Technological intimacy: Re-engaging with gender and technology in the global factory

Abstract

This article reflects on the place of technology in the ethnography of global manufacturing and puts relationships with tools and machines back into debates about the production of gender in transnational labour processes. Much ethnography of the global factory, I argue, has over-determined or underexplored worker engagements with their immediate material environment, with implications for the role of technology in the production of gendered persons and selves. This article outlines a different approach, derived from theories of technology as performance or technique, to explore the relationship between Telugu masculinity and machines on the floor of a large diamond factory in one of India's special economic zones. In doing so it opens new dialogue between the ethnography of work and labour and the social study of technology.

Artifacts of workers' knowledge: Finding worker skill in the closing and restructuring of a furniture manufacturer

“…In this way working knowledge can be a source of pride and dignity that workers insert into otherwise unskilled and degraded work – that feeling engaged on the job while developing a new jig or flying through production with an easy flow of the body, even if for only part of a shift, a week, or a year, is significant to workers fighting the degradation and alienation of repetitive work. As Cross (2012) suggests, these are also important performative moments.…”

“…In this way a jig operates as an intermediary between the machines and the operators. Too often we see technology as Braverman did, as ‘causal, one-way and deterministic’ (Cross, 2012: 121). In this conception workers are passive recipients of technology with no agency, power, or control.…”

Everyday barricades: bureaucracy and the affect of struggle in trade unions

“…Elsewhere, similar affects may arguably emerge through workers' attempt to 'win' in their daily, personal struggles with the production process (Burawoy 1979;Kesküla 2016;Parry 1999). They also feature in informal gendered solidarity networks (Pollert 1981;Westwood 1984), or when one endeavours to reclaim skilled workmanship by forging new connections with colleagues and machinery (Bear 2015;Cross 2011;Leitch 1996). Furthermore, an affect of struggle may be expressed in indigenous cosmologies and ritual practices, which critique capitalism and promote class consciousness (Mills 1999;Nash 1979;Ong 1987).…”

Skills for Work and the Work of Skills: Community, Labour and Technological Change in India’s Artisanal Fisheries

“…A second set of debates to which this article is oriented take as their origin Marx's analysis of the impact of mechanization on the standardization and replaceability of labour, and more generally his critique of the drudgery of work under industrial capitalism (Cross, 2012; provides an excellent overview of this literature; see also Harvey, 2010.). In an influential application of this analysis, Braverman (1998) argued that, contrary to claims that industrialization and the incorporation of technology into production saw a general upgrading of skills, what resulted instead was a polarization of skill between those with managerial and information-heavy roles and other workers, now required to have far less comprehension of the entire labour process.…”