Dear Economic Geographers,
This is an ad for a book on industrial-economic geography which may have passed
under your radar. Apologies for this mailing, but I have found that
publicising a monograph by other means is extremely difficult. The book has
unfashionable, but I think important, themes:-
* a detailed examination of change and conflict within varied labour processes;
* how labour process change is bound up with firms’ choices on workplace
location;
* the strong effects of the business cycle on labour process change and
workplace location.
All the best, Jamie Gough
[log in to unmask]
Jamie Gough, Work, Locality and the Rhythms of Capital, Routledge, 2004, £80
Professor Bob Jessop, Lancaster University, comments:-
“This is one of those books one wishes one had written. For Jamie Gough offers
us an original, elaborate, and incisive account of the complex and
contradictory dynamics of the labour process, competition, and capital
accumulation that combines theoretical sharpness with detailed empirical
analysis. Showing an acute sensitivity to the fractal repetition and
interrelation of the contradictions and tensions within capital relation as it
unfolds on many scales and sites, he successfully integrates the uneven
temporal and spatial dynamics of the metropolitan manufacturing economy in
London and explores how these dynamics are both generated by and feed back into
enterprise strategies, interfirm and worker competition, and worker resistance
in different branches of production. Gough explores a wide range of
interrelated factors that bear on the fortunes of firms, workers, sectors,
localities, labour markets, product markets, and so forth and, in so doing,
pays equal attention to commonalities and differences. Whilst Gough's data are
drawn from London in a specific time period, they are intricately interwoven
with the broader analysis. Moreover, his overall approach holds for capital
accumulation wherever it occurs. Work, Locality, and the Rhythms of Capital
will become a landmark study in the revival of Marxist inquiry and will inspire
much debate and research within political economy more generally.”
Work, Locality and the Rhythms of Capital undertakes a theoretical and empirical
investigation of relations between waged work, spaces of production, and the
cyclical dynamics of capitalist investment.
The centre of the study is the workplace labour process, comprising tasks,
technologies, work intensity, divisions of labour, employment of segments of
the labour force, and industrial relations. It develops a systematic
comparison of the dynamics of a range of different labour processes within a
particular territorial economy – a theoretical task which has not been
addressed before. It shows how both the commonalities of, and the differences
between, labour processes can be analysed. These dynamics are always spatial:
labour process change is shown to be integrally bound up with stasis or change
in the location of the workplace.
Workplace change is situated within its locality, and the labour process is
related to labour forces and their reproduction, to local cultures, and to the
built environment. Analysis of the labour process is broadened in another
direction by considering its reciprocal relations to products, their change and
variety, their consumption, and the surplus profits which they can reap.
Changes in work organisation and products are further related to the particular
competitive pressures arising from the spatial division of labour in the
industry.
Another thread of the argument relates labour process change to the
roller-coaster rhythms of capitalist investment, the self-propelling upward and
downward trajectories of investment within workplaces, local industries, local
economies and – in the business cycle – national and international economies.
In a novel analysis, labour process changes and their use of space are related
to the business cycle, showing how the propagation of the cycle is inherently
geographical. In this way the book explores the intertwining of the uneven
spatiality and unstable temporality of capitalist production.
The book is based on a detailed case study of factories in London in 1976-81,
the beginning of the period of neoliberal restructuring. The study is set
within a history of the diverse work cultures of London manufacturing and long
waves of investment within it. The book thus explores the contradictions and
divisions characteristic of metropolitan economies.
An overarching concern of the book is the political fragmentation of labour. It
explores both the differences and commonalities in workers’ identities and
experiences of change within their workplaces, and the pressures created by
spatial flows of capital. It discusses how these construct barriers to, but
also possibilities for, collective action. The book concludes with a
discussion of strategies which could overcome these divisions among workers.
Dr Jamie Gough,
Senior Lecturer,
Department of Town and Regional Planning,
Sheffield University,
Winter Street,
Sheffield,
S10 2TN
0114 222 6909 (direct line)
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