single employer, working in the main steady and
regular hours – an assumption that was never as
strong in the USA and which, of course, in Great
Britain only ever applied to a minority of ‘work-
ers’, mainly middle-class men, ‘career’ women
and the labour aristocracy – has been displaced.
Employment for many is now uneven, contin-
gent, casualized and insecure (Gallie et al.,
1998). Similarly, the idea that work should be
more significant in the lives of men than women,
as male breadwinners brought home the bacon
for their dependants, has been displaced. More
and more women are entering the labour market,
‘encouraged’ by the social and economic poli-
cies of governments that emphasize the responsi-
bilities of individuals rather than the mutual
needs of a family or household. Unlike earlier
periods in the twentieth century, motherhood is
no longer regarded as an acceptable alternative
to waged work. Further, even in the industrial
west, where participation in education has
lengthened, growing numbers of children and
young people are now employed while they are
still undertaking education and training (Mizen
et al., 1999). This redistribution of employment
has had a significant impact on the nature and
meaning of work, the conditions under which
people labour, the social relationships in the
workplace and people’s sense of themselves as
members of a community.Disruption 3: work and local culturesAs I argued earlier in this chapter, the nature of
work, its organization, social structure and status,
are also related to changes in the organization of
production, control, ownership and location, as
well as to the participation and social character-
istics of workers. The growing concentration of
ownership into the hands of a small number of
multinational corporations operating across the
boundaries of the nation-state, and the conse-
quent loss of power both by the state and by
workers and their organizations (Dicken, 1998;
Held et al., 1999), have recast the relationships
between firms and corporations and their work-
force, leading to a disruption in the spatial
associations between work and localities.
Nation-states, eager to attract and retain inward
investment by increasingly footloose capital,
have adopted policies of financial and labour
market deregulation, and, in the US and the UK
par excellence, the benefits of labour flexibility
are trumpeted. Labour power, which is seldom
as footlooseor flexible as capital, has been left
unprotected against the demands for ever-
increasing efforts to cut costs and increaseprofits, and so the old industrial proletariats have
seen their livelihoods disappear and their living
standards plummet as capital draws in and
exploits the attributes of the new industrial
working class. The fate of these old working-class
communities, discarded by mobile capital, has
been well documented in the literatures of dein-
dustrialization (Hudson, 2000; Lawless et al.,
1998; Martin and Rowthorn, 1986). What is clear
is that the links between workplace cultures – the
attitudes, beliefs and customs that develop in a
workplace – and a specific locality have unrav-
elled, or rather been reconstituted at different
spatial scales, as organizations rethink their
structures of regulation and control (Castells,
2000a and b; Marcus, 1998; Standing, 1999;
Yeung, 1998; 2000). The strong association
between place and a dominant industry that was
a distinctive feature of the space economy of the
first industrial nations is disappearing.
Until perhaps some time in the 1970s, in a
country such as Britain, there were evident asso-
ciations between place and industrial structure
and customs, as well as voting patterns, that
meant that class mapped onto space in specific
ways (Thrift and Williams, 1987) and produced
the sense of a local culture that Raymond
Williams defined as ‘a structure of feeling’. But
economic restructuring and its correlate, the
growing dominance of service employment,
have altered these regional associations as the
economic geography of the nation perhaps
becomes less distinctive. Service sector employ-
ment tends to be less certain, often undertaken on
a casual or part-time basis, and also less spatially
distinctive, at least in the low-income parts of the
sector. Labour turnover is higher, which also
alters older patterns of loyalty to an employer.
New forms of work and new patterns of owner-
ship have also recast the nature of workplace
cultures. The rites and symbols that construct
forms of high-tech work or professional services
employment, for example, as distinctive are dif-
ferent from those that defined the solidaristic
community of miners or steel makers, now only
visible in romanticized representations in movies
such as The Full Monty, Brassed Off orBilly
Elliott. In new forms of work, professional
loyalties rather than place-based connections are
often more important and job mobility is greater.
In the localities formerly dominated by older
forms of work, workplace and local customs
were elided as the ties formed between predo-
minantly male workers also influenced their
patterns of leisure activities and political organiza-
tion outside work (Beynon, 1975; Beynon and
Blackburn, 1984; Cooke, 1988; Dennis et al., 1956;
McDowell and Massey, 1984; Thompson, 1980).CULTURES OF LABOUR 1033029-ch04.qxd 03-10-02 10:30 AM Page 103