transmission of custom and custom’s evolution
within historically specific forms of working
and social relationships’ (1999:13). Although
these customs are spatially variable, the linea-
ments of certain general changes might be dis-
cerned. Even in the immediate post-war period in
Great Britain, the relationships between work-
place cultures and local communities were
beginning to be transformed. Deferential atti-
tudes to paternalistic employers – the textile
mill owners, the coal and steel barons of north-
west and north-east England – had weakened in
the Depression and especially during the Second
World War, and the election of the post-war
Labour government accelerated this change.
Similarly the links between a local neighbour-
hood, forms of mutual organization and benefit
societies and the church had weakened, to be
replaced by growing allegiances to trade unions,
political party and the welfare state (Clarke,
1996; Obelkevich and Catterall, 1994). Thus the
‘localness’ or geographicalspecificity of work-
place institutions began to diminish; national-
level institutions, systems of regulation, control
and bargaining become more important; and
regional variations in, for example, conditions of
work and remuneration levels decreased.
The period between the end of the Second
World War and the end of the 1960s was also,
for most working-class men in Britain, one of
relatively secure work and, as I noted above, the
development of new forms of association and
leisure interests. It was widely assumed that the
so-called embourgeoisement of the working
class would become more widespread, as work-
ers developed typically middle-class consump-
tion habits and behaviours, with, for example,
the rise in home ownership and the widespread
possession of a range of consumer durables. This
shift in consumption patterns, it was argued,
would be reflected in shifts in voting patterns,
especially in the realignment of older class asso-
ciations, in a reduction in industrial conflict and
in new forms of companionate marriage and
shared leisure activities within families
(Franklin, 1985; Summerfield, 1994; Young and
Willmott, 1973).
Growing numbers of women entered the
labour market in this period, in part to support
the increased costs of the rising living standards
but also to meet labour shortages in both the
public sector as the institutions of the welfare
state expanded and in new manufacturing indus-
tries producing consumer durables. Women
moved into both these sectors in growing
numbers, often employed on a part-time basis.
Their presence in the workforce, especially on
the factory floor, led to a theoretical and empiricalchallenge to the assumptions about workplace
cultures and to new work uncovering the ways in
which labour segmentation by gender and race is
reinforced by shop and factory rituals and every-
day behaviours. In a study of social relationships
in a Leicestershire hosiery factory in the early
1980s, for example, Sallie Westwood (1984)
documented in fascinating detail the ways in
which women breached the traditional distinc-
tions between home and work as separate
spheres. Based on different traditions and prac-
tices to male workers, these women introduced
reminders of home into the workplace, personal-
izing their benches for example, swapping food
and recipes, undertaking sewing for their own
families in slack periods and insisting on the
celebration of birthdays, engagements and
weddings by workmates.
There are now a rapidly expanding number of
studies of women’s work in different circum-
stances on assembly lines and in factories,
exploring women’s customs and workplace
cultures both in the older industrial economies
(Cavendish, 1983; Cockburn, 1986; Glucks-
mann, 1990; Redclift and Sinclair, 1991; West,
1982) and increasingly across the newly indus-
trializing societies (Chant and McIllwaine, 1995;
Elson and Pearson, 1981; Faulkner and Lawson,
1991; Fuentes and Ehrenreich, 1983; Hsiung,
1996; Jackson and Pearson, 1998; Lee, 1997;
Mies, 1986; Momsen and Kinnaird, 1993; Ong,
1987; Pearson and Mitter, 1993). In this work the
interconnections between women’s position in
the home and locality and the ways in which they
influence both the assembly of female labour
forces and the social relationships between
women and between men and women in the
workplace are explored. In these studies the
ways in which the cultural assumptions and
symbolic meanings about work and gendered
identities are explored, demonstrating in fasci-
nating empirical detail how cultural attitudes and
workers’ gendered subjectivities are an essential
part of developing an understanding not only of
local labour markets and labour processes
therein but also of the larger-scale nature of
globalization. In a study of women working in
the information processing industry in Barbados,
for example, Freeman (2000) has vividly demon-
strated the importance of a cultural analysis of
the production process.
There are also growing numbers of feminist
studies of the wide variety of women’s work in
the service sector, in both highly paid, profes-
sional jobs and more typical ‘women’s jobs’ in
caring and servicing roles (England and Stiell,
1997; Greed, 1991; Gregson and Lowe, 1994;
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