting point, I further explore the historical contextualisation of two aspects of platform capitalism: its de-spatialisation and its use of “autonomy”.
{"title":"The Hidden Labour of Digital Capitalism: Changes, Continuities, Critical Issues","authors":"Nico Pizzolato","doi":"10.1017/s0020859024000336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859024000336","url":null,"abstract":"Rapid technological development means that the ground on which recent academic studies and public debates about the future of work organisation are based is shifting too rapidly for predictions to be credible. Organisational studies scholars have provided a counterpoint to this futuristic, speculative debate about the world of tomorrow with studies that contextualise seemingly new trends within a longer history of industrial capitalism. In this article, using Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) as a starting point, I further explore the historical contextualisation of two aspects of platform capitalism: its de-spatialisation and its use of “autonomy”.","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"329 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142236827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-18DOI: 10.1017/s002085902400035x
Greg Downey
Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) accomplishes in just under two hundred pages what many other books twice that length have struggled with: assembling a concise yet readable introductory map to the global, fragmented, and too-often hidden landscape of digitally-mediated capitalism. But the digital factory itself is an incomplete concept, almost always requiring us to look for the external and contingent labor support hidden just outside of its supposedly totalizing network of logistics, robotics and algorithms.
{"title":"Mapping the Social Relations of Labor in Contemporary Algorithmic Society","authors":"Greg Downey","doi":"10.1017/s002085902400035x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s002085902400035x","url":null,"abstract":"Moritz Altenried's <jats:italic>The Digital Factory</jats:italic> (2022) accomplishes in just under two hundred pages what many other books twice that length have struggled with: assembling a concise yet readable introductory map to the global, fragmented, and too-often hidden landscape of digitally-mediated capitalism. But the digital factory itself is an incomplete concept, almost always requiring us to look for the external and contingent labor support hidden just outside of its supposedly totalizing network of logistics, robotics and algorithms.","PeriodicalId":46254,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Social History","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142236825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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