Towards an Ethnography of the Workplace: Hierarchy, Authority and Sociability On the South Indian Textile Shop-Floor

South Asia Research

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 133-160

  de Neve, Geert ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84992776090     PISSN: 02627280     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/026272800102100201     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. See Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism, Chicago, 1979;
2. Michael Burawoy The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism, London, 1985;
3. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940, Princeton, 1989;
4. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940, Cambridge, 1994;
5. Leela Fernandes, Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills, Philadelphia, 1997;
6. Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia, New York, 1987;
7. Samita Sen, Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry, Cambridge, 1999;
8. Diane Wolf, Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural Industrialization in Java, Berkeley, 1992;
9. Kevin Yelvington, Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace, Philadelphia, 1996.
10. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, ‘The Making of the Working Class: E.P. Thompson and Indian History’, History Workshop Journal, No. 43, 1997, p. 7.
11. See for example Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History.
12. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent, pp. 1–12;
13. also Michael Burawoy, ‘Thirty Years of Making Out’ in R.E. Pahl, ed., On Work: Historical, Comparative and Theoretical Approaches, London, 1989.
14. Burawoy, The Politics of Production, p. 13.
15. Chandavarkar, ‘The Making of the Working Class’, p. 187;
16. Yelvington, Producing Power.
17. See also Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent, pp. 46–73, on the ‘culture of making—out’ which shapes the employees' work patterns and labour relations at Allied Corp.
18. See, for example, Theo van der Loop, Industrial Dynamics and Fragmented Labour Markets: Construction Firms and Labourers in India, New Delhi, 1996.
19. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent;
20. Burawoy, ‘Thirty Years of Making Out’.
21. Fernandes, Producing Workers, p. 6.
22. Karin Kapadia, ‘Gender Ideologies and the Formation of Rural Industrial Classes in South India Today’ in Jonathan P. Parry et al., eds, The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour, New Delhi, 1999, p. 330.
23. Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India, pp. 168–238, 278–334.
24. See, for example, Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History;
25. Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India;
26. Fernandes, Producing Workers;
27. Mark Holmström, South Indian Factory Workers: Their Life and Their Wortd, Cambridge, 1984;
28. Maria Mies, The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market, London, 1982;
29. Clare Wilkinson-Weber, Embroidering Lives: Women's Work and Skill in the Lucknow Embroidery Industry, New York, 1999.
30. Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India's Informal Economy, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 1–23.
31. For comparisons see also Sally Westwood, All Day, Every Day: Factory and Family in the Making of Women's Lives, London, 1984;
32. Israel Drori, The Seam Line: Arab Workers and Jewish Managers in the Israeli Textile Industry, Stanford, 2000.
33. A survey was conducted of all the workplaces in Bhavani (about 120) and of all the handloom workers (1,570). A detailed questionnaire was gathered from 200 workers. In Kumarapalayam, a sample of about 60 factories of various size were surveyed and 300 workers filled in a questionnaire. For a more detailed discussion of the organisation and the relations of production within the handloom and power-loom industries of these towns, see Geert De Neve, ‘Tamil Warps and Wefts: An Anthropological Study of Urban Weavers in South India’, unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, 1999, ch. 1, pp. 34–72.
34. See also Tirthankar Roy, ‘Development or Distortion? “Powerlooms” in India, 1950–1997’, Economic and Political Weekly (hereafter EPW), Vol. 33, No. 16, 18–24 April 1998, pp. 897–911;
35. Tirthankar Roy, ‘Growth and Recession in Small-Scale Industry — A Study of Tamil Nadu Powerlooms’, EPW, Vol. 34, No. 44, 30 October 1999, pp. 3137–45.
36. Fernartdes, Producing Workers, p. 70, emphasis added.
37. Similar discourses on male and female workers are reproduced by male employers in various factory settings, as documented, for example, by Kapadia, ‘Gender Ideologies’, p. 341;
38. Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, p. 152;
39. Wolf, Factory Daughters, pp. 115–19; and
40. Yelvington, Producing Power, p. 110.
41. Elsewhere I have discussed the women workers' marginalised position in the Bhavani Weavers Union and indicated how this union itself constitutes a strongly male-dominated space; see D. Neve, ‘Tamil Warps and Wefts’, ch. 3, pp. 119–46.
42. See also Fernandes, Producing Workers, pp. 109–11;
43. Kapadia, ‘Gender Ideologies’, p. 330;
44. Sen, Women and Labour in Late Colonial India, pp. 1–20; also
45. Samita Sen, ‘Beyond the “Working Class”: Women's Role in Indian Industrialisation’, South Asia, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1999, pp. 96–106.
46. Yelvington, Producing Power, p. 211.
47. Drori, The Seam Line, p. 143.
48. Westwood, All Day, Every Day, p. 32.
49. Drori, The Seam Line, p. 136.
50. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History, p. 96.
51. See also Arjan de Haan, Unsettled Settlers: Migrant Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Calcutta, Hilversum, 1994, pp. 91–118.
52. Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India, pp. 100–110.
53. Westwood, All Day, Every Day, pp. 32–38. For comparative literature on the position and role of the foreman and supervisor in different UK factories, see also
54. Huw Beynon and R.M. Blackburn, Perceptions of Work: Variations within a Factory, Cambridge, 1972, pp. 88–106;
55. Huw Beynon, Working for Ford, Middlesex, 1973, pp. 101–61; and
56. Theo Nichols and Huw Beynon, Living with Capitalism, London, 1977, pp. 44–67.
57. Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India, p. 199.
58. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850–1950, Cambridge, 1998, p. 343;
59. see also de Haan, Unsettled Settlers, pp. 73–81.
60. Breman, Footloose Labour, pp. 88–101.
61. Holmström has discussed how the notion of ‘merit’ takes a central place in the way both workers and employers talk about recruitment processes in most large Indian factories; see Holmström, South Indian Factory Workers, pp. 42–51, and
62. Mark Holmström, Industry and Inequality: The Social Anthropology of Indian Labour, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 206–18. It is argued by workers and management that both influence/contacts and merit are required. Getting a job by merit, however, is seen as ‘fair’ and achieved status is morally better than ascribed status or luck. See also
63. de Haan, Unsettled Settlers, p. 81, for a discussion of the importance of personalised recruitment in the Calcutta jute industry.
64. Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India, pp. 197–98. For Calcutta, see
65. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History, p. 113;
66. de Haan, Unsettled Settlers, pp. 73–81.
67. Geert De Neve, ‘Asking For and Giving Baki: Neo-bondage, or the Interplay of Bondage and Resistance in the Tamilnadu Power-loom Industry’ in Parry et al., eds, The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour, pp. 379–406.
68. Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India, pp. 99–123, 295–307.
69. Breman, Footloose Labour, pp. 93–101.
70. See also Fernandes, Producing Workers, pp. 67–68, for a discussion of similar changes in the sardar's job in contemporary Calcutta jute mills.
71. Yelvington, Producing Power, Kevin Yelvington, ‘Flirting in the Factory’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (hereafter JRAI), n.s., Vol. 2, No. 2, June 1996, pp. 313–33;
72. Fernandes, Producing Workers;
73. Westwood, All Day, Every Day.
74. Yelvington, ‘Flirting in the Factory’, p. 329.
75. Yelvington, Producing Power, pp. 173–78.
76. Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella, ‘Friendship and Flirting: Micro-Politics in Kerala, South India’, JRAI, n.s., Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1998, pp. 189–206;
77. George Simmel, George Simmel: On Women, Sexuality, and Love, New Haven, 1984 [1911].
78. Osella and Osella, ‘Friendship and Flirting’, p. 196.
79. See also A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘On Joking Relationships’, Africa, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1940, pp. 195–210.
80. Osella and Osella, ‘Friendship and Flirting’, p. 203.
81. Kevin Yelvington, ‘Power/Flirting’, JRAI, n.s., Vol. 5, No. 3, September 1998, pp. 457–59, a reply of Yelvington to the critique formulated by Osella and Osella.
82. See Collinson's multi-sided interpretation of joking on the shopfloor of Slavs, a Lancashire-based manufacturing company. He sees humour and joking practices among male workers as a tool for resistance against controlled tasks, as an expression of group conformity among young men, and as a form of mutual control and discipline among interdependent workers. See David Collinson, Managing the Shopfloor: Subjectivity, Masculinity and Workplace Culture, Berlin, 1992, pp. 103–22.
83. My focus here is explicitly on interactions of joking and teasing, rather than-on flirtatious relationships as such. It is recognised, however, that these practices of joking and teasing do contain sexual undertones and that at times they may be used to explore the potential of a romance or even a sexual relationship; see also Osella and Osella, ‘Friendship and Flirting’, p. 195, and
84. Yelvington, ‘Flirting in the Factory’, pp. 314–15, 321–23.
85. Osella and Osella, ‘Friendship and Flirting’, pp. 192–95.
86. Yelvington, Producing Power, pp. 172–73.
87. Anthony Good, ‘Elder Sister's Daughter Marriage in South India’, Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 36, No. 4, Winter 1980, pp. 474–500;
88. Anthony Good, ‘Prescription, Preference and Practice’, Man (JRAI), n.s., Vol. 16, No. 1, March 1981, pp. 108–29;
89. Karin Kapadia, Siva and Her Sisters: Gender, Caste, and Class in Rural South India, Boulder, 1995, pp. 13–45.
90. Yelvington, Producing Power, idem, ‘Flirting in the Factory’.
91. Osella and Osella, ‘Friendship and Flirting’, p. 195.
92. See Yelvington, ‘Flirting in the Factory’, p. 329.
93. See Osella and Osella, ‘Friendship and Flirting’, p. 197.
94. See also Westwood, All Day, Every Day, pp. 89–101, for a discussion of the contradictory nature of shop floor culture for women workers. She writes, p. 101, that ‘although the elements of shopfloor culture were shot through with ideological components which linked shopfloor culture among women to an ideology of femininity and a patriarchal definition of womanhood, they also contained a message about sisterhood and strength, both inside and outside the factory. In this respect the culture was a powerful threat to gender inequalities and patriarchal assumptions. Girls coming into the factory were inducted into a culture that was deeply contradictory.’
95. Breman, Footloose Labour, pp. 235–36.
96. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent, p. 67;
97. Burawoy, ‘Thirty Years of Making Out’, p. 205.
98. Westwood, All Day, Every Day, p. 39, 40–43, 45.
99. Jonathan P. Parry, ‘Introduction’ in Parry et al., eds, The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour, pp. xii–iv.
100. Suffice to note that while the handloom weavers are well organised in a Weavers' Union, the power-loom workers have never managed to resort to concerted action, let alone organised union activity. The handloom weavers' high level of organisation, as I have argued elsewhere, is directly related to their close identification as workers, their similar caste backgrounds and the particular organisation of production, which allows them to interact and socialise on the shop-floor. The organisation of the production process and the methods of recruitment in the power-looms, however, are much less conducive to socialisation among workers within the factory and have led to the cultivation of more individualised relationships between employers and workers. See D. Neve, ‘Tamil Warps and Wefts’, and
101. D. Neve, ‘Asking For and Giving Baki’.