Cultural Geography

moved from a sense of a whole, integrated, self-contained

social group and way of life to a sense of an entity, that

while still defining a coherent group or community, is

highly mutable, flexible, open to shaping from many

directions at once in its changing environment, and,

most importantly, a result of constructions continuously

debated and contested among its highly independent,

even unruly, membership. (1998: 6)

Influenced by this redefinition of culture as

mutable and riven by the social relations of

power and conflict, an exciting and vibrant new

field of labour geographies (Herod, 1997; Martin,

2000; Wills, 1998) has begun to be developed, as

well as interdisciplinary work by economic

sociologists, anthropologists and organization

theorists focusing on the analysis of labour and

organizations as socially constructed entities.

The ways in which class, gender, ethnic and

place-based differences, as well as local habits,

customs and cultures, are used to assemble,

differentiate, control and reward workers, who are

drawn into and expelled from the labour market

in particular ways in different places and indus-

trial sectors, as well as the patterns of worker

resistance and struggles against exploitation, are

being analysed and explained in the growing

number of these studies that insist on the social

and cultural constitution of labour power and

organizations (Grahber, 1993; Grint, 1998;

Martin, 2000; Massey, 1984; Peck, 1996; Sayer

and Walker, 1992; Smelser and Swedberg, 1994;

Zukin and DiMaggio, 1990). In this work, more

complex and contested notions of labour are com-

mon. There are, for example, a growing number

of interesting case studies by geographers and

others focusing on the social meaning of waged

work and the identity of workers, some of them,

but not all, feminist in inspiration and many

drawing on poststructuralist analyses of the

social and discursive construction of subjectivity

(Casey, 1995; du Gay, 1996; Hanson and Pratt,

1995; Leslie and Butz, 1998; Massey, 1995;

Pringle, 1998; Wajcman, 1998; Wright, 1994).

Thus, work on gendered identities, and on plea-

sure, desire and discipline in the workplace, has

become part of explorations of what constitutes

class identity. Here ideas about performance,

embodiment and aesthetic labour are crucial and

have been significant in finding a way to include

the cultural construction of difference into what

seemed initially hostile economic debates.

Through such analyses it might be possible to

find a way through the sterile juxtaposition of

economic versus cultural questions/approaches

that has tended to dominate geographical debates

as well as the equality/difference distinction that

has dominated feministtheorizing and politics

(McDowell, 1999; 2000; Phillips, 1999; Sayer,

2000; Segal, 1999; Thrift, 2000a).

Rather than pursue the theoretical implications

of overcoming these dichotomous distinctions,

I want now to return to an assessment of the

late-twentieth-century transformation in work.

My main focus will be on the old industrial

economies of the west, not only because this is

where I undertake my own empirical research

but also because the current debates about the

nature of work in ‘new’ knowledge-based

economies and their implications for cultural

identity are currently western-centric. First, then,

let us turn to a set of assumptions about the

meaning of work in the Fordist era to provide

the basis for a comparison and evaluation of the

debates about transformation.

POST-WAR ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT

WORK AND THEIR DISRUPTION

Disruptions 1 and 2: work and masculinity;

leisure and work

Before the late twentieth century, in the long

decades following industrial capitalism, waged

work was, in general, imbued with the attributes

of masculinity. This association took a distinc-

tive binary form, linked to class position. For

working-class men who laboured in manual

occupations, work was represented as an heroic

embodied struggle against both the material

world and the owners of land and capital. For

middle-class men, by contrast, work consisted

of rational disembodied cerebral thought. The

general association of work with men, however,

was widespread and taken for granted. Women,

in contrast, were on sufferance in the labour

market, constructed by their femininity as out of

place in the public arena of the workplace,

except in the segregated ghettos of female

employment. Here the stereotypical attributes of

femininity – caring, empathy and dexterity –

apparently fitted them for less prestigious and

less well-paid work. In the main throughout the

century from 1850, it was assumed that women’s

proper place was in the home, dependent on the

waged labour of their menfolk, despite well-

documented exceptions to this belief (Bradley,

1989; McDowell and Massey, 1984). This

assumption, as numerous feminist scholars have

documented in detail, not only affected the

patterns of labour market participation and

remuneration but also structured appointment

and promotion policies, the cultural assumptions

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