Fordism: a review essay

ABSTRACT

Fordism is a central concept in American labour history. This essay, the first survey of the range of historiographical and sociological approaches deployed to understand Fordism, suggests that Fordism and Americanism are inseparably intertwined. Previous scholarship has emphasised that the technological and managerial efficiency of Fordist practice were a hallmark of twentieth-century Americanism. Historians of labour have demonstrated that these aspects manifested as a relentless system of control in the workplace that paradoxically helped to unify worker resistance. Historians of capitalism have tended to used Fordism to refer to an ethos underpinning mid-twentieth-century capitalist development marked by a balance between mass production and mass consumption. They identify increased social provisions and class compromise between labour and management as features that made Fordism attractive to states rebuilding their economies following the Second World War. New transnational histories of Fordism have begun to bridge the gap between these two main interpretations to show how Fordist practice and ethos were exported together internationally as part of an ideological project to modernise nations in America’s image. This essay concludes by assessing the usefulness of Fordism to historians and suggesting avenues for future research.     

Protestantism and capitalism revisited,in the rural highlands of Ecuador

The central concern of this paper is to examine some of the consequences of the penetration of capitalism among a‐ group of Ecuadorian Indian peasants, recently converted to Protestantism. Particular attention is given to the role played by certain ideological practices in the extraction and appropriation of the peasants’ surplus. It is argued that, in addition to the analysis of the economic aspects of the interdependence between capitalist and non‐capitalist modes of production, the concept of ‘ideological articulation’ is particularly useful in the understanding of those social formations which have suffered successive colonialisms. The problem of Protestantism is analyzed in the context of the changing social relations of production, and in relation to the ideologies of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationalism’. The paper concludes with some remarks on the redefinition of ‘tradition’, and on the development of political consciousness among Indian peasants.     

‘disparate in voice,sympathetic in direction’: gendered political blackness and the politics of solidarity

While political blackness seems to be making quite a comeback, this resurgence has also met with frustration and ambivalence. This paper aims to make sense of why this mobilising concept is accepted in some contemporary black feminist circles and outright rejected in others. It unpicks the diasporic dimensions of political blackness, reflecting on the issues that converged to foreground ‘black’ as the basis for mobilising women of African and Asian decent to engage in collective activism. Attention is given to the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent, a national network that linked black women’s organisations and expressed and projected what the author defines as gendered political blackness. Interrogating its implications and the tendency towards ideological policing, the author argues that political blackness must be viewed as a politics of solidarity. If it is to maintain its viability, political blackness needs reframing, contextualising and further analysis. A retelling of its ideological underpinnings, and crucially the tensions and contradictions inherent in political blackness, offers a critical lens through which to rethink how we use it as a mobilising tactic in the present.     

A cluster and its trajectory: evidence from the history of the French Champagne production cluster

This article explores historical and contemporary evolutions within the French Champagne cluster. Its purpose is to demonstrate how the study of rural dynamics in the knowledge economy could be improved through an analysis of its history. Our theoretical contribution includes an analysis of the French Champagne cluster’s trajectory with the aim of illustrating the perspectives of human capital and knowledge-based cluster theory. A narrative historical methodology was carried out within a mature cluster. The paper empirically relates the labour and workforce history of Champagne from the twelfth century onwards in order to show the role of the local entrepreneurial context in the cluster’s longitudinal development. The evolutionary dynamics of the champagne-producing cluster can be understood through the lens of four historical sequences: an institutional sequence, a technological sequence, an industrialisation sequence and a territorial sequence. The cluster’s recent development highlights the increasing importance of a creative class that followed the demographic reversal within its specific rural area.     

Did Mrs Danvers warm Rebecca's pearls? significant exchanges and the extension of lesbian space and time in literature

This article is concerned with the ways in which literary spaces can become sexualized by the transfer of objects between women, as well as by the ways in which bodies themselves touch. It discusses how lesbian desire changes both spatial and temporal structures, via a consideration of the use of pearl imagery. In particular, it analyses the link between sexual, class and bodily construction in two texts: Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (1938) and Carol Ann Duffy's poem ‘Warming Her Pearls’ (1987). These texts encode contrasting ideas about the lesbian body, ideas that are discursively textured by the periods in which they were written and by the relative ideological resistance of their writers. While du Maurier's novel establishes a concept of spatial and temporal enclosure, Duffy's poem creates an unconfined and unstable lesbian body-text. Within this, the pearl can be seen as a subversive device, destructuring and stretching the parameters of lesbian desire.     

In Love with <Emphasis Type="Italic">Inspector Morse</Emphasis>: Feminist Subculture and Quality Television

This article consists of textual analysis of a highly successful television series, Inspector Morse, combined with qualitative audience study. The study of Morse and the fan culture surrounding it is presented in the context of a discussion of recent feminist work on the texts and audiences of popular culture. The textual analysis focuses on those elements of the programmes which contribute to its success as ‘quality’ television, and particularly on Morse as an example of the role played by nostalgic representations of Englishness in ‘quality’ media texts of the 1980s. The article goes on to discuss whether the presence of such representations in these programmes leads inevitably to a convergence of ‘quality’ and conservative ideology. The discussion of the ideological subtexts of the programmes then focuses on the area of gender representation, and on the extent to which feminist influences are discernible in this example of quality popular culture, particularly in its representations of masculinity. The second part of the article presents an analysis of a discussion group involving fans of the series, which was organized as part of a larger qualitative study of the fan culture surrounding the programmes. There is a detailed discussion of the impact of the social dynamics of the group on their readings of Morse. The analysis also focuses on the ways in which the discourses identified in the textual analysis, such as gender representation, quality and Englishness, are mobilized in talk about the programmes. Finally, the nature of the group made it possible to discuss the construction of a feminist subcultural identity in talk about a mainstream media text, and to identify irony and critical distance as key components of that identity, particularly in the discussion of the pleasures offered by the romance narratives of the programmes.     

gendered politics of alienation and power restoration: Arab revolutions and women’s sentiments of loss and despair

From the start of the Arab revolutions in late 2010, a connection between the law, state, political economy, gender norms and orientalist ideology has formed the foundation of women’s systematic exclusion from politics. By unmasking processes in Egypt that have created the ideological and material conditions of externalising women’s revolutionary acts, estranging their political involvement, and exposing them to various forms of violence, this article offers a gendered political reading of the concept of alienation. The article suggests that gender-normative ideology’s characterisation of women’s images, roles and acts during and after revolutions, corresponds to the most profound form of alienation. The article identifies the externalisation and subjugation of women, and objectification of their revolutionary acts as modes of alienation. Moreover, it proposes that the implementing of these modes of alienation are necessary for creating conditions that allow for the reconfiguration of power dynamics that restore the authoritarian power of the state. This discussion suggests that the sphere of politics not only relates to political activism and conflict between revolutions and counter-revolutions, but that it is also a battlefield for the (re)production of gender-normative knowledge.     

Resistance,class struggle and social movements in Latin America: contemporary dynamics

ABSTRACT

This paper traces out the changing forms of the resistance associated with each advance in the capitalist development of the forces of production over the course of the neoliberal era in Latin America. The central argument is that the resistance to the forces of agrarian change and capitalist development over the past three decades has been mobilised by a succession of social movements, whose dynamics and changing forms can best be understood in terms of Marxist class theory. The central focus of the paper is on the current dynamics of the class struggle on the expanding frontier of extractive capital in South America in the context of what has been described as a ‘progressive cycle’ in Latin American politics – a cycle that to all appearances is coming to an end.     

Concubitu Prohibere Vago: Sex and the Idiot Girl, 1846–1913

This paper interrogates Michel Foucault’s claim, that the spread of psychiatric power originated in concerns around the educatability of idiot children in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, before being applied to adult “defectives”. It is argued that Foucault, although partially correct, fails adequately to consider the extent to which the base concept, of “instinct”, was linked in particular ways to female idiot sexuality. The paper challenges Foucault’s view through an analysis of a series of nineteenth century cases involving the rape of female idiots, arguing that their sexuality was understood in terms of a relation to instinct which manifested in terms of an opposition between dangerousness and vulnerability. It then traces that opposition into the Mental Deficiency Act 1913 where, it is argued, it functioned in a collapsed form—now, the vulnerable were dangerous and the dangerous were vulnerable—and in which form it underpinned a psychiatrised regime for the control of mentally defective women through the control of their sexuality.     

Household production and the national economy: Concepts for the analysis of Agrarian formations

This essay argues that the central concept for analysis of agrarian social relations is the form of production. This is conceived through a double specification of the unit of production and the social formation. The approach allows for the analytical specification of simple commodity production and capitalist relations of production in a manner consistent with the development of new concepts within political economy for agrarian structures which do not correspond to modes of production. The latter have generally been referred to as ‘peasant’, a term derived through empirical generalisation and resting on a (usually) implicit contrast with simple commodity production. The contrast can be made more rigorous through the concept of commoditisation, defined as the penetration into reproduction of commodity relations. Simple commodity production is a concept within political economy, allowing for deduction of conditions of reproduction and class relations. ‘Peasant production is negatively defined as resisting commoditisation, and nothing can be deduced about reproduction or class relations. ‘Peasant’ must be replaced ty a comprehensive and mutually exclusive set of rigorously defined concepts specifying forms of production. Procedures for defining such forms of production are suggested.     

Marginal lands: the role of remote sensing in constructing landscapes for agrofuel development

With the growth of the biofuel complex, the concept of ‘marginal land’ has emerged as a term commonly associated with the promotion of agrofuels. Remote sensing and other data are used to globally characterize land as marginal based on predominantly biophysical features that render it ‘non-competitive’ for the purpose of commercial food agriculture. This paper explores the limitations of current geospatial technologies in determining whether marginal land is appropriate for bioenergy crops given that (i) people often have intentions behind land use that are not reflected in most routinely collected remote sensing data and (ii) a remote (and spatio-temporally static) characterization of marginality is unable to capture the shifting character of what constitutes marginality in an economic sense and is therefore a non-sequitur for guiding land use decisions on the ground. This paper also explores the latent values embedded in the ontology of a macro-scale ‘marginal land’ land cover class and advances the notion that ‘marginal land’ as an artificial spatial construct serves to re-frame land in a way that neglects socio-ecological processes in order to re-frame it in support of principles based in resource productivism.     

‘i pray for the factory to continue earning money’: the familial factory regime of the ‘Sun’ food factory in Turkey

This paper explores the factory regime in the ‘Sun’ food processing factory in Turkey, drawing on participant observation in the factory, informal interviews with women workers and in-depth interviews with the managers of the factory’s ‘gherkin department’ in which I worked. This paper argues that the ‘Sun’ bottling and canning factory is best understood through my concept of the ‘familial factory regime’. By ‘familial factory regime’ I mean a factory regime in which the features of the extended patriarchal family are used to manage the labour force by obtaining women workers’ consent. Indeed, the paper suggests that there is a tendency for patriarchy to be reconstituted in the workplace through the presence of a familial factory regime.     

Three generations: Historians view American communism

It has been argued that support for the First World War by the important French syndicalist organisation, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) has tended to obscure the fact that other national syndicalist organisations remained faithful to their professed workers’ internationalism: on this basis syndicalists beyond France, more than any other ideological persuasion within the organised trade union movement in immediate pre-war and wartime Europe, can be seen to have constituted an authentic movement of opposition to the war in their refusal to subordinate class interests to those of the state, to endorse policies of ‘defencism’ of the ‘national interest’ and to abandon the rhetoric of class conflict. This article, which attempts to contribute to a much-neglected comparative historiography of the international syndicalist movement, re-evaluates the syndicalist response across a broad geographical field of canvas (embracing France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Britain and America) to reveal a rather more nuanced, ambiguous and uneven picture. While it highlights the distinctive nature of the syndicalist response compared with other labour movement trends, it also explores the important strategic and tactical limitations involved, including the dilemma of attempting to translate formal syndicalist ideological commitments against the war into practical measures of intervention, and the consequences of the syndicalists’ subordination of the political question of the war to the industrial struggle.     

‘Peasantry’ as an economic category

This paper is concerned to challenge the category ‘peasantry’ as defining a distinct and general type of economy. It is divided into three sections: i. an examination of the work of Lenin and Kautsky on capitalism in agriculture which shows that they investigated economies in which peasant production was important without using such a concept; ii. it is argued that no rigorous concept of a ‘peasant’ mode or ‘peasant’ relations of production can be constructed which has the general applicability of the common‐sense notion of ‘peasantry'; iii. the treatment of ‘peasant’ economy in non‐Marxist literature is considered.     

Gender trouble on the German soccer field: can the growth of women’s soccer challenge hegemonic masculinity?

Soccer in Germany represents a social sphere for the expression of masculinity and features significant ideological battles over gender roles. This paper discusses whether the growth of women’s soccer can challenge the prevailing hegemonic masculinity in an area that represents an important economic aspect of consumer culture and social identity. Does women’s soccer have the potential to subvert existing gender norms and challenge dominant understandings of gender? While women’s soccer has seen some important areas of growth in Germany, there are reasons to remain sceptical about the subversive potential of women’s soccer. This article argues that the unholy trinity of the sports-media-business alliance is the root cause for the limitations women’s soccer faces in challenging hegemonic masculinity. This sports-media-business alliance has served as the structural framework that has shaped societal discourses about women’s soccer in Germany. This paper discusses three of those discourses: the evolution of the macro-historical discourse over the societal role of women’s soccer in post-World War II Germany; the discourse comparing men’s and women’s soccer and asserting the superiority of men’s soccer; and the discourse on the role of femininity in women’s soccer and the sexualization of the players.     

Crafts and trades (english): Comment on T. Shanin

Eric Hobsbawm's outline of the concept of social banditry suggest certain conditions of existence for that mode of primitive rebellion. Primary among these conditions are the presence of a ‘traditional peasant environment and the absence of ‘industrial capitalism’. This paper presents a critique of Hobsbawm's specifications, and suggest two alternative conditions: the presence of class conflict which unites direct producers, and the absence of effective, institutionalised political organisation of producers’ interests. This reformulation is illustrated by reference to the Kelly Outbreak in late nineteenth century Australia.     

高校工会思想政治工作探讨

高校工会思想政治工作是党的思想政治工作的重要组成部分。本文基于高校工会思想政治工作的特点 ,对高校工会思想政治工作的重要性、内容、主要途径和方法进行了探讨。     

论加强和改进大学生思想政治教育

构建社会主义和谐社会,是我们党全面建设小康社会、开创中国特色社会主义事业新局面的一项重大任务,涉及社会发展的各个方面。当前,大学生思想政治教育在构建和谐社会中面临着种种挑战,积极发挥思想政治教育功能、建立以人为本的思维理念和解决大学生的实际问题,是加强和改进大学生思想政治工作的重要举措。     

militarism,conflict and women's activism in the global era: challenges and prospects for women in three West African contexts

This paper deals with the wrought relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism, broadly defined. Tracing the trajectory in which psychoanalysis leads feminism from sexuality to sexual difference then to the Phallus and the ideology of femininity, the paper takes on these ‘f-words’—femininity and ‘f-allus’, Freud and Foucault—to foreground an unacknowledged challenge of Judith Butler by Toril Moi in 1999. In this paper, I read Freud closely and demonstrate that although Freud's theory of cure is obscured by the turn to the Phallus and the ideology of femininity, its language of fantasy, sexuality, desire and the unconscious remain important concepts for feminism of the new millennium. On the other hand, critiques of ‘empire of the Phallus’ such as the French feminists’ affirmation of femininity and Judith Butler's concept of ‘lesbian Phallus’ only reproduce the master's system. Butler's misreading of Freud's ‘tooth’ and Lacan's ‘eyes’ as the Phallus shows that ‘inversion, subversion and rebellion’ by reversal or negation often leads to repetition without difference. In conclusion, I introduce Joan Copjec's critique of Foucaultian historicism and Toril Moi's turn to ordinary language philosophy to propose a new psychoanalytic feminism that can have sex without the Phallus.