Workers’ Culture – an Unfinished Project: From Scepticism to Historical Cultural Studies

Abstract

The research on workers’ culture carried out in Poland from the 1960s to the late 1980s has been recognised in this article as a failure. The author discusses the numerous attempts to conceptualise research programmes and their actual implementation in the fields of sociology, anthropology and the emerging cultural studies. She looks for the sources of their failure, reflecting on its nature and possible causes. She asks whether the failure of the research on workers’ culture was not due to the scepticism of the researchers themselves, who might have overlooked important attempts at demonstrating self-awareness and pro-active attitude on the part of the workers, treating them as politically manipulated and therefore inauthentic. She raises the question about both ideological and methodological reasons behind this stance, the latter having to do with a clash between quantitative research and humanistic orientation. She calls for “preposterous” research (as proposed by Mieke Bal) to be undertaken, which would give a different interpretation of the workers’ various cultural initiatives from today’s perspective. Perhaps this would inspire the creation of a counter-history of workers’ culture.