Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. One chapter has a small amount of highlighting otherwise book would be very good. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Recently I was the commentator on a panel where I confronted the “problem” of this book or a version of it in the findings of a large collaborative research project. The panelists focused on the intersection of industrial restructuring and changing household work practices and while their research was explicitly geared to exploring the reciprocal impacts and interactions of these two social domains the principal relationship that emerged was the adaptation of households to changes in the industrial sector. “Adaptability” and “coping” were the general terms under which a remarkably diverse array of living situations and reactions to industrial change were subsumed. The researchers hinted in passing at some points of tension and contradiction that stood out against the background of harmoniza- tion and adjustment: older workers who were having great difficulties adjusting to a 12-hour shift destabilized gender identities stemming from a changing gender division of labor in two-earner households increases in (noncapitalist and nonindustrial) economic activity among both shiftworkers and laid off workers. But while these problematic contradictory and complicating moments were acknowledged their effects upon the industrial site were left unexplored. What was being produced was a narrative of local adaptability and accommodation inad vertently establishing the dominance of global economic restructuring over local social and cultural life. It was clear to me that the refusal to explore disharmony – the things that did not line up and fit in with industrial change – had led to an unwitting economism or productionism in the social representation that was being constructed. As the process to which everything else was adapting and adjusting industrial restructuring was the central. (SP)