Machine-made lace, the spaces of skilled practices and the paradoxes of contemporary craft production

Abstract

This article inspects a set of paradoxes that appeared in an investigation of contemporary industrial craft in the last remaining factory making machine lace in the United Kingdom. Its focus on a single site, set against a now global industry, means it can build on work in cultural and economic geography to understand this setting as a heterogeneous space, with links to a range of material and immaterial lineages, practices and networks. Ethnographic fieldwork on the factory floor at Cluny Lace threw up three paradoxes inherent in the firm’s continued survival in a context of industrial decline. The first of these paradoxes is the re-concentration of material and immaterial resources in the factory both despite and as a result of the global restructuring of the textile industry. The second is the embodiment of knowledge, and therefore craft skill, both within persons and distributed through the worker’s material environments. Third, is the recognition that the skilled practice the workers carry is not uniform but is multiple, resulting from an unequal distribution of opportunities within the lace industry and different versions of practice that result from the re-concentration of human capital in the factory. This article demonstrates that skill is not uncontested, but is power-ridden and value-laden, and transcends scale. It shows that knowledge and skill are not bound within an individual but are distributed among social actors, material objects and locales, where an attention to each is necessary for understanding the spaces of skilled practices and the ongoing survival of contemporary industrial craft production.

Twist-hands and shuttle-kissing

“…The other is a developing relationship with a working museum of framework knitting at Ruddington, near Nottingham. The former work used ethnography (Fisher and Botticello 2016) and 3D modelling to uncover some aspects of the human/machine interactions that are necessary to producing lace with a 150-year old technology [Figures 3&4]. It resulted in a short film, 'Twisthands at the Deadstop', which explains the Leavers technology using animation 8.…”

Exploring migrants’ knowledge and skill in seasonal farm work: more than labouring bodies

“…The logic underpinning this binary has been challenged by scholars of organisational and management studies (Brown and Duguid 1991;Riege and Zulpo 2007) and human geographers (Carr and Gibson 2016;Fisher and Botticello 2018). Focusing on factory floor workers, service technicians and maintenance and repair staff, they have shown that 'manual' labour is neither unskilled nor bereft of knowledge.…”

“…They exercise insight and judgement based on "accumulated wisdom", moving beyond instruction manuals or plans (Brown and Duguid 1991, p.45). Their knowing deepens with repetition, trial and error, thinking and doing (Riege and Zulpo 2007;Fisher and Botticello 2018). This body of work unsettles the mind/body binary, asserting that knowledge and skill overlap.…”

Animating geographies of making: Embodied slow scholarship for participant‐researchers of maker cultures and material work

“…The renewed interest in embodiment and the affective and emotional aspects of everyday life within cultural geography has created an opportunity to shift to a finer grain of analysis. Labour geographers attentive to the cultural and ethnographic have thus called for closer analysis of the mundane acts, bodily tasks, emotional terrain, and instances of negotiation and resistance present in concrete workspaces, in the moments of labouring (Fisher & Botticello, ; Herod, Rainnie, & McGrath‐Champ, ; Warren, ). What exactly do bodies do at work?…”