At the beginning of the new century, this elision
of work and leisure is perhaps beginning to
emerge in new forms, less politicized than the
old. In, for example, the currently dominant new
types of work in the service sector, a culture of
presentism is evident that requires that long
hours are spent in the workplace engaged in a
range of work-related activities (Budd and
Whimster, 1993; Hochschild, 1997; Lewis,
1989). Similarly these new forms of aestheti-
cized work (Bauman, 1998) demand particular
embodied performances from employees that
often result in workers spending their leisure
hours working to produce a particular bodily
form and appearance. The merchant bankers
whom I studied in the mid 1990s, for example,
were more likely to spend their leisure in the gym
at work or in escorting clients to sporting or
cultural events than in locally based community
activities, still eliding work and leisure but in a
different way than in older industrial occupations
(McDowell, 1997).
In the next sections of this chapter, I shall
illustrate these claims about the transformation
of workplace cultures and identity through a
review of case studies of particular sectors or
occupations at different periods of time from the
social sciences literature. In particular, I want to
explore the implications for workers of the grow-
ing significance of waged work in all aspects of
their lives and yet its increasing uncertainty. I
shall assess the contentions of some of the key
claims of theorists of labour market change and
transition, including more pessimistic claims that
work has become less certain, corroding the
sense of pride and identity of workers (Sennett,
1998), and more optimistic claims of the advan-
tages of the new ‘detraditional’ working patterns
and organizations (Beck et al., 1994; Lash and
Urry, 1994). In both cases, however, I want to
caution against too radical an assertion of a total
transformation in the nature of work. The old
Fordist pattern of full-time attachment for indus-
trial and white-collar workers alike, as the socio-
logist of work Ray Pahl (1984; 1989) has
consistently argued, was always a temporally and
spatially specific phenomenon, dominant for
perhaps only a 30-year period from the 1940s.
Furthermore, exaggerated claims about the end
of the working class (Gorz, 1982), the end of
work (Rikfin, 1996), even the brave new world
of work (Beck, 2000) need careful and empirical
interrogation. For some workers, perhaps, there
is a brave new world in sight, but for many
others, trapped in the least prestigious parts of
the new economy, the new patterns, as I sug-
gested above, seem to reflect older forms of
labour market attachment and exploitation.FORDIST CULTURES OF WORK:
LABOURING HEROES IN THE
POST-WAR DECADESMany of the post-war studies of the worlds of
work were undertaken by sociologists. Anthro-
pologists had not yet returned from ‘the field’ in
foreign lands to cast a critical eye on their com-
patriots, and geographers were interested in a
wider spatial focus – the region or the nation-
state rather than singular workplaces. Fifty years
later, scholars in all these disciplines seem united
in their interest in a wide range of issues about
the cultures of labour in and across a wide range
of workplaces and sites of production, attempting
to document the links between global and local
processes and patterns (see, for example, Burawoy,
2000, for a review of this changing focus). In the
first decades after the Second World War, how-
ever, the most common method was a single-site
ethnography, often presented as a typical exam-
ple of the nature of work, rather than as a single
case study set in its own particular historical and
geographical context. Numerous studies were
undertaken of the customs, rites and rituals found
among men working in heavy and dangerous
occupations in primary and manufacturing indus-
tries, based mainly on studies within a plant or a
firm. The ways in which shared risks led to a
specific sense of camaraderie among, for exam-
ple, miners, deep sea fishermen or steel makers
were examined, as well as the tedium and bore-
dom of working on the assembly line in the
expanding car plants, components industries,
meat-packing plants, white goods assembly and
so forth of the early post-war decades (Beynon,
1975; Dennis et al., 1956; Goldthorpe et al.,
1968; Halpern, 1996; Stull, 1997). These work-
place ethnographies also uncovered the multi-
tude of ways in which workers manipulated and
resisted workplace discipline, through horseplay,
having a laugh, covering for each other’s
absences, making preposterous demands through
to prolonged periods of serious industrial action,
as well as some of the divisions between workers,
on the basis of ethnicity for example. In their
respective studies of life on the line in a car plant
in the UK and USA, Huw Beynon (1975) and
Ben Harmer (1992) showed how men tried to
survive the noise, monotony and repetition of the
assembly line by everyday acts of resistance and
mutual support.
As Thompson emphasized in his historical
analyses, the notion of culture, or customs, a con-
cept synonymous with culture, includes a bundle
of attributes – ‘rites, symbolic modes, the cultural
attributes of hegemony, the inter-generational104 THE CULTURE OF ECONOMY3029-ch04.qxd 03-10-02 10:30 AM Page 104