Austerity, skill, and gendered work in Kazakhstan's heavy industry

Abstract

Earlier analyses have demonstrated the loss of industrial worker autonomy and the rise of deskilling after production is automated. But what happens to autonomy and skill in times of austerity, when automation breaks down? Through studying the labour process in a Kazakhstani coal processing plant, I explore how the lack of investment in machinery and staff influences the way female workers conduct their everyday work. Workers are simultaneously reskilled and exhausted by invisible extra maintenance work, with their gendered dispositions drawn on as a resource. Ethnographies of the economic crisis and austerity have so far paid little attention to the transformation of everyday industrial work. This ethnography makes a distinctive contribution by shifting the focus on to an embodied and detailed analysis of industrial work in austerity, developing ideas of gendered maintenance, repair, and skill.

Disrupting ‘a man's world’: gender, technology, and class in Vietnam's global heavy industry

“…As an export‐driven middle‐income industrialized nation with a growth rate of about 7.2 per cent (World Bank 2022), Vietnam epitomizes the heterogeneity of modernity, as seen in other rapidly transforming communist societies (Hann et al. 2001; Humphrey 2002; Kesküla 2021; Rofel 1992). The socioeconomic transformation process Vietnam has undergone reflects a political shift from import substitution to export orientation with Foreign Direct Investment Zones, Export Processing Zones, Economic Zones, and High Tech and Industrial Zones (T.T.A.…”

“…Heavy industry is capital‐intensive and produces big machinery, factory buildings, infrastructure, and so on (GSO 2018). While Vietnam's vision for development and progress has been intimately intertwined with classic heavy industrial production and the significance of workers, especially male workers, for reaching ‘modernity’, heavy industry is taking new shapes (Kesküla 2021; Parry 2007; Pettus 2003; Rofel 1992). Artificial intelligence applications and potential nanotechnological solutions in companies like Xylan demand worker specialization in high‐tech and thus challenge traditional heavy industrial jobs like those in the Yate factory (cf.…”

“…If women were to conduct jobs on the floor, usually assigned to men in heavy industry, it would not only disrupt but even revoke typical ideas of gender roles as enmeshed with images of femininity and masculinity (ISDS 2020; Khuat 2016). To share tasks in heavy industry equally by gender would recast the status of the idealized and ideologically defined male worker valued for his inherent strength and contribution to reaching industrialization and modernization goals in transforming communist societies (Humphrey 2002; Kesküla 2021; Pettus 2003; Schwenkel 2020).…”

“…In this article, I explore the ways in which blue‐collar and white‐collar female employees’ interagency with technology in Vietnam's male‐dominated global heavy industry enables counter‐images of femininity and masculinity (cf. Cross 2012; Kesküla 2021; Parry 2007). Women working in heavy industry, I would suggest, generate ‘disruption’ ( làm gián đoạn ) in terms of incidents that could carve out new opportunities and/or provoke crisis in the gender order 5 .…”

“…With this article, I seek to contribute new insights into the ways in which the interagential dynamics of gender and technology from shopfloor to engineer offices coproduce social orders in contesting and perpetuating essentializing notions of femininity and masculinity. My analysis is inspired by anthropology's engagement with feminist technology studies (Bray 2007; Cross 2012; Haraway 1991; Kesküla 2021; Ong & Collier 2005; Strathern 1996) 3 and conceptualizations of technological innovations as materiality integrated into the social fabric, which for better or worse introduces new possibilities and, moreover, redraws the lines between people and things (Lemonnier 1992; Pfaffenberger 1988; Richardson 2015). When gender and technology interact, as Donna Haraway (1991) reminds us, new interfaces take shape which, according to Marilyn Strathern (1996), could generate positive change and empowerment but also dehumanizing injustice and inequity (cf.…”