Factory Discipline Research Articles

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Motivating First-Generation Factory Employees: A Case Study of the Garment Industry in Myanmar

Research Aims: This study investigates how to foster and motivate factory employees at the onset of industrialisation. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 728 employees of the garment sector in Myanmar were surveyed using a structured questionnaire. Research Findings: The results of this study indicate 1) that employees’ maladaptation to factory discipline leads to workplace stress and fuels employees’ counter-productive behaviour and 2) that employees who perceive benevolence from the factory manager take on pro-organizational (vs counter-productive) behaviour based on social exchange rooted in indigenous patron-client ties. Theoretical Contribution/Originality: This study discusses the singular aspects of human resource management (HRM) at the onset of industrialisation. The cause of workplace stress differs from what is widely claimed in industrialised societies. Organisational commitment is deeply affected by cultural settings. Managerial Implications in the South East Asian Context: This study offers insights for cultivating and motivating factory employees hailing from indigenous societies. Moreover, HRM practices based on patron-client ties that persist in southeast Asian societies can be effective measures to enhance organisational commitment. Research Limitations &amp; Implications: The current study does not cover either white-collar or skilled employees in the capital-intensive industry. Keywords: organisational maladaptation, motivation, factory discipline, workplace stress, social exchange, Myanmar

ЭВОЛЮЦИЯ ФОРМ БУНТА В РАЗНЫХ ТИПАХ КУЛЬТУР (АНТРОПОЛОГИЧЕСКИЙ АСПЕКТ)

The article considers the relationship of the evolution of forms of riot with the characteristics of a rebellious person. It is shown that riot is inherent in all historical types of cultures. Riot as a form of social protest has its own specifics in various societies. A participant in the revolt in traditional cultures is homo religious (a religious person), for whom power is sacred, and any manifestations of natural and social cataclysms are a consequence of the loss of legitimization by the ruling elites from above. The traditional type of society was characterized by riots caused by the frustration of basic human needs — hungry and plague. The formation of an industrial society is accompanied by revolts against forms of rigid factory discipline. In the modern consumer society, representatives of the precariat become participants in consumerist riots. Reactions to the uncertainty of the situation, restrictive measures during the pandemic caused by the spread of the COVID‑19 virus became the so-called “covid riots”.

The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire. By Elizabeth D. Esch (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2018) 257 pp. $85.00 cloth $29.95 paper and e-book

The Ford Motor Company was not only a leader in the adaptation of assembly-line technologies to auto production; it was also unusual in several dimensions of its approach to labor relations. Esch examines the interplay of Ford’s technological practices and its broader labor policies, giving particular attention to Ford’s approach to race, ethnicity, and immigrant status in forming its workforce. Although she provides a thorough discussion of Ford’s plants in Detroit, a major goal of this volume is to extend the Ford story by examining the company’s labor practices outside the United States, especially on its rubber plantations in Brazil and in its production facilities in South Africa.Esch makes much use of quantitative studies of Ford by economic historians, as well as archival material. Her discussion repeatedly calls back to Gramsci’s writing on Ford and on the interplay between technology, culture, and politics in getting workers to produce under Ford’s intense system.1Chapters 1, 2, and 3, which focus on Ford’s activities in the United States, are the most thoroughly developed. Esch begins with an examination of Ford’s use of immigrant workers, particularly at the Highland Park plant. Ford’s establishment of the $5.00 day wage, in part to stymie organizing efforts, was tied to a program of “Americanization” through Ford’s Sociological Department and English School. Esch’s discussion of this program is thorough and vivid, including a description of the graduation ceremonies at the English School in which immigrant workers emerged from an actual “melting pot” waving American flags.2As production moved from Highland Park to Rouge, Ford began to draw from different labor supplies, and the company’s methods of extracting effort also changed. Rather than focusing on “making [American] men” out of an immigrant workforce, this new approach established order through both the pace of the assembly line and the harsh, sometimes arbitrary, discipline meted out by supervisors. Esch emphasizes that the role of the foreman as a driver of labor was a constant in Ford’s modern production methods, and she connects this system of labor control to Ford’s expressions of support for emerging Fascist movements.Esch highlights the role of the “color line” in her extended discussion of the use of African-American labor at Rouge. She aptly applies the work of Whatley, Wright, and their co-authors in creating and analyzing data sets based on personnel records from Ford’s Detroit plants in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.3 The main lesson is that Ford was effective in exploiting the limited outside options of African-American workers by concentrating them in difficult and dangerous jobs that white workers would not tolerate for long, particularly in the foundry.Chapters 4 and 5 deal with Ford’s rubber production facilities in the Amazon and auto plants in South Africa. In Brazil, Ford applied aspects of both its “making men” and foreman-driven methods of extracting effort at rubber-production facilities at Fordlandia and Belterra. In neither case was Ford able to adapt its established methods to this new context. Esch’s discussion of South Africa focuses on the 1920s and 1930s, well before the formal establishment of apartheid. She notes that “company records on Ford in South Africa are scarcely available” for this period (152). She instead highlights analysis and recommendations in the 1932 Carnegie Commission Report about the conditions of the white poor in South Africa. The Carnegie Report emphasized themes similar to those characterizing labor relations at Highland Park—the reform of the white poor through factory discipline and mass consumerism. Although these ideas apparently influenced government and business leaders in pre-apartheid South Africa, concrete evidence about Ford’s “specific impact” is, as Esch admits, “fragmentary” (181).In a substantive concluding chapter, Esch takes a look at the operation of new Ford facilities around the globe and the firm’s continuing practice of identifying vulnerable groups of workers that might be susceptible to intense production methods. Her discussion of the use of migrants from the countryside in urban auto plants in China, in particular, draws interesting and surprising parallels to Ford’s use of migrant black workers at Rouge.Esch’s discussion of Ford’s practices outside the United States is less detailed than her discussion of Detroit, but she provides a useful starting point for examining Ford’s adaptation of its labor practices to differing national contexts. Historians and historically minded social scientists will find this book to be an accessible, informative, and engaging contribution to the literature about Ford.

Self-control and the rise and fall of factory discipline

We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model that accounts for the historical pattern of the rise and fall of factory discipline in the course of economic development. Firms have two alternative means to increase work effort: discipline and control vs. monetary incentives. A key ingredient of our model lies in the fact that workers suffer from present-bias. We show that this lack of self-control makes discipline relatively cheap when workers' outside option is low even in the absence of moral hazard. Then, as one economy develops, it endogenously goes through three stages where firms successively use low-powered monetary incentives, factory discipline and then high-powered monetary incentives. When moral hazard is introduced, multiple development paths may emerge.

Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society: New Translations on Politics, Bureaucracy, and Social Stratification (review)

262 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2016. Symonds’s reading is careful and convincing in drawing attention to some of the most perplexing and yet salient aspects of Weber’s work. He asserts that his commentary can be drawn from an internal reading of Weber without resort to other thinkers or to Weber’s biography, as other commentators have tended to do. When he concludes by considering some possible applications and prescriptions with respect to concerns that lie outside Weber’s immediate sphere of interest, however, he does not take the next step of turning these lessons back on how Weber’s writings themselves can be read. For example, he does not ask what the implications are of this understanding of modernity as an endless pursuit of meaning for how we understand Weber’s final reflections on the meaning of meaning itself. To take up this question would mean considering whether Weber’s interpretive method can account not just for the fateful loss of meaning in the face of death but also for its bewildering abundance and surplus under modern conditions of existence. Confronting this issue might also entail interrogating the androcentric assumptions inherent in the ethic of brotherhood as a response to the problem of suffering, despite its extra-familial direction or universalistic aspiration : for example, in the direction of an ethic of motherhood or of otherhood more generally. Finally, the hermeneutic question of the meaning of meaning might lead us to ask whether Weber’s writings themselves still have meaning and significance in a disciplinary and intellectual context where social theory no longer guides large-scale comparative and historical scholarship, and where ‘the meaning of value-freedom’ (the topic of one of his last essays) is often undermined , or even dismissed as impossible and nonsensical. It is to the credit of Symonds’s book that even when these questions are not posed directly they are often implicitly invoked. Thomas Kemple University of British Columbia Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters, eds., Weber’s Rationalism and Modern Society: New Translations on Politics, Bureaucracy, and Social Stratification (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), ix + 233pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-1-137-37353-3. $100.00. Translations are a bit like buses: you wait ages for one, and then lots arrive around the same time. They are also like buses in an unregulated system, in that some are brand new, and others well past their Book Reviews 263© Max Weber Studies 2016. date with the scrapyard, sometimes re-badged in shiny new livery. Readers of this journal do not need to be reminded of Max Weber’s move from translational penury, with nothing but Julien Freund’s Le Savant et le politique in France and Parsons (and Gerth and Mills) in the Anglosphere, (and, in both countries, a selection of his methodological writings—Freund again, and Shils and Finch), to an embarras du choix today. This one is something different. Most academic translators are what are now pejoratively termed ‘lone scholars’ or linguistically complementary dyads like Gerth and Mills. This book is the result of a collaborative and pedagogic project over several years, carried out by the Waters in Germany and the United States, beginning in an academic English class in the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen . Careful editorial control has ensured that these various Autorenkollektive did not design a camel. The four texts, three from Economy and Society (‘Klassen, Stände, Parteien’ from chapter 8, ‘Die Disziplinierung und die Versachlichung der Herrschaftsformen’ and ‘Wesen, Voraussetzungen und Entfaltung der bürokratischen Herrschaft’ from chapter 9) and finally ‘Politik als Beruf’, are well chosen to represent key themes of Weber’s sociology in formal and slightly more informal mode. All four are accompanied by an excellent apparatus of footnotes, put together partly at the initiative of Benjamin Elbers. One of these also features in the introductory ‘Translation Notes’: along with more familiar Weberian concepts, the editors select caput mortuum. This, I was glad to learn, has a concrete meaning: the dirty residue left by an alchemist , and is used by Weber to describe what they call ‘the soulless factory discipline that emerged from the discipline of the militaries’ (33). As for the translations themselves, on...

Disciplina fabril y estrategias de dominación corporal en una corporación automotriz transnacional

This ethnographic research relates capitalist discipline and labour resistancethrough body dimension. On the shopfloors of PSA Peugeot-Citroen Argentina,we discover a variety of dominant strategies bodily situated which constrain theexperience of each worker (factory codes, rules, disciplinary suspensions), a directconfrontation, a mechanism of power that exploit, dislocate and reconstruct thebody profitably. Even though the factory discipline inscribes forms of dominancethrough the body, it is necessary to understand how workers resist being reducedto them. Oppositional tactics appear, incidental ways of protest inside theautomotive labour process. Those practices of everyday life show an active culturalstruggle in contexts of domination, subordination and insubordination.

Factory discipline, health and externalities in the reduction of working time in nineteenth century France

The role played by health considerations in the reduction of working time in nineteenth century France has been largely overlooked. This paper sets out to demonstrate their importance. Section 2 documents health deterioration in the workplace. Section 3 argues that the worsening of living conditions is a negative externality suffered by workers. It arises out of ‘factory discipline’ and inter-firm competition. Section 4 highlights one of the necessary conditions for any reduction in this externality: the recognition by both employers and workers of the long-term health effects of the prevailing working conditions. Physicians played a decisive role in this change. Section 5 concludes.

O trabalho como objeto médico-legal em São Paulo dos años 30

The legal medicine practised in Sao Paulo in the years 1930 was deeply influenced by biodeterminism theses. In an attempt to harmonise body and work, professionals in the area aimed at rationalising the therapeutic treatment of delinquents, as well as the factory discipline and productivity. Thus one of the main points in their discourse was the theme related to work. The present article analyses the content of such a discourse.

The relationship between accounting and spatial practices in the factory

During the eighteenth century, tobacco production in the Royal Tobacco Factory (RTF) of Spain moved from the San Pedro Factory located in downtown Seville to the purpose built New Factories outside the city walls. This paper examines the relationship between accounting practices and spatial practices in these two radically different factory premises. The paper explores how the intervention of detailed accounting calculations into spatial configurations and the intertwining of accounting and spatial practices provide discipline in the factory by yielding calculable spaces and accountable subjects. The spaces produced by architects in the New Factories were subsequently mediated through administrative arrangements that rendered enclosure and partitioning more disciplinary. Moreover, accounting practices were developed as a coding system to reconfigure factory space by classifying it into cost centres, quantifying activities carried out in these cost centres, and rendering spaces visible and subjects accountable. In this context, we argue that accounting practices have the capacity to function as time–space ordering devices, and, through networking with spatial practices, provide the scope for managers/administrators to enhance employee surveillance and overall factory discipline.

The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics

The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics

Law, factory discipline and 'theft': the impact of the factory on workplace appropriation in mid to late nineteenth-century Yorkshire

The illegal taking of workplace materials by employees was an inherent part of the majority of eighteenth-century industries. This article summarizes lengthy research into the continuity of workplace 'theft' into the factory age of the mid-nineteenth century, and in particular the Yorkshire textile mills. It takes issue with the assumption that the establishment of internal supervisory structures in the factories quickly eradicated workplace 'theft', arguing instead that the criminal law, administered by a private policing agency, remained a central weapon against workplace appropriation until the 1850s. Thereafter, the factories reinforced rather than replaced the use of the criminal code with informal punishments. The article, therefore, suggests that the impact of the criminal law on private workspaces should be reassessed.

Culture Change and the New Technology: An Archaeology of the Early American Industrial Era

Introduction: Industry and Interpreting the Past. At the Mercy of the Capitalist. The Most Eligible Spot on the Whole River: Harpers Ferry - The Early Years. Under a Malign Influence: Factory Discipline, Political Factionalism, Corruption, and the New Technology. Their Little Gardens: Landscapes in an Armory Town. Customs and Habits Interwoven with the Very Fibers of Things: Consumerism among Armory Households. Oh! Let Oppression's Hand Be Stay'd: The Transformation from Craft to Wage Labor. Home...! Refuge from Sadness. Appendix: 1842 Interview with Armory Workers. Index.

Inscribing the workers: an experiment in factory discipline or the inculcation of manners?

The establishment of the factory system during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution created a demand for labour – labour that was unused to the confines and rigours of factory life. In an attempt to encourage punctuality and conscientiousness the industrialists of the late eighteenth century resorted to a number of practices designed to encourage their employees to give up their old habits and take on a new rhythm of life tied to the demands of the factory. At the same time, the guiding principle of improvement of product and factors of production led many industrialists to devote considerable energy to improving their human capital. Samuel Oldknow was one of these industrialists. This study is concerned with his attempts to exert discipline through the surveillance and recording of the behaviour and output of his employees.

Factory Discipline

Before the Industrial Revolution in Britain most workers controlled their pace, timing, and conduct at work. Factory discipline radically changed this. Employers now dictated how, when, and in what manner work was done. Why did discipline triumph? Was it required by the need to tightly coordinate workers with new technologies? Or was it successful because it coerced more effort from workers than they would freely give? The empirical evidence shows that discipline succeeded mainly by increasing work effort. Workers effectively hired capitalists to make them work harder. They lacked the self-control to achieve higher earnings on their own.

Constructing Difference: The Making of Gendered Subcultures in a Japanese Automobile Assembly Plant

Using participant observation, this article explores the social forces giving rise to workers' culture in a Japanese automobile assembly plant. Most theories share the problematic assumption that workers' culture is homogeneous, obscuring the emergence of, and interplay between, subcultures. Subcultures encourage male and female workers to see themselves in opposition to the other and to articulate narrowly constructed gender subjectivities that conform to factory discipline in a changing post-Fordist work place. The analysis suggests the need to examine both sides of the class and gender divide in order to understand fully the labour process and the formation of organisational culture.

Rethinking Modernity: Space and Factory Discipline in China

The search for modem is zeitgeist, if there is one, of China's recent period of economic reform (1978-89).' This is but an intensification of a process that has marked at least entire 20th century in China. One of most telling ways to examine this process is through changing representations of urban space. Spatial relations, as cultural, political, and economic practices, have featured prominently in discussions of modernity (Davis 1990; Harvey 1989; Holston 1989; Rabinow 1989). Urban design is, arguably, epitome of modernity (Rabinow 1988:361). How can we evaluate this project in China? As Chinese party-state rather self-consciously claims to be borrowing at least selected Western practices, can we therefore conclude that modernity there is like that described for the West? Most important, do various people's struggles with modernity in China present a confirmation of, or a challenge to, recent discussions in United States and Europe that have been rethinking this category? In what follows, I argue that hegemonic transnational flows of commodities and values create a powerful discourse on modernity spreading out of West, but we must nonetheless remain wary of creating unified readings out of local Euro-American practices and allowing those to overpower interpretations elsewhere.2

A Piece of Business: The Moral Economy of Detective Work in the East-End of London

The practice of policing takes many forms, yet all correspond to a perceived demand for a specific style of social control. However not all police specialisms emerge as the result of rational organisational processes. In the case of detective work, a combination of historical precedent, and the demands made upon officers by the enacted environment has resulted in the policed providing the occupational style for the police. Of course I am like a businessman. Put it this way, out there you got the punters, taxpayers and regular civilians, they pay my wages and they want a service from me. Then there's villains. For me to provide a service to the punters I nick the villains. But if I do deals with some villains I can nick those that really need nicking. So I do a deal here, a trade there, somebody goes down and I keep paying my mortagage. This may not be the conventional way in which officers express the need to define priorities in police work, but this quote exemplifies the manner in which detectives in one area of London attempt to make sense of the daily grind. This paper is based on a three year study utilising historical analysis, formal and informal interview and, most prominantly, ethnography,l The genesis of British Policing has been well established in recent years as having its origins in pre-industrial settings.2 However, the growth of industrialisation and its concomitant urbanisation, established both the philosophical and economic framework upon which modern state policing was grounded. In London urbanisation created its own special conundrums. Acting as a magnet for those escaping agricultural destitution, London's population expanded daily, and while other urban centres absorbed this surplus population into the factories and mills, London, due to a lack of heavy industry proved immune to both the hierarchies of labour that emerged from factories, and to the factory discipline that bound the workers to the mode of production.3 London's working class emerged as an undisciplined group reliant upon the casual labour market. The cost of land

Luddism and Labor Protest Among Silk Artisans and Workers in Jiangnan and Guangdong, 1860-1930

Did the development of modern industry during the late Qing and early Republic threaten the livelihood of traditional artisans, and if so, how did the artisans respond? Was the formation of a working class with a social consciousness and propensity to rebel against capitalist exploitation a necessary consequence of modern industrialization in China? This paper seeks to throw light on the above questions through an examination of the impact of the growth of silk-reeling, China's leading export industry, on traditional artisans and on the formation of a new class of workers, and on the extent and nature of their protests. As we shall see, regional differences in industrial location, the function of silk in the local economy, and economic and social organization shaped and conditioned different reactive patterns of artisans and workers to industrialism in Jiangnan and Guangdong, the two leading centers of the modern silk-reeling industry. Curiously, despite their higher level of militarization and politicization, Guangdong male weavers engaged only sporadically in isolated acts of protest while their Jiangnan colleagues erupted violently far more frequently and regularly. Paradoxically, the more radical marriage strategies pursued by Guangdong women workers-delayed transfer marriage and sworn spinterhood1-made them more pliable to factory discipline and less prone to labor disputes than their Shanghai sisters, who practiced the major form of marriage.

War, Law, and Labour: The Munitions Acts, State Regulation, and the Unions, 1915-1921.

This book examines the working of the Munition of War Acts 1915-1917, during the First World War. The munitions code, parts of which remained in force until 1921, appeared at first to constitute a radical break with the pre-war voluntarist system of industrial relations. It aimed to prevent strikes by law, it imposed wage controls and tighter factory discipline and discouraged munitions workers from leaving their jobs. Munitions tribunals were established to enforce the law. Using, among other sources, the evidence offered by the tribunal proceedings under the Acts, the author suggests that a policy of strict enforcement of the law was transformed to one of sensitive conflict management, involving trade unionists, employers, and the tribunal judges. The identification of complex working-class attitudes to the wartime state accounts largely for the creation of this modus vivendi, despite the controversial nature of the legislation. This book, though dealing with events which arose during wartime in an atmosphere of militarism, radicalism as well as patriotism, inflation and full employment, may nevertheless offer glimpses of insight to analysts of modern industrial relations.