Abstract
ABSTRACT Focusing on ITAS, a Croatian metalworking company with a turbulent past characterized by various property arrangements and varying degrees of success in the market for machine tools, I sketch out a shop-floor history of the ways in which the materiality of production continues to matter in contemporary capitalism. Control over machines allowed ITAS workers to negotiate their precarious position in the market. I show how collective and individual decisions of workers as economic agents contribute to shaping the geographical unevenness of capitalism. Industrial machines can serve as an ethnographic object that connects analytical scales, allowing scholars to provide a relational and historically situated understanding of how workers are incorporated into political economic systems as well as the degree to which they can influence those systems.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
