Dundee Jute Industry Research Articles

Strategic responses to low-cost competition: Technological lock-in in the Dundee jute industry

This article examines path dependency and technological lock-in in the evolution of the Dundee jute industry, from its beginnings in the 1860s to its demise in the 1970s. The evolution of the industry is explored using the resource-based view of the firm (RBV). The results suggest that the nature and construct of jute fibre was the root cause of a lack of sustainable strategic responses in the sector. Path dependent decisions and technological lock-in meant that many firms were not able to make successful strategic switches, although the capabilities of their engineering skills allowed some firms to endure for longer. Thus, the article extends the RBV to a deeper firm capability level and complements cognate literature on the UK textile sector with a finer specification of the phases in jute’s evolution.

Orientalism at Work? Dundee's Response to Competition from Calcutta, circa 1870–1914

From the late nineteenth century the Dundee jute industry faced intensifying competition from Calcutta. This article examines the responses in Dundee to this competition, focusing upon the ways Dundonians understood Calcutta and India, and how these understandings shaped the debate on possible lines of action. It argues that the diversity of approaches to the threat, inter-linked with the complexities of local politics, led to a concentration of effort on seeking to establish and then strengthen Indian factory legislation. The severity of competition from another empire country posed acute dilemmas for pro-imperial politics in the city: how could such a politics be sustained if the local economy was being so harmed by Calcutta's invasion of Dundee's markets, yet a protective response was ruled out by the realities of imperial policy?

A woman's industry? The role of women in the workforce of the Dundee jute industry c. 1945-1979

This paper will explore the reduced role of women in the jute industry in Dundee in the post-war years. This industry experienced high levels of female participation in the years before 1945, as was the case in many of Britain's textile industries. This was instrumental in the city's characterisation as a 'women's work town'. Following the war however the dominance of the jute industry in Dundee was under threat. Competition from Indian producers as well as from substitutes for jute was intensifying, but perhaps more problematic was increased pessimism concerning the future of the industry within the city itself. Dundee City Council, supported by the Board of Trade and the government more generally, actively campaigned for subsidies to attract new industries to the area and therefore diversify Dundee's industrial base. The success of this policy ensured that the jute industry faced increased competition in terms of retaining its female labour force. As a consequence of this labour shortage, and the jute employers response to it in the 1960s and 1970s, Dundee's jute industry was no longer characterised by high female participation.

Rhetoric of a troubled industry: the case of the Dundee jute industry during the inter-war period

This study examines the rhetorical strategies deployed by supporters of the Dundee jute industry (DJI) during the legislative debate surrounding British trade policy of the inter–war period. It conducts a content analysis of the House of Commons debate on 2 February, 1938 on a motion entitled 'Importations from Overseas'. This debate highlights the position and the rhetorical strategies of the jute industry through its parliamentary surrogates. Analysis suggests that rhetorical strategies challenged policy, while avoiding a direct or explicit challenge to the dominant institutional logic of free trade. This study also furthers our understanding of government–industry relations in the jute industry during the inter–war period.

Inventions and Other Developments Associated with the Heritage Textile Industries of the British Isles

The objectives of this paper are to examine some of the factors which may account for the rise in predominance of British textile manufacture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This paper identifies a range of important eighteenth century British inventions and associated developments, such as the ``factory`` system, which stimulated expansion in textile manufacture in the British Isles and led to the rise in international importance of various ``heritage textile industries``, including the Lancashire cotton industry, the Yorkshire woollen and worsted industry, the Dundee jute industry and the Irish linen industry.

Managing Decline: The Case of Jute

The decline of Dundee's jute industry is used here to throw fresh light on the much broader discussion of the ‘management of decline’ of the great staple industries – a key part of the historical political economy of twentieth-century Britain. The competitive pressures on jute are analysed, and the ways in which the industry responded to these. There is a particular focus on government-industry relations around the issue of protection, but also assessment of the overall employers’ response to market pressures. The experience of jute is compared with that of cotton, its closest comparator. The article suggests that decline was managed with some success until the 1970s, but that thereafter changes in the policy environment coupled with technological change led to the jute industry's rapid demise.

Accounting as a legitimising device in voluntary price agreements: The Dundee jute industry, 1945–1960

Using archival and interview data, this paper uses institutional theory (INT) to analyze the role that accounting played in the operation of voluntary price agreements in the Dundee jute industry (DJI) during the sector's decline from 1945 to 1960. At its peak in the late 19th century, the industry employed almost 50% of the Dundee labour force and its output was critical to the UK's war effort. Hence, once decline set in, serious efforts were made to protect it from foreign competition. The DJI was highly fragmented, with some firms happy to comply and others in a state of defiance. The role of accounting helped to provide legitimacy and attract compliance, while the isomorphic forces (normative, coercive and mimicry) played key roles individually and together in binding together a set of voluntary price agreements. Key influencers in the DJI exerted agency to reinforce these efforts. These agreements proved more successful than other ‘shelter’ strategy schemes in other UK sectors in decline, e.g., cotton, in buying time for firms to diversify.

Manufacturing Space: Gendered Cityscapes and Industrial Images in Dundee

Recent interest in the material and discursive construction of built environments has largely focused on the iconic skyscraper as a symbol of ‘modern’ global and corporate power. Within this theoretical frame, industrial landscapes are given short shrift. I seek to redress this by taking the example of Victorian and Edwardian Dundee and exploring the construction of a specific manufacturing space by the city's industrial elite. Moreover, this paper moves beyond traditional analyses to take a specifically gendered look at this process. I argue that, while women numerically dominated Dundee's jute industry, it was men as jute-company directors who laid claim to place through their role in image making. The paper starts by looking at the processes of building and elaborating industrial space and power through an investigation of the fabric of the city. It then explores how such materiality was accompanied by and represented in a range of industrial imagery. Unpacking this landscape—pointing to the construction and subversion of gendered binaries and the recursive relationship between the material and immaterial—helps us see how industrial elites fashioned and reaffirmed their identity and power through the mobilisation of a set of representational tactics, creating a particularly gendered manufacturing (of) space.

Constructing Gendered Workplace ‘Types’: The weaver–millworker distinction in Dundee's jute industry, c. 1880–1910

Victorian and Edwardian Dundee was labelled a ‘woman's town’ due to the high proportion of women who worked in the city's staple jute industry. In this article, drawing on a range of contemporary sources, I use the work of feminist historians and Foucauldian notions of discourse to interrogate this label and explore why and how working women came to be marked as particularly problematic. Further, in questioning this label, I demonstrate how two specific workplace ‘types’—the weaver and millworker—were identified and constructed in contrast to one another. This article probes the processes through which these two ‘types’ were created, contested and performed in relation to the segregations and working conditions of their respective workplaces, and argues for a markedly spatial interrogation of gender identities and the category ‘working woman’.

Women and Work after the Second World War: A Case Study of the Jute Industry, Circa 1945-1954

This article examines the attempts by the Dundee jute industry to recruit women workers in the years circa 1945-1954. It locates its discussion of these attempts in the literature on the impact of the Second World War on the participation of women in the British labour market more generally, and the forces determining that participation. It stresses the peculiarities of jute as a traditional major employer of women operating in very specific market conditions, but suggests that this case study throws light on the broader argument about the impact of war and early post-war conditions on women's participation in paid work.

Strategy options and cognitive freezing: The case of the Dundee jute industry in Scotland

Drawing on extensive archival research, this article analyses the ‘soft systems’, such as logic and thinking, inherent in the Dundee jute industry post its world domination in the 1880s into its final demise and eventual reduction to a fringe competitor in the 1970s. Evidence for the existence of powerful individual firm and collective industry recipes that resulted in “cognitive freezing” is provided and, drawing on the earlier work of MacKay and McKiernan [The role of hindsight in foresight: refining strategic reasoning, Futures (2004) (3) 161–179], a theoretical framework that explains the formulation of these recipes is posited. The article argues that cognitive freezing on past recipes within the individual firm soft systems and the collective soft systems of the industry resulted in the industries’ managers missing existing strategy options that could have triggered industry renewal.

Dundee's Jute mills and factories: Spaces of production, surveillance and discipline

Taking Dundee's jute industry as its focus, this paper provides a geographical reading of the architectural form, design and layout of the mills and factories of the late 19th century. By tracking the change from the multi‐storey to the shed system, it emphasises the importance of the internal geographies of the production process. And drawing upon Foucault's notion of disciplinary power, notably his rule of functional sites and techniques of enclosure and partitioning, together with his tentative references to the factory system, I show how the external architecture and internal space of the mills and factories were used to create an ordered geography of both people and machinery and help maintain a gendered labour hierarchy. With the industry's largely female workforce channelled through points of visibility, a preliminary investigation is made into the matrix of knowledge, spanning the entire works, that ensured all space and all those within it, could be accounted for.