Changing Work and Community Identities in European Regions: Perspectives on the Past and Present (Identity Studies in the Social Sciences)

Changing Work and Community Identities in European Regions Perspectives on the Past and Present Edited by

John Kirk, Sylvie Contrepois and

Steve Jefferys

Identity Studies in the Social Sciences Series Editors: Margaret Wetherell, Open University; Valerie Hey, Sussex University; Stephen Reicher, St Andrews University Editorial Board: Marta Augoustinos, University of Adelaide, Australia; Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley, USA; David McCrone, University of Edinburgh, UK; Angela McRobbie, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Syracuse University, USA; Harriet B. Nielsen, University of Oslo, Norway; Ann Phoenix, Institute of Education, University of London, UK; Mike Savage, University of Manchester, UK Titles include: Will Atkinson CLASS, INDIVIDUALIZATION AND LATE MODERNITY In Search of the Reflexive Worker John Kirk, Sylvie Contrepois and Steve Jefferys (editors) CHANGING WORK AND COMMUNITY IDENTITIES IN EUROPEAN REGIONS Perspectives on the Past and Present John Kirk and Christine Wall WORK AND IDENTITY Historical and Cultural Contexts Janice McLaughlin, Peter Phillimore and Diane Richardson (editors) CONTESTING RECOGNITION Culture, Identity and Citizenship Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor MOVING HISTORIES OF CLASS AND COMMUNITY Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England Susie Scott TOTAL INSTITUTIONS AND REINVENTED IDENTITIES Margaret Wetherell (editor) IDENTITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY New Trends in Changing Times Margaret Wetherell (editor) THEORIZING IDENTITIES AND SOCIAL ACTION

Identity Studies in the Social Sciences Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–20500–0 (Hardback) 978–0–230–20501–7 (Paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, UK

Also by John Kirk TWENTIETH CENTURY WRITING AND THE BRITISH WORKING CLASS CLASS, CULTURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE: On the Trail of the Working Class WORK AND IDENTITY: Historical and Cultural Contexts (co-authored with Christine Wall)

Also by Sylvie Contrepois SYNDICATS: La nouvelle donne. Enquête sociologique au cœur d’un bassin industriel GLOBALIZING EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS: Multinational Firms and Central and Eastern Europe Transitions (co-edited with Violaine Delteil, Patrick Dieuaide and Steve Jefferys)

Also by Steve Jefferys MANAGEMENT AND MANAGED: Fifty Years of Crisis at Chrysler MANAGEMENT, WELFARE AND WORK IN WESTERN EUROPE: An Historical and Contemporary Analysis (co-authored with Mike Carpenter) EUROPEAN WORKING LIVES (co-edited with Frederick Mispelblom Beyer and Christer Thornquist) LIBERTÉ, EGALITÉ AND FRATERNITÉ AT WORK: Changing French Employment Relations and Management GLOBALIZATION AND PRECARIOUS FORMS OF PRODUCTION AND EMPLOYMENT: Challenges for Workers and Unions (co-edited with Carole Thornley and Beatrice Appay)

Changing Work and Community Identities in European Regions Perspectives on the Past and Present Edited by

John Kirk London Metropolitan University, UK

Sylvie Contrepois London Metropolitan University, UK

and

Steve Jefferys London Metropolitan University, UK

Selection and editorial matter © John Kirk, Sylvie Contrepois and Steve Jefferys 2012 Individual chapters © their respective authors 2012 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–24954–7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

This book is dedicated to the memory of Professor John Kirk (1957–2010)

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Contents

List of Tables

ix

List of Figures

x

Acknowledgements

xii

Notes on Contributors

xiii

1 Approaching Regional and Identity Change in Europe John Kirk, Sylvie Contrepois and Steve Jefferys

1

2 Industrial, Urban and Worker Identity Transitions in Nuremberg Lars Meier and Markus Promberger

23

3 Industrial Decline, Economic Regeneration and Identities in the Paris Region Sylvie Contrepois

57

4 Two Spanish Cities at the Crossroads: Changing Identities in Elda and Alcoy María Arnal, Carlos de Castro, Arturo Lahera-Sánchez, Juan Carlos Revilla and Francisco José Tovar 5 Post-communist Transitions: Mapping the Landscapes of Upper Silesia Kazimiera Wódz with Krzysztof Ł˛ecki, Jolanta Klimczak-Ziółek and Maciej Witkowski

91

124

6 Zonguldak Coalfield and the Past and Future of Turkish Coal-mining Communities H. Tarık S¸ engül and E. Attila Aytekin

154

7 Representing Identity and Work in Transition: The Case of South Yorkshire Coal-mining Communities in the UK John Kirk, with Steve Jefferys and Christine Wall

184

vii

viii Contents

8 A Skyline of European Identities Sylvie Contrepois, Steve Jefferys and John Kirk

217

Author Index

232

Subject Index

236

List of Tables

1.1 Manufacturing employment as a percentage of all civilian employment, 1970–2005 2.1 Unemployment rates in selected Nuremberg districts, 2008 2.2 Selected percentage share of Nuremberg district election results, 2008 3.1 Occupational demography of Corbeil-Essonnes, 1954–82 3.2 Major employers (with over 500 workers) in the Corbeil-Essonnes and Evry conurbations, 2004 3.3 Unemployment rates (%) in France, Corbeil-Essonnes and Evry, 1990–2007 3.4 Workers by socio-professional category in 1999 and 2007 as a percentage of workforce 4.1 150 years of population growth in Alcoy and Elda 4.2 Hidden employment in the Elda shoe industry, 1935–2004 5.1 Silesian Voivodship and Polish economic indicators, 2007 6.1 Coal mining and population change in the Zonguldak region, 1950–2004 6.2 Net migration rate (per 1000) in Zonguldak, 1975–2009 6.3 Women’s participation in the workforce in Zonguldak (including Bartın and Karabük) by age group (%) 7.1 Labour statistics, NCB mines 1948–75 7.2 Employment in manufacturing as a percentage of civilian employment 7.3 Numbers employed in different sectors in the Yorkshire and Humber Region, 1841–2001

ix

4 40 43 62 79 79 80 93 102 145 169 171 177 190 192 209

List of Figures

2.1 ‘Adler’ hauling the first German train, leaving Nuremberg in 1835 2.2 The Wöhrd (District 9) Cramer Klett factory (a predecessor of MAN) in the nineteenth century 2.3 The districts of Nuremberg 2.4 Apartment house plaque: [Destroyed 2.1.1945, Reconstructed 1959] 2.5 The former Siemens-Schuckert plant today 2.6 Unemployed numbers in Nuremberg, 1960–2009 2.7 The Franken Campus 2.8 The Aufseßplatz following its restoration 3.1 Corbeil viewed from the right bank of the Seine showing the flour mills on the tributary Essonne River behind the bridge 3.2 The new town of Evry, showing the university and the cathedral behind 3.3 Corbeil-Essonnes demonstrators marching in defence of jobs at Crété, 20 February 1976 3.4 A disused building at Port Darblay 4.1 Shoe factory in the 1950s 4.2 Old industrial area and Canalejas Viaduct (Alcoy) 4.3 Moors and Christians Parade 2009. Comparsa Zíngaros (Elda) 5.1 Gross domestic product in Poland, 1996–2010 5.2 Unemployment (%) in Poland, 1992–2010 5.3 Deep coal-mining employment, Katowice/Silesian Voivodship, 1990–2010 (in thousands) 5.4 Shopping centre Silesia City Center in Katowice 5.5 Migration in Poland, 1990–2010 in thousands 5.6 Silesian Voivodship ´ aska, 5.7 Restored workers’ house (familok) in Ruda Sl ˛ Kaufhaus settlement 5.8 Industrial sector shares (%) in the Silesian Voivodship, 2009 x

33 34 35 37 38 39 41 50

60 63 66 73 98 104 114 127 128 128 129 130 132 142 146

List of Figures

7.1 Location of South Yorkshire coalfield, and other major UK coalfields 7.2 A call centre on the site of a former coal mine 7.3 Representations of South Yorkshire past and present/future

xi

193 201 211

Acknowledgements

The editors wish to acknowledge the support of the European Union Directorate General Research, under its Framework Seven research programme, for the research project SPHERE from which the material for this book came. They also wish to acknowledge and thank Alison Campbell for the time and expertise she generously gave to help them and the excellent Palgrave production team with the book’s publication.

xii

Notes on Contributors

María Arnal is Lecturer in the Sociology Department of Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) and a member of the EGECO research team and the TRANSOC Institute of Sociology. Research areas: labour identities and migrant movements. Publications include: with C. Prieto, C. M. Caprile and J. Potrony, La Calidad en el empleo en España: una aproximación teórica y empírica. E. Attila Aytekin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. A specialist in Ottoman history, he has published articles on Ottoman peasants and a book on miners: Tarlalardan Ocaklara, Sefaletten Mücadeleye: Zonguldak-Ere˘gli Kömür Madenlerinde I˙s¸ çiler, 1848– 1922. Carlos de Castro is Lecturer at the University of Murcia, Spain. He is the author of Trabajadores en busca de narraciones [Workers in Search of Narratives] and joint editor of Mediterráneo Migrante. Tres décadas de flujos migratorios [Migrant Mediterranean. Three decades of migrant flows]. Sylvie Contrepois is Senior European Researcher at London Metropolitan University’s Working Lives Research Institute, UK, and a member of the CRESPPA CNRS Institute in Paris, France. She is the author of many publications on French and comparative employment relations, including Syndicats, La Nouvelle Donne. John Kirk was Professor at London Metropolitan University. In addition to the books listed on page ii, he was widely published in journals of sociology and cultural theory. His main areas of expertise were working class literature, class and representation, and work and identity. Jolanta Klimczak-Ziółek is Senior Researcher at the University of Silesia and Academy of Business, Poland. Jolanta is the co-editor (with Kazimiera Wódz) and author of Restrukturyzacja ekonomiczna a sytuacja xiii

xiv Notes on Contributors

kobiet w województwie s´laskim ˛ and of Sociological Reflection on Representation of Female Identity in Polish Mass Media, Visnyk of L’viv University. Sociological Series. Steve Jefferys is Professor of European Employment Studies at London Metropolitan University and Director of the Working Lives Research Institute, within the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities. Arturo Lahera-Sánchez is Senior Professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). His research areas are work sociology, ergonomics and industrial relations. His latest book is Diseño tecnológico y proceso de trabajo [Technological Design and Labour Process]. Krzysztof Łecki ˛ is Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the University of Silesia. He is the author and co-author of Perspektywy socjologii kultury artystycznej (with A. Lipski), Zinstytucjonalizowane formy komunikowania o literaturze: socjologiczna analiza zjawiska and Komunikacja interpersonalna w pracy socjalnej. Lars Meier is a sociologist and a geographer. He is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg and is teaching sociology at the Technical University of Darmstadt and the University of Munich. His main research foci are on work, migration, urban studies and globalization. Markus Promberger is head of Joblessness and Social Inclusion research at the Institut fur Arbeitsmarktund BerufsforschungInsitute (IAB), Lecturer at the University of Erlangen and Visiting Professor at the University of Munich. His publications are in the fields of sociology and history of labour, poverty, unemployment, social inequality and social theory. Juan Carlos Revilla is Senior Lecturer in the Social Psychology Department at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). Research interests include identity and critical work and organization studies. Member of EGECO research team. Publications include: with Tovar, “La (re)producción narrativa de la identidad laboral y sus condiciones de posibilidad”, in Trabajo, subjetividad y ciudadanía (ed. Complutense). H. Tarık S¸ engül is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. Tarık served as president of the Turkish Chamber of City Planners from 2008 to 2010

Notes on Contributors

xv

and has published articles on urban sociology, local government and urban politics. He is the author of Kentsel Çeli¸ski ve Siyaset. Francisco José Tovar is Researcher at the Social Psychology department of Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). Research interests include identity and critical work and organization studies. Member of EGECO research team. Publications include: with Revilla, “An alternative view of competence-based management”, in P. Koistinen, L. Mósesdóttir and A. Serrano (eds) Emerging Systems of Work and Welfare. Christine Wall is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Research into the Production of the Built Environment (ProBE), University of Westminster. Her most recent publication is Work and Identity: historical and cultural contexts, with John Kirk, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Maciej Witkowski is Senior Lecturer and Researcher at the Academy of ˙ czy Business, Dabrowa ˛ Górnicza, Poland. He is the author of Menedzer antropolog. Jak powstaje dyskurs mi˛edzykulturowego marketingu i zarzadza˛ nia and joint editor of Młodziez˙ z dwóch stron Brynicy. Warto´sci obywatelskie a stosunek do mniejszo´sci etnicznych (with Kazimiera Wódz). Kazimiera Wódz is Professor of Sociology, Head of Cultural Studies and of Social Work, Institute of Sociology, University of Silesia, Poland. Editor of Przestrzen´ s´rodowisko społeczne-´srodowisko kulturowe, author of books including Regional Identity. Regional Consciousness, Dimensions of Silesian Identity (with Jacek Wódz) and Negocjowana demokracja czyli europejskie governance po polsku.

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1 Approaching Regional and Identity Change in Europe John Kirk, Sylvie Contrepois and Steve Jefferys

What have been the effects of de-industrialisation across key European regions over the past forty years? The decline of industrial economies came to define many parts of Europe during this time, radically altering ways of working and notions of livelihood formed over time. Once distinctive regions and localities shaped by economic development evolved as sub-systems of much wider national formations and traditions, which were commonly shaped through conceptions of nation and state, culture and economy. From the early nineteenth century, the emergence of the Industrial Revolution began the uneven transformation of European nations. Already by the 1950s in most parts of Europe and in other industrialised nations, specific regions had developed distinct identities primarily through the increasing importance and the dominance of industrial work: this could be found, for instance, in coal mines, in factories, in shipyards. Yet as radical economic restructuring in many of these areas began after the 1970s, there was a fragmentation of these established structures, formations and traditions. New products and production methods and technologies and the growth of the service sector rapidly altered the condition of labour, the nature of communities and the lives and experiences of people. One rapid and major effect of this was the rise of unstable and precarious social conditions, leading to the development of flexible forms of work, irregular working hours and a growing discontinuity and transformation in working lives (see Beck, 1992; Sennett, 1998; Thornley et al., 2010). This book is situated within the interconnecting themes referred to above, pursuing the impacts of this profound economic restructuring within the expanding orbit of the European Union (EU). The term deindustrialisation – and the associated shifts in culture and identities that occur through such a process – signified the decline of industrial 1

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Approaching Regional and Identity Change in Europe

economies, communities and livelihoods, a process re-forming major regions and communities across Europe. To investigate and explore these shifts the book focuses on specific regions in six countries. The observations are based on research carried out in former industrial areas across the EU (including the EU candidate state of Turkey). The objective is to map their histories from the early or mid-twentieth century to the present and to consider the places of work and living in what are now ‘new worlds’. The Introduction maps out three key areas that dominate the book. First, we underline some of the effects of economic transformation, or what others might call ‘the rise of globalisation’; this provides a necessary context for the changes outlined in the chapters that follow. Taking the discussion on, we explore altering modes of work and the impact of these transitions on cultures and regional forms: that is on the changes in everyday life in long-established cultural formations and traditions. Finally, here, we draw attention to the effects of regeneration in these former industrial areas, considering how the emergence of ‘new places and new spaces’ finds expression through new modes of work and work places and in the processes increasingly employed in the contexts of regeneration and heritage formations. We close the Introduction by outlining some of the key conceptual terms that inform the book’s arguments throughout. ∗

∗

∗

∗

∗

1.1 Regional economies: transforming industrial areas in Europe Our choice of regions provides the opportunity to cover the importance of economic and cultural transformations in diverse parts of Europe. In the book, we present two regions that remain coal-producing (Upper Silesia in Poland and Zonguldak in Turkey), although both are in decline; the other region is a former coal-producing region (South Yorkshire, in the UK). Two regions are declining manufacturing areas (Northern Bavaria, Germany; and Levante in Spain), while one is a surviving manufacturing region (Corbeil-Essonnes/Evry, France). As part of their earlier histories as ‘successful’ industrial regions, four of the six first attracted and now retain significant ethnic or national minority populations, with important consequences for their social and cultural landscapes and formations. In each region there are similar tensions between contrasting spaces: between two different towns (Levante, Corbeil-Essonnes/Evry), between urban and rural (Upper Silesia and

John Kirk et al.

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Zonguldak) and between areas regenerated in variable ways (Northern Bavaria, South Yorkshire). What is common among these regions and towns is the intensity of socio-economic change involved in the shift from being industrial heartlands to becoming post- or perhaps neo-industrial. In the late twentieth century, the globalisation of the world’s economy through rapid technological transformation and market liberalisation constituted powerful forces reshaping social and political life, thereby re-figuring structures and experiences in decisive ways. The British geographer David Harvey highlighted countries like Britain and the United States as central exponents of the emergent neo-liberal agenda after 1979. New economic structures in particular were a process encouraged by the ideological Right whose political rhetoric sought to promote new conceptions of identity bound around ideas of ‘individualism, freedom, liberty as opposed to trade union power and stifling bureaucratic ineptitude on the part of the state’. The new economy heralded ‘globalisation’; this led to, or invoked, new global identities and cultures. Political advocates of these fundamental shifts shaped a new political agenda so that ‘all forms of social solidarity were to be dissolved in favour of individualism, private property, personal responsibility and family values’ (2006, pp. 16–17). Within the European Union, the speed and pace of the processes of transition was deeply significant at regional level, even though it was not always, or straightforwardly, uniform in its national effects, as Table 1.1 indicates. These figures expose the depth of change in the context of manufacturing employment – the world of work constitutive of our regions. Carpenter and Jefferys (2001) argued that the effects of this fell on the European working class in particular, with structural shifts from once-established industrial occupations towards newly emergent service sector work. They (2001, pp. 148–9) noted three key effects: through economic transformations the ‘changing composition of collective work is now being carried out by women’; that there were effects on workingclass traditions where ‘work has now become more managerial’ through ‘the dominance of white-collar employment’; and, finally that ‘the trend towards the increasing job insecurity and “atypical” work schedules’ impacted on work experience and community and family ties. Economic structures and planning altered with the ‘new times’. As we will see, in region after region throughout Europe, coal mining, textiles, steel and shipbuilding, as well as much of the engineering industry, contracted dramatically.

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Approaching Regional and Identity Change in Europe

Table 1.1 Manufacturing employment as a percentage of all civilian employment, 1970–2005 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 Change 1980–2005 Turkey∗ Poland∗ Sweden USA Japan Spain Germany Italy France UK

26.8 21.2 29.2 27.4 34.3 30.3 30.0 30.0

24.8 18.7 26.8 27.7 30.2 31.5 28.7 26.7

22.0 17.5 24.0 27.1 28.4 31.5 25.7 24.3

20.1 15.1 22.8 24.0 26.2 27.2 22.5 20.0

14.3 14.7 28.3 18.5 17.4 13.6 12.6 21.7 19.2 21.7 19.3 25.1 20.6 25.6 23.8 20.1 17.4 17.9 16.0

16.9 25.7 16.7 11.2 17.4 18.6 19.1 22.5 15.8 13.9

18.5 24.7 15.2 9.2 15.7 16.7 18.0 20.5 13.9 10.7

+4.2∗ −3.6∗ −6.8 −8.3 −8.3 −10.4 −10.4 −11.0 −11.8 −13.6

∗

Reliable data are available only from 1990 in Turkey and 1995 in Poland. Source: EUKLEMS Database, March 2008 edition

Table 1.1 flags up the extent of de-industrialisation, and the UK stands out in terms of the dimension of this transition. A radical re-orientation of the UK economy from manufacturing and extractive industries to an emerging service sector led to the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs – particularly in the North of England, and in Wales and Scotland – work embedded in once staple industries such as textiles, coal and steel (see Hudson, 1986; Beynon et al., 1992;). Economic liberalisation and free markets combined with an anti-trade union stance, beginning in the early 1980s, and was clearly hegemonic from the defeat of the 1984–5 miners’ strike. The South Yorkshire area we focus on later experienced both that defeat and some of the most dramatic changes in industrial fortune in the UK. In Turkey a dramatic turn in the national economic policy occurred in 1980 following the introduction of International Monetary Fund (IMF)proposed measures and the subsequent coup d’état. Turgut Özal, the economic minister of the transition government, who would later serve as the Prime Minister of the first and the second civilian governments, implemented a laissez-faire policy throughout the 1980s. Between 1980 and 1995, the number of coal workers halved in the Zonguldak area, a massive blow to the local economy and to the complex identity formation processes in the region. The rundown of coal mining also impacted upon other European nations, transforming regional identities for good. The political and economic changes were initiated in Poland with a compromise between the government and the Solidarity opposition

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made during the ‘Round Table’ talks in 1989. A new government proceeded to implement economic reforms adopted in October 1989, in keeping with the neo-liberal economic model that dominated Central and Eastern Europe in this transitional period. As we will see later, the intensified processes of de-industrialisation after 1990 had profound implications for the Upper Silesian region. The Levante region of Eastern Spain is a highly differentiated manufacturing centre, but as with many other industrial districts from the turn of the 1980s, economic and cultural transformations reshaped distinct regional localities. Global competition meant restructuring of economic forms; by 2005 the process was accentuated when China, India and Pakistan became primary competitors with Europe, the Levante included. International competition cut profoundly into regional stability. The more corporatist French and German economies to some degree resisted the extremes of the neo-liberal ‘rush’ that marked the UK and Poland. Thus temporising the declining Corbeil-Essonnes manufacturing centre to the South-East of Paris was the new industrial and service-based town of Evry; and in the midst of the declining Ruhr industrial heartland there are still new technology workplaces emerging. Yet economic change and the growth in manual worker unemployment has led to the dilution of the manual working class and the near disappearance of the utopian beliefs that once guided collective action through most of the twentieth century in such industrial areas (see Bourdieu, 1991). Symbolising the development was the election in 1995 of one of France’s biggest industrialists, Serge Dassault, to replace a Communist as mayor of Corbeil-Essonnes. Meanwhile, the structural changes reshaping the German economy following the Second World War can be seen in the figures of occupational change: in 1975, 42.4 per cent of the workforce in regions like Northern Bavaria was employed in industry and crafts; by 2006 this figure was down to 21.6 per cent. Job growth in new services could not fully compensate for the number of lost industrial jobs, while industrial companies reorganised their internal employment structure to include more knowledge workers. This restructuring of former industrial areas represents processes of transition, leading to economies and cultures ‘in transition’. How people live, and where people live, disintegrated in many areas of Europe, and as old means of work fell to global change and political intent, at the same time cultures and communities were reshaped.

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1.2 Identities: beyond occupational communities and regional cultures? The concept of identity informs the following chapters. But we recognise that identity formation remains complex, the result of a range of factors interacting over time and through space (Harvey, 1989; Skeggs, 2004; Kirk, 2007). Though often thought of in individualistic terms, we argue that identities become lived and experienced collectively – people realise themselves in wider social, economic and political contexts that powerfully shape notions of self, and in turn modes of identification and belonging. Culture, too, is an important concept in this context. The cultural co-ordinates through which identities are derived or expressed turn upon much wider understanding of culture than that associated merely with the arts, and should be viewed instead as the components that make up over time a ‘shared web of significance’ for people (Geertz, 1973), so that culture is regarded in this light as ‘a constitutive social process, creating specific and different ways of life’ (Williams, 1977). Consequently, how these ‘specific and different ways of life’ come into being and are (or are not) sustained becomes a question of central importance, particularly at a time of significant historical change. Historians have long revealed the distinctive character of industrial regions and communities. For Lancaster (2007, p. 24), a region consists of ‘people and space that is frequently in flux in a series of internal relationships with individual groups and processes and externally interacts with metropolitan, national and transnational forces’. While regions are the product of often distinct economic forces, they are also constructs ‘that are created both by people who live in them as well as those who observe them externally and that it is the act of reflection on this process that constitutes the formation of the region’ (ibid., pp. 24–5). Lancaster wants to avoid any static or fixed notion of place – he sees a dialectic at work instead, with the interaction of economic, or material, forces enmeshed with the cultural forms and traditions with which they operate in complex ways. This is an ongoing process as localities emerge through types of work and social interaction: from this, inevitably, cultural forms and identity practice evolve both independently and in relation to wider formations, most obviously in relation to a hegemonic national culture, as we have already outlined. Regions are never isolated, though they might be, or might become, distinct. Work itself marks a region’s potential distinctiveness. The coalfield areas, for instance – our examples are in regions of Turkey, Poland and the UK – have revealed clearly defined characteristics, the product of

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long historical development constituting ways of life (Dennis et al., 1956). The physical growth of the town/village was shaped decisively by the development of the colliery; according to one commentator speaking of English coalfields, ‘the pit is the village, paying its wages, supporting its shops, keeping the community together’ (Marshall, in Richards, 1996, p. 21). Mining coal, then, was bound up with every aspect of life, representing one of the few industries in which the provision of leisure activities, for instance, was required by law (Dennis et al., 1956, p. 122). Identity becomes bound up in this historical development, with work, producing culturally distinct traditions that shape everyday life: the local miners’ welfare association, the working men’s clubs and a range of sporting associations and activities deriving their raison d’être from the ‘organic’ connections to the pit. The presence of the miners’ union was both a powerful cultural and political force, here. We discuss this in later chapters, and in greater detail. These features are replicated in the Polish mining region of Upper Silesia, where the mine still dominates local life with its trade union a central institution, and from which emerge forms of identity practice coded through cultural forms: the wearing of miners’ hat plumes, distinctive miners’ houses called familoki, the blood sausages (krupnioki) favoured by locals, distinctive folk clothes and of course a local jargon or dialect. One characteristic feature of the mining culture in the cases of both Poland and the UK was the presence of a colliery brass band, representing a cultural expression articulating both a local identity (the village/pit) and a wider occupational affiliation bound up with complex expressions of class and culture that stretched beyond the village identity itself. In some crucial respects, as we see in greater detail later, Turkish mining contradicts the picture painted just now. Historically, Turkish workers in Zonguldak were divided into two formations: the ‘underground workers’, mainly drawn from the rural areas, less skilled, employed on a rotational basis (working for a while, then taking some time off to work in the fields, and then back underground); and the ‘surface workers’, settled in the town, skilled and permanently employed. This differentiation of the workforce problematises identity formation and complicates the development of internal politics, labour activism and cultural traditions. This could have laid the ground for the potential rifts between these two factions of coal workers.1 This reminds us to be wary of any assumed homogeneity of such formations, historically and in the present. While historically, manual manufacturing occupations sustained relatively hegemonic industrial cultures in the Corbeil-Essonnes and Northern Bavaria examples discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, the industrial cultures constituting a region can also reveal a distinct entrepreneurial

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character, a seeming contradiction when speaking about class identities in ‘collectivist’ modes or contexts. Textile and shoe making in Spain is a case in point, and this is explored in detail in a later chapter. Unlike other industries whose owners may not belong to the community, in this case companies are the product of the initiative of local middle classes, and working classes, too, in some cases – evident in the case of other Spanish regions and industrial sectors: machine tools in the Basque Country, metalworking in other regions. As a consequence, it is not new for individualism to be in tension with communitarian structures of feeling. There is an established familial culture within this tradition. Husband, wife and even children were often part of a family business up to the 1970s and beyond. Identification with the work itself took precedence over a collective industrial identity. Given the individualistic character of this industrial culture, it is possible to identify pride in the experience and the knowledge of making shoes or sewing clothes, as well as in the excellence of the outcome, and this can be understood, as our Spanish contributors suggest, as a source of the self (Taylor, 1989). In the regional situations described so far work expresses in part a common and complex identity: habitus, or structures of feeling inform cultural practice and social identities, and this provides the basis for forms of collective identification. Work identity also enunciates cultural meanings that find expression through and in both space and place. But added to this, industrial regions came to be viewed not only (or stereotypically) as spaces of working-class life or labour, but also, to a large degree, as masculinised spaces of both production and consumption – conditions marginalising female participation. Nevertheless, other industrial activities and localities (notably textiles, as with the Spanish example) resisted a similar connotation in quite the same sense, thus seen, indeed, as more feminised, and this will be argued in Chapter 4. How far the shift from industrial forms, traditions and cultures to service sector-based formations modifies the complex interrelationships described here proves to be a key question for us throughout. Cultural identity is bound to not only class and labour, but to gender as an important analytical category. For making sense of new relations and the formation of identities, gender is central to our investigation of class cultures and occupational forms.2 But economic restructuring, and processes of deindustrialisation set in train in Western Europe from the end of the 1970s (and a decade later in countries to the East, in the context of post-communism), powerfully undermine traditional collective identities.3 The material world

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and cultural life of working-class communities across Europe have come to be regarded, it seems, as extinct or as increasingly obsolete and, in recent years, the object only of heritage spectacles and exercises in nostalgia.4 This suggests new emerging forms of identity and belonging, not based around work and community or class and culture in any significant sense at all. Identity becomes redefined, a response to economic changes, but also to understandings of identity in contemporary times. Studies have long since exposed the divisions within former workingclass communities in the UK, particularly in terms of gender (Campbell, 1984; Steedman, 1986). Recent commentators now see those identities as ‘constructed within the play of power and exclusion ... the result of the over-determined process of closure’ (Hall, 1996; also Said, 1992). Moreover, the dimension of inward and outward migration has historically typified many of the working-class communities where industry flourished, and this continues to shape and frame European experience. We therefore need to argue for an understanding of how communities have traditionally formed and maintained ‘complex solidarities’ (see Kirk, 2007). We need to investigate how these solidarities have been nurtured and how they have evolved and indeed survived over time, and how and why community and workplace relations often play a key role in this process.5

1.3 Regeneration and the region: reconstituting space and place Regional regeneration has central objectives that are not only to find ways to enable new economic growth, but also to undertake activities intended to reshape the physical environment itself, transforming the understanding and experience of ‘place and space’.6 This involves altering the material and the cultural landscape in which people have interacted historically, what was once the very fabric, the constitutive setting, of ‘home’. Yet in this ‘creative destruction’ the processes of restructuring and regeneration interact and operate to remodel, and even erase, complex solidarities and identities forged over time. A further concern, then, in this book is to underline the effects of such transitions, acknowledging that cultures and economies ‘entail geographical as well as historical relationships’ (Wills, 1998). In turn this underscores the way restructuring of place is part of ‘a disorientating and disrupting impact upon political-economic practices . . . as well as upon cultural and social life’ (Harvey, 2006). Williams’ term ‘rooted settlements’ (1980) reveals how a bounded ‘presence’, the

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product of historical forces and social interaction, can come to be disrupted by an ‘otherness’ from outside finding articulation in various formations. Recent regeneration processes are not merely economic reconstruction, however; in large part, they have involved ‘re-imagining’ community and place, ‘re-inventing’ or ‘reshaping’ traditions and formations, and such objectives are enunciated in much regeneration literature itself. So both the material and discursive effects of regeneration interact in the formation of new places and cultural change. This is closely linked to the concept of ‘representation’ – articulated in both political and aesthetic modes. Therefore, representations fix ideas of region in the popular consciousness; specific cultural practices have historically worked to establish a sense of place and identity, often in contradictory ways. Conceptions of identity and belonging are embedded in both the real and the mythical, as already suggested. Thus, communities disclose ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1961, 1977) that are the product of historical experience and which find articulation in cultural forms, traditions and expression, as well as factories and coal mines. The objective of regeneration is to shape the ‘new’ through the forms of the ‘old’. Thus the concept of tradition is imperative in a range of expressions, both individual and public. Simultaneously, heritage has become bound up with regeneration, both confirming the objectives of regeneration in ultimately acknowledging the ‘new’, while challenging at the same time regeneration’s amnesia in relation to the past. What counts as the past, and what constitutes the present, remain essential in forming and comprehending ‘new’ identity forms alongside the still active, though residual, collective histories.

1.4 Outlining orientations/themes/histories Each chapter, in valuable ways, seeks to define perspectives on economic and occupational transition and cultural change in distinct European regions. We explore, then, the effects and meanings of the demise of ‘old’ formations and the emergence of ‘new’ ones within key regions in the EU. A theoretical and historical frame shapes each argument, offering varied approaches, but with common intentions and aims. Key themes dominate: conceptions of place and space in historical contexts; the place of identity, community and action; the significance of gender in evolving cultural times; and, finally, the relevance of representation of the past for the present.

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Throughout the book, each chapter is vitally concerned with work, but also crucially occupied, as we have insisted already, with the significance of culture as constitutive of and constituting the material world. In general we define culture more broadly than mere artefacts (paintings or books), regarding instead the place of culture and its products as part of a ‘whole way of life’, embedded in experiences and practices, formalised in institutions and in public spaces, instantiated in experiential dispositions and actions and evidenced through structures of feeling and practical consciousness. Raymond Williams and the work of Pierre Bourdieu underpin many arguments here, with Bourdieu echoing Williams’ concept of structures of feeling through his own notion of the habitus (Bourdieu, 1984, 1991).7 The two concepts of habitus and structures of feeling importantly signify culture and identity formation. Through the notion of habitus we see the importance of structures in determining identity through time and in space. The internalised structure of the habitus acts as a classifying mechanism for making sense of the world – embedded dispositions generate in the subject an almost spontaneous response to the world they inhabit, confirming a kind of ‘feel for the game’, or a ‘design for life’ (both of the chapters covering Germany and Spain, for instance, draw on Bourdieu here). In Williams’ understanding of structures of feeling and identity formation we get a more immediate sense of the experiential, interacting nevertheless with external forces and historical events interacting over time (see the chapter covering South Yorkshire). Bourdieu regarded the internalised structure of the habitus as a classifying mechanism for the actor to make sense of the world. What he calls dispositions further constitute the habitus – shaped by institutions of the family or education systems, for instance – reproducing the social structures that shaped them in the first place reflecting the ‘habitat in which they were formed’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 24). Williams argues for what might be regarded as a more fluid understanding of identity formation and culture, suggesting that what he calls structures of feeling might constitute the site of a ‘practical experience’, or ‘practical consciousness’ (Williams, 1977, p. 130). Practical consciousness differs for Williams from ‘official consciousness’ – Bourdieu’s notion of doxa – in that it is ‘being lived ... not only what is thought is being lived’ (Williams, 1977, p. 131). Lived experience is key for Williams; so he defines practical consciousness as ‘a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become a fully articulate and defined exchange’ (Williams, 1977, p. 131). Agency appears to loom more prominently in Williams’ understanding of identity and

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its expression through cultural and social forms. These two analytical frames explain lived regional experience and cultures as exchange, highlighting the significance of action in historical transformations. Williams underlines the importance of formations, traditions and institutions in shaping identity and constituting cultures. He also talks of ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ structures of feeling, which operate in the context of more socially and culturally dominant forms. In the following chapters, and touched upon in the Introduction here, the place of tradition and identity formation in the context of industrial communities comprise major components of the regional cultures discussed. While some of these traditions might now be defined in Williams’ terms as ‘residual’, closer inspection reveals a more nuanced picture. As we will see later, identity formations in Poland take an interesting shift in terms of both gender and class, with the emergence in more recent years of the first female trade union in the Polish mining sector. Williams would view this as evidence of an emergent structure of feeling, though one rooted in political and cultural frames bound up with work, or class or gender identity, as well as regional and occupational formations. A similar development occurred in the UK during the 1984–5 Miners’ Strike. Discussing former mining communities in the UK, Jane Parry underlined how ‘work geared towards supporting communities was a central, albeit a taken for granted feature of coalmining cultures, and adhered to highly gendered formations’ (2005, p. 149). In the South Yorkshire area, and elsewhere, the political and economic conflict of 1984–5 led to a greater role for women, politicising many, and this re-emerged too in the protests against widespread pit closures in 1992. The central question to emerge here, examined in a number of chapters, is how politicised acts are sustained and what their impacts are on an established way of living in the reshaping of communities and identities, with the notion of intersectionality drawing attention to the place of class, work and gender.

1.4.1 Emergent/residual identities in place Reshaping landscapes and communities opens up the possibility of new identities and regional forms in the midst of older formations and working spaces. Immigration can be a central factor here, both internal and external in form, an important development across the EU in recent times. Yet, as Nayak (2006) identified, practices of social interaction flag up the ‘enduring significance of place, locality and regional identities’ where ‘the cultures of the old industrial city and the identities

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therein refuse to be written out of existence’, but are instead refigured ‘as palimpsest – a cultural text upon which the previous inscriptions of past cultures continue to be etched into the present, to be embodied by a new generation’ (2006, p. 828). Manufacturing towns like Alcoia, Corbeil-Essonnes or Nuremberg or mining regions like Upper Silesia, Zonguldak or South Yorkshire have been strongly identified through their occupational identities, yet economic reconstruction is now intensifying the importance of the geographies of place. This is an important dimension to the book as it turns upon ideas of community, belonging and what are, ultimately, identities and cultures. The place-bounded dimensions of identity practice, as it is embedded in historical time, become ‘an important source of meanings for individuals [and groups] which they can draw upon to tell stories and thereby come to understand themselves and their positioning within the wider society’ (see Reay, 2001). Historians of de-industrialisation noted the way ‘industrial smokestacks’ – and the myriad other material structures linked to and symbolically marking the production of coal, or steel, or textiles – loomed large in working-class districts, shaping landscapes and defining a sense of place and constituting culture (see for instance Linkon and Russo, 2002; High and Lewis, 2007). Landscapes form places of belonging, the product of social relations weaved together over time, so that ‘when people invoke “place” and its attendant meanings, they are imagining geographies and creating identities’ (High and Lewis, 2007, p. 32). How new communities and geographies are imagined and lived in radically altered material circumstances also forms our investigation of labour and identity formation.8

1.4.2 Narrating work and regions What we have just referred to in terms of landscapes can also be articulated as the relevance of place-consciousness. This reflects the notion of ‘home’. Bound to this, however, are discursive practices that operate at a different cultural and social level to define these very regions – not only for those dwelling within, but for those with no real connections with the region at all. In this sense we might see places become inseparable from their representations, thus drawing attention to the role of narratives in constituting cultural identity. Thus experience of place is articulated through cultural forms as well as more unmediated experiences, expressed through, for instance, the novel and film, autobiography and social documentary, photography and art.

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Representation of place has found expression through regeneration practices, along with other modes of heritage representation, which now inscribe these former industrial landscapes in culture. We have already discussed this above. We suggested that such forms bear down on notions of old/new identities. Heritage practice in former industrial areas offers ‘versions of the past’ that imply new identities in contexts often marked by the ‘old’. These narratives constitute what Williams would call a ‘selective tradition’ (see Williams, 1977; also Kirk, 2007) – where the past is constituted for the purposes, primarily, of the present. This sees the establishing of traditions as an institutional and hegemonic process, the past and its artefacts made and remade in and for the present, as we have already suggested. There is a dialectic created here between ‘old’ understandings and experiences of place, and the ‘new’ ones constituted through material change. These discursive forms will be a further area of investigation in a number of the book’s chapters.9

1.5 Chapter outlines Chapter Two, ‘Social and spatial change in the Nuremberg metalworking region’ focuses on the Northern Bavarian engineering heartland of Germany, which has undergone major recent restructuring. The industry consolidated a regional and occupational identity from the late nineteenth century, but with quite different skill and gender structures from, for instance, the coal-mining regions we discuss later. The metalworking or engineering industry is differentiated internally, with a whole range of different products and different ways to organise the labour process, from craft shops and assembly lines to computerintegrated metal-shaping stations and offices. But this is tied together by employing similar types of labour. The occupational forms seen as emanating from mass production, and the favourable trade unionorganising conditions of huge factories, were instrumental in developing strong union and social-democrat traditions, involving both institutional frameworks for action and strong neighbourhood bases. Additionally, there have been large immigration waves, attracting people from the Bavarian countryside up to 1950, people from Italy and Greece in the 1960s and from Turkey in the 1970s, followed by the so-called ‘Russian’ Germans in the 1980s and 1990s. Call centres and shopping malls now partially fill the urban spaces left by the declining factories, and new high-technology engineering is found at greenfield sites in the south of Bavaria. Yet ‘traditional’ blue-collar metalworking still employs thousands of people in the area, repeatedly threatened by

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factory closedown conflicts such as at AEG in 2006. This chapter traces these developments through a historical analysis of the shifting national and regional contexts in Germany since 1945. It maps the changing social and spatial landscapes of Nuremberg’s industrial region, raising questions about the ‘problem’ of working-class identity in the German context, while mapping out the implications of change for established identities and community cultures with a distinct regional base. ‘Contrasting trajectories: cultural identity in “old” and “new” towns’ sees our next chapter explore a French case, the engineering and papermanufacturing area to the South-East of Paris in the Essonnes River basin where that river flows into the Seine. This area is now organised around two adjoining towns of around 50,000 inhabitants each, about 5 km apart. The first town, Corbeil-Essonnes, was an important industrial centre from the nineteenth century up to the 1980s, based on textiles, paper and printing. These industries began to decline in the middle of the twentieth century (earlier for textiles), and were replaced by big engineering companies: Snecma (aircraft engines) and IBM. CorbeilEssonnes had a communist town council majority between 1959 and 1995, and a powerful trade union movement throughout the twentieth century. Yet from 1995, the Right has headed the town council. Industrial transformation and political and social change have gone hand in hand (Contrepois, 2003). In the middle of the 1960s, the administrative and political leadership of the département was handed over by the French government to nearby Evry, the second town in the area. It had only 7000 inhabitants in 1969 and very few industries apart from the Decauville enterprise (trains and locomotives). Working-class culture was weak in Evry and the conservative national government of the day chose it as the site for one of five experimental ‘new towns’. From this time, therefore, the industrial decline of Corbeil shaped the context for the development of Evry. Several prominent companies have relocated to Evry since the 1970s: Arianespace, the Genopôle, and also the headquarters of big groups like Carrefour, Accor, Courte Paille and Snecma. Currently, Evry is dominated politically by the Socialist Party, and an important range of local ‘solidarity associations’ have a key cultural influence. Industrial decline in Corbeil-Essonnes is relatively recent, echoing in some respects that of South Yorkshire, Upper Silesia and Northern Bavaria; but there is somewhat greater continuity (as with the German case), since engineering (metalworking), although not as closely tied to a fixed locality as mining, is not as volatile as the textile industries – particularly when leading firms have made huge fixed investments in plant and equipment. The

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two towns’ different trajectories in terms of the cycles of development and social history and their geographical proximity offers an illuminating comparison of different facets of French reality. Their history is thus strongly interwoven, as the transformation of one of them impacted the other and vice versa. The fourth chapter, ‘The future will no longer be the same: changing worker identities in the Spanish Levante’, investigates identity continuities and transitions in an area that produced 9.8 per cent of the Spanish GDP in 2005. In this highly differentiated Levante industrial region, the textile and tailoring industry embraces approximately 2000 firms and 40,000 employees, and the shoe industry some 2000 firms and 30,000 employees (Generalitat Valenciana, 2006). Geographically distinct, textile manufacture is located in the area of Alcoiá-Comtat (Alicante) and Vall d’Albaida (Valencia), whilst the shoe sector is located in the area of Vinalopó (Alicante). The chapter shows how several generations of these communities have been socialised and qualified into the productive skills characteristic of the different sectors. This kind of labour socialisation provided the basis for social integration and also stimulated strong identity formations. Both industries were composed of mainly small and medium firms in every productive stage, and characterised by important levels of women working from home and intensive use of the work force. They endured profound restructuring at the end of the 1970s, which provoked the social and political mobilisation of the strong and traditional regional labour movements. However, these actions could not put an end to the closure of many firms and a rapid increase in unemployment. From the 1970s both industries responded to global competition with a continuous process of restructuring. The chapter examines the consequences of these ‘transitions’ for the dominant artisan-like and trade-based identities, identifying a key social development: wariness of a future that will ‘no longer be the same’ (Obiol, 2007). It concludes by considering the prospect and the implications of the eclipse of the collective identity traditionally built around the textile-cloth sector in the last century and a half (Carpi et al., 1997), and how such identities survive in new material conditions. ‘Post-communist transitions: mapping the landscapes of Upper Silesia’ is the title of Chapter 5. This chapter explores the impact of political transformation for the heavy industrial regions of Upper Silesia in Poland. There are several similarities with coal-mining areas like South Yorkshire. Upper Silesia’s industrial past took shape in the nineteenth century and came to be dominated by the coal-mining and steel

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industries. After the Second World War this traditional industrial area was subjected to a further process of extensive development imposed by the Communist regime and based mainly on heavy industry. The region thus became the heartland of the country’s raw material and energy supplies and, for many years, this preserved a regional labour market dominated by relatively low-qualified manual work. Work in industrial plants and factories and in the mines continued to rise: up from 645,000 people registered working in industry in 1950, it rose a decade later to three-quarters of a million and from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s it remained close to 900,000. In this region the decline of these heavy industries started only after the 1989 fall of Communism and Poland’s achievement of independence from Soviet influence. Transition to a capitalist economic system demanded rationalisation and privatisation. This led to a major contraction of the mining industry: between 1998 and 2002 up to 100,000 employees left Polish mining. In common with areas in the UK like South Yorkshire, the concentration of mining was geographically distinct and specific, and thus the impact is felt powerfully in terms of the collective identities structured upon occupation and region. Strong trade unions have played an important role in the life of this region, and still take a key role within the mining communities in post-1989 Poland. In 2004 the first women Polish coal miners’ trade union was founded. The Silesian Voivodship (region) concentrated on here has a long history of industrial work and associated cultural traditions, centred around Dabrowa ˛ Górnicza (with its declining ´ aska steel industry), Sosnowiec (coal and some steel), Ruda Sl ˛ (coal) and Bielsko-Biała (textiles). This chapter, therefore, explores the significance of both political transition and economic restructuring for the concepts of identity and place. It examines the role, too, of cultural traditions and affiliations in a period of radical change. The Turkish Black Sea Zonguldak Province, with a total population of just over half a million, is the focus of Chapter 6, ‘Surviving closure: the fate of Zonguldak mining communities’. The area is divided into six administrative areas, with Zonguldak being the historic centre. Already employing 10,000 temporary and permanent workers in the Ottoman period, the coalfield was the biggest employer in the region (Quataert, 2006). Coal mining remained central to the economy during the Republican period that began in 1923, and at its peak point it employed more than 70,000. The industry started to experience a decline from the mid-1970s as it largely failed to compete in international markets. Today, unlike the situation in South Yorkshire, but like that in

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Silesia, the coal industry survives, but with a labour force of just 12,000 (Ersoy et al., 2000). As a mono-industrial region, the decline of coal mining has dramatically affected the overall economy in the area and one of the indicators of this decline is that almost all local towns, including the city of Zonguldak, have lost population over the last two decades. In the process of liberalisation in the post-1980s period, the strikes organised by trade unions found strong support in the local communities. Likewise, the attitudes of the political parties and governments towards the mining sector have always been highly influential in voting behaviours. Coal remains the main employer in the region and coal-mining identities and experiences continue to have a deep-seated impact in the cultural and social life of the region (Kahveci, 1996). Following decline, however, local economic and political elites sought alternatives to mining, through regeneration: several were tried, ranging from textile to tourism (which is growing rapidly in Turkey), but with only limited success to date. This chapter investigates the processes and implications of de-industrialisation. It considers what happens to local identities, strongly (manual) working class in character, when the main pillar of the identity formation process, namely the coal-mining industry, undergoes an irreversible decline, but is not clearly replaced. In this context, a special emphasis falls on the role of the ‘old cultures’ and the practices of emerging ones. The seventh chapter, ‘Colliery closures, identity formation and cultural change in South Yorkshire’, maps transitions in the former South Yorkshire coalfield. With Barnsley as its main town, this region covers some 127 square miles and has a population of 230,000. It has mined coal for nearly 200 years. In the early 1980s it contained 16 pits, employing 15,000 people. South Yorkshire was never fully mono-industrial, however, with a manufacturing and industrial sector based around linen and glass making. But by 1994 virtually all of South Yorkshire’s coalfields had been closed. Much new work takes the form of call centres or other service-related activities, and by 2000 coal mining had all but disappeared. The same can be said for the nearby steel-making industry concentrated around Sheffield. A highly distinctive history and industrial culture characterised the area, and South Yorkshire was at the heart of the year-long miners’ strike to save jobs and communities in 1984–5, as well as the protests against the final wave of pit closures in 1992. In this region the question of class cultures and community identity has long loomed large (Orwell, 1937; Hoggart, 1957; Charlesworth, 2000; Kirk, 2006).

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This chapter tracks some of the implications of these changes – in terms of working lives, identity formation and cultural practice. The discussion takes two main approaches: first it traces the development of mining in the area, placing these developments within a wider context of national economic policy in the UK since the end of the Second World War. The chapter then moves on to consider the cultural and social coordinates characterising mining life and culture. To do this it examines the significance of embedded cultural forms and traditions shaped through generational interactions and community settings, and considers how coalmining communities have come to be figured historically in a wider discourse around identity, work and place. The chapter then turns to the implications of de-industrialisation for communities, and the processes of regeneration – of both economy and of ideas and experience of place – currently under way in these regions. There are two key objectives: first to outline the extent of socio-economic change in these former industrial areas; secondly, to consider the impact and ramifications of economic restructuring on specific regions in relation to notions of identity as a product of forms and practices established over time. Finally, in the light of regeneration discourses emphasising the ‘renewal’ – indeed, ‘reinvention’ – of the area, a further, and more difficult consideration will be examined – how, in the discourses of regeneration, can South Yorkshire’s industrial past be safely laid to rest? ∗

∗

∗

∗

∗

The impact of restructuring through processes of de-industrialisation and regeneration within the European context, particularly since the late 1970s, has been profound. Regarding identity formation in the light of changing working lives and community interactions is important too. As older institutional forms, alignments and traditions fall away, or as they are forced to re-orientate themselves in different ways, important questions emerge around notions of citizenship, civic action and political participation; around feelings of identification and belonging. Grasping the implications of such transitions on collective and individual identity and action is a central aim of the study, and a major strength of the book is its innovative and inter-disciplinary approach to addressing these issues, drawing on the fields of sociology, history, cultural and urban studies and narrative analysis. Employing a wide range of analytical approaches, then, the book addresses the historical articulation of regional and national identities in areas of significant socio-economic dislocation. In doing so it will develop new insights into

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identity and livelihood in relation to community, work and place across key European regions.

Notes 1. There was also an ethnic dimension to this divide. Mainly the Laz were employed as surface workers, while the workers from the villages (the natives of the region) worked underground. On the other hand, Tuncer (1998), himself a union activist, argues that ethnicity has not played a divisive role in union activism. 2. Meanwhile Pettinger et al. (2005) have identified a series of themes for examining work change, including the blurred spatial and temporal boundaries of work and its embeddedness within social relations. This is linked to Glucksman’s (1995) development of the ‘total social organization of labour’ as a conceptual tool to describe the labour process and, more pertinently, the impact of the deep changes in economic organisation and form. 3. Collective identities around class coordinates are complex and in need of interrogation – a further aim of this book. 4. The notion of heritage as the historical documentation of such formations and traditions will form part of the arguments in the book around the core concepts of regeneration and representation. 5. The decline of collective class identities was felt strongly in debates within cultural studies and cognate disciplines, including sociology, in the UK. More recent research reflects and interrogates these earlier analyses around the ‘politics of difference’ (Reay, 1997; Kirk, 2003; Skeggs, 2004; Sayer, 2005), while recognising the acute effects of restructuring upon cultures (Charlesworth, 2000; Turner, 2000; Kirk, 2006) and the impact on both class and gender formations and ideas of place, belonging and community (Kirk, 2007; Kirk and Wall, 2010). This work sets out important arguments for understanding contemporary working-class formations. 6. This has taken the form of targeted aid to former industrial areas under European Objectives 1 and 2, aid that seeks to promote ‘business growth and entrepreneurship, connecting people to opportunities [while] funding physical developments that promote economic development’. UK government website: www.gos.gov.uk/goyh – both South and West Yorkshire, for instance, are recipients of Objectives 1 and 2. 7. There is a fascinating symmetry between Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ and that of ‘structure of feeling’ developed by Raymond Williams, and this will be explored later. 8. Mapping such landscapes from the distance of some 25 years demands an understanding of absence in these areas as much as an engagement with what is present, with what exists. 9. Our intention in future publications from this research is to move on from the macro developments mapped in this book, to an exploration of everyday life in a micro-sense, exploring social interaction in changing spaces and altered times. The oral testimony we have gathered will help us to understand how people remember what is gone and how this also remains and shapes what is present and implies a future.

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References Anderson, B. (1981) Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Beynon, H., Hudson, R. and Sadler, D. (1991) A Tale of Two Industries: The Contradiction of Coal and Steel in the North East of England. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill Education. Bourdieu, P. (1991) The Weight of the World. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge. Campbell, B. (1984) Wigan Pier Revisited. London: Virago. Carpenter, M. and Jefferys, S. (2001) Management, Work and Welfare in Western Europe: An Historical and Contemporary Analysis. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Carpi, T., Antonio, J., Torrejón Velardiez, M., and Such, J. (1997) ‘Producción flexible, redes empresariales y sistemas territoriales de pequeña y mediana empresa. La industria textil valenciana’, Sociología del Trabajo, no 30, pp. 21–42. Charlesworth, S. (2000) A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Contrepois, S. (2003). Syndicats, la nouvelle donne. Enquête sociologique au cœur d’un bassin d’emploi industriel et ouvrier. Paris: Syllepse. Cowie, J. and Heathcott, J. (2003) Beyond the Ruins: The Meaning of Deindistrialisation. Ithaca: ILR Press. Dennis, N., Henriques, F. and Slaughter, C. (1956) Coal is Our Life: An Analysis of a Yorkshire Mining Community. London: Tavistock. Dicks, B. (2000) Heritage, Place and Community. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Ersoy, M., S¸ engül, H. T., Ho¸sgör A., and Tokluo˘ glu, C. (2000) Zonguldak Kentinde Ya¸sanan Sanayisizle¸sme Süreçlerinin Kentsel Geli¸smeye Etkileri ve Yerel Topluluklar Üzerindeki Sonuçları, Ankara. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Generalitat Valenciana (2006) Plan de Competitividad del Sector Textil. Valencia: Conselleria d’Empresa, Universitat i Ciencia. Giddens, A. (1992) Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity. Glucksman M. (1995) ‘Why “Work”? Gender and the “Total Social Organization of Labour” ’, Gender, Work and Organisation, II, 2, pp. 63–75. Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (2006) Spaces of Global Development. London: Verso. Hall, S. and du Gay, P. (eds.) Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage. High, S. (2007) Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialisation. Ithaca: ILR Press. Hill, J. (1986) Sex, Class and Realism. London: Routledge. Hoggart, R. (1957) The Uses of Literacy. London: Pelican. Hudson, R. (1986) ‘Nationalized Industry Policies and Regional Policies: The Role of the State in Capitalist Societies in the Deindustrialization and Reindustrialization of Regions’, Society and Space, 4, pp. 7–28. Kahveci, E. (1996) ‘The Miners of Zonguldak’, in Erol Kahveci, Nadir Sungur and Theo Nichols (eds), Work and Occupation in Modern Turkey. London: Mansell, 172–207.

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Kirk, J. (2003) ‘ “Northern Exposure”: Mapping the Remains of the Post-Industrial Landscape’, Space and Culture: International Journal of Social Spaces, 6, 2, pp. 178–86. Kirk, J. (2006) ‘Figuring the Landscape: Writing the Topographies of Space and Place’, Literature and History, 15, 1, pp 1–17. Kirk, J. (2007) Class, Culture and Social Change: On the Trail of the Working Class. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kirk, J. and Wall, C. (2011) Work and Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Lancaster, B., Newton, D. and Vall, N. (eds.) (2007) An Agenda for Regional History. Newcastle: Northumbria University Press. Linkon, S. and Russo, J. (2002) Steeltown USA. Kansas: University of Kansas Press. Nayak, A. (2006) ‘Displaced masculinities: Chavs, Youths and Class in the Postindustrial City’, Sociology, 40, 5, pp. 813–31. Orwell, G. (1937) The Road to Wigan Pier. London: Penguin. Obiol, S. (2007) Vivint en la incertesa: Estratègies de benestar dels treballadors del textil a l’eix Alcoi-Ontinyent. Gandía: CEIC Alfons El Vell. Parry, J. (2005) ‘Care in the Community? Gender and the Reconfiguration of Community Work in a Post-mining Neighbourhood’ in Pettinger, Lynne et al. (eds) A New Sociology of Work? Oxford: Blackwell. Pettinger, L., Parry, J., Taylor, R., and Glucksman, M. (2005) A New Sociology of Work? Oxford: Blackwell. Quataert, D. (2006) Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire: The Zonguldak Coalfield, 1822–1920. New York: Berghahn Books. Reay, D. (2001) ‘Finding or Losing Yourself?: Working Class Relationships to Education’, Journal of Education Policy, 16, 4, pp. 333–46. Richards, A. J. (1996) Miners On Strike: Class Solidarity and Division in Britain. Oxford: Berg. Said, E. (1992) Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Savage, M. (2000) Class Analysis and Social Transformation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Sayer, A. (2005) The Moral Significance of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sennett, R. (1998) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: Norton. Skeggs, B. (2004) Self, Class, Culture. London: Routledge. Steedman, C. (1986) Landscape for a Good Woman. London: Virago. Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thornley, C., Jefferys, S. and Appay, B. (2010) Globalization and Precarious Forms of Production and Employment: Challenges for Workers and Unions. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Tuncer, K. (1998) Tarihten Günümüze Zonguldak’ta I˙s¸ çi Sınıfının Durumu. Kumpanyalar Dönemine Geri Dönü¸s. I˙ stanbul: Göçebe. Williams, R. (1961) The Long Revolution. London: Penguin. Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wills, J. (1998) ‘Taking on the cosmocorps: Experiments in transnational labour organization’. Economic Geography, 74, pp. 111–30. Wódz, K. and Wódz, J. (2006) Dimensions of Silesian Identity. Katowice: ´ askiego. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Sl ˛

2 Industrial, Urban and Worker Identity Transitions in Nuremberg Lars Meier and Markus Promberger

The Nuremberg region is one of the important economic centres in southern Germany. This chapter considers its transformations in relation to urban areas, economic and social structures and with reference to broader developments in Germany. Significant restructuring and change, typical of industrial shifts in the older manufacturing areas of southern Germany, can be observed in all of Nuremberg’s industrial quarters and neighbourhoods, the biggest of which are located in the south and west of the city. The Südstadt (the area between the main railway line to the north and the railway shunting yard to the south) of Nuremberg, the city’s old industrial core, is an area of major transformation with many structural problems. In this chapter we consider these transitions on different interconnected levels, beginning with Germany as a whole and considering ways of understanding these changes and then moving to city level and to the regeneration experiences of living and working in the Südstadt.

2.1 Socio-economic developments in Germany from 1945 Germany had few raw material resources, which are now virtually exhausted and its economy now focuses on the manufacturing and service sectors. With a 2009 GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of US$3.4 billion, Germany is the fourth largest national and the second largest exporting economy in the world, with an export value of ¤816 billion. This performance is based essentially on the automobile, mechanical and electrical engineering, electronics and chemical industries. After the Second World War, the German economy recovered rapidly. Having implemented a new and stable currency in 1948, there was a steady growth in GDP and, from around 1955, unemployment almost 23

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Industrial, Urban and Worker Identity Transitions in Nuremberg

completely disappeared until the early 1970s. Those conditions, currency stability, steady growth and low unemployment, together with a positive foreign trade balance, were described as the ‘golden rectangle of prosperity’ (Preiser, 1959) and characterised the period of the ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ (economic wonder). In the period following the heavy defeat of ‘leftist’ wage policies in the 1954 Bavarian metalworkers strike (Schmidt, 1995), the trade unions adopted moderate wage policies relating wage growth to productivity. Large-scale reconstruction of devastated cities and industrial plants created homes and work to allow the integration of millions of refugees from East Germany. Reconstruction had not been limited to the cities, but also stimulated the urbanisation of formerly semi-urban suburbs and some rural regions. The faces of the cities changed: in private housing, this was a move towards suburban apartment buildings; in industrial architecture this meant a shift towards space-consuming, single-storey buildings. Infrastructure modernisation was dominated by the concept of individual car ownership. City, industrial and infrastructure planning in that period incorporated the concept of ‘middle classism’, which presupposed the merging of the former distinct classes, as a result of economic progress, into a broad middle class (Geiger, 1949). The dominant cultural model of that time was the male, urban white-collar worker and his wife with two children, upward educational mobility and a slow but steadily growing inclusion of the skilled and politically moderate blue-collar workers into the cultural patterns of the self-employed middle class. The social relations between the various parts of this broad middle class were considered more in a functional than a political perspective, as were spatial structures. Social and labour conflicts were seen more and more as a question of negotiation and redistribution than as an expression of the clashing differences of economic and political interests that had shaped the Weimar Republic of the 1920s. Working-class identity in Germany is a complex issue. Germany was a latecomer to industrialisation, and the socio-economic formation of an urbanised, organised, homogeneously living working class, conceiving of themselves as such, had probably reached its peak between 1890 and the 1920s (Mooser, 1984). This was relatively late compared with the UK, and this new class was soon brought down by the arrival of the Nazis in 1933. The formative periods of the German working class were thus linked by powerful political events such as the First World War, the November revolution of 1918 and the emerging institutionalisation of the first elements of the welfare state.

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Working-class identities in Germany referred mainly to two sources, the respective norms, values, habits and practices of both the socialist and the Christian labour movements. The first reference was to Marxism, Lassalleanism and Social Democratic Party (SPD) debates in the discursive sense. But this tradition also incorporated many guild traditions from urban craftsmen and journeymen in organisational and practical aspects of everyday life. The second tradition referred to the mainly Catholic immigration into the cities from the German countryside and from Poland. It drew political orientation from Pope Leo XII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, which had been influenced by prominent German priests like Bishop von Ketteler and Adolph Kolping. After 1918, the socialist side of the labour movement was torn in two through the separation of the communist left from the previously all-embracing SPD. This split arose from the pro-war voting of most social democrats in the Reichstag in 1916 and from the repressive policy adopted by Friedrich Ebert’s SPD government in confronting the strikes and the workers’ and soldiers’ councils movement that were striving towards a kind of soviet system in Germany. In the late 1920s, the tensions between the two left factions returned with street fights between the mainly Stalinist German Communist Party (KPD) and followers of the SPD. When fascism took over political power in Germany it brutally repressed the whole labour movement – Christian, socialist or communist – and combined this with reshaping and misusing labour movement terms, metaphors and images. It achieved some electoral success with the working class, mainly among the unemployed, low-paid white-collar workers and some lower-skilled workers. This was an early manifestation of the question over whether the meaning of the ‘working class’ concerns a group’s relation to the means of production or its behaviour, culture and political actions. The Nazis broadly succeeded in reshaping the rather common anti-capitalism of the later Weimar years into anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish businesses, and in subverting both the socially inclusive Socialist concept of solidarity and the Christian concept of community with the fascist discourses of Volksgemeinschaft [nation] and Schicksalsgemeinschaft [community of fate]. These were exclusive concepts claiming that there was no social or class differences between the members of a (racially homogeneous) nation, and that any objections to these were deviant, insane or dangerous. Increasing exploitation of the workforce and the repression of workers’ organisations were then counterbalanced by both a symbolic glorification of the worker and a few redistributive measures that were given great attention in the fascist media.

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Following the Weimar Republic, fascism and the Second World War, German workers did not return enthusiastically to a ‘class’ agenda. Their responses were framed by the weakly adversarial trade union policies and an SDP whose mainstream, after witnessing the compulsory unification of the socialists and communists in East Germany and the spread of the politically oppressive regime of state socialism in Russia throughout Eastern Europe, said farewell to socialism at the Godesberg conference in 1956. Apart from some local leaders of the labour movement who survived fascist prosecution and still kept up a rhetorical use of class concepts, workers’ identities strongly tended to reorientate on the middle class (Schelsky, 1965). This concerned patterns of family structure, educational mobility and a feeling of growing social integration and political participation. They also conceived themselves as a disadvantaged part of the middle classes, requiring strong trade unionism and social–democratic (or left Christian) redistributive policies and a strong welfare state. Spending their schooldays predominantly in the shortest track of the three-tier West German secondary education system, they acquired the physical and psychological expectations of industrial labour, but had aspirations for their own children to move upwards and out of manual labour. The 1960s student movement, its radicalisation after 1968 and its impact on the social sciences helped renew class concepts in intellectual and scientific discussions, and had a limited impact on some trade union activists. However, they did not win much ground among workers in general, as shown in the 1970s’ ‘workers’ consciousness’ studies: their dominant concern was to gain self-esteem and status within the middle classes. The Weimar Republic was not only the scene of clashes between visions of socialism and the emergence of fascism. It also witnessed the birth of a resolution of the ‘labour’ question that still operates today: ‘Rhineland Capitalism’. The Rhineland model, cutting away all theoretical and historical sophistication, consists essentially of the concept of workers’ political participation at all levels, with an emphasis on corporatist behaviours at the national, company and workplace levels, with welfare institutions based on workers’ and employers’ contributions. It is rooted in a historical coalition between the moderate social democratic parts of the labour movement and the forces of political Catholicism, dating back to the late nineteenth century. This coalition of interests was interrupted but not broken by fascism. It later served as an attractive alternative both to ‘real’ socialism in East Germany and to the AngloSaxon, or rather, US model of capitalism with its built-in higher social inequality.

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Following the path pioneered in the 1920s and interrupted between 1933 and 1945, workers and their organisations were socially accepted, industrial relations and conflicts became institutionalised and there was a strong development of workers’ participation in general. This occurred at three levels. First, there were formal co-determination laws at company and workplace levels throughout the whole economy (BetrVG, 1952, 1972; MontanMitbestG, 1956; TVG, 1974; MitbestG, 1976). The steel and mining sectors had even more radical co-determination laws that even provided veto rights for workforce representatives. Secondly, collective bargaining was strongly dominated by huge, sector-specific and politically inclusive trade unions, organised in the German Trade Unions Federation (DGB). It effectively marginalised any political, occupational or company-based unions, virtually ensuring their complete disappearance. This reorganisation of industrial relations and strengthening of the workers’ position dovetailed with the lessons learned from historic experience when, in the late Weimar Republic, political differences inhibited united anti-nazi action and some prominent owners of huge companies took sides with the rising Nazi movement. This led to a dual system of industrial relations, with a sector- and state-wide collective bargaining system on one hand and a workplaceand company-based system of co-determination on the other, both covered by legal regulations and endorsed in economic policy at national level. The 1950s saw a huge increase in welfare state interventions. Taking up and enhancing previous developments from the 1920s, the value of pensions rose by more than 50 per cent between 1957 and 1965, effectively ending poverty among old people while unemployment and health coverage were extended. All three systems were funded by compulsory contributions from both employees and employers and were administered by autonomous and jointly managed (co-determined) public bodies. This system was, and still is, backed up by general taxation-funded basic income support of various kinds, which has been a legal entitlement of disadvantaged citizens since 1961, thus differing from charity help. If we take ‘Fordism’ to mean a system created by the combination of Taylorist mass production and mass consumption, then the socioeconomic development of Germany in the post-war period until the 1970s can be categorised as broadly ‘Fordist’ (Hirsch and Roth, 1986). However, serious empirical doubts have been raised about the extent of Fordist mass production in the German engineering and chemical industries (Hildebrandt and Seltz, 1989; Pries et al., 1989). Perhaps only

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Industrial, Urban and Worker Identity Transitions in Nuremberg

the automotive and most of the electrical industries of that time can truly be seen as Fordist. In this ‘economic miracle’ period the precapitalistic zones of the German economy that had been excluded or sheltered from the full capitalist market were gradually included (Lutz, 1984), especially female labour and the remaining self-sustaining peasantry in the south of Germany. In this ‘golden phase’ (Lipietz, 1998) the systems of social security provided even higher benefits, wages increased generally and the unemployment rate remained very low. A general increase in purchasing power was matched by the spread of industrial mass-produced goods. The recruitment of migrant workers from Southern Europe was intensified in the 1960s to meet the huge labour requirements of German manufacturing. Already, however, although largely unobserved at the time, the proportion of manufacturing workers within the total workforce had reached its zenith in 1961 and started to decrease slowly thereafter. The process of tertiarisation, the shift towards service industries, which had firstly been described by Colin Clark (1957) and had become a prominent ongoing debate following Jean Fourastié (1969), had begun in Germany. From 1967 unemployment rose cyclically and fluctuated from the 1990s between 10 per cent and 13 per cent, but with remarkable regional differences. In general, it is higher in eastern and northern Germany and lower in the south, but even in the south there are remarkable differences at local level. Tertiarisation, whose origins lie in the drive to automation in the 1960s and 1970s, in the changes in the global division of labour in the 1970s, in the 1980s’ microelectronic revolution and outsourcing tendencies in manufacturing, and in the growing relevance of shareholder value orientation in the 1990s, led to a long-lasting employment crisis in the German labour market as demand for manufacturing labour fell. Many former manual workers became unemployed, possessing skills and habits not easily transferable to the service sectors. Thus, involuntary and partially long-term unemployment, as well as forced early retirement, became strong personal challenges for German industrial workers, especially if they were from northern German heavy industries like shipbuilding, mining and steel, and were generally lower-skilled and older workers. German unification in 1990 added further burdens to labour markets and the social security system as the results of four decades of tertiarisation and rationalisation in West Germany were rapidly implemented in the East. Millions of former East Germans lost their jobs and became dependent on the welfare state.

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Structural changes – tertiarisation, globalisation and technical change – have been the architect of the socio-economic situation since the 1980s, accompanied by persistent unemployment, cuts in budgets for social policy and changes in the tax systems to benefit big companies and the wealthy, creating rising property inequalities. Deregulation of industrial relations, anti-inflation programmes and lower or falling real wages can be viewed as an end to the earlier worker-friendly redistribution policies in general, though never reaching ‘Thatcherite’ dimensions. It has been argued that Germany has turned towards ‘post-Fordist’ regulation models and rejected industrial society and its institutions, changing from Keynesian to neoclassical economic policy and focusing on the political demands of large export-oriented, globalised companies while domestic consumer demand had lost its importance for socioeconomic policies. It was also argued that this was a consequence of all-embracing German commodification. Following this argument, the German economy could only expand further by accessing new external markets (Lutz, 1984). With historical distance, however, some of these theoretical arguments almost vanish through differentiation and qualification. German industry was not Fordist as a whole, and neither was everything commodified – as shown by the examples of its still relatively low female labour force participation rate and the remaining broad scope of affordable and accessible public services. Equally, although tertiary sectors have been expanding since the 1960s, industrial work remains important in Germany today. In 2008 manufacturing employed 7,991,000 workers (out of a total workforce of 43 million) (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2008a), although a growing number of these occupied white-collar jobs in manufacturing companies. Social differences also exist within this group, particularly regarding gender and ethnicity with discriminating effects on wages and – in the case of non-Western migrants – access to higher education. In the 1970s German economic policy was in no way Keynesian to the core, and after 1983 it never followed a strict neoclassical approach: public debt continued, and neither before nor since has it been intentionally associated with (or against) the business cycle. Powerful unions and centralised bargaining were still present, and so were obligatory and public unemployment and health insurance, pension insurance and basic income support. In addition, domestic demand remained relevant. Nevertheless, tertiarisation, the shift to an information society (as everywhere else in the European Union) and the specific problem of German

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Industrial, Urban and Worker Identity Transitions in Nuremberg

unification had real impacts on German labour markets, social policy and the nature of work in general. In Germany, while there has been some anti-union legislation and dialogue in public as well as in media discourses, these never reached the levels of ‘union-bashing’ that occurred in the UK. Nonetheless, unionisation has declined dramatically, falling from 9.7 million in 1994 to 6.4 million in 2007, and it now faces the emergence of small but vociferous professional unions among specialist occupations such as hospital physicians, locomotive drivers and pilots. Being a manual worker is viewed as being more risky when compared with previous generations. The golden days of post-war prosperity have certainly passed and are not likely to be repeated, but the trade union movement does not appear to have the answers it formerly had. The ups and downs in union successes in the long term can be explained by business cycles and their relation to unemployment, as well as by economic structural changes in labour and its markets. But political decisions are important as well, not only in the case of the German reunification, where they led to extremely accelerated adaptations of the economic structures with high costs for social policy, but also in several other political decisions made, for example, in the taxation system that especially favoured large, internationally engaged companies. Thus, general purchasing power was lowered while support was given to the richest quartile of the population. These structural changes are still ongoing. Persistent labour market problems and budgetary restrictions on welfare expenditure (also the result of changes in the taxation system) are political arguments driving welfare state reforms. This remains the case even since the late 1990s, when the Hartz Reforms of the ‘red–green’ coalition government occurred. Even if some of the new structures of ‘work-first’ active labour market policies appear as elements of a post-Fordist, postmodern or neo-liberal accumulation regime (Harvey, 1991; Altvater and Mahnkopf, 2007; Butterwegge et al., 2008), it is not easy to see a complete break from former regulatory patterns (Promberger, 2009). This is true of the specific forms of organisation of work and production, of welfare and labour market institutions and discourses conciliating the accumulation regime (the modus of regulation), and of the overall landscape. Transitions are rarely consistent and old regulations and structures are durable and resist a complete break. Moreover, some of the new structures can even be seen as increasing the inclusiveness of the social security system – for example, the compulsory personal care insurance established in 1995. However, in contrast to other public social insurances,

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this new insurance is solely funded by employees rather than including equal contributions by employers, which were previously typical of the German social security system. There have been cuts in the maximum duration of unemployment insurance, the implementation of a stricter ‘work-first’ policy among basic-income support clients, and the enforced development of a lowwages sector with lower job protection. More and more people are now working in non-standard and temporary part-time jobs: their numbers rose by 2.58 million from 7.68 million between 1997 and 2007. Most of these are women, the low-qualified and younger people (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2008b). The proportion working in regular full-time jobs with contributions paid to the social insurance system has lost ground, down from 72.6 per cent in 1998 to 66.0 per cent in 2008, while the proportion employed on ‘atypical’ contracts has risen from 16.2 per cent to 22.2 per cent (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2009). Increasing wage differentials, as well as a general rise in income inequality (OECD, 2008; Frick and Grabka, 2009), are also affected by the business cycle – alternating periods of growth and decline in the economy (Schumpeter, 1954) – and can therefore not be directly attributed to welfare state reform in its entirety. Even the critical merger of long-term unemployment benefit with basic income support did not solely create new poverty. Although several hundred thousand people have faced cuts in their transfer incomes, some who had not previously been included in the welfare system benefited. This occurred either because their previous employment status (former students, selfemployed) excluded them or because their personal wealth and income were formerly above threshold levels but subsequently below them. There has also been a considerable move out of previously ‘hidden poverty’ into the new system (Promberger, 2009). Nonetheless, the poverty rate climbed from 13 per cent in 2000 to 18 per cent for all citizens in the year 2005, representing the highest increase of all OECD countries (OECD, 2008). Overall, the German middle class has shrunk while the proportions of the poor and the rich have risen over the past decade (Berth, 2008). Unemployment and poverty are real, and are experienced as powerful threats by nearly all German manual workers and their families – not only by the most vulnerable workers, the elderly, the lower-skilled or migrant workers. This is confirmed not only by factory close-down conflicts of recent decades, but also by results from poverty research showing that biographical periods of unemployment extended far into the middle classes (Leibfried and Leisering, 1995). With the Hartz IV reform in 2005, the

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broad feeling of insecurity linked to the threat of unemployment has intensified. This measure established a ruling where, after one year of receiving unemployment benefits, personal wealth above a certain threshold must be spent before that person can become eligible for basic income support. Rather than making a complete break with the former social security structures, what is now taking place is a distinct shift in the German welfare state at a conceptual and discursive level: from a supporting and sustaining welfare state towards an ‘activating’ state (Dingeldey, 2006; Lessenich, 2008), where individuals are encouraged and required to ‘act’ and where the self becomes more and more a ’project’ (Boltanski and Chiappello, 2003; Bröckling, 2007) in an accelerated society (Rosa, 2005). These broad trends and transitions reflect and impact on the socioeconomic developments of Germany’s regions and cities. Yet they are not homogeneous or consistent. In addition they differ with respect to specific regions and cities with particular histories and structures. We now turn to consider how they have impacted on the socioeconomic development of Nuremberg and its old industrial heart, the area to the south known as Südstadt.

2.2 Local industrial history of the Nuremberg Region Nuremberg today has both significant manufacturing and service sectors. As a city of around half a million people, it is the second largest industrial zone in Bavaria (after Munich). Its particular strengths lie in electrical engineering, manufacturing systems and engineering and communication technologies. It also has an important services sector, with more than two-thirds of the City’s employees working in the service sector in companies like Datev, gfk or the Nürnberger Versicherungsgruppe. Manufacturing in 2007 employed some 50,000 people in 273 companies (of over 20 employees), such as MAN, Siemens or Bosch (Stadt Nürnberg, 2009a). Nuremberg’s central location for both East–West trade within Northern Europe and North–South trade over the Alps encompasses a very long history, with historical documents dating back to 1050. It rose to being a wealthy city from the thirteenth century, when trade to Poland and Bohemia enabled it to become a centre for metal manufacturing crafts linked to armoury and weapons. The wealth, importance and power of Nuremberg are attested to by Nuremberg castle and early representations of it.

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Probably one of the first steps for both trade and industry was the development of the south German ‘iron road’ in the Middle Ages. Iron from the Amberg-Sulzbach pits was refined in charcoal fires in eastern Bavarian hammer mills before being transported to Nuremberg and used by craftsmen, especially for the making of armour and other iron and tin products, which may explain Nuremberg’s position as a crafts and trade centre. This craft tradition and the city’s importance in the Middle ages are still significant in regard to recent presentations of Nuremberg. After a period of decline Nuremberg regained its position in the nineteenth century through industrialisation, its traditions of craftsmanship in metal manufacturing being revived, but also through the new paintbrush, bicycle, pencil and toy industries (Zentrum Industriekultur Nürnberg, 1988). By 1850 Nuremberg had 400 factories and 3005 handicraft businesses (http://www.nuernberginfos.de/ industriekultur-nuernberg.html). Its prominent position is exemplified by the first railway line in Germany, built in 1835 between Nuremberg and the nearby city of Fürth, as shown in Figure 2.1. Nuremberg’s early industrialisation occurred in two phases, the first being characterised by metal manufacturing and engineering (1840s– 1870s) and the second by the development of the electrical industry (1880s–1890s). During this period some important companies emerged,

Figure 2.1

‘Adler’ hauling the first German train, leaving Nuremberg in 1835

Source: ‘Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, Signature A 60-I-209’.

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Industrial, Urban and Worker Identity Transitions in Nuremberg

Figure 2.2 The Wöhrd (District 9) Cramer Klett factory (a predecessor of MAN) in the nineteenth century Source: Museen der Stadt Nürnberg – Graphische Sammlung.

a few of which are still relevant employers and global players today. For instance, in engineering the MAN Company’s predecessor (see Figure 2.2) started building steam engines, diesel motors, marine engines, trucks and railway wagons, and the electrical engineering Schuckert Company, which was later taken over by Siemens, was founded. As a consequence of the expansion of industry and craft trades beyond the old borders of the city centre, outlying districts such as Wöhrd (District 9) and Gostenhof (District 4) were incorporated within the city of Nuremberg. The location of these different districts is shown in Figure 2.3 Industrialisation was accompanied by a huge increase in the number of inhabitants – up from 26,000 in 1812 to 250,000 in 1900. In the midnineteenth century craftsmen and industrial workers lived in crowded quarters and poor neighbourhoods with inadequate hygiene to the west of the city centre, near to Nuremberg castle (Müller, 1983, pp. 35–6). However, by the end of the nineteenth century workers had secured better living conditions, especially through the creation of self-organised housing cooperatives (Wohngenossenschaften) to the south of the city in districts such as Werderau (District 46) and Gartenstadt (District 45), (Häusler, 1983, pp. 43–4). Many still exist today with financial

Nürnberg: Statistische Bezirke

79 77 78 76

86 87

73 75 72

85

74

83 80 81

71

84 82 91

94 90 24 25 26 92 23 7 8 64 6 9 27 93 22 5 1 28 2 63 62 21 4 3 29 95 11 10 16 13 20 60 19 1817 15 14 12 61 50 30 43 42 40 51 34 46 41 52 33 31 35 32 45 53 47 38 36 44 37 70

65

97

96

39 55

54 49 48

N

3 km

The districts of Nuremberg

Source: Stadt Nürnberg (2000).

33 Langwasser Nordost 34 Beuthener Straße 35 Altenfurt Nord 36 Langwasser Südost 37 Langwasser Südwest 38 Altenfurt, Moorenbrunn 39 Gewerbepark Nürnberg-Feucht 40 Hasenbuck 41 Rangierbahnhof 42 Katzwanger Straße 43 Dianastraße 44 Trierer Straße 45 Gartenstadt 46 Werderau 47 Maiach 48 Katzwang, Reichelsdorf: Ost u Keller 49 Kornburg, Worzeldorf, Weiherhaus 50 Hohe Marter 51 Röthenbach West 52 Röthenbach Ost 53 Eibach 54 Reichelsdorf 55 Krottenbach, Mühlhof, Holzheim 60 Großreuth bei Schweinau 61 Gebersdorf 62 Gaismannshof 63 Höfen

64 Eberhardshof 65 Muggenhof 70 Westfriedhof 71 Schniegling 72 Wetzendorf 73 Buch 74 Thon 75 Almoshof 76 Kraftshof 77 Neunhof 78 Boxdorf 79 Großgründlach 80 Schleifweg 81 Schoppershof 82 Schafhof 83 Marienberg 84 Ziegelstein 85 Mooshof 86 Buchenbühl 87 Flughafen 90 St. Jobst 91 Erlenstegen 92 Mögeldorf 93 Schmausenbuckstraße 94 Laufamholz 95 Zerzabelshof 96 Fischbach 97 Brunn

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Figure 2.3

Stadt NümbergAmt für Stradtforschung und Statistik Geographisches Informationssytem December 2000

01 Altstadt, (St. Lorenz) 02 Marienvorstadt 03 Tafelhof 04 Gostenhof 05 Himpfelshof 06 Altstadt, (St. Sebald) 07 St. Johannis 08 Pirckheimerstraße 09 Wöhrd 10 Ludwigsfeld 11 Glockenhof 12 Guntherstraße 13 Galgenhof 14 Hummelstein 15 Gugelstraße 16 Steinbühl 17 Gibitzenhof 18 Sandreuth 19 Schweinau 20 St. Leonhard 21 Sündersbühl 22 Bärenschanze 23 Sandberg 24 Bielingplatz 25 Uhlandstraße 26 Maxfeld 27 Veilhof 28 Tullnau 29 Gleißhammer 30 Dutzendteich 31 Rangierbahnhof-Siedlung 32 Langwasser Nordwest

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Industrial, Urban and Worker Identity Transitions in Nuremberg

support and control from the city government, although some have been privatised and sold. Nuremberg’s small local pubs and workers’ sports clubs (especially soccer and wrestling clubs) have been important in regard to male labourers’ leisure since the nineteenth century, and are still key elements of local workers’ culture (Beer, 2004). The workers were strongly unionised, but also politically organised both in the KPD but mainly in the SPD, which was particular strong in Nuremberg. After Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship in 1933, Nuremberg became central to Nazi propaganda. The Nazi party held its annual party congress, the Reichsparteitag, in Nuremberg and developed its economic backbone; huge investments were made in arms-related industries such as carburettors, aluminium pistons, two-stroke engines, motorcycles, diesel engines, ignition units, telephones and wireless communication units. Partly because of its prominence in Nazi propaganda and in the war economy, the city and its infrastructure were largely destroyed in 1945 through bombing. In the mixed industrial and workers’ residential areas of the city such as the southern districts of Galgenhof (13) and Steinbühl (16), more than half of the apartment blocks were destroyed, eventually being rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of these received plaques to commemorate the events, as shown in Figure 2.4. After the war, Nuremberg’s city centre was rebuilt on the lines of the medieval structures that still shape its public image. Today it is characterised by a mix of different types of building, both old and modern. The central area inside the old city wall is mainly dominated by historical buildings or new ones built to the old historical dimensions. Outside the city walls there is a mixture, but former workers’ neighbourhoods were mainly rebuilt in the original style – five-storey apartment blocks with backyards, plus some small shops and sheds. German post-war economic recovery was partly driven by some large Nuremberg manufacturing companies. The most prominent of these were in metalworking, engineering and electrical engineering, such as Siemens-Schuckert, MAN, AEG, Diehl and Triumph-Adler. However, Nuremberg’s industrial structure also included a range of smaller firms; in 1966, while 21 out of Nuremberg’s 550 manufacturing companies employed over 1000 persons, 298 employed fewer than 50. At that time a total of 112,116 were employed in Nuremberg’s industrial sector, of whom 81,907 were manual workers (Stadt Nürnberg, 1967). Nuremberg has a central, pivotal location on the East–West and North–South transportation route systems of continental Europe. Its hub position for cross-country traffic complements Nuremberg’s

Lars Meier and Markus Promberger

Figure 2.4

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Apartment house plaque: [Destroyed 2.1.1945, Reconstructed 1959]

Source: Lars Meier.

industrial position, strengthening its recent importance in regard to logistics, and also in trade fairs and the service sector. Its centrality to the European transport system was reinforced by the rebuilding of the airport in 1955 and the construction of a harbour on the Euro canal (the Main–Donau canal) in 1972. The city is fully connected to both the autobahn and the railway system. From the 1960s Southern European migrant workers began moving into the city, working in low-skilled but well-paid industrial jobs and living in the working-class districts from where better-off, German-born manual workers had slowly started to move to the newer suburbs. Many skilled workers now live outside Nuremberg in the suburbs and commute every working day by car or public transport. In 2005, some 134,526 persons (53.2 per cent of the labour force) were commuting into Nuremberg compared with 41,531 who commuted in the opposite direction (Stadt Nürnberg, 2007b). In 2008 foreign nationals made up 17.2 per cent of the Nuremberg population, compared with

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Figure 2.5

The former Siemens-Schuckert plant today

Source: Lars Meier.

8.8 per cent for Germany as a whole (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2008a). Overall about one in three Nuremberg citizens have migrant origins, mainly from Turkey, the former Yugoslavia or Greece (Stadt Nürnberg, 2008b). They tend to live in the traditional industrial worker districts to the south and west of the city, where in some parts the proportion of the population without a German passport reaches 30–40 per cent (Stadt Nürnberg, 2007a). These migrants are very strongly represented among Nuremberg’s less well-off citizens. Since the 1980s, Nuremberg has been significantly affected by structural changes in the local economy (Dörre/Röttger, 2006, p. 44). While some prominent factories such as AEG, Grundig and Hercules closed down, remaining companies like MAN or Siemens (see Figure 2.5) have suffered considerable job losses. In consequence, the dominant metalworking and electrical sectors have lost around 50,000 jobs since the 1970s and, although considerable, job growth in the service industries could not fully compensate for these. The IT sector, in particular, grew strongly from the 1990s, with communication technology and software production (SUSE, PKI, Lucent) information processing for the financial and taxation (DATEV) and medical industries (Siemens), and consumer research (GfK), insurance and logistics and call centres.

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From the 1975 figure of 42.4 per cent of the workforce (111,679 persons) employed in industry and crafts, this share had declined to 29.9 per cent (78,313 persons) in 2000 and to 24.7 per cent (66,162 persons) in 2008. In contrast, service sector employment grew from 43.2 per cent (113,320 persons) in 2000 to 50 per cent (134,082 persons) of the total workforce in 2008 (Stadt Nürnberg, 2010). However, these figures understate the growth of white-collar professional jobs. Many of the manufacturing companies changed their internal employment structures and recruited more information technology workers in sectors such as research and development, planning and management. In consequence, the share of employees holding a university degree has increased continuously. The downside of these structural changes is also obvious in the more or less steady rise in the number of unemployed, from only 317 in 1961, to nearly 15,000 in 1980, to over 30,000 since 2002 (see Figure 2.6). Nuremberg’s 8.6 per cent unemployment rate in March 2008 was below the German average, but about three-quarters of those had been unemployed for over a year and 16,167 were then receiving basic income support (Stadt Nürnberg, 2008b). These benefit recipients are concentrated in the former worker neighbourhoods of the south, southwest and west of Nuremberg (Stadt Nürnberg, 2008a). Overall, the proportion of blue-collar workers in Nuremberg’s unemployed reached 60 per cent in 2003, most of these (70 per cent) living in districts with above-average unemployment rates. This means that there was some spatial segregation of manual and unemployed workers, confirmed by

40000 35000 30000 25000 20000 15000 10000 5000 0 1960 Figure 2.6

1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

Unemployed numbers in Nuremberg, 1960–2009

Source: Stadt Nürnberg, 1967, 2010.

2005

2009

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Table 2.1 Unemployment rates in selected Nuremberg districts, 2008 District

Direction from city centre

Dianastrasse (43) Steinbühl (16) Gibitzenhof (17) Gugelstrasse (15) Galgenhof (13) Werderau (46) Altstadt (1) Marienberg (83) Erlenstegen (91) Thon (74)

S S S S S S Centre N NE N

Unemployment (% of potential labour force aged between 15 and 65) 13.5 10.6 10.9 9.8 8.7 4.0 5.9 2.1 1.9 1.9

Source: Stadt Nürnberg (2008c).

the remarkable differentiation in unemployment rates between various districts of the city as illustrated in Table 2.1. Thus in certain Südstadt districts such as Steinbühl or Galgenhof unemployment is about three to four times higher than it is in uppermiddle-class districts such as Erlenstegen or Marienberg. A recent survey confirmed this segregation in terms of household financial security, showing that in the Südstadt over half of all households had only very small financial resources (Stadt Nürnberg, 2009b). These socio-economic transformations and the related changes in working lives have had massive impacts on the local trade unions. Since the mid-1980s there has been a massive loss of members due to rationalisation, altered values and new generations of workers, and due to factors such as leisure orientation, consumerism and failure to unionise whitecollar workers. Huge factory closures also took place, starting with the last local iron-rolling mill in the 1960s (Eisenwerk Tafel) and followed by office machinery (Triumph Adler), electrical equipment (Telenorma, Philips) and, in particular, consumer electronics (SEL and Grundig in the 1980s and 1990s, and AEG in 2006). All of these had represented the backbone of union strength. The most recent case in this chain of closures is that of Quelle, one of the largest mail order retail trading companies in Germany, marking a shift in threats to employment from manufacturing to services. While some observers tend to characterise the AEG closure as a failure of worker solidarity (Dörre and Röttger, 2006), it has to be stated that there was a lot of solidarity shown in Nuremberg, not only at AEG but at all of its antecedents. However, this solidarity could not withstand the pressures of a changing economy. Nuremberg

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trade unions, which are fairly well organised and experienced in conflict, simply could not save those jobs, although they often succeeded in delaying the closures and in setting up financial compensation schemes, or transfer and outplacement companies under union control. Besides the socio-economic and political developments there are other changes of major relevance in Nuremberg. The material and architectural structures of former industrial areas and working-class neighbourhoods have also been partly transformed. Thus, since the late 1980s new business parks have been developed on the sites of many former manufacturing concerns. Some of these display completely new architecture, while others incorporate restorations of the old industrial architecture. One example of the latter is the Franken Campus, developed in the former MAN area to the south of the city where, in 2004, some stylish loft-offices emerged out of previous industrial structures, as shown in Figure 2.7.

Figure 2.7

The Franken Campus

Source: Lars Meier.

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In other examples, the former manufacturing sites have not been filled by new business parks with clean, planned white-collar offices, stylish restaurants, advertising agencies and IT companies, but with frequently changing low-end businesses. These businesses tend to be cheaper supermarkets, second-hand car showrooms, import–export offices, outsourced departments of ruined banks at risk of imminent closure, recycling yards and drop-off places for trailers. Handfuls of employees fill the places where thousands of metalworkers once worked one or two decades earlier. In some, their nineteenth-century brick buildings are still partly visible, some are even still in use, while in others the earlier buildings have been torn down to create space for the drive-in fast-food restaurants, car sales or truck parks. This is quite unlike the complete disappearance of some of the pithead buildings in South Yorkshire, for instance. The former neighbourhood Greek, Turkish or German food stores, pubs and backyard craft shops have also partly closed down and the infrastructure formerly based on walking distance has rapidly changed to a car-based one. Consequently, the workers’ housing areas have also changed. For example, the Werderau (46), a garden suburb and the MAN workers’ company housing area, was sold in 1998 to a private real estate company (Telos) and then resold to the Bayrische Landesbank in 2001. Since then, the neighbourhood and its public image have changed. Solidarity and shared life and work circumstances have diminished, as the investors sold more than half of the Werderau flats and houses to private owners. The proportion of both non-MAN employees and migrant inhabitants has increased. Trouble between long-established and new residents has increased (Berndt and Boeckler, 2007), as the formerly unifying force of being a MAN worker has diminished. This came to a head in the harshest way when a racist anti-foreigner initiative, the Bürgerinitiative Ausländerstopp, under the control of a neo-Nazi party gained 9.7 per cent of the Werderau district votes in the local elections of 2008 (see Table 2.2 below). Since 1967, there has been constant Nazi or extreme right-wing voting in Nuremberg. This has usually been well below 3 per cent, but there have been election years with significant numbers of right-wing votes being cast in former homogeneous working-class districts. Traditionally, Nuremberg has been a ‘red’ city, with the social democrats holding power since the end of the Second World War, with only one six-year Conservative interruption between 1996 and 2002. Throughout the city, worker housing areas have usually shown an above-average share of social democratic votes, although with a

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Table 2.2 Selected percentage share of Nuremberg district election results, 2008

Nuremberg Steinbühl (16) Galgenhof (13) Gartenstadt (45) Werderau (46)

SPD

CSU

Greens

Left Party

43.2 49.2 46.0 62.5 51.7

32.0 24.9 22.0 18.6 23.2

7.6 5.6 10.6 3.6 3.6

4.8 7.6 7.7 4.7 5.4

FDP Bürgerinitiative Ausländerstopp 3.2 2.6 3.0 1.5 1.3

3.3 4.4 3.2 4.6 9.7

constant decline in numbers. Today, in these same areas, the newly formed Left Party has also gained a substantial share of votes – higher than in the whole city, inheriting the former Communist votes and attracting left-wing trade unionists and former social democrats – as well as votes from New Left groups. However, the interaction of all of these changes at the socio-economic level, in political behaviour and in the material structure of urban areas, along with concerns linked to lifestyles and identity formation regarding current and former workers, is still largely unrecognised. Research on industrial culture in Nuremberg is mainly historical (Glaser et al., 1983; Zentrum Industriekultur Nürnberg, 1988; Beer, 2004). In its early phase this included manifestations of collective memories and significant biographical accounts of the ‘lower classes’, but today, if they exist at all, these histories have more often become perspectives on company history and employer biographies (Bähr et al., 2008), with fewer (mainly male) workers’ or activists’ accounts.

2.3 Concepts of culture and identity Many consider that the welfare state has partly lost the ability to provide German citizens with a feeling of social security. The need to be flexible over life’s course and to adapt one’s self to economic demands provides a powerful discourse. The ‘subjectivity’ debate focuses on capitalism’s new requirements for creative, flexible, decisive and self-steering but decollectivised individual workers in the new knowledge economy (see Voß and Pongratz, 1998 and their concept of Arbeitskraftunternehmer). Within this concept, self-control and self-management were more an ideal model for a possible future. Empirically, it was limited to the elite of white-collar workers and eroded collective protection. Introducing flexible hours and the internal decentralisation and marketisation of

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companies imposed a strong pressure on working individuals who had survived permanent labour market crises (e.g. Sauer, 2005). Several years later, the counterpart emerged in literature: the excluded ‘underclass’ and long-term unemployed, with no collective orientation, almost no skills and no other possibilities than reliance upon transfer income, suffering from their situation socially, physically and psychologically (Bude and Willisch, 2006). The emergence of self-responsibility and flexibility as an outcome of a project-based economy, characterised by the rise of temporary employment contracts, is demonstrated by the French authors Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiappello (2003). The consequences for working individuals are exposed in Richard Sennett’s book (1998) on the corrosion of character and social relations. While Alain Ehrenberg (2004) makes clear that the demand that the individual organises the self through self-reliance goes hand in hand with increased bouts of depression. In Germany, levels of depression and other psychiatric illnesses have risen considerably. While the health status of employees has generally been improving, psychiatric illnesses skyrocketed by around 70 per cent between 1997 and 2004 (DAK, 2005). Days absent from work due to depression nearly doubled between 1978 and 2006, while absenteeism has decreased in general. Among young men and women the recent increase in these illnesses has been particularly marked. In general, the unemployed suffer depression – up to three times higher than the employed. Indeed, lengthy periods of unemployment impose even more risks of bad physical and psychiatric health on individuals (Logistik BKK, 2007). Among manual workers the standard employment relationship has lost ground and job losses – following cuts in jobs or plant closures – have become a common threat to the employment status of the workers, their everyday lives and identities.

2.4 Culture, identity and place Work-related cultures are understood herein with reference to the ‘cultural studies’ tradition, defining culture and identity through Raymond Williams’ notion of ‘a whole way of life’ (Williams, 1958). This is a way of life that includes not only the forms and traditions of work, but also other everyday activities not directly related to work. Thus, work-related culture can also be located in urban areas outside the factory gates, for example where workers reside, consume, take their leisure or simply move through. Culture as a whole way of life is therefore a specific way of life for a particular social group, constituted not only by its members’

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occupational activity and status but also through particular everyday practices in specific places. But is, or was, industrial culture homogeneous? Obviously not (and it never was), if one considers that there are different types of identities under the umbrella concept of a work-related culture. Dimensions and aspects of identity such as ethnicity, nation, class, milieu and gender interact with culture at a conceptual level. At the same time, specific elements of individual identities contribute to the constitution of collective identities, constituting part of the respective culture. A specific male identity is thus a part of industrial culture alongside a class identity and ethnic or national identities. A Turkish worker may live different expressions of his male identity compared with a male German worker. Moreover, industrial culture is not only one comprising males – gender dimensions suggest differences in relation to women. Identities are dynamic because they have to be learned gradually (Willis, 1977), as well as performed and expressed by specific everyday practices (Bourdieu, 1984; Butler, 1993; Billig, 1995; Hall, 1996; Meier, 2009) and by distinct discourses (Anderson, 1983). Media representations of the working class in Germany were dominated historically by a two-layer perspective: on the one hand, manual workers, and on the other, white-collar workers and civil servants. This differentiation can be found, for example, in photographs taken by workers in the 1920s (Stumberger, 2007), and it was still inherent in the self-perception of workers and their overall image of their position in German society in the 1950s (Popitz et al., 1957). But the working class itself had always been heterogeneous and divided into diverse segments. In the nineteenth century the working class in Germany came into existence out of different social groups with dissimilar identities and experiences: from different crafts and qualifications – for example, former peasants, day labourers and skilled or even master craftsmen (Ruppert, 1986, pp. 22ff.). Internal differences are also framed by age. In the nineteenth century workers usually reached their personal peaks of both labouring capacity and earnings around the age of 30. After that their physical ability and income decreased and the problem of real poverty arose for manual workers who had reached old age. Different regional origins also played an important role in shaping dissimilar identities and interests, marking differences, for example, between urbanised workers and countryside immigrants. These differences remained considerable in Germany, at least until the early 1980s (Deppe, 1982; Kudera, 1995). Today, some of the former rural population continue to live in those rural areas but work in the city – a phenomenon that can

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be observed from the early days of industrialisation, although it subsequently changed from seasonal or more extended periods of working in the city to daily or weekly commuting (see Chapter 6 for similar patterns among Turkish coalminers). Between these groups frictions occurred regularly. The more recent migrants were less prone to enter disputes with the factory owner about wages or working conditions (see Chapter 3 for a similar French contrast between newer industrial workers and workers with longer trade union histories). An internal hierarchy between ‘qualified’ workers has also existed since the beginning of industrialisation in Germany (Renzsch, 1980, pp. 143–84; Ullrich, 1999, pp. 297ff.). Leaving aside this internal heterogeneity within the working class, and apart from what orthodox Marxism used to call ‘antagonistic differences’ of interests between capitalists and workers, other structuring everyday experiences were similar. Manual workers learned to work together under more or less similar conditions in the industrial plants, and they learned to be part of a workers’ community both at work and at home in working-class housing areas, where social contacts evolved in neighbourhood clubs, pubs and political and social organisations. Common experience of physical effort and exposure to bodily risks were rooted in everyday routines – of monotone and externally controlled working days secured by disciplinary techniques, like the clock and the factory gate. These experiences were passed on to their descendants, and the essential personal capabilities necessary for working in industrial plants were also learned within the family. The common experience of poverty was also strongly linked to manual industrial work in Germany and to a Protestant work ethic (Weber, 1934). This is expressed by popular sayings such as ‘Who doesn’t work doesn’t need to eat’ and ‘Idleness is the beginning of all vice’ (Mooser, 1984, p. 141). Obviously the conditions of industrial work have in some ways changed dramatically. Today’s industrial work is, in many cases, bodily less strenuous in former times, Many workers are also more qualified and wages and salaries have risen, allowing some to live in suburban detached houses far away from the factory. Social identity is always a kind of forced assignation of specific attributes and characteristics from the outside to individuals who are forcefully amalgamated into specific identities (Butler, 1993; Hall, 1996). Even if one is aware of the dangers of reproducing identities on the basis of attributed stereotypes, it does not mean that social identities are not in existence itself. By conceptualising identities as a ‘dynamic

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project’ (Hall, 1996; Keupp, 1999; Mitchell et al., 2005), it is possible to understand historical changes in identity formations. If one accepts the notion that identities are reconstructed by everyday practices, the site where they perform becomes both an expression of identity and an influence on it. Places are ‘neither totally material nor completely mental; they are combinations of the material and mental and cannot be reduced to either’ (Cresswell, 1996, p. 13). Consequently the material structure of a place (Frers, 2007; Thrift, 2007) – but also the way place is imaged and perceived (Tuan, 1974) – are intertwined with different forms of rooted everyday activities (Meier, 2007). Belonging to a social milieu – such as that of an industrial manual worker – is, like many other social facts, expressed by subtle body movements or by body forms, and by a kind of language or by ‘taste’. The experiences of work are embedded as the workers’ habitus (Bourdieu, 1984). But identities are not only expressed, they are also reproduced by these practices. The dynamics of identities and the ongoing process of identity formation by everyday practices are in continual struggle. This is because identities acquire their character by constructed differences in relation to other identities. Practices are therefore also processes of differentiation from the other, and consequently Analysis of class should therefore aim to capture the ambiguity produced through struggle and fuzzy boundaries, rather than to fix it in place in order to measure and know it. Class formation is dynamic, produced through conflict and fought out at the level of the symbolic . . . Class (as a concept, classification and positioning) must always be the site of continual struggle and re-figuring precisely because it represents the interests of particular groups. (Skeggs, 2004, p. 5) Identities are related to specific interests and specific motivations for action. But these interests and motivations can change, as well as identities (cf. Reese-Schäfer, 1999). So the interests of today’s manual worker may be different from those of manual workers of former times. Overall, differences in interest are intertwined with differences in activities and identity formations. But this is not the whole story, as shown by discrepancies of worker interests and activities that can be read as workers’ ‘false consciousness’, through which their subjectivity is alienated by the construction of false needs (Marcuse, 1964). This outcome can be regarded either as a result of commodity fetishism, in the strict Marxian sense, or as a consequence of the cultural hegemony of capital, a concept developed by Antonio Gramsci (1971).

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2.5 Class and workers’ identity in Germany In German social sciences, the working class is almost a forgotten concept. It was strongly criticised from the early 1930s (Geiger, 1949) up to the 1980s (Hradil, 1987), and workers’ identities today, even under the changed socio-economic conditions, are widely unexplored. Speaking of ‘workers’ identity’ or of the ‘working class’ today is still unusual. Even recognising that class concepts are losing ground in international social research compared with analyses and theories focusing on ethnicity and gender, the situation in Germany is special. This has resulted from the specific political situation of Germany’s division into a communist East and a capitalist West. Here, ‘class’ appears more as an aggressive concept arising from East Germany and as a concept opposed to social partnership in West Germany. In addition, the German discussion is still heavily influenced by the concept of individualisation (Beck, 1986, but see Geißler, 1996 for a critical appraisal), which opposes the so-called ‘old’ concept of class, conceptualised most prominently by Karl Marx and Max Weber. It continues the argument that, with a wide increase in the standard of living, the different classes and milieux became more similar (cf. Schelsky, 1965), and that therefore the manual working class has lost its significance. Moreover, the manual working class in particular is considered as having lost a specific cultural worker lifestyle (Entproletarisierung) (cf. Mooser, 1983). This is also discussed as the consequence of an increase in the possibilities of consumption and as current lifestyles are considered as being less determined by work relations and more by their specific manner of consumerism. The argument of the ‘loss of the working class’ receives some support from research on worker class-consciousness. Following this, an overall proletarian consciousness is seen to be absent, found neither in the 1950s (cf. Popitz et al., 1957) nor more recently. It is argued that this comes as a consequence of technological development and rising demands for higher qualifications (cf. Kern and Schumann, 1970), which has led to fragmentation of workers on the basis of diverse qualification/learning levels. Without doubt manual industrial workers in Germany today live under different conditions (and under continuous change), and this group is internally more segmented (by salary, qualification, employment contract, as well as gender, ethnicity, etc.). But this does not lead automatically to a liquidation of worker identity. Rather it has led more

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to a multiplication of workers’ identities. In consequence it makes sense to conceptualise worker identity in its plural: as workers’ identities.

2.6 European and national projects and programmes in Nuremberg A very large proportion of the still remaining Nuremberg manufacturing workers continue to work in the Südstadt alongside substantial numbers working in the service sector. Today the Südstadt is very fragmented. Besides modern industrial factories and office buildings one can see both renovated and shabby, flat buildings. Some parts of the south have a high population density, with blocks of flats dominating the area. In some districts the unemployment rate and the share of the unemployed of migrant origin are above average.1 Major social problems arose as a result of the large factory closures that have occurred since the 1970s. As one of the worst affected parts of Nuremberg, the Südstadt has participated in several support programmes involving considerable structural change. Aside from the inclusion of Galgenhof and Steinbühl (northern Südstadt) in the federal government’s social city support programme (Soziale Stadt) in 1999, the Südstadt received remarkable support from the EU between 2000 and 2006. During this period around ¤70 nillion (¤31 million from the EU and the rest from the Bavarian federal state) was spent on 101 projects; of these, 40 projects were supported by the European Social Fund (ESF) and 61 by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) (Nürnberg Wirtschaftsreferat, 2007). These projects involved four main developments: (1) the improvement of residential areas with small landscape projects. Examples include the restructuring of public places such as the Aufseßplatz (see Figure 2.8), the greening of streets and sites (e.g. Humboldtstrasse), the establishment of children’s playgrounds and the renovation of small sports facilities; (2) an attempt to improve the qualifications of disadvantaged inhabitants by establishing specific education and training facilities (e.g. Südstadtforum SÜD, Service und Soziales); (3) through support for cultural events by helping to fund the established Hubertus Cultural Centre, and cultural events such as the annual Südstadtfest, the Asian ‘Spirit of Asia 2007’ night market and other community actions and festivals; and (4) through the establishment of projects to encourage companies and research institutes to settle in the south of the city, particularly focusing on infrastructure within technology and energy areas

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Industrial, Urban and Worker Identity Transitions in Nuremberg

Figure 2.8

The Aufseßplatz following its restoration

Source: Lars Meier.

(such as the Energietechnologisches Zentrum and the European Centre for Power Electronics). In the Südstadt, a range of institutions and organisations, such as the Südstadtladen or the Kulturtreff Bleiweiß, represent the interests of different groups of the population and offer support. These two bodies both address the challenge of intercultural encounters, organising cultural events and other activities around language courses or choirs. Other institutions, such as the Südstadtforum, offer educational courses and qualifications and help, for example, young school-leavers with their applications to find vocational training and unemployed persons with advice on job-seeking. Second-hand shops have also opened to provide people with cheaper clothes and furniture. The unemployment and poverty rates in the Südstadt are still above the Nuremberg average. The Südstadt is an area of considerable social diversity with around one-third of the population migrants, visible through the mix of ethnic restaurants and small shops next to small and established German shops. Many of these developments have been accompanied by the engagement of local inhabitants and have helped create important networks. The programmes are published widely by the neighbourhood magazine, Südstern. In general, it seems that one of the intentions of the development activities in the Südstadt was that this quarter should

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transform its image from a manual industrial worker quarter. This perspective is exemplified in Südstern, which is distributed around the entire city of Nuremberg. It not only aims to foster a local identity among traditional worker inhabitants, but also attempts to encourage other Nuremberg inhabitants to explore in greater detail the changes that the Südstadt has undergone. The Südstadt is presented in Südstern as being ‘fit for the future – trendy and multicultural’. The development is seen positively (Klumpp-Leonard, 2007; Nürnberg Wirtschaftsreferat, 2007), and as having changed the previous image from an area of social problems, deprivation and criminality (Der Spiegel, 2000, pp. 114ff.). The support received by the Südstadt seems to have enabled some important structural changes to attract other social groups. However, in the Südstadt today, while blue-collar manual workers and the long-term unemployed mix with more highly qualified white-collar employees, as well as representatives of urban bohemia, at cultural festivals, the representation of the Südstadt as a problem area still prevails in the opinion of many of its own residents, even if most are satisfied with their living conditions (Bacher and Wenzig, 2001).

2.7 Conclusion This chapter has argued that identities are conceptualised as everyday performances. These emerge through the process of self-reflexivity and are built on assumed perceptions and expectations, both of the self and of others. This supposes that, over time, changes in urban encounters will have effects on the identity formations of industrial workers. As places and identities go hand in hand, transformations in areas of the Südstadt (in both its material structure and its representation) will impact on the identity formations of the manual industrial workers themselves who live there. There is still a significant level of industrial activity in Nuremberg, with industry and industrial life still visible, at both a personal and a collective level, through memory as well as in the stories displayed in the structures and narratives of heritage. It is found in the museum of industry, which is located in west Nuremberg, and is visible in newly restored buildings that partly incorporate architectural elements of the former industrial buildings. Industrial culture in Nuremberg today is thus marked in two ways: both as ‘real’, though under changing conditions, and as expressed and narrated through the concept of representation.

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Industrial, Urban and Worker Identity Transitions in Nuremberg

Note 1. The share of those with a migrant background in 2008 was: Galgenhof (13), 32 per cent; Gugelstrasse (15), 33 per cent; Werderau (46), 27.6 per cent; and Steinbühl (16), 33.7 per cent (Stadt Nürnberg, 2009a). For information on unemployment rates, see Table 2.1.

References Altvater, E. and Mahnkopf, A. Grenzen der Globalisierung – Ökonomie, Politik und Ökologie in der Weltgesellschaft, 7th edn (Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2007). Anderson, B. Imagined Communities – Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Bacher, J. and Wenzig, C. Leben in Galgenhof/Steinbühl – Ergebnisse der BewohnerInnenbefragung, Sozialwissenschaftliches Forschungszentrum der Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Nuremberg, 2001). Bähr, J., Banken, R. and Flemming, T. Die MAN. Eine deutsche Industriegeschichte (Munich: C.H.Beck, 2008). Beer, H. Südstadtgeschichte – Aus der Vergangenheit der Nürnberger Südstadt, Katalog der Ausstellung des Stadtarchivs im FrankenCampus (Nürnberg, 2004). Beck, U. Risikogesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986). Berndt, C. and Boeckler, M. ‘The city as a world-place: transterritorial flows and territorial order in a Nuremberg neighbourhood’, Environment and Planning A, 39 (2007) 1545–63. Berth, F. ‘Die Kunst des Weglassens – Wachsende Ungleichheit: Wie aus einem alarmierenden Gutachten für Arbeitsminister Scholz ein sanfter Regierungsbericht wurde‘, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 5 September (2008), 6. Billig, M. Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995). Boltanski, L and Chiapello, E. Der neue Geist des Kapitalismus (Konstanz: UVK, 2003). Bourdieu, P. Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Bröckling, U. Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Aktivierungsform (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007). Bude, H. and Willisch, A. (eds) Das Problem der Exklusion. Ausgegrenzte, Entbehrliche, Überflüssige (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006). Butler, J. Bodies that Matter – On the discursive limits of sex (New York: Routledge, 1993). Butterwegge, C., Lösch, B. and Ptak, R. Kritik des Neoliberalismus, 2nd edn (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2008). Clark, C. The Conditions of Economic Progress (London: Macmillan Press, 1957). Cresswell, T. In Place/Out of Place – Geography, Ideology and Transgression (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Deppe, W. Drei Generationen Arbeiterleben. Eine sozio-biographische Darstellung (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1982). Dingeldey, I. ‘Aktivierender Wohlfahrtsstaat und sozialpolitische Steuerung’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 8–9 (20 February 2006). Dörre, K and Röttger, B. Im Schatten der Globalisierung – Strukturpolitik, Netzwerke und Gewerkschaften in altindustriellen Regionen (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2006).

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Ehrenberg, A. Das erschöpfte Selbst – Depression und Gesellschaft in der Gegenwart (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2004). Fourastié, J. Die grosse Hoffnung des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Bund Verlag, 1969). Frers, L. ‘Perception, Aesthetics, and Envelopment – Encountering Space and Materiality’, In L. Frers and L. Meier (eds) Encountering Urban Places – Visual and Material Performances in the City (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 25–45. Frick, J. and Grabka, M. ‘Gestiegene Vermögensungleichheit in Deutschland’, Wochenbericht des DIW Berlin, 4 (2009). Geiger, T. Die Klassengesellschaft im Schmelztiegel (Köln: Kiepenheuer, 1949). Geißler, R. ‘Kein Abschied von Klasse und Schicht. Ideologische Gefahren der deutschen Sozialstrukturanalyse’, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 48 (1996) 319–38. Glaser, H., Ruppert, W. and Neudecker, N. (eds) Industriekultur in Nürnberg (Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1983). Gramsci, A. Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publisher, 1971). Hall, S. ‘Who Needs Identity?’, In S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996), pp. 1–17. Harvey, D. The Condition of Post-Modernity – An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Malden/Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Häusler, H. Helmut. ‘Baugenossenschaft’, In H. Glaser, W. Ruppert and N. Neudecker (eds) Industriekultur in Nürnberg (Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1983), pp. 43–4. Hildebrandt, E. and Seltz, R. Wandel betrieblicher Sozialverfassung durch systemische Kontrolle? Die Einführung computergestützter Produktionsplanungs- und Steuerungssysteme im bundesdeutschen Maschinenbau (Berlin: Edition Sigma, 1989). Hirsch, J. and Roth, R. Das neue Gesicht des Kapitalismus – Vom Fordismus zum Post-Fordismus (Hamburg: VSA Verlag, 1986). Hradil, S. Sozialstrukturanalyse in einer fortgeschrittenen Gesellschaft (Opladen: Leske+Budrich, 1987). Kern, H and Schumann, M. Eine empirische Untersuchung über den Einfluss der aktuellen technischen Entwicklung auf die industrielle Arbeit und das Arbeiterbewusstsein, Bd. 1 und 2 (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2007). Keupp, H. et al., Identitätskonstruktionen – Das Patchwork der Identitäten in der Spätmoderne (Reinbeck: Rowohlt Verlag, 1999). Klumpp-Leonard, O. ‘Schub für die Südstadt – Sieben Jahre Geld von Europa’, In W. Baumann et al. (eds) Der Nürnberg Atlas – Vielfalt und Wandel der Stadt im Kartenbild (Nuremberg: Emons Verlag, 2007), pp. 106–7. Kudera, W. ‘Lebenskunst auf niederbayerisch: Schichtarbeiter in einem ländlichen Industriebetrieb’, In Projektgruppe Alltägliche Lebensführung (eds) Alltägliche Lebensführung (Opladen: Leske+Budrich, 1995), pp. 121–70. Leibfried, S. and Leisering, L. Zeit der Armut (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995). Lessenich, S. Die Neuerfindung des Sozialen – Der Sozialstaat im flexiblen Kapitalismus (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2008). Lipietz, A. Nach dem Ende des “Goldenen Zeitalters” (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 1998). Lutz, B. Der kurze Traum immerwährender Prosperität (Frankfurt: Campus, 1984). Marcuse, H. One dimensional man – Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964).

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Meier, L. ‘Working in the Skyline – Images and Everyday Action’, In L. Frers and L. Meier (eds) Encountering Urban Places – Visual and Material Performances in the City (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 119–34. Meier, L. Das Einpassen in den Ort – Der Alltag deutscher Finanzmanager in London und Singapur (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009). Mitchell, W., Bunton, R. and Green, E. Young People, Risk and Leisure – Constructing Identities in Everyday Life (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Mooser, J, ‘Auflösung des proletarischen Milieus – Klassenbindung und Individualisierung in der Arbeiterschaft vom Kaiserreich bis in die Bundesrepublik Deutschland’, Soziale Welt, 34 (1983) 270–306. Mooser, J. Arbeiterleben in Deutschland, 1900–1970 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984). Müller, A. ‘Armenquartiere’, In H. Glaser, W. Ruppert and N. Neudecker (eds) Industriekultur in Nürnberg (Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1983), pp. 35–9. Nürnberg Wirtschaftsreferat, Zukunft Südstadt – EU Ziel 2 Südstadtschub 2000– 2006/2008, Vorlage für den Stadtrat (Nuremberg, 18 July 2007). Popitz, H., Bahrdt, H.P. Jüres, E.A. and Kesting, H. Das Gesellschaftsbild des Arbeiters – Soziologische Untersuchungen in der Hüttenindustrie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1957). Preiser, E. Nationalökonomie heute. Einführung in die Volkswirtschaftslehre (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1959). L. Pries and R. Schmidt and R. Trinczek (eds) Trends betrieblicher Produktionsmodernisierung (Opladen: Leske+Budrich, 1989). Promberger, M. ‘Arbeit, Arbeitslosigkeit und soziale Integration’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 40/41 (2008) 7–15. Promberger, M. ‘Fünf Jahre SGB II. Versuch einer Bilanz’, WSI-Mitteilungen, 62, 11(2009) 604–11. Reese-Schäfer, W. (ed.) Identität und Interesse – Der Diskurs der Identitätsforschung (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1999). Renzsch, W. Handwerker und Lohnarbeiter in der frühen Arbeiterbewegung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1980). Rosa, H. Beschleunigung. Die Veränderung der Zeitstruktur in der Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005). Ruppert, W. (ed.) Die Arbeiter – Lebensform, Alltag und Kultur (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1986). Sauer, D. Arbeit im Übergang – Zeitdiagnosen (Hamburg: VSA Verlag, 2005). Schelsky, H. ‘Die Bedeutung des Schichtungsbegriffs für die Analyse der gegenwärtigen deutschen Gesellschaft’, In H. Schelsky (ed.) Auf der Suche nach Wirklichkeit (Düsseldorf: Diederichs, 1965). Schmidt, R. Die verhinderte Niederlage. Der Streik in der bayerischen Metallindustrie von 1954. Lehrstück eines sozialen Konflikts (Köln: Bund Verlag, 1995). Schumpeter, J. History of Economic Analysis (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954). Sennett, R. The Corrosion of Character (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). Skeggs, B. Class, Self Culture (London: Routledge, 2004). Der Spiegel, Ein ungeheuer belastendes Klima, 44 (Hamburg, 2000), 144ff. Stumberger, R. Klassen-Bilder: Sozialdokumentarische Fotografie, 1900–1945 (Konstanz: UVK Verlag, 2007). Südstern – Das Nürnberger Stadtmagazin, Zukunftsfähig, Trendy Multikulturell (Nuremberg, 2008), http://www.südstern-nernberg.de/konzept.shtm.

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Thrift, N. Non-representational Theory – Space, Politics, Affect, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2007). Tuan, Y.F. Topophilia – A Study of Environment Perceptions, Attitudes and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974). Ullrich, V. Die nervöse Großmacht 1871–1918: Aufstieg und Untergang des deutschen Kaiserreichs (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1999). Voß, G. and Pongratz, H.J. ‘Der Arbeitkraftunternehmer – Eine neue Grundform der Ware Arbeitskraft?’, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 50, 1 (1998) 131–58. Weber, M. Die protestantische Arbeitsethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1934). Williams, R. Culture and Society (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958). Willis, P. Learning to Labour – How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Aldershot, UK: Gower, 1977). Zentrum Industriekultur Nürnberg, Leute vom Fach – Nürnberger Handwerk im Industriezeitalter (Nuremberg: Verlag W. Tümmels, 1988).

Statistical data sources DAK – Deutsche Angestellten Krankenkasse, DAK Gesundheitsreport (2005). Logistik BKK, BKK Faktenspiegel (Juli 2007), http://www.logistik-bkk.de/index. php?dms_id= 3&id= 2. OECD, Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD countries – Country note Germany (2008), www.oecd.org/dataoecd/45/27/41525386.pdf. Stadt Nürnberg – Amt für Stadtforschung und Statistik, Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Nürnberg 1964, 1965, 1966 (Nuremberg, 1967). Stadt Nürnberg – Amt für Stadtforschung und Statistik, Statistische Bezirke (Nuremberg, 2000), http://www.nuernberg.de/internet/statistik/nbg_ statistische_bezirke.html. Stadt Nürnberg – Amt für Stadtforschung und Statistik, Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Nürnberg 2007 (Nuremberg, 2007a). Stadt Nürnberg – Amt für Stadtforschung und Statistik, Regional Monitor 2007— Die. Metropolregion Nürnberg. Zahlen. Karten. Fakten (Nuremberg, 2007b). Stadt Nürnberg – Amt für Stadtforschung und Statistik, Statistik aktuell für Nürnberg und Fürth, Statistischer Monatsbericht für Januar 2008. Sozialraumtypisierung (Nuremberg, 2008a). Stadt Nürnberg – Amt für Stadtforschung und Statistik, Statistik aktuell Monatszahlen März 2008 (Nuremberg, 2008b). Stadt Nürnberg – Amt für Stadtforschung und Statistik, Stadtteilprofile (Nuremberg, 2008c), http://archiv.statistik.nuernberg.de/scripts/flexnav/ flexnav.html. Stadt Nürnberg – Amt für Stadtforschung und Statistik, Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Nürnberg, 2008 (Nuremberg, 2009a). Stadt Nürnberg – Amt für Stadtforschung und Statistik, Statistischer Monatsbericht für November 2008 – Finanzielle Schwierigkeiten Nürnberger Privathaushalte (Nuremberg, 2009b).

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Stadt Nürnberg – Amt für Stadtforschung und Statistik, Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Nürnberg, 2009 (Nuremberg, 2010). Statistisches Bundesamt (2008a), http://www.destatis.de Statistisches Bundesamt, Neue Beschäftigungsformen prägen Arbeitsmarktentwicklung Pressmitteilung, 340 (2008b). Statistisches Bundesamt, Umfang atypischer Beschäftigung hat zugenommen Pressemitteilung, 304 (2009).

3 Industrial Decline, Economic Regeneration and Identities in the Paris Region Sylvie Contrepois

3.1 Introduction The Corbeil-Essonnes–Evry area is located about 30 kilometres to the south-east of Paris in the County (Department) of Essonne.1 It is composed of two adjacent conurbations (communautés d’agglomérations2 ), Corbeil-Essonnes and Evry. The first consists of five districts, bringing together 58,849 inhabitants, and covers an area of about 48 square kilometres. Created in 2002, the Corbeil-Essonnes conurbation is a recent alliance between towns with no real history of working together. Corbeil-Essonnes, at its core is a former industrial town, a regional economic and administrative centre that today is in decline. The conurbation of Evry was established, by contrast, on the basis of a strong synergy created between four of its five member towns. These four towns are at the origin of the huge new town of Evry, built at the end of the 1960s near the old village of Evry, which had fewer than 1000 inhabitants. Finally created in 2001 with the addition of a fifth town, the Evry urban area has 104,162 inhabitants and covers an area of about 39 square kilometres. The decision to focus on these two urban areas together as if they were a homogeneous geographical entity – and to pay particular attention to their two core adjacent towns Evry and Corbeil-Essonnes – requires some explanation. The two conurbations are just a small part of the Evry employment region (zone d’emploi). According to the official map of the National Institute for Economic Statistics (INSEE), the Evry employment region comprises 66 towns (56 from the Essonne Department and 10 from Seine-et-Marne). Furthermore, the two conurbations often 57

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appear to ignore each other, the recent history of their relations being characterised by sharp competition. However, focusing on them together highlights several aspects of social, political and economic history, which shape European, national and local identities. The two conurbations have a significant economic infrastructure that is both long established and diverse: 85,600 people are employed by some 7800 companies, some of which are nationally or even internationally known names. The main part of this activity is concentrated in Evry and Corbeil-Essonnes, which are the first and second most populated towns in the employment region. In addition, the two towns’ very different experiences of economic development and social history – combined with their geographical proximity – offer a rare and illuminating comparison of different aspects of French life. Finally, notwithstanding the competition between the two towns, their histories are strongly interwoven. This is largely thanks to a number of institutional, work and social factors. For example up to the middle of the twentieth century, the two towns constituted a single area for trade union organisation. Together, today, they form the centre of the same diocese, the same employment tribunal area and the same hospital zone. The proportion of people who work within the area where they live is still high, with about half the residents finding a job locally. As a result of the social networks that have therefore developed over time, these two towns can now be considered a cohesive, single territory. The formation of social identities is – for us – a process in which individual histories interact with the histories of economic, social and political institutions (Leblanc, 1998). We have deliberately decided not to focus solely on those occupational identities likely to dominate locally, on account of the economic weight of the enterprises in which they develop. Of course it is true that economic and social life is often built around one dominant activity, which gives structure to other activities and consistency to the territory as a whole. However, there are often also other economic activities that are not necessarily linked to the dominant activity. Furthermore, the territorial interconnections between dominant and peripheral activities appear to be weakening on account of globalisation. By enlarging our field of research we hope to take into account emerging activities and thus to understand better how the territory has been restructured and the full impact on local identities. This chapter is organised in four sections. The first retraces developments in the regional economic, political and institutional fields

Sylvie Contrepois 59

over the period 1945–80 and puts them in their national context. The effects of the end of deindustrialisation appeared quite late in this region, thanks to its rich industrial heritage. This was still developing towards the end of the 1970s. Nonetheless, urban developments radically changed the balance between different parts of the territory. Traditional local identities, namely rural and industrial, became more complex. Indeed, as we will see in the second part, the Parisian decentralisation of high-tech companies and the building of the new town of Evry changed the population in the region. The second part develops the notion of identity and analyses the evolution of regional identities. The third section explores the challenges that lie ahead, while describing more precisely the changes that have occurred since 1980 and their impact on identities. We will see that the economic slowdown began to impact the region from the middle of the 1980s and during the 1990s. Political changes occurred thanks to both local and national dynamics (Communist Party decline and, more importantly, a reduction in activism). The big housing schemes built in order to welcome workers from decentralisation became ghettos.

3.2 The ‘Thirty Glorious years’ in the Corbeil-Evry region Several structural changes in economic, social and political life took place in France during the post-war period. Among these were the decentralisation of economic activity and reorganisation of the regions; the development of huge housing schemes and infrastructural programmes; the development of welfare policies and changes in management–workforce relations; the introduction of new technologies; new forms of capitalisation; and reform of the institutions of the Republic. After the Second World War, the most striking feature of our area was the economic influence of Corbeil and Essonnes, then two separate towns. Corbeil had been an economic and administrative regional centre since the Middle Ages, and it industrialised early3 thanks to the presence of two strategic rivers. The River Seine was a major route of communication, while the Essonne River was a reliable source of energy for water mills (see Figure 3.1). In 1841, the arrival of the railway provided another transport link. The town of Essonnes almost entirely surrounds Corbeil, from whose early development and industrialisation it was able to benefit. At the same time Essonnes offered a major road

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Figure 3.1 Corbeil viewed from the right bank of the Seine showing the flour mills on the tributary Essonne River behind the bridge c D.R. Source: Mémoire et Patrimoine vivant, 

communication route, the Nationale 7, and available land on which to build new factories and other buildings. By the end of the Second World War, these two towns had already been through dramatic transformations of their industrial fabric. The textile industry that employed a quarter of the local workforce during the second half of the nineteenth century had completely disappeared. Nonetheless, the two towns remained economically dynamic and were still a regionally important employment zone, with the century-old presence of paper, printing and steel industries. The paper factory Darblay employed 1000 workers, while the printer Crété remained the third largest nationally with 2000 workers and the famous manufacturer of railway engines, Decauville, gave work to more than 1000 people. In addition, Corbeil was still one of the biggest sous préfecture (deputy county seat of government) in France and one of the main administrative centres of the large County (Department) of Seine-et-Oise. Meanwhile, Evry was a small rural and agricultural village covering 883 hectares with barely 1000 inhabitants. It was a holiday resort on the river Seine for the nobility, and later for the Paris bourgeoisie. For local people, life centred around the castles and farms owned by these

Sylvie Contrepois 61

wealthy outsiders. Land ownership was divided among a tiny number of families. Radical changes started to happen at the end of the 1950s, considerably modifying economies. First, the nationwide reorganisation of local government radically transformed the administrative landscape. Evry became a ‘new town’ with regional influence, as well as becoming the capital and the Prefecture of the new Essonne Department. Second, the national economic transformation had an impact on local activities with the decline of agriculture, the reorganisation of industry and the development of services.

3.2.1 Regional and urban developments During the period 1945–80, Corbeil-Essonnes grew substantially and saw its urban landscape change radically. Several large housing construction projects were started in the 1950s, as part of the national rebuilding policy and the campaign against housing shortages.4 Three large housing estates, aimed at welcoming a principally working-class population, were built. Many public buildings were commissioned: secondary schools, primary schools, health centres, youth and cultural centres, sports stadium, gyms, media centres, nurseries . . . Whole neighbourhoods were renovated, and the Essonne River was entirely redeveloped as part of an ambitious clean water policy. In addition, investments were made in local social welfare programmes and a cultural policy was initiated. All these developments were accelerated and amplified by the election of a communist mayor, Roger Combrisson,5 in 1959. At the same time the population grew rapidly from the end of the 1950s. Corbeil-Essonnes had 22,891 inhabitants in 1954; by 1962 it had 26,596, 32,196 by 1968 and 38,745 by 1975. This population growth significantly altered the social structure. The employer element declined under the effect of the concentration of businesses. And new groups emerged – mid-level managers and clerical workers. The proportion of manual workers in the population as a whole declined (see Table 3.1). The evolution of Evry over this same period is even more spectacular.6 In 1965 a landmark Paris-region development and urbanisation plan designated Evry and its hinterland as the site of one of five new towns. Fourteen communes around Evry were given the chance to join the new agglomeration in order to increase its economic potential. In the end only four towns with particularly low levels of urbanisation agreed

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Industrial Decline, Economic Regeneration and Identities in the Paris Region Table 3.1 Occupational 1954–82 Occupational status Employers Independent professionals Mid-level managers Clerical workers Personal service workers Manual workers Skilled manual workers

demography

of

1954 (%)

Corbeil-Essonnes,

1982 (%)

11.3 2.7

4.71 5.46∗

6.8 14.1 4.8 58.2 36.7

15.26 30.77∗∗ 42.39 23.79

∗

In 1982 this figure includes higher managers In 1982 this figure includes personal service workers Source: INSEE census data supplied to Essonne Chamber of Commerce.

∗∗

to participate – Evry, Lisses, Bondoufle and Courcouronnes. CorbeilEssonnes was asked, but declined the invitation out of fear of losing its autonomy. Evry was then chosen as the administrative capital of the newly created Essonne Department (see Figure 3.2). In the space of a very few years the population of Evry grew rapidly, from 4900 in 1962 to 29,500 in 1982.7 The Préfecture (county administrative centre) was the first building completed and inaugurated in 1971, in the middle of what had formerly been a beetroot field. The urbanisation that followed was in the shape of an X, with the town centre at the ‘node’ of the X and parks situated between the ‘arms’. The neighbourhoods of Parc-aux-Lièvres and Champtier-du-Coq were created in 1972, then those of Champs-Élysées and Aguado in 1974. Also in 1974, the emblematic neighbourhood of the Pyramides was opened in the north-west of the town, close to a large, new commercial centre. The creation of this neighbourhood gave rise to a major international architecture competition launched in 1973 (the Evry ICompetition). The call to tender was for the construction of 7000 dwellings to house 30,000 inhabitants. In the end 2500 homes were built between 1974 and 1980 on an area covering 300,000 square metres. Two main principles guided the construction of this neighbourhood. First, the separation of ‘soft’ traffic (pedestrians, bicycles) from road traffic. Residential blocks were built on top of concrete platforms, allowing pedestrian passage on the terraces and walkways. Cars can circulate and park underneath the concrete platforms and on the major roads that constitute the ‘arms’ of the X. Second, a degree of fluidity was created

Sylvie Contrepois 63

Figure 3.2 behind

The new town of Evry, showing the university and the cathedral

c Odile Nave Source: 

between private and public spaces through the integration of public services within residential zones. Schools were therefore installed on the ground floor of residential buildings. Every building has its own terrace, which by facilitating communication with neighbours constitutes both a private and a public space. Initially, the ground-floor terraces were not closed off. The architectural design of the project was highly original, suggesting the form of a pyramide of medium-rise buildings (half-way between tower block and conventional housing). One of the innovations introduced was the way the buildings were physically distributed to allow extensive spaces for walking. Artists designed a layout for the pedestrian areas intended to be both recreational and aesthetic.

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This model of spatial organisation was partly re-used in the design of the Épinettes neighbourhood in the late 1970s. Ten years later, however, this style of urbanisation had been abandoned. The new neighbourhood of Aunettes was a large development of individual dwellings with all forms of circulation (car and pedestrian) reintegrated.

3.2.2 Economic transformations In many ways, the economic transformations of the Corbeil-EssonnesEvry region reflect the changes that took place in the country as a whole during the immediate post-war period and then during the so-called ‘thirty glorious years’. There was a huge change in the balance between the three major sectors of economic activity: agriculture went into steep decline while services grew rapidly. This trend was particularly obvious in Evry and its neighbouring communes, whose way of life was abruptly changed with the creation of the new town and the development of a service infrastructure corresponding to its new status as a county headquarters. But similar, if less dramatic, transformations also affected Corbeil-Essonnes. This was still a centre of market gardening where tractors and other farm machinery were a common sight in the 1950s.8 Another trend, particularly evident at Corbeil-Essonnes, was the rise of new industrial sectors linked to the latest technologies at the expense of traditional activities. Industry in Corbeil-Essonnes was damaged by the crisis in the paper-making sector, which took place in the 1950s. In the early 1960s the paper mill at Corbeil-Essonnes was much less important than it had previously been. Following a serious crisis, the number of employees had fallen to 858 in 1961. With its machinery ageing, the company was unable to satisfy the high standards demanded regarding the quality of the paper produced. After several attempts at reorganisation, and the failure of a conversion project to paper towel production,9 the company was finally sold to a financial group later in that same decade. In the following years, there were more job cuts. Two redundancy plans took place, in the course of which over 600 jobs were lost. By 1981 the site was employing only 180 workers; to survive it had to change its production – it now focused on recycled paper. Crété, a giant of the French printing sector, was also badly hit by changes in the market. The establishment of the EEC (European Economic Community) in 1957 exposed it to fierce competition from firms more technologically advanced. German and Italian printers, in particular, were very much at the cutting edge, benefiting from their countries’

Sylvie Contrepois 65

technological lead in machine manufacturing. Germans and Italians had clear competitive advantages in print quality, production costs and delivery times (Gueilhers, 1993, p. 34). Later, the appearance and development of the new media (radio and television) cut demand for the written word. This factor was reinforced by a rise in the cost of paper that forced printers to raise their prices. Finally, important technical innovations occurred in the early 1960s: photo typesetting, which used photography and computers, gradually took over from lead typesetting; two new printing techniques, offset and heliography, came to supplant typography; and binding became entirely automatic. In 1961, faced with these developments, Crété formed the Intergraphique Companie group with Desfossés, Néogravure and Lang. The following year, having closed its hard covers workshop, it then closed its typeface workshop and stopped printing books altogether. From that point it concentrated on periodicals, catalogues and publicity material. The number of workers did not alter significantly; in 1961 it still employed 2100 workers and retained its position as one of the three biggest printing firms in France. Despite these changes, it was obliged to continue restructuring. Eventually, it lost its romance magazines to a competitor, Del Ducas. During the 1970s it underwent further restructuring and, by 1981, it had only 780 workers (see Figure 3.3).10 The Decauville engineering works also declined rapidly. In barely six years, its labour force fell by half: it still had around 1000 workers in 1957, but then 689 in 1960 and 560 in 1962. By the end of this contraction it was concentrating on three main products – tipping wagons, diesel (autorail) traction engines and, from 1963, flat wagons. Other traditional companies underwent similar experiences. Grands Moulins [Great Mills] (550 workers) and the Doitteau chemical factories (200 workers) shrank considerably. The Testut company (500 workers) transferred its factory to Béthune in the Pas-de-Calais. The tile- and brick-makers Gilardoni (200 workers in the 1960s), the hat-maker Marcel Cassé, the Exona biscuit factory (140 workers) and Seima all went out of business. Jean-Jacques Netter and Maciej Wegrzecki (1981) explained the development like this: The causes of these difficulties, although multiple, can be classified into two main categories. The general economic situation, from 1975, was one factor that must be taken into account. But Corbeil industry also faced problems of its own: a failure to modernize on the part of many companies which continue to operate on 19th century

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Industrial Decline, Economic Regeneration and Identities in the Paris Region

Figure 3.3 Corbeil-Essonnes demonstrators marching in defence of jobs at Crété, 20 February 1976 c Alain Chatenet Source: Mémoire et Patrimoine Vivant 

principles; dilapidation of workplaces; difficulty of access for certain industries trapped in an urban environment. This context and the process of industrial decentralisation orchestrated by the government ended in an important renewal of the local industrial base.11 Two firms emerged as important local players – a manufacturer of electronic components (IBM) and the National Company for the Study and Construction of Aircraft Engines, Snecma (Société Nationale d’Etude et de Construction des Moteurs d’Avions).12 In 1941, the Compagnie Electro-comptable, an IBM subsidiary whose factory was very close to Paris at Vincennes, set up an electromechanical workshop in Essonnes. This small factory employed 40 workers who manufactured sorting and counting machines. Very quickly, the development of information technologies helped it grow. Within seven years its workforce numbered 300 and, in 1948, the Compagnie Electrocomptable became IBM-France. The growth of the Essonnes factory accelerated with the transfer of all production from Vincennes in 1954. This was followed by a major expansion – by 1957 it employed 1774 workers, 2464 by 1960 and 3270 by 1975. The factory increasingly

Sylvie Contrepois 67

focused on the manufacture of electronic components. By the end of the 1970s, the Essonnes factory had become a pioneer in micro-electronics and one of the major production sites for IBM in Europe. Snecma made its appearance in 1966. It was based on a huge site, shared between the towns of Corbeil-Essonnes and Evry. The buildings (manufacturing workshop, general equipment, technical training and administrative block) covered 143,000 square metres. From August 1966 to 1969, it took in workers who had come from the Boulevard Kellerman site (Paris), as well as from those in Billancourt and Suresnes. Workers recalled in interviews (Contrepois, 2001) that these relocations were accompanied by the introduction of tighter disciplinary measures for manual workers.13 In the following years, Snecma continued to grow; the Evry-Corbeil site employed around 5000 workers in 1975. Like those mentioned above, the company also began to diversify production; from 1971 it started to invest in civil aeronautics. Quite apart from the process of renewal that they triggered, the arrival of these hi-tech giants also allowed Corbeil-Essonnes to remain an important economic centre. By the late 1960s, twice as many workers travelled into the area to work than those living there but travelling to work outside. From the mid-1970s, other hi-tech companies and research centres came to base themselves in the area, particularly in the new town of Evry. This process was encouraged by government grants for new-town investments. Examples include the National Centre of Space Studies (CNES) in 1972, the Higher School of Geometry and Topography in 1978, the National Institute of Telecommunications in 1979 and the Arianespace group in 1980. Another fundamental development was the transfer of economic activities from Corbeil Essonnes to Evry, as a result of both national planning policy and decisions concerning the administrative and political reorganisation of the Paris region. The creation of the new town and the relocation of the County Centre of Government (Préfecture) to Evry sucked in large numbers of jobs in services linked to the administration. Administrative offices, the Postal and Telephone Service, the Social Security and law courts all progressively moved from Corbeil-Essonnes to Evry (Maisonnial, 1969). At the same time, industrial zones were developed in the Evry agglomeration to accommodate new businesses. Evry also became regionally attractive for its retail and leisure-time activities. On 19 March 1975, one of the biggest shopping malls in the Paris region, the Agora, was opened. Occupying 100,000 square metres on two levels and with 5300 parking places, it accommodated 175

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Industrial Decline, Economic Regeneration and Identities in the Paris Region

businesses, including a Euromarché megastore, the Nouvelles Galeries department store, a swimming pool, an ice rink, a cinema and a multimedia library.

3.3 Culture and identity in the industrial period (1945–80) In general, collective identity is defined as the ability of a group to recognise itself as a group. Each member internalises the principle of cohesion, which works as a resource for social living and for collective action. In France, the mechanisms of identity formation in industrial society were mainly studied via arguments over the development of social classes. The manual working class has been an object of particular interest, as instigator of an alternative form of society. This interest remains despite the fact that industrial society has entered into a period of deep crisis since the 1960s. Studies have increasingly focused on the disintegration of the manual working class and on understanding how social relations were being transformed. The development of the consumer society and the growth of a white-collar class, believed to be less antagonistic to liberalism, opened the way to new theories predicting the end of social class (Touraine, 1966; Aron, 1969; Crozier, 1970).14 These theories were not particularly helpful in understanding the persistence and renewal of many traditional working-class organisations, social movements and, more recently, the emergence of alternative organisations. Some other studies proposed a more focused approach on white-collar workers as a new force of change. We will first summarise these and then return to the analysis of local realities. 3.3.1 Culture, identities and social class in the French debate An ideological obstacle makes it difficult to define the notion of social class. Classification criteria and boundaries between classes in themselves form part of class struggle (Bourdieu, 1984). Some authors show how far the notion of social classes arose out of very different theoretical approaches (Desbrousses and Andréani, 1998, pp. 84–5; Durand, 1995, p. 112). According to many Marxist writers, social classes are defined through the antagonistic position held by their members in the system of production and distribution of wealth; through the consciousness that unites or divides them; and through their ability to act in an independent way. Their concrete existence is the provisional result of societal

Sylvie Contrepois 69

divisions that are more or less advanced but have only a tendency to embrace everyone in society (Bensussan and Labica, 1999). Taking into account this complexity, Bourdieu (1984) suggested that the reality of social classes could be analysed through the concept of ‘social space’. For him social space is ‘constructed on the basis of principles of differentiation or of distribution made up of the totality of the interaction of various forms of property in a given social world, capable of conferring strength and power to their holders’. Social space can thus be defined as a multidimensional space of class situations where people are distributed according first to the volume of capital they own, and second to the composition of their capital: how much is economic, cultural, social or symbolic. Such a construction takes on board ways of accessing power other than economic. Cultural capital can also be a mean of accessing power. However, most of the time economic capital remains the form of capital most able to optimise returns from the other kinds of capital. From this point of view, the situation of technical, professional and managerial workers who emerged as important social groups in the late 1960s is close to that of the manual working class. The members of the manual working class were characterised by their early exclusion from school, the precariousness of their jobs, their subordinate situation relative to knowledge and power and the limited opportunities for social promotion (Terrail, 1990, p. 67). Technical, professional and managerial workers, by contrast, were very well integrated in society. Some authors identify them as a component of a ‘new little bourgeoisie’ (Bensussan and Labica, 1999, p. 868). With an initial educational level that protects them from unemployment, they benefit from stable life conditions and from greater possibilities of social mobility. Thanks to a relatively good income, often improved by dividends and savings, benefiting from an efficient social security, from owning their own homes and more generally from their greater degree of autonomy or individuation (Verret, 1995), the members of this group appear less dependent on traditional group dynamics. This independence is linked to this group’s greater social mobility (upwards and downwards) by comparison with that of manual workers (Bensussan and Labica, 1999). Nonetheless, describing the situation of American white-collar workers after the Second World War, Wright Mills (1970, p. 92) argued: ‘From the ownership point of view, white-collar workers are not between Capital and Labour. They are exactly in the same situation as blue-collar workers. They have no financial connection to the means of production

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and no rights to the products they produce. Like factory and daily paid workers, they work for the owners of the means of existence’. Such a status allows little room for manoeuvre in managing one’s future. From this point of view, the recent development of share ownership among workers changed nothing in reality. Some observers commented that from the early 1970s white-collar workers were often the focus of company restructuring and, as a result, tended to lose the privileged status they had previously attained (Godard and Bouffartigues, 1988). How does this objective situation impact on the representations and class consciousness that these technical, professional and managerial workers might develop? According to Wright Mills (1970, p. 368), ‘Class consciousness has always been understood as the political awareness of the interests of one class and of their opposition to the interests of other classes ... So, the existence of class consciousness depends on (1) a clear idea of one’s own class interests with which to identify; (2) an awareness of the interests of other classes and their rejection as illegitimate; and (3) a knowledge of collective political action and a willingness to use it to achieve common goals’. In his book, La conscience ouvrière [Working-class conciousness] (1966), Touraine described these three elements of class consciousness as ‘identity, opposition and totality’. With his identity principle Touraine defines the contribution workers make in production, the social function they fulfil and the class demands that arise. As far as technical, professional and managerial workers are concerned, their ‘self-awareness’ is often influenced by two different life experiences, those of primary domestic socialisation in a manual worker family15 and accessing a more prestigious status through longer schooling. Their identity is expressed in feelings of holding technical knowledge useful for the company and of playing an essential role in the everyday management of some aspects of production (Contrepois, 2001). This ‘professional’ attitude is often integrated in a strategy aimed at upward social mobility, and is shaped by strong demands in relation to career prospects. But these demands are often impeded by the objective situation of being in a group managed by a hierarchy. This contradiction shapes the identity developed by these new workers. The principal enemy remains the ‘bosses’, but technical, managerial and professional workers do not resist them in the same ways as manual workers do. While they struggle as much over wages and working conditions, they also raise other issues such as work organisation, company decision making and the economic and social purposes of production (Mallet, 1969, p. 42).

Sylvie Contrepois 71

Nonetheless, the basic demand for ‘the abolition of waged work’ has disappeared. So what other projects are technical, professional and managerial workers putting forward today? It is clear that the ‘totality’ – identified by Touraine (1966, p. 311) as ‘a consciousness of society, the idea of social organisation as a power system that controls the use of labour and the distribution of its production’ – no longer shapes a coherent project. The concept of desirable change has tended to evolve into a pragmatism built around certain fundamental ideas. Among these are (1) the demand for a mutually supportive society and a form of social organisation that allows people to manage their own lives; (2) the aspiration to control their own work; and (3) the desire to re-establish or to preserve the socio-ecological balance of the planet. In contrast with Touraine’s theory, we suggest that this pragmatism does not mean that the traditional forms of organisation and conflict have been abandoned. On the contrary, white-collar workers have tended to join the old manual worker trade union organisations. They now constitute a majority of their membership and have brought new policies that are more compatible with their pragmatism (Mallet, 1969, pp. 98–9). This evolution is visible in the Corbeil-Evry region, as we will see below.

3.3.2 Between rural and industrial cultures – a mixed heritage At the end of the Second World War the identity of the region was divided between two groups. On the one hand there was the rural culture of servants from bourgeois properties, agricultural workers and independent farmers who largely populated Evry and, more marginally, Essonnes – often called ‘beetroot workers’, because beetroot production dominated on this land. On the other hand, there was the workingclass culture of the many workers who made up the industrial labour force of Corbeil-Essonnes. In fact, Corbeil and Essonnes had emerged as centres of working-class agitation from the nineteenth century, constituting a very favourable environment for the appearance of the French Communist Party (PCF) and the General Labour Confederation (Confédération générale du travail – CGT) constellation,16 which became quasi-hegemonic. But the workers’ movement did not develop there as rapidly as it did in other big industrial centres such as Paris, Lyon or Marseille. The creation of the first mutual aid societies and then of the first trade unions occurred quite late (Contrepois, 2001). Their perspectives and actions were more timid and, according to many witnesses, more imbued with reformism.

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Two characteristics seem to explain these facts. The first concerns the weight of the rural environment. In practice, the industrialisation of the area, organised around the urban centre of Corbeil, coexisted with the maintenance of considerable agricultural and land-owning activities. In addition, the working-class populations of Corbeil and Essonnes themselves maintained an ancestral peasant tradition, and many workers continued to cultivate parcels of land and to go fishing or hunting. The second regional characteristic is the enduring influence on local life of rich families through business paternalism and active – sometimes financial – participation in public life and local politics. The ‘Darblay system’, for example, organised practically the whole life of company employees, with modern housing, school, shop, health centre, chapel and charity assistance. Additionally, during the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, some public building works were directly funded by local businessmen, from whom were drawn several generations of mayors and local government councillors.17 As a result, these local industrialists took on the status of a rarely challenged local nobility. By the early 1950s the big industrial families had still not sold their businesses to shareholders and continued to dominate local public affairs. The only short exception to their hegemony had been in 1927, when Essonnes was won for the first time by the Communist Party. But that did not last long. From the early 1950s changes occurred at different levels. First, the particular post-war context and the merger of Corbeil and Essonnes in 1951 had an impact on the electoral configuration.18 A new political team, led by a socialist mayor, was elected. Eight years later, in 1959, a list partly consisting of manual workers and led by a communist, Roger Combrisson, won the town in a three-cornered election. A new era then dawned. The new mayor remained in office for 33 years and, from 1965, there was a major simplification of the town’s political life. From then on elections were all won at the first round, with electors being asked to choose between only two election lists – that of the existing municipal government and a joint list of right-wing parties (Varin, 1986, p. 287). From the early 1960s the strength achieved by the left-wing political parties radically altered the reality of social conflict. The workers and their trade union organisations then found the Corbeil-Essonnes local government systematically on their side, and benefited from both political and financial support. Thus, for example, during the printing crisis of 1978, the mayor and the elected councillors intervened directly with the Industry Minister, the National Assembly and with the Prefect (the

Sylvie Contrepois 73

chief government representative in the county). They demanded that the public authorities take into account the trade union plan to modernise and develop the company, particularly through bringing back work being done outside France. The same thing took place in relation to the paper mills. With a view to establishing a major paper mill on the Darblay site, the municipal council itself solicited possible new owners in order to keep the factory in business. Finally, in 1980, an old trade union demand originally made in 1905 was successful: a public building was lent to them for use as union offices (bourse du travail). Figure 3.4 shows a former industrial building in terminal decay. Several other factors had an impact on regional identity during the 1960s and 1970s. First, the restructuring and/or progressive disappearance of traditional industries led to the erosion of the paternalist system that had dominated employment relations up to that point. The companies that survived the crisis were sold to national or multinational companies with private shareholders. The big industrial families gradually ceded control to the shareholders, at the same time disengaging from the management of their businesses and from local political life. The centres of decision making became, as a result, less accessible. If the model of the large firm remained dominant, the management of

Figure 3.4

A disused building at Port Darblay

c Claude Breteau Source: Mémoire et Patrimoine Vivant 

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Industrial Decline, Economic Regeneration and Identities in the Paris Region

employment relations underwent a profound transformation. Gradually added to the paternalist tradition, until it dominated, was the culture fed by Taylorist and Fordist conceptions, which in turn were gradually replaced by participative management principles. Thus from the 1960s IBM became a leader in the import of American managerial methods. These changes in management were conducted in tandem with the modernisation of the companies. Automation of production processes and new technologies appeared gradually and transformed jobs and career profiles. The manual worker group tended to weaken, to the benefit of the technical, professional and managerial workers. Finally, the mobility of employees generated by decentralisation accelerated these transformations. The new companies that arrived from Paris came with some of their staff, accustomed to less personalised management methods and organised in unions with a stronger tradition of struggle. The old and new manual worker populations mixed with difficulty. Many people remember there being strong opposition, sometimes expressed in physical confrontations even inside the union organisations themselves. Some witnesses spoke of a ‘culture shock’ (Gueilhers, 1993, p. 50). As they saw their transfer to Corbeil as a backward move, workers at Snecma, IBM and the printers Chaix Desfossés, who travelled from Paris, did not systematically settle in Corbeil. Most of them hoped to find new work back in the capital or in a nearby suburb, so they kept their original housing and required their employers to establish transport services. In addition, even when they agreed to rehouse these workers, the employers attempted to keep them at arm’s length from the manual worker concentrations that were already considered too militant.19 They had the support of the local authorities, who were developing a more active housing policy. The IBM workers were thus primarily directed towards Mennecy, and those of Snecma towards Evry and Ris-Orangis. These interconnected phenomena increased the disassociation between where people lived and where they worked, a process that was happening everywhere in France. In 1962, 82.6 per cent of the active labour force who lived in Corbeil-Essonnes also worked there, whereas by 1975 this proportion had fallen to 63.3 per cent and by 1982 to 48.4 per cent. During the 1960s and 1970s, there was thus a relative ‘dilution’ of the Corbeil-Essonnes manual working-class, expressing itself in the weakening of the old social networks. Nevertheless, the Corbeil-Essonnes population remained a generally manual working-class population, with a high proportion of skilled workers. Thus in 1982 INSEE (the French national statistical office) estimated a

Sylvie Contrepois 75

manual working-class base of 42 per cent of the working population with 24 per cent skilled workers, compared with 58 per cent and 37 per cent, respectively, in 1954. In this context, the stability provided by a left-wing council led by communists is perhaps the element that allows us to explain how a relative coherence was maintained at the heart of the Corbeil-Essonnes workers’ movement. The communist municipality played an integrating role for those Parisian workers who decided to stay. Several of them thus became municipal councillors or got involved in municipal activities. It is also worth noting that the trade union landscape remained little changed during this time, despite a national context marked by the arrival of three new confederations: the CGC, created in 1944, and whose founder, Henri Maleterre, actually worked in the Darblay Paper Mill; FO, born from a split with the CGT in 1947; and the CFDT, deriving from a split in the Catholic-inspired CFTC in 1964. The CFDT found a more favourable environment in the new town of Evry. The creation of the new town of Evry constitutes another and later factor in the evolution of local identity. At first, the modernity of the concept of a new town attracted a population looking for social experimentation. From the mid-1970s, the Pyramide neighbourhood was the focus of a comprehensive experiment in workers’ control, in accordance with the utopian ideas circulating since the 1968 movement. It was in these heady days that one of the first Networks for the Reciprocal Exchange of Knowledge (RERS) developed.20 It was also at this time (1977) that Evry elected a Socialist Party majority in the town council, four years ahead of François Mitterrand’s national presidential victory. Finally, the development of the welfare state progressively altered the forms of solidarity and poverty management that had prevailed at the local level. The post-Second World War period saw the principle of social protection generalised across France with the creation of the Social Security system in 1945. A guaranteed minimum wage applicable to all professions and across the whole of the country was put in place in 1950. The unemployment insurance bodies UNEDIC and ANPE were put in place in the 1960s. Housing, employment and training policies were substantially developed. Workers thus experienced a growing autonomy – increased control over housing, education, health, social protection, and so on in short, over everything not deriving directly from employment contracts. The changes that took place in the 1960s and 1970s thus profoundly shook the identities of the populations of Corbeil-Essonnes and Evry. Yet the administrations of the two towns continued to pursue totally

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different development policies without seeking to develop any kind of mutual synergy.

3.4 The new challenges of development, from 1980 to the present Fresh problems appeared in France during the 1980s and 1990s. Among these, three were particularly sensitive in this region. The first was that of economic development. Confronted by the consequences of economic crisis and the growth in unemployment, local government, which had been given much greater responsibilities by the process of devolution, was increasingly obliged to take steps in favour of jobs and growth.21 A second problem arose from the dilution of the manual working class and the disappearance of the utopian beliefs that had guided collective action through most of the twentieth century. Questions were raised over how to renew the networks of solidarity or the forces of change. But there were no clear answers. The third problem was, finally, that of the huge housing schemes, termed cités. These great concentrations of housing had been developed to improve conditions for workers in a period of growth. But with the economic crisis, they became ghettos into which the poorest of the population could be dumped. 3.4.1 The challenge of economic development The economic crisis that hit France also had a big impact on the local economy. The gradual disappearance of older businesses accelerated throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Several companies were forced to close down, despite being integrated into large multinationals and continuing to make profits. This was the case for Avebe-Doittau, in 1994, for the Compagnie papetière (Essonnes paper mills) in 1997 and of Decauville at the beginning of the 2000s. Others relocated elsewhere, such as Périodic Brochage in 1998. Others were subjected to restructuring plans and acquired by new owners. Thus, having been demolished, then rebuilt and automated in 1988 following its acquisition by the Hachette group, the printer Hélio was finally resold in 2001 to the Canadian group Québécor. This new owner proceeded with yet another redundancy plan. Meanwhile the Snecma and IBM factories, which in the 1970s had become the area’s two biggest employers, began to cut back on their development. However, the consequent reduction in the labour force

Sylvie Contrepois 77

was not a result of a cut in output. This was because changes in the market had had a profound effect on the system of capital accumulation. Simple economies of scale were no longer the answer, and management sought to reduce production costs by other methods of rationalisation. The externalisation of risks via subcontracting and/or the creation of subsidiaries was one method; others included the use of temporary, lowpaid staff and zero-stock management. Nonetheless, even after 20 years of factory closures, redundancies and restructuring plans, Corbeil-Essonnes and Evry were not totally devastated. They retained their economic attractiveness thanks to the redeployment of existing industries and the arrival of new ones. In the spring of 1999 the management of IBM-France announced the restructuring of its Essonnes factory, with the loss of 1150 jobs. The factory, which had until then produced RAM units, was to convert to making logic gates. The market for RAM units had become too strongly competitive and no longer offered a realistic prospect of profits. The firm was transformed into a subsidiary, Altis, 50 per cent owned by IBM and 50 per cent by Infineon, itself a subsidiary of Siemens. Interviewed by Le Monde, the managing director of IBM-France argued that it was the best solution, given that other options had included closure or sale.22 From its establishment in 1999, Altis Semiconductor had a policy of creating partnerships with companies whose activities complemented its own. Its site became a kind of international campus, with firms such as Toppan Photomasks, Air Liquide or Boc Edwards. Today, Essonne Nanopole – as it is called – comprises about 15 companies, and has become a centre of international renown in the semiconductor industry. Snecma for its part had to adapt to the competition reigning in the civil aeronautical industry. Originally it had produced only for the military, but it started moving into the civil market in 1971. By 1990, engines for non-military planes represented 75 per cent of its production. This change of strategy forced it to develop a more commercial way of operating. Over the course of 20 years it overhauled its managerial methods in order to meet two new imperatives – the need to shorten production times and reduce production costs. After adapting to financial market norms and becoming the world’s fourth largest producer, the company was finally privatised in September 2001. Meanwhile in Evry and its surrounding urban area, a new generation of companies arrived and helped expand the service sector in the special industrial zones. Major groups such as Carrefour (retail distribution), Accor (hotels) and its subsidiary Courte-Paille (restaurants) set up their headquarters, and major outlets, in these zones.

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In 1987 the commune was given the title of ‘champion town for business’ by the magazine Entreprendre. But its development did not stop there. It also saw the establishment of the University of Evry-Val d’Essonne and several other higher education institutions. Today, Evry is an important centre of research and development in the fields of aerospace and medicine. A number of institutions have been established near the University of Evry-Val d’Essonne and the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM). These include the national space centre, Sagem, Arianespace and Starsem. Together they comprise a research centre called Cédric. Meanwhile a centre for genetic research was established in 1998 with the Génopole, the Génoscope and the Centre National de Génotypage. This was funded by money from the charities Généthon and the French Association against Myopathies (AFM). Several pharmaceutical firms set up nearby, including Integragen. From 2011 the laboratories of the new major Sud-Francilien (South Paris Region Central) hospital will also be based there. The new hospital centre, bridging the towns of Evry and CorbeilEssonnes, is a major project that will replace the two existing hospitals.23 By 2004, some 5400 firms were present in the Evry agglomeration (2877 in Evry itself) and 2400 in the Corbeil-Essonnes agglomeration (1900 in Corbeil-Essonnes itself). Together, they provide work for over half the local population (see Table 3.2). Despite this economic vitality, maintained by high-technology industries, the towns of Corbeil-Essonnes and Evry have unemployment rates higher than the average for the Essonne Department and higher than in France as a whole. In 2007 unemployment in Corbeil-Essonnes and Evry was 14.0 and 14.3 per cent, respectively, compared with 9.6 per cent in the whole Evry employment zone and 9.0 per cent throughout France (Table 3.3). A higher proportion of the population than elsewhere are also defined as manual working class. In 2007 in Evry, more than one-third had the status of clerical worker, 21 per cent manual worker, 26 per cent intermediary professional (under-managerial staff, skilled workers) and 11.8 per cent senior managerial staff. This situation was still more accentuated at Corbeil-Essonnes, where manual workers made up 29 per cent of the working population, with clerical workers 31.4 per cent, intermediary professionals (under-managerial staff, skilled workers) 23.7 per cent and senior managerial only 10.5 per cent (Table 3.4). Under these conditions the average income of the inhabitants of the two towns is relatively low compared with the average for the Paris region.24 For Evry, the data available for 2008 on the town website show

79 Table 3.2 Major employers (with over 500 workers) in the Corbeil-Essonnes and Evry conurbations, 2004 Name

Numbers of workers

Centre Hospitalier sud Francilen Snecma Moteurs Département de L’Essonne Altis Semiconductor Caisse Primaire d’Assurance Maladie Accor Commune d’Evry Carrefour Hypermarchés France Commune Corbeil-Essonnes Geodis Logistique Sofinco IBM-France

Location

Activity/Industry

CorbeilEssonnes Corbeil/Evry Evry

Health Aircraft engines Local government

1600

CorbeilEssonnes Evry

Electrical and electronic chips and components Public administration

1374 1300 1200

Evry Evry Evry

Hotels and services Local government Retail management

1100

Local Government

700

CorbeilEssonnes Evry Evry CorbeilEssonnes Evry

Logistics Finance Electrical and electronic chips and components Education

600

Evry

Education

506

Evry

Retail

3800 3686 2600 2100

Université d’Evry-Val d’Essonne Service Dpt. Education Nationale IKEA

940 809 700

Table 3.3 Unemployment rates (%) in France, CorbeilEssonnes and Evry, 1990–2007

France Evry Employment zone Evry Corbeil-Essonnes

1990

1999

2007

10.0

12.8 10.3

9.0 9.6

13.0 17.3

14.3 14.0

14.0

Source: INSEE, RP1999 and RP2007, exploitations principales, EMP T4. http://www.statistiques-locales.insee.fr

80

Table 3.4 Workers by socio-professional category in 1999 and 2007 as a percentage of workforce Evry employment zone

Total Agricultural Independent tradesmen, retailers, small and medium enterprises company heads Senior managerial staff, professors and researchers Under-managerial staff and skilled workers (Health, education, etc.) Clerical Blue-collar

Evry

Corbeil-Essonnes

1999

2007

1999

2007

1999

135, 073 0.3 4.4

147, 649 0.2 3.9

24, 702 0 2.8

26, 125 0 2.1

18, 651 0.1 3.7

20, 305 0 3.8

14.9

16.8

13

11.8

6.9

10.5

27.5

28.8

25.9

26.1

20.9

23.7

31.1 20.7

30.3 19.2

35.2 21.8

36.9 21.4

32.9 33.5

31.4 29.2

Source: INSEE, RP1999 and RP2007, exploitations complémentaires, EMP T3. http://www.statistiques-locales.insee.fr

2007

Sylvie Contrepois 81

an average per-person annual income of ¤13,856, with 49.4 per cent of households not paying any income tax and 59.1 per cent of residents renting their homes.

3.4.2 Dilution of the manual working class and new social forces In the 1980s and 1990s the working-class movement in CorbeilEssonnes was considerably weakened, even though the local socialist government in Evry held on to political power. The profound changes that affected the French Communist Party nationally eventually had echoes in the political life of CorbeilEssonnes. In 1995, after a gap of more than 30 years, the right were back in power at the town hall. The new mayor, Serge Dassault, came from a powerful industrial family. The managing director of Dassault Industries and Dassault Aviation, he was also president of the French Aerospace Industry Group (GIFAS) and a member of the executive of the then national employers’ association, CNPF. In 1977 Dassault stood for the first time in municipal elections at Corbeil-Essonnes, on a list bringing together several right-wing parties as well as the radical socialists. But despite the lavish funds spent on his campaign, his candidacy had only limited impact.25 With 35 per cent of the votes compared with 65 per cent for Roger Combrisson, this result was very similar to those of his predecessors.26 He fared better in the 1978 parliamentary elections, when he gained 48 per cent of the votes against 52 per cent for Combrisson. Several years later, at the municipal elections of 1983, the left unity list’s vote fell by 12 points to 53 per cent, while as many as 30 per cent abstained. But it was really only with the European elections of 1984 that the local Communist Party began to experience the crisis that was already being felt at national level. In these elections, the communist list gained only 21 per cent of the local vote, its lowest share since the Liberation in 1944 (Varin, 1986, p. 286). Despite these difficulties, the Communist Party nonetheless remained in power locally up until the mid-1990s, but then several factors combined to hasten the arrival of the right. First, what we know today as the ‘problem of the housing schemes (banlieue)’ began to make itself felt.27 Families who could afford to move into the private sector gradually abandoned the town’s three big social housing estates. These effectively became ghettoes for the very poorest. Second, one effect of the economic crisis was the creation of growing personal anxiety. As we have already indicated above, unemployment

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Industrial Decline, Economic Regeneration and Identities in the Paris Region

was particularly high in Corbeil-Essonnes, hitting over 17 per cent in 1999. Most local people had the feeling that even if the town hall had acted with good intentions, its impact on unemployment was limited. By contrast, the promises of a rich industrialist, presenting himself as an exemplary businessman, were listened to with attentive ears. The third element was the difficulty in finding a replacement for the Mayor Roger Combrisson. After some 30 years at the head of the council, he retired in 1993. The departure of this symbolic and respected leader left a void that was only made worse by problems over his succession. His chosen successor, who had been groomed over a long period, was pushed aside following a series of internal quarrels within the leadership of the local Communist Party. Instead, they chose someone who was less well known and obviously much less prepared. The resulting internal divisions badly impeded the communist election campaign, as well as the work of existing communist councillors. This was the context in which Serge Dassault finally achieved his objective in 1995. Should we see in this a renewal of the paternalism of a bygone era? Certainly, the successful methods used by the new mayor raise several questions. By promising to intercede personally with local business leaders in order to maintain employment, or to find work for those who ‘deserved’ it, he won a reputation as a generous politician and employer,28 anxious for the ‘well-being’ of his voters. Dassault’s arrival at the head of the municipality radically changed the context of both trade union activity and social struggles. No longer was there any question of the municipality supporting collective movements, even when these were aimed at maintaining local employment levels. On several occasions the mayor even denounced trade union activists for their ‘irresponsibility’. But it was the repeated attempts to evict the trade unions from their bourse du travail offices that constituted the most important symbol of his attitude toward them. At the end of the 1990s, the tradition of local working-class action was thus thrown into confusion at Corbeil-Essonnes. The Communist Party lost many of its members, and saw its structures dissolve into various factions in opposition to the ruling council majority. Immediately after Dassault’s election, several senior members actually left to live in other communes in the Paris region where the communists were still in control, or to take their retirement in the country. A new generation of activists had to take up the baton. However, the Communist Party soon stopped putting up lists in its own name and instead formed alliances with other left-wing groups – with greater or lesser degrees of success. The Party’s affiliate organisations lost influence, although in

Sylvie Contrepois 83

some cases they continued to play an important role in local affairs. The CGT underwent a radical change as a new generation of members replaced the old (Contrepois, 2001). The political situation appeared more stable in Evry, despite a relatively low participation rate in the elections. The Socialist Party won an easy majority there in the two presidential elections of 2002 and 2007. It had been the same in all other elections since the late 1970s – local, parliamentary and European. At the end of the long mandate of Jacques Guyard in 2001, his fellow socialist Manuel Valls was elected mayor with 44 per cent of the vote, despite a three-cornered election that cost him some support. He was re-elected with more success in 2008, when he gained 70 per cent of the vote with the right getting only 14 per cent. It is nonetheless important to note that participation in these elections was extraordinarily low: only 49 per cent of the electorate cast votes in 2001 and 48 per cent in 2008. Furthermore, serious dissension between Jacques Guyard’s former team and the new one led by Manuel Valls made the transfer of power difficult. In spite of this, the fact that socialists were permanently in power lent long-term coherence to municipal action. The Evry town council has thus set itself the task of fighting against social inequalities and discrimination. Several initiatives have been launched: to fight against racism, anti-Semitism and recruitment discrimination; to improve literacy among immigrant families; to welcome new inhabitants; to support town-twinning initiatives; to develop international solidarity and cooperation; and to assist dialogue between different communities and faiths. In this context the town council had a policy of strong support for local associations. In 2003 it signed 98 partnership contracts, for a total subsidy of over ¤1 million. A particular effort was made to support initiatives helping integration, culture and education. A Centre of Voluntary Associations (Maison des Associations) has been established alongside the already existing Open to the World Centre (Maison du monde) to offer these associations help in running their operations.

3.4.3 Urban renewal and the problem of the ‘estates’ As with most French towns that respected or exceeded their quotas of social house building, Corbeil-Essonnes and Evry29 faced the ‘ghettoisation’ of their ‘estates’ during the 1980s and 1990s. Little by little, the poorest and very diverse migrant populations were concentrated

84

Industrial Decline, Economic Regeneration and Identities in the Paris Region

there. The national statistics office shows that more than 100 different nationalities live together in the Tarterêts at Corbeil-Essonnes and in the Pyramides at Evry. They tend to reconstitute their original community and to turn in on themselves in order to protect themselves against discrimination. The estates thus become closed worlds, whose populations share strong feelings of injustice. Lacking any sense of shared rules or values, they fall easy prey to gangs and local mafias (Madzou, 2008). Dealing with this new urban problem is particularly difficult when town councils have few resources to tackle poverty and social exclusion. In fact, the two towns have developed radically different strategies. Thus, after its capture by the right in 1995, Corbeil-Essonnes was the object of a major urban restructuring. The few businesses still situated in the centre of town were encouraged to move to sites further away, sometimes outside the town borders. Vacant and rundown lots in the centre of town were targeted for higher-quality housing projects aimed at attracting the middle classes. Meanwhile, tower blocks in the three larges estates were demolished and many of their inhabitants relocated to other towns. This strategy, whose aim was to renew the town’s population, has led to only a small increase in numbers over the last ten years. It was only in 2006 that the population passed 40,000, having been at 39,000 for a long time. As a result its density is relatively low – around 3715 people per square kilometre in 2005. The growth of Evry has been, in contrast, much more significant. While the population numbered 29,471 in 1982, this had risen to 52,600 by 2007. Its density increased proportionately, to reach 6315 people per square kilometre in 2005. A young town in terms of urbanisation, Evry is also young in terms of population: 41 per cent of its population were under 25 years old and 24 per cent less than 15 years old in 1999, four percentage points more than across the whole department. Today the former ‘new town’ has had to put in place an urban renewal programme to tackle the problems faced in its different neighbourhoods. In the Pyramides quarter, the attempt to encourage social diversity has largely failed thanks to the departure of middle-class residents. On the one hand, middle-class people were attracted by the development of housing schemes in neighbouring towns where they received financial support for house purchases. And, at the same time, the municipality discouraged many people who had hoped to develop ambitious self-management ideas. Many flats were then bought by housing companies and rented to poorer families. Today classified as a ‘sensitive’ urban area, the

Sylvie Contrepois 85

neighbourhood of the Pyramides has 10,000 inhabitants on 53 hectares, with 52 per cent living in social housing. With an unemployment rate of 19 per cent in 1999 and 25 per cent of people without qualifications, this neighbourhood has a very low annual average income of ¤8564, and 57 per cent of inhabitants were below the income tax threshold in 2004. In order to tackle these problems, the town arranged with a number of partners (the state, region and department, as well as public housing bodies) to launch a Major Town Project (Grand projet de ville – GPV). This major urban development project was presented to the inhabitants at an extraordinary town council meeting in June 2001. The aim of the GPV is a fundamental transformation of the townscape leading to a higher quality of life and a more positive image for the neighbourhood. Besides the Pyramides, five other neighbourhoods have been given priority status for urban renewal: Bois-Sauvage, the Centre Urbain Nord, the Champtier du Coq, the Aunettes and the Épinettes.

3.5 Conclusion Between 1945 and the present, the region studied has experienced two big waves of economic and urban transformation. These changes took very different forms in the two towns of Corbeil-Essonnes and Evry, despite their being adjacent. Corbeil-Essonnes, which came early to industrialisation, retains its industrial identity principally through two major companies that are flagships of the town’s historic engineering activity. Evry, which came late to urbanisation, has become over the course of 30 years a centre for the new service- and knowledge-based economy. These contrasting realities prompt deep reflection on the nature of restructuring and its impact on identity. From this evidence, despite their proximity and the similar problems that they face, the two towns are not on the same trajectory. On Corbeil’s side, a kind of ‘ideal paternalism’ is coming back, while former networks of solidarity are collapsing. The blue-collar workers’ political parties have undoubtedly lost their influence. Despite their efforts, the left-wing parties have obtained few results in remobilising and unifying people, although the trade union movement is still full of life. Evry has a very different profile. Benefiting from the implementation of the new town, it attracted most of the new activities coming to the region. It turned out to be a field of social experimentation for many

86

Industrial Decline, Economic Regeneration and Identities in the Paris Region

left-wing people. A strong network of associations developed, and this has provided a basis for a strong, left-wing political stability.

Notes 1. This chapter benefited from the expertise of local historians and actors: Serge Bianchi, Claude Breteau, André Darmagnac, Aline Marti and Odile Nave. 2. In France, the ‘communautés d’agglomération’ (conurbations) were established in 1999 by a law aimed at reinforcing and simplifying cooperation between communes (urban or rural districts). They have to include a commune of at least 15,000 inhabitants, they must have in total a minimum of 50,000 inhabitants, and the different communes must be contiguous. Under the law they have powers in the fields of economic development, land planning, social housing balance and urban policy. Conurbations are also obliged to take control over any three of the following policy areas: roadworks, drainage work, drinking water, environmental policies, social action, culture and sport facilities. 3. In the middle of the nineteenth century Corbeil and Essonnes experienced a level of development comparable with that of England, having taken a relative lead over the other towns in the Paris region (Contrepois, 2001, p. 101). 4. As a result of the war, housing in large French towns was devastated; 500,000 dwellings were destroyed and the same number were damaged. Around 3.5 million blocks of flats became highly dilapidated. One in two people was regarded as poorly housed or homeless (Lallaoui, 1993). 5. Interviewed in June 1998, Roger Combrisson, Mayor of Corbeil-Essonnes from 1959 to 1993, said that his social and urban policies were inspired by the experience of ‘real socialism’ (Contrepois, 2007, p. 414). 6. Most of the information contained in this section was provided during a walk through Evry organised by Evry’s maison de l’habitat during the Journées du patrimoine, on 20 September 2008, and during an interview with André Darmagnac, president of the association Mémoire de la ville nouvelle, on 23 September 2008. 7. Insee (1982). 8. In 1950, cultivated land represented over 20 per cent of the total. Relatively important farms sent their produce on a daily basis to Les Halles (the large central market halls) in Paris. In 1975 market gardening still occupied 5 per cent of the land. 9. Interview with Stanislas Darblay by Claude Breteau (Association Mémoire et Patrimoine vivant). 10. In 1972 there were 2249 printing works in France; by 1980 there were only 1614 left. Between 1973 and 1980 the sector dismissed 15,000 people (Gueilhers, 1993, p. 30). 11. The idea of industrial decentralisation appeared in 1945, when the imbalance between Paris and the regions became very obvious (Gravier, 1947). From the 1950s decentralisation policies constituted a key part of the new country planning system. Particular rules were implemented, some aiming to slow down or stop industrial companies being set up or extended in the

Sylvie Contrepois 87

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

Paris region (except for the new towns), others aiming to encourage transfers toward other regions of France (Collectif, 1984). Snecma emerged from the nationalisation of the Gnome and Rhône factories that before the war manufactured aeroplane and car engines. Several elements of the history of this company, created at Gennevilliers, can be found in the chapter by Noëlle Gérôme, Ouvriers et usines: à propos de la Snecma, in Jacques Girault (ed.), Ouvriers en banlieue, XIXe – XXe siècle, Editions de l’Atelier, 1998, pp. 153–69. On this point our observations are close to those of Patrick Fridenson concerning the car industry (in Girault, 1998, p. 117). He notes that ‘These decentralised factories . . . have often served to test new methods of personnel management, management having the idea that they have there a less experienced and combative and theoretically more docile labour force than in the centre or even in the periphery’. The debate on the existence of social class appeared with capitalism (see Louis Reybaud quoted by Georges Lefranc, 1937, pp. 114, 119). Claude Thelot (1982) showed that the influence of the family circle lasts over the entire active life of the children, and does not depend on their education or their first job. The family circle thus impacts on the whole career path on a long-term basis and more deeply than various episodes within a career. One of the particularities of the French model of collective association is, according to Ion (1997, p. 27), ‘its organisation in collective federations linked to one another through vast ideo-political networks . . . Within a federation there are both the social links at the base but also a vertical network that reaches up, more or less directly, to the national political scene. Entry to an association occurs often on the basis of primary identities such as the family, the company or the neighbourhood. These can determine which out of several networks a person belongs to. Belonging to this or that network can then lead in later life to all sorts of other associations, successive and enduring, for the individual or their family’. Two mayors of Corbeil were the paper producer Paul Darblay (1858–78) and the printer Jules Crété (1878–81). The textile producer Enerst Féray was several times mayor of Essonnes between 1848 and 1878, as well as the hat-maker Léon Cassé between 1908 and 1914. Finally, Evry was led by the businessmen Paul Aguado, Paul Decauville and by some members of the Pastré family. This evolution concerns other communes of the Paris region and could thus be interpreted as an extension of the ‘red belt’ (Banlieue rouge). From the 1920s the PCF grew considerably in the inner suburbs around Paris (the ‘petite couronne’) and gained several municipalities. Interview with the secretary of the regional CGT union, 20 March 2001. The RERS (Réseaux d’Échanges Réciproques de Savoirs) were established in the early 1970s as part of a popular education movement. The principle was to allow people from all social, occupational and cultural backgrounds to offer services of knowledge, know-how and experiences. Reciprocity is a key value behind these networks. By 2000 there were 600 in France, 150 in the rest of Europe and also in Latin America and Africa. The decentralisation laws gave wider responsibilities in county planning and economic development to regions, departments and communes. Elected

88

22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

Industrial Decline, Economic Regeneration and Identities in the Paris Region political representatives were thus empowered to intervene directly in the local economy and to sort out employment problems. In fact, they received very few resources to do this. Economic development was thus more closely affected by the logic of the market. ‘IBM filialise avec Siemens son usine de Corbeil’, Le Monde, 25 April 1999, p. 17. When it is completed it will have 975 beds divided between surgical, gynaecological and obstetrics, paediatrics and neo-natal and psychiatry, an emergency centre, a high-level medical centre catering for 4000 births, eight operational buildings, and more. It will be involved in research in association with the Génopole and will have 3000 square metres dedicated to scientific research. http://www.essonne.cci.fr/atlas/epci91.htm The UDCE (Union for Corbeil-Essonnes) attempted to scientifically lay down a campaign plan through sociological analysis. The Dassault list held political meetings with, the participation of variety artists, in the style of an American election campaign (Varin, 1986, pp. 288–9). Twelve years earlier, in 1965, the results were 67 per cent for Combrisson and 33 per cent for the hat-maker Marcel Cassé. According to the French Home Office, two-thirds of urban violence in the Department (County) of Essonne occurs at Corbeil-Essonnes. See the documentary, Du côté de chez nous, by Daniel Karlin, Channel 5, 1995. In 1999 in Evry, 24 social housing associations managed an estate of 7790 social houses out of a total of 19,258 dwellings, or 40.45 per cent of social housing, much more than the law on solidarity and urban renewal requires.

References Aron Raymond, 1969, La lutte des classes, Nouvelles leçons sur les sociétés industrielles, Gallimard Idées, 377 p. Bacque Marie-Hélène and Fol Sylvie, 1997, Le devenir des banlieues rouges, l’Harmattan, 216 pp. Bensussan Gérard and Labica Georges, 1999, Dictionnaire critique du marxisme, Quadrige (2e edition), 1240 p. Bouffartigue Paul, 2001, Les cadres, fin d’une figure sociale, La dispute, 246 pp. Bourdieu Pierre, 1984, Questions de sociologie, Documents, Les editions de Minuit, 1984, 277 pp. Chassagne Serge, 1976, ‘La formation de la population d’une agglomération industrielle, Corbeil-Essonnes’, 1750/1850, Mouvement social, oct–déc, n◦ 97, pp. 90–107. Collectif, 1984, Trente ans de décentralisation industrielle en France (1954–1984), Cahiers du Centre de recherches et d’études sur Paris et l’Ile-de-France (CREPIF) n◦ 7, Septembre 1984. Collectif, 1989, Vingt cinq ans de villes nouvelles en France, Economica, 358 pp. Contrepois Sylvie, 2001, Stratégies et pratiques syndicales au tournant du XXIe siècle. Une contribution aux théories de l’action collective, Thèse pour le doctorat de sociologie, Université d’Evry.

Sylvie Contrepois 89 Contrepois Sylvie, 2003, Syndicats, la nouvelle donne. Enquête sociologique au cœur d’un bassin d’emploi industriel et ouvrier, Paris: Syllepse. Contrepois Sylvie, 2007, ‘Roger Combrisson’, Notice biographique, in Claude Pennetier (dir.), Le Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier et du mouvement social, de 1940 à mai 1968, tome 3, Paris: les Editions de l’Atelier, pp. 413–14. Crozier Michel, 1970, La société bloquée, Paris, Seuil, 246 pp. Darmagnac André, 1966, Corbeil entre le passé et l’avenir, Thèse pour le doctorat de troisième cycle, Paris. Desbrousses Hélène and T. Andréani, 1998, Objet des sciences sociales et normes de scientificité, Paris, Montréal, l’Harmattant. Di Folco (coord), 1999, Visages d’une société, L’Essonne au milieu du XIXe siècle, CRHRE, Malesherbes. Durand Jean-Pierre (dir), 1996, Le syndicalisme au futur, Paris, Syros, 364 p. Girault Jacques (dir.), 1998, Ouvriers en banlieue, XIXe-XXe siècle, Editions de l’atelier, 448 pp. Godard Francis and Bouffartigues Paul, 1988, D’une génération ouvrière à l’autre, Paris, Syros, coll Alternatives sociales, 150 pp. Gravier, J.-F. (1947) Paris et le désert français, le Portulan, In-8, 421 p., ill., cartes h. t.Paris; (1958) Flammarion, In-8, 317 p., fig., cartes; Paris et le désert français en 1972, Paris, Flammarion, 1972, 20 cm, 285 pp. Gueilhers Sophie, 1993, L’évolution de l’identité professionnelle des ouvriers imprimeurs de 1948 à 1993 chez Hélio-Corbeil, Mémoire de maîtrise, Nanterre, 90 pp. Iaurif, 1987, Géographie de l’emploi et du déséquilibre actifs – emplois en Ile-deFrance, évolution 1975 – 1982, IAURIF, deux tomes, 76 et 95 pp. Iaurif, 2001, Quarante ans en Ile-de-France, IAURIF, janvier. INSEE, Recensement général de la population de 1982. France métropolitaine, Paris: INSEE, 1982. Insee, 1990, Découper l’Ile-de-France pour l’étudier et agir, INSEE, 32 pp. Ion Jacques, 1997, La fin des militants? Paris: Editions de l’atelier. Kergoat Jacques, Boutet Josiane, Jacot Henri and Linhart Danièle, 1998, Le monde du travail, La découverte, 443 pp. Lallaoui Mehdi, 1993, Du bidonville aux HLM, Syros, 135 pp. Leblanc Frédérique, 1998, Libraire: un métier, Paris: L’Harmattan. Lefranc Georges, 1937, Histoire du mouvement syndical français, Librairie syndicale, 470 pp. Madzou Lamence, 2008, J’étais un chef de gang, La Découverte, 241 pp. Maisonnial Anny, 1969, Etude de la population de Corbeil-Essonnes d’après le recensement de 1968, mémoire de maîtrise, Paris. Mallet Serge, 1969, La nouvelle classe ouvrière, Paris, Seuil, coll point politique, 252 pp. Mouriaux René, 1998, Crises du syndicalisme français, Montchrestien, coll Clefs politique, 156 pp. Nave Odile (Coord), 2008, Le lycée de Corbeil a 50 ans! 1958–2008: un demi-siècle au lycée Robert Doisneau, Edition du Livre Unique, 47 pp. Netter Jean-Jacques and Wegrzecki Maciej, 1981, Analyse prospective de la ville de Corbeil-Essonnes, Mémoire de 3e cycle. Unité pédagogique d’architecture n◦ 6, Paris.

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Oulmont, 1999, ‘Corbeil et Essonnes: naissance d’une cité industrielle’, in Di Folco (coord.), Visages d’une société, L’Essonne au milieu du XIXe siècle, CRHRE, Malesherbes, pp. 195–236. Oulmont Philippe and Bianchi Serge (dir.), 2008, Aventures industrielles en Essonne, Ed Comité de recherches historiques sur ls revolutions en Essonne. Noiriel Gérard, 1986, Les ouvriers dans la société française, Le Seuil, Paris. Pialoux Michel and Beaud Stéphane, 1999, Retour sur la condition ouvrière, enquête aux usines Peugeot de Sochaux-Montbéliard, Fayard, 468 pp. Pinçon Michel and Pinçon – Charlot Monique, 2000, Sociologie de la bourgeoisie, La découverte, Repère, 128 pp. Terrail Jean-Pierre, 1990, Destins ouvriers, la fin d’une classe?, Paris, PUF, 275 pp. Thelot Claude, 1982, Tel père, tel fils?, Position sociale et origine familiale, Dunod, 249 pp. Touraine Alain, 1966, La conscience ouvrière, Paris, Seuil, 393 pp. Terrail Jean-Pierre, 1990, Destins ouvriers, la fin d’une classe?, Paris, PUF, 275 pp. Varin Jacques, 1986, Corbeil-Essonnes, aux rendez-vous de l’histoire, Paris, Editions sociales, 330 pp. Verret Michel, 1995, Chevilles ouvrières, Paris, Les éditions de l’Atelier, 254 pp. Voldman Danièle (dir), 1990, Les origines des villes nouvelles de la région parisienne (1919–1969), Cahier de l’IHTP n◦ 17, CNRS. Willard Claude, 1993, 1995, La France ouvrière, Des origines à nos jours, Tome 1, Editions sociales,1993, 489 p. et Tomes 2 et 3, Editions de l’atelier, 1995, 368 pp. et 266 pp. Wright Mills C., 1966, Les cols blancs, coll Points Sciences Humaines, Maspéro, 411 pp. (Première édition en 1951).

4 Two Spanish Cities at the Crossroads: Changing Identities in Elda and Alcoy María Arnal, Carlos de Castro, Arturo Lahera-Sánchez, Juan Carlos Revilla and Francisco José Tovar

4.1 Introduction The dynamics of collective identity are subject to a multiplicity of facets that render understanding both complex and precise. By comparing identity formations in two cities and regions that share many dimensions of both their past and their present, we will explore the significance of work-based collective cultures. We argue that examining differences in sector dynamics, population trends and socio-cultural dimensions are key to understanding the (re)configuration of old and new identities and cultures. The analysis of industrial cultures and identities needs to account for a whole network of social relations linked to a defined space and to social structure. A collective identity implies, too, the existence of collective action: the existence of social practices involving a set of individuals or groups of similar characteristics, in spatio-temporal contiguity who form a social field enabling the capacity to make sense of their social actions (Melucci, 2001). When this human group shares a territory, as well as a network of social relationships configuring different social fields, then the relative importance of the possible identities varies with the transitions within each of the social fields. Consequently, it may well be the case that the crisis of regional industries leads in turn to a crisis of work-based identities. For a long period of time, the cities of Elda and Alcoy (Alcoi in the Catalan/Valencian language) were characterised as configuring a significant labour market and social ‘field’ based upon shoe and textile industrial activities, respectively. These two cities are situated in eastern 91

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Two Spanish Cities at the Crossroads: Changing Identities in Elda and Alcoy

Spain in the province of Alicante, around 30 to 50 km away from the coast, and they now have populations of 55,000 (Elda) and 61,000 (Alcoy), as shown in Table 4.1. The early entrepreneurial character of local owners, expressed in the creation and fostering of industrial activity, meant that during the twentieth century an enormous dependence of local people developed in respect to these two sectors. This generated a coherent collective cultural frame, a symbolic universe, widely acknowledged inside and outside Elda and Alcoy specifically, and within Spain itself. The objective in this chapter is to examine the contribution of the different social groups to the configuration of these symbolic universes in relation to their different social positions. Our interest lies in the type of collective identities that now best define these cities and regions. We ask: Is there a predominant collective identity based on industrial traditions or, on the contrary, an emergent and new collective identity wholly removed from its industrial past? The industrial structure of Alicante province is bound to its geography. The area is located in the inner regions of Spain away from tourist areas promising sun and beach. Moreover, the city, and the region itself, constitutes the place where a whole series of social and cultural networks are threaded in ways that go far beyond productive activity – sometimes articulated by it, sometimes independent from it. Furthermore, it is worth highlighting the network of civic and cultural associations that are characteristic of eastern Spanish culture and that greatly contribute to the activities taking place within and around local celebrations and festivals. These festivals remain meaningful to the majority of the area’s population, while they also attract visitors from neighbouring cities and through national and international tourism. As a consequence, this creates the opportunity for significant collective action, as well as providing space for collective acknowledgement on the part of outside groups. Both situations are very important in the development or maintenance of a sense of collective identity, although in this instance it is an identity not directly related to workers’ occupational and industrial cultures alone. This experience of the collective must not hide the social differences in the areas. The constitution of differentiated identities, for instance, can be significant in dividing worker–owner relations. This is evident through the kind of relationships between these two groups, ranging dynamically from extremely conflictual scenarios to forms of cooperation. It is our understanding that in those moments when conflictual

Table 4.1

Alcoy Elda

150 years of population growth in Alcoy and Elda 1860/1877

1900

1920

1940

1950

1960

1970

25,196 4,328

32,053 6,166

36,463 8,116

45,792 20,402

43,880 20,477

51,096 28,380

61,371 41,500

1981 65,908 53,128

1991

2001

2009

64,579 54,350

58,358 51,593

61,552 55,168

Source: Instituto Nacional de Estadística-INE, Spanish National Statistics Institute.

93

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relationships prevail, intra-group cohesion will be greater and communitarian identities more problematic. However, when a degree of cooperation or restructuring of a mutuality of interests takes place then communitarian identities become more intense.1 In this chapter the different characteristics of identity dynamics in both Elda and Alcoy will be discussed. The individualistic character of local populations in general and owners in particular will be analysed, as well as the family structures evident in a number of firms. At the same time, we trace the integration of migrants from neighbouring Spanish towns and regions. Finally, an analysis of female work exposes its traditional subordinated position, while the study of collective workers’ movements will reveal its fragility. The thesis that we will try to sustain is that the traditional culture in the region expressed itself through a dominant artisan-like, trade-based identity. The failure of a workers’ movement in the region frustrated the appearance of a stronger working-class identity bound to collective labour and solidarity. The dominant working conditions in the sector today have deepened the crisis of trade-based identities and produced strong disaffection within industrial culture, especially among the younger generations. Nevertheless, the region still clings to traditional industries as part of its present and its future. It will be shown that public institutions today are trying to modernise the manufacturing sector while simultaneously articulating the place and significance of identity as represented through industrial heritage.

4.2 National and local context: the shoe industry in Elda Spain’s shoe industry is historically concentrated in the Valencian Autonomous Community (where 64 per cent of total Spanish shoe production takes place), and Elda is one of its most important cities for shoe manufacturing (Ybarra et al., 2004). According to Soler (2000), Elda could be considered one of the four ‘shoe cities’2 found in this region. Currently, the shoe sector is in deep crisis, underlined by a decrease in production, trade and employment (FICE, 20093 ). But this crisis cannot be understood without considering the long history of the shoe sector in Elda. Elda is close to an important axis of communication (the MadridAlicante highway) and has always combined industrial activity with agriculture. Elda’s population stood at 55,168 in 2009, having stagnated for almost 20 years (see Table 4.1). Over the last decade 41.3% of employment was in the service sector, 1% in agriculture and 6.4%

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in construction (Spanish National Statistics Institute [INE], 2004), while 51.3% of the employment is industrial and 83.6% of that is in the shoe industry. The shoe industry in Elda began in the first half of the nineteenth century (Valero et al., 1992; Miranda, 1998; Ponce y Martinez, 2003), but the industrialisation of the sector did not take place until the first third of the twentieth century. The first large factories opened between 1891 and 1903, effectively consolidating the sector. The arrival of a Spanish subsidiary of the United Shoe Machinery Company (USMC) in 1899 was a key factor for the technological developments that subsequently drove shoe manufacturing production in Spain (Miranda, 1998, pp. 68–85). Spain’s neutral position in the First World War favoured the development of the sector. Improving domestic demand, the arming of the Spanish army, the high number of orders coming from the French and UK armies in the two years from 1914 to 1916, and the penetration of other external markets led to the industry’s ultimate mechanisation. The end of the First World War marked the beginning of a period of stability expanding through the 1920s, until the international crisis of the 1930s (Valero, 1992, pp. 16–31; Miranda, 1998, pp. 116–26). From the end of the nineteenth century to the Republican period from 1931, conflicts between workers and owners characterised labour relations in Elda. Industrialists formed a network of large firms bringing together a large number of workers. Industrialisation allowed the population to grow, creating the conditions for a vigorous workers’ movement. In the case of Elda this development was controlled between 1910 and 1939 by anarchists. In fact, anarchism was dominant throughout Spain in this period: an ideological formation that was perhaps suited to an individualist and rural society facing state institutions that were relatively powerless. Since the end of the nineteenth century anarchism has become an ideology widespread among shoe workers (Valero, 1992, p. 29), and Eldian anarchism was held in high prestige throughout the rest of the country during the 1920s. Elda workers created the Single Trade Union of the Leather Sector4 and developed a negotiating strategy based on a mixture of radical and soft measures to obtain significant improvements in wages and working conditions (Valero, 1992, pp. 73–5). The Eldian version of the ‘roaring twenties’ was also reflected in the life of the town, which the growing industrial bourgeoisie and the emergent working class created cooperatively. The construction of theatres, the support of local festivals and creation of mutual societies, and the development of local educational and health services were signs of a

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new society with a rich cultural and political life (Valero, 1992, p. 74). The increased power of industrial owners and workers gave rise to republican parties, both conservative and leftist, sweeping monarchic and oligarchic parties from the local political scene (Valero, 1992, p. 78). It was a political and social phenomenon repeated in most cities in Spain and that would have important consequences for the political future of Elda and Spain itself. King Alfonso XIII called for local elections on 12 April 1931 as a response to a politically and economically chaotic situation. Coalitions of left and republican parties won the elections in almost every single village and city of Spain, including Elda. Several demonstrations were organised in every city in order to force the King to renounce his position. The King fled the country, and the Republic was proclaimed on 14 April 1931. History gathered pace during the following five years in Spain. The declaration of the Second Republic provoked the development of an ambitious programme of social, economic and political reform. This involved agrarian reform in order to redistribute property in land, the universal extension of education and the redefinition of the relationships between Catholic Church and state. Alongside this there was army reform, constitutional and electoral reform, with extension of suffrage allowing women the right to vote in 1931. All these were reforms that had been unresolved for decades. The defendants of the reform programmes came from across Spain: professional middle classes (lawyers, teachers, for instance), the liberal bourgeoisie and working classes from socialists and communists to anarchists (Graham, 2005; Casanova, 2007). The Republican period (1931–36 and then to 1939) coincided with the international economic crisis of the 1930s, and a deep contraction of international trade. Conflicts between new and old classes finally ended in a military coup d’état that restored the power of the oligarchic landowners and of the religious and military factions of Spanish society. Franco’s regime would extend until 1975 through an authoritarian and strong model of state intervention, both in the economy and in all other spheres of social and political life. Between the end of the Civil War (1939) and the beginning of the Stabilisation Plan (1959), the shoe industry, much like the whole economy of the country, passed through a period of severe scarcity and economic stagnation, caused by excessive and unwise state intervention, poor domestic demand and workers’ economic isolation. The aggressive state intervention of Franco’s regime was designed by a military and extremely nationalist elite hostile to the industrial bourgeoisie, a class

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that, in the opinion of the Francoist political elites, was too close to republican groups and, during the republican period, too distant from ’real’ Spanish and catholic moral values. As a consequence, the production structure of the shoe industry changed radically. The large firms of the 1920s and 1930s disappeared or turned into a wider network of smaller firms that started to work illegally in order to avoid the regime’s regulation. Even though Spanish purchasing power improved in the 1950s, the domestic market was still restricted. The economic policies of the Franco regime and the shoe companies’ strategies focused on external markets in order to strengthen the industry. Yet European markets were largely closed to Spanish products and the only option that Spain had was to reach out to the North American market. The possibility of accessing this market had the effect of relaxing the regime’s regulatory fever and contributed to the opening of Spanish markets to the rest of the world. The regime’s 1959 Stabilisation Plan5 meant increased economic potential. It sought to compensate for Spain’s exclusion from the main international organisations and agreements of trade and finance (Bretton Woods, IMF), and from the emerging European Economic Community project. Nevertheless, customs restrictions, tax reductions and export credits were not enough to reinvigorate the shoe industry (Miranda, 2001, p. 77). At the same time, the first wave of American delocalisations was about to start. Several American shoe firms moved their production units, in order to take advantage of lower labour costs and the rich traditions of shoe manufacturing, to several European areas which included Elda. These North American firms6 tried to supply the vast American market, expanding their production capacity through the externalisation of their activities. Eldian industrialists made contact with American entrepreneurs through the organisation of trade fairs and exhibitions (Martinez, 1992; Miranda, 2001, pp. 179–80, 183). Some of these firms became controlled by retail networks in the USA, assessing the needs of those markets, designing the production accordingly and coordinating the externalising production units in Elda. Consequently, they contributed at the same time to the decline of the shoe industry in the USA and to its development in Elda (Miranda, 2001, p. 166). This extraordinary growth of the shoe industry, based on the intensive use of labour at very low cost, attracted a large number of people from neighbouring areas such as Albacete, Murcia and Valencia. The development of the Eldian shoe industry was thus favoured through contracts with American firms. But this ensured that Eldian

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Figure 4.1

Shoe factory in the 1950s

Source: Digital Photographic Archive, CEFIRE, Elda.

industrialists became separated from important steps in the production process and orientated their efforts only on shoe manufacturing. Moreover, the production of standardised models of shoes provoked the emergence of bigger and more mechanised firms, which led some shoe workers to migrate elsewhere in Europe.7 The fact that owners did not worry about the retail aspects, the diversification of production, the promotion of trade in the search for new customers or the development of new technological processes would be extremely negative in the crisis of the 1970s, when the American distribution firms left Alicante for Asian

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countries, instigating a second wave of delocalisations (Ybarra et al., 2004, pp. 13–14; Ybarra and Santa María, 2005, p. 10; Miranda, 2001, pp. 189–90). As some people in Elda now remark, ‘Eldian people were the Americans’ first “Chinese”’. Dependence on the American market and on American retail firms intensified the crisis. This wave of delocalisations also impacted on other European regions and provoked several developed countries to sign the Multi Fibre Agreement (MFA) in 1974 in order to impose quotas on the export of products from developing countries (Egea, 1995; Moreno, 1995). These measures restricting world trade allowed the slow recuperation of the Spanish shoe industry. The 1970s and the 1980s were decades of enormous social, political and economic changes in Spain, when the transition to democracy took place. Spanish democratic transition followed the death of General Franco in 1975, converting the legal, political and economical structures of the Franco regime into a liberal democracy. At the same time that European liberal democracies and welfare states were starting to be called into question, Spain’s social construction was just beginning. In 1977, trade unions and political parties were legalised for the first time since their prohibition in 1939; a Workers’ Act was passed in 1980; a national health system with universal coverage followed; a public education system was developed; and an extensive system of social benefits was introduced. The configuration of this political framework guaranteed workers’ economic, social and political rights, but these objectives were soon to be reversed. Like Penelope, the Spanish socialist government seemed to be destroying at night what was constructed in sunlight during the day. In 1982 the Socialist Party won a majority in the general election. In 1983 an Industrial Restructuring Law was passed, and in 1984 the workers’ Act was reformed in order to promote the deregulation of the labour market. This encouraged the use of temporary contracts, reducing the cost of dismissal and unemployment benefits (Bilbao, 1993; Prieto, 2002). In short, the resolution of the crisis between 1977 and 1986 meant the almost simultaneous combination of both social-democratic and neoliberal programmes in a relatively brief period. Paradoxically, it was the Socialist Party (PSOE) that implemented both programmes in practice. From this perspective, Felipe González, socialist leader and government president from 1982 to 1996, was in fact the precursor of the so-called ‘third way’. These changes would have an immediate effect in Elda. On the one hand, the most important was the appearance of a spectacular ’assembly-like’ workers’ movement in August 1977 (Martínez, 1992,

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pp. 159–65), when a mass meeting of shoe workers organised a strike to demand better conditions for labour independently of both the political parties and the main trade unions. It proved a surprising and atypical movement if we take into account the conditions in which it emerged: a majority of workers came from rural areas, were barely organised and were based in medium-sized production centres, with some workers longing to own their own businesses. Under paternalistic regimes, however, this form of mobilisation appeared to be the only way workers would be able to seize some level of control. The most common response to the crisis consisted of a strategy based on the reduction of labour costs that led to a progressive worsening of working conditions. This strategy had two forms: one consisted of signing temporary employment contracts and in paring wages down to the minimum legal level; the second involved some key firms deciding to work illegally, hiding their production activities in order to improve their competitiveness in the global and open market. Both strategies weakened the potential for workers to resist management demands and claim better conditions, including improvements in health and safety. Shoemaking needs a clean, safe environment to avoid exposure to toxic gases emanating from glues that can lead to the medical condition known as ‘shoe paralysis’ (San Miguel et al., 2000, pp. 117–52). Moreover, although the shoe sector was not included in the 1983 State Plan of Industrial Restructuring, the owners did begin a severe de facto restructuring. This consisted of closing firms that were then immediately reopened under a different commercial and legal name with just a fraction of the former workforce, with those still employed having lost their permanent status. The entry of Spain into the European Union (EU) in 1986 allowed the industry to access the European market and to start a new period of growth, as well as improving production and trade. However, competition on costs did not disappear but increased in severity, signifying that it now constituted a structural component of the industry. By the early 1990s the shoe industry had improved its production and employment levels. From 1993 to 2000 the Eldian shoe industry then entered a new golden era (Cachón, 2005), comparable only to the earlier boom times of the 1910s and 1920s (Valero, 1992). Yet Eldian businessmen failed to direct their profits towards the technological improvement of the production process: a crisis that from 2000 continues up to the present. Indeed, this decade represents not only a period of severe economic deceleration, but a period in which the earlier model of competition seems to be ending. The final question that frightens Eldian people is

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whether the end of this model now means the definitive termination of the shoe industry itself in Elda. The key element explaining the current dramatic situation is the liberalisation of the global shoe market, linked to the process of globalisation. The MFA expired on 1 January 2005, and this meant that China and other Asian countries could then strengthen their dominant position in the shoe and textile markets and, in general, in the international economy (Egea, 1995; Moreno, 1995). The end of the MFA signified that the European shoe and textile sectors were finally fully exposed to global competition. The 2008 financial crisis accelerated the crisis in the shoe industry. In 2008 production, exports and employment indicators all fell rapidly (see below; FICE, 2009). This reflected four significant restructuring aspects (Ybarra et al., 2002, 2004, pp. 53–4; Cachón, 2005, pp. 53–68). First, the shoe industry in Elda was distinguished by a high level of fragmentation of the production process. Any stage of the production process (designing, leather cutting, sewing, assembly and storing) could be outsourced away from the companies’ centres, contrary to the 1963–74 period when firms tended to make every stage of the product within their own premises. Now, the common situation is that each company specialises in a single process. This implies several forms of possible externalisation: outsourcing, home-working and informal work. Second, the Eldian shoe industry turned extensively to outsourcing, provoking an extended and ’thick’ network of barely legal workshops. Some workers, either compulsorily or voluntarily, became owners of those workshops, with a small initial investment (a small workshop to rent and several machines can be enough to start a business); consequently, they have become small businessmen.8 Third, a high level of informal production and employment appeared. In fact, informal work is the most used form of externalisation. Ybarra et al. (2004) estimate that informal production may represent 40–50 per cent of the total production of the sector in Elda, which could lower the final price of the product by 12–14 per cent, thus improving its competitiveness. This proportion is perhaps higher in times of economic crisis, when work in shoemaking can serve as an informal refuge for workers made redundant elsewhere. On the other hand, temporary contracts are also very frequent, as they allow businessmen and workshop owners to pass on to their workers the risks associated with the discontinuity of an activity that stops during the summer months. The historical significance of informal or illegal employment in the sector is demonstrated clearly in Table 4.2.

102 Two Spanish Cities at the Crossroads: Changing Identities in Elda and Alcoy Table 4.2 Hidden employment in the Elda shoe industry, 1935–2004 Year

Employment (by census)

Declared employment

Hidden employment (%)

1935 1965 1970 1980 2004

7, 542 13, 854 16, 317 12, 370 5, 478

2, 402 7, 392 9, 805 8, 881 3, 067

68.2 46.5 39.9 28.2 44

Source: Bernab´e (1984) and Ybarra et al. (2004).

The methods of hiding production embrace contractual irregularities, the illegal working of extra hours, which are sometimes not paid, or firms operating without any legal structure and providing illegal workshops that produce for legal firms. It is also very easy to find the infamous ’rotating’ contract, where workers move from a legal to an illegal status and back (Ybarra et al., 2004, pp. 59–61). Fourth, the shoe sector has been traditionally linked to homeworking, where there is a clear sexual division of labour: sewing and storage for women and design and cutting for men (San Miguel, 2000). Women sew shoes at home, to provide money for the household while taking care of children and doing the housework. Some of the consequences of these transformations have resulted in a permanent deterioration of working conditions. Outcomes included a shortage of specialised workers, the declining reputation of the shoemaker profession among young people, a degree of decline in product quality, a rupture of confidence between workers and businessmen and, in general, a loss of confidence in the future itself (Ybarra et al., 2004, pp. 15–16; Cachón, 2005, p. 65). As a consequence, collective work-based identities are certainly experiencing a severe challenge, and the younger generation, even those working in the sector, do not strongly identify with this traditional and valuable trade. However, as long as it remains a relevant industrial activity, the possibility exists of identification with shoemaking work. This identification may still exist even under conditions of exploitation or precariousness: a working life that under present conditions precludes workers’ chances of a decent standard of living and of a decent future retirement settlement. Eldian collective identities will thus be configured predominantly by other axes of identification, as will be discussed below.

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4.3 National and local context: the textile-cloth industry in Alcoy The general socio-economic context and Spain’s historical evolution presented in the previous section are again sketched here in the context of the textile industry, with a central focus on the textile town of Alcoy. Spanish textiles can be defined as a mature though not very technologically dynamic industry where labour productivity is the main productive resource (Carpi et al., 1997). Around a fifth of the industry is located in Valencia (Masiá Buades and Capó Vicedo, 2004). In 2000 17 per cent of the companies of the region were in the textile industry, which provided 22 per cent of all jobs (around 40,000 workers) and 20 per cent of total business turnover. These figures indicate the social and territorial importance of these small to medium-sized textile companies (Generalitat Valenciana, 2006). They are concentrated in the districts of L’Alcoiá (Valley of Alcoy), the Comtat-Cocentaina and in the Vall d’Albaida (Ontinyent) and are of three main types: a small number of medium-sized companies (200–500 employees), a large number of small companies (50–100 employees) and another large group of tiny textile (home) workshops and ‘micro-companies’ (<10 employees) that specialise in only selected manufacturing phases (such as spinning and threading). Alcoy is located in a geographically highly difficult to access area, in a wide and deep valley that has historically hindered communication and transport. Nonetheless, the town is surrounded by several rivers providing abundant water resources. This favoured the installation of water-powered factories for textile production next to the river beds from as early as the thirteenth century, some of which are still today producing textile fabrics and dyeing, while others are now represented as restored industrial heritage sites. Alcoy’s population stood at 61,552 in 2009 covering an area of approximately 130 square kilometres. In the early 2000s, 53.6 per cent of the town’s employment was in services, 0.9 per cent in agriculture and 8.3 per cent in construction (Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE), 2004), while 37.9 per cent of employment was industrial and just over half (52.5 per cent) of this is in the textile industry. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the industrial and textile history of Alcoy, however, seems to be nearing its end, with the offshoring and closure of many textile firms and an increase in unemployment, markedly affecting historical labour identities.

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Figure 4.2

Old industrial area and Canalejas Viaduct (Alcoy)

From the nineteenth century onwards, continuous technological innovation took place in the region’s vertically centralised and mechanised factories, incorporating later, diverse mechanisation technologies substituting for manual spindles (Jordá Borrell, 1975; García Domínguez, 1981; Berg, 1985; Cuevas, 1999). This process was based on the production of low-quality fabrics, oriented towards low consumption social groups in other Spanish regions or in newly independent Spanish America. Mechanisation was exclusively oriented to the reduction of human labour and to lower skills, and thus to increasing the extraction of surplus value (Espiago, 1978). This Taylorised intensive production model aimed at achieving employer organisational independence from the skilled weavers (Cuevas, 2006b). This production model still dominates today.9 The growth of the industry at that time produced an enormous concentration of Alcoyan industrial activity around the textile industry. In the second half of the nineteenth century around two-thirds of the town’s population worked in textiles (Cuevas, 2006a); by 1910, 80 per cent of total industrial production was textiles (Beneito et al., 2006a).

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However, the expansion of the industry did not come without a struggle. Workers’ movements emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, developing later in that century through intense labour conflicts and revolts. In the 1820s the first Luddite actions took place in Alcoy, when a huge ’mob’ of male and female workers from Alcoy and neighbouring Cocentaina destroyed the early mechanical looms (Torró Gil, 1999). The main aims of these revolts were to prevent the end of the putting-out system, to reject the new wage system in centralised factories and/or the loss of workers’ control over speed of work (Cuevas, 2006b), as well as to oppose the mechanisation of work. In 1873 the anarchist-inspired ‘Petrol Revolution’10 (El Petrolio) occurred, an event still mythically recalled in today’s Alcoyan imaginary. A Bakuninist anarcho-syndicalist group called a general strike (a ‘total’ revolutionary action) supported by 6000 workers (out of a total population of 28,000). They demanded wage increases and a reduction in the working day to eight hours. During the revolt the town’s mayor was killed and there was severe repression of the strikers, who failed to achieve any of their objectives (Beneito et al., 2006a). This revolution had such negative repercussions that even Engels (1873) criticised it as a ‘bad example’ of class struggle.11 Yet the revolution in Alcoy established its union culture and politics, and also contributed to the later history of industrial relations in the textile industry: textile industrialists’ strategies focused not so much on improving working conditions inside the factories, but in developing practices of industrial paternalism that focused on workers’ living conditions. This meant investing in improvements of Alcoy’s community infrastructure (Cuevas, 2006b). For example, bridge building was promoted and financed by local industrialists, as were industrial colleges, housing for workers, theatres, collective festivals and sports activities, as well as mutual societies, thus creating a symbolic image with entrepreneurs taking care of the town, or as captains of industry who not only created employment but also the necessary infrastructures for the enjoyment of the whole town. From the nineteenth century a bourgeois class dominated the political and industrial development of Alcoy until the end of Franco’s dictatorship in 1975 (Beneito et al., 2006b). Around 20 industrial families had for generations owned the largest and most important textile factories, while controlling companies in other industries such as metallurgy, paper manufacturing and finance. This had created an economic ‘power elite’ covering both business and politics.

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These textile industrialists built and lived in a bourgeois neighbourhood, still clearly identifiable today. They invested in stylish (modernist) houses, community buildings and leisure spaces (theatres, churches), as well as in luxury residences and social clubs for their own bourgeois socialisation, reflecting symbolically, even today, the social power of textile industrialists. Meanwhile, up until the 1970s, segregated workers’ neighbourhoods were also being developed. These were characterised by dire living conditions (neither proper ventilation nor running water), tiny, poor-quality buildings and degraded urban environments (epidemics, factory pollutants and smoke), with enduring malnutritionand labour-related diseases. These harsh conditions were only finally removed in the post-Franco era with the coming of Spanish democracy. Production stagnated until the 1910s when, as in the case of shoe manufacturing, Spain’s neutrality in the First World War encouraged the Spanish textile industry to grow rapidly. A wholesale mechanisation took place in the industry after the technological introduction of the first self-acting mules in one of the biggest and most important integrated factories12 (Jordá Borrell, 1975; Cuevas, 1999). However, during this whole period, the sector continued to face low domestic demand for most textile products as a consequence of the limited consumption capacity of an impoverished and underdeveloped Spanish population, something congruent with manufacture of low-quality products for low prices. From the early twentieth century until the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), the CNT (the National Workers’ confederation), a libertarian anarcho-syndicalist trade union, represented the dominant ideology of Alcoyan workers. It organised repeated strike activity for improvements in textile workers’ conditions in 1909, in 1919 and again in 1933, when the textile trades struck and occupied their factories for several weeks (Beneito et al., 2006a). At the beginning of the Civil War, the CNT ‘nationalised’ all 128 Alcoy textile factories, but when the Spanish Republican forces lost the war, all the factories were returned to their previous private owners and the trade unions and workingclass movement were repressed by General Franco’s fascist, authoritarian regime. The traditional industrial (and anarchist) fighting spirit of Alcoy’s working class then disappeared. In the post-war period (1940–59), the shortage of raw materials and the loss of both energy sources and capital impeded technological renovation, which meant the continuing use of obsolete 1920s machinery, ensuring low-quality production. However, by the 1960s, the technological systems began to be modernised and transformed as

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the new economic policy (National Stabilisation Plan, 1959) started to challenge the autarky of the dominant economic system. Through a slow but continuous process of liberalisation of the Spanish economy and its integration into the international economy, internal demand increased for textile products as higher-quality fabrics were demanded by an emergent, albeit small, middle class. This helped in the diversification and segmentation of the industry. However, in contrast to the case of the shoe industry, in the 1970s’ context of a continuing Spanish protectionism that handicapped their export potential, continuous technological and organisational innovations produced an overproduction crisis (Costa and Duch, 2004). At the same time, between 1974 and 1976 following the end of Franco’s regime, a strong working-class movement fighting for better wages and working conditions, contesting new working methods (intensification of working processes) and long hours and seeking paid vacations and a 40-hour working week, led to a large number of strikes (Moreno Sáez and Parra Pozuelo, 2007). By the 1980s unemployment had increased as a result of the emergent international economic crisis. Political uncertainty dominated the transition process, leading to entry into the European Economic Community (EEC). This, however, implied an increase in foreign competition from other European economies in the internal Spanish textile-cloth market, as well as greater competition from the developing world (ACTE, 1998, p. 79). The Spanish and Valencian textile industry was less competitive than new partners like Greece and Portugal, let alone such new international competitors as Turkey, India, China and Bangladesh. A restrictive monetary policy raising interest rates and the financal costs of Spanish business hit small and medium-sized companies especially hard. Consequently, textile production fell sharply, with the closure of companies and further unemployment, while segments of the industry went ‘informal’, becoming networks of small, irregular workshops or returning to becoming household workshops (with mainly female employment). This process intensified in the 1992–93 recession. Only a small number of medium-sized companies specialising in higher-quality products (‘technical textiles’) were not affected by competition from undeveloped economies during the 1990s (Smith et al., 2010). Problems intensified once again from 2005, however, with the global liberalisation of textile production. This context embedded a model of individualised and highly discretionary industrial relations, with low-quality production and a hegemonically Taylorist managerial culture in small firms, and reinforced traces of industrial paternalism and an intense and traditional distrust

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of unions and their activities in medium-sized companies (Tomás Carpi and Torrejón Velardiez, 2001). In fact, social and class segregation had always been clear-cut. Opposing social formations shared neither social spaces nor collective, mutual experiences. Yet, as a result of a social consensus sustained on the notion of capital and labour as citizens and members of the same community who could combine in the mutual interest of the town, factories whose workers had anarchist traditions and local industrialists had operated cooperatively during most of the previous ten years (Arensberg, 1942; Whyte, 1946; Warner and Low, 1947; Warner, 1963). This functionalist sociological approach (Davis and Moore, 1945) allowed a management discourse to accentuate cooperation in industrial relations. Industrial relations were thus moved outside the factory as well, reinforcing a local/regional cultural identity (Nash, 1989). From the point of view of managers and industrialists, a specific identity was constituted in which the town’s intense industrial development was the product of the industrialists’ historically continuous entrepreneurship that had overcome any geographical limitations to open the industry to outside markets, thus creating employment and infrastructures for the whole community. This community identity implied a relationship between companies and workers that can be viewed as ‘reciprocity obligations’ (Polanyi, 1971). These were forms of investments in town improvements in exchange for workers’ ‘loyalty’, all of which encoded as acts performed for the good of the whole town (’We all are Alcoy people’). This entailed the decline of the anarchist labour movement and a reduction in the number and intensity of conflicts, despite the transition occurring in a period of intense deindustrialisation. A decline in contestation took place, although a 12-hour working day remains in force for male workers (fundamentally weavers) and female workers (cloth manufacturing) as it has for the last 60 years, and this despite the fact that around a third of the workforce is paid informally or on an irregular basis and that working conditions are generally bad. Currently, a discussion is taking place on the need to reorient the Spanish textile industry toward more innovative and high-quality and value-added production, with a more relevant role for design and finishing processes and with more integrated and coordinated companies increasing their capacity to generate greater economies of scale (Masiá Buades and Capó Vicedo, 2004). Nevertheless, this continuous history of restructuring signifies challenges for social and economic development, and for collective forms of identity practice experienced through

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institutional and culture frameworks (Contreras, Gallego and Nacher, 2001). The extent of these challenges was underlined from 2000 to 2005, when around 15 per cent of jobs and production were lost in the run-up to the end of the MFA (Generalitat Valenciana, 2006). The result, even before protection was finally removed, was increased labour uncertainty and vulnerability accompanied by more part-time jobs and the loss of traditional trades. The main sociological outcome has manifested itself as distrust of a future that will ‘no longer be the same’ (Obiol, 2007), and a strong possibility of breaking the collective identity traditionally built around the textile-cloth sector in the last 150 years (Tomás Carpi et al., 1997). The importance of the continuous decline in the local textile industry and its impact on the identity of Alcoy over the last three decades can be summarised in one of the strike banners seen at picket lines in 1981: ‘Save Textile Industry, Save Alcoy’ (Hernández, 2006a, p. 518). At a celebration of the 750th anniversary of the foundation of the city in 2006 a local historian emphasised: Alcoy is an industrial city . . . and what was good for the industry was good for the citizens. Our collective soul was perfectly settled inside looms’ noises and in the smoke of chimneys. The civic pulse beat according to factory schedules and pace, and a strong feeling of security always existed because of the capacity for survival of those factories, where different Alcoyan generations worked and lived, like a regular and natural flow . . . The ’flight’ of companies toward other places and the unstoppable crisis of traditional sectors showed us a different reality questioning our monolithic image of a self-sufficient and proud industrial city . . . the feeling of lack of confidence is growing stronger. (Llopis, 2006, p. 542) Thus, Alcoyan people are already in the process of reinventing their collective enterprise around a different axis. This emerges through attention to long-standing traditions (most notably the Moors and Christians festivals) that now serve as a basis for maintaining the pride in being an Alcoyan citizen.

4.4 Questions of culture and identity As we have already suggested, the shoe and textile industries in the Vinalopó River area and in the muntanya [mountain] regions of Valencia

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are industrial forms that articulate modes of tradition, culture and identity. But into what formations do these cultures alter and emerge? The early industrial cultures of the region of Alcoy and Elda expressed a strong entrepreneurial character. Unlike other industries whose owners may not belong to, or be part of, the community, in their case companies were products of the initiative of the local middle classes, and in some instances of a working class, as with other Spanish regions and industrial sectors – machine tools in the Basque country, metalworking in Madrid. As a consequence, individual initiative may be stronger than communitarian commitment as the inclination to stand out from the rest was, and is, apparently evident. In fact, individualism has been identified as one of the features of Spanish culture. Solidarity seems to be limited to the family, and not to the larger community. This trait may, however, clearly be exacerbated in entrepreneurial cultures. Nevertheless, regional cultures such as these are not necessarily the product of external actors alone. Indeed, what we have called the local entrepreneurial character instigates, potentially, active responses on the part of local populations. Warner et al. (1963) emphasised the fact that for owners and managers, belonging or not to the community may have important consequences for industrial relations. In this case, a large number of local managers are still found in Alcoy; the firms’ owners (the local bourgeoisie) are important members of the community, defining the harmony between managers and unions. Thus a popular factory owner recently received a union award acknowledging his positive attitude towards collective bargaining. In Elda these acts of respect have become rare, a consequence of the deterioration of working conditions in the shoe industry in the region and their impact on notions of community. We can also see Alcoy culture as having been shaped through more familial structures and forms than those of more traditional workingclass locations. In other words, the industry was principally a family affair, something due chiefly to the firm’s size. Husband, wife and even children were part of this family business, until at least several decades after the Spanish Civil War. Thus, the main identification was in relation to the trade (el oficio – métier, Beruf), rather than in relation to a collective industrial culture or associations. This is especially so in the case of the Elda shoe industry, where the extension of a putting-out system lies in home-based production. This trade-based industrial culture has always had an important gender component, constituting for us another key point: a significant

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number of women work in these industries and their involvement in the wider community may have contributed to a deeper identification with the industry itself. However, women’s participation did not usually mean their incorporation into a wider public realm and job market, as women mostly worked from home. Women failed to find a relevant role in public and collective activities with the trade unions or with workers’ movements. This might be seen as dilution of a clear work identity for women in these industries. Hence when the general trend in Spain is towards the complete incorporation of women into the labour market (even if this process of transformation is far from problematic; see Fernández Villanueva et al., 2003), they would rather choose to work in other industries – for instance, in retailing. It has also been the case that workers’ movements have emerged in these areas in ‘favourable’ periods – of growth, of political democratisation or of liberalism. Franco’s dictatorship prevented the 1930s’ workers’ movement from consolidating, but following the end of Franco’s regime and as industry experienced a renewed period of growth, workers were quick to organise and ask for their rights. In spite of the historical fragility of workers’ movements in the region, the periods of conflict between workers and owners are of great importance in terms of communitarian identity. The failed revolution of 1873 in Alcoy and the ‘assembly movement’ in 1977 in Elda are still very much present in the collective imagery of each city. The fact that these were violent outbursts is a symptom of the weakness of workers’ movements in the region, when collective bargaining was not really institutionalised and workers’ helplessness was the norm (and mobilisation was the exception). The region also received an important contingent of migrant workers from neighbouring agrarian regions, attracted by the significance of the industrial sector in terms of work. Migration proved important: it transformed a former Valencian-speaking town (Elda) into a Spanish-speaking one. The social integration of these migrants proved relatively untroubled but, and although this is an under-researched issue, these migrant workers may have been the basis for the later workers’ movement. Despite the recurrent crisis, the shoe and textile industries continue to be an important component of the culture of these regions, shaping an ‘industrial atmosphere’ across generations (Marshall, 1890; Beccatini, 1992). Nevertheless, the threat to an embedded industrial culture is that it becomes merely a thing of the past, little more than a form of heritage and folklore, rather than a way of living or lived experience itself. In this context the question could be whether the ’old’ industrial

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cultures in both regions are being replaced by newer forms of identity, and whether industrial culture is literally and simply becoming a monument or museum signifying the past. Indeed, in Elda there is already a shoemaking museum and a sculpture dedicated ‘to the shoemaker family’ [sic], as a token of the town’s industrial past. In Alcoy several old factories have been transformed into university buildings (Valencia Polytechnic University), aiming to offer professional industrial engineering training for the young people of the region who seek work in other trades. Under these circumstances, what are the possibilities for the survival of an industrial-based identity in the region? Given the individualistic character of this industrial culture, a dominant trade-based identity might be found marked by the pride, experience and the knowledge of the art of making shoes or sewing clothes, as well as through the excellence of the outcome that is then constitutive as a ‘source of the self’ (Taylor, 1989). This kind of identity may also be the basis for a collective identification bound by cultural traditions (Sainsaulieu, 1977; Dubar, 2000). Historically, Elda formed modes of identity through workers’ solidarity and mobilisation, constituting conditions amenable to a collective sense of self. For a variety of reasons, however, these experiences ultimately failed, weakening the possibilities for communitarian identity, signifying a different relationship between workers and the wider community itself. The conditions that made a collective identity possible were a certain Taylorisation of the industry (higher levels of production and greater numbers of workers under the same working conditions), the perception of real possibilities of improving working conditions, as well as the subsequent estrangement between workers and owners. Yet the persistent crisis of the sector stalled this. Production shrank and the power of companies required almost heroic acts to resist the abusive human resource action and practices of management. There has been a tendency over the last decade of progressive abandonment of the sector, mainly for jobs in realms of construction or real estate. Indeed, this was an astonishing period of economic growth, though mainly in the tourist and retailing sectors. In terms of identity, thus, a process of disaffection occurred towards traditional industrial cultures, especially among the younger generation. Young people, especially women, no longer work for the shoe industry and seek instead other sectors. Even shoe workers recommend their children to resist working in the industry and to look for alternatives. Thus, unlike the experience in other contexts, where workers mourn the loss of a highly valued past, in Elda workers are less and less committed to the regional tradition.

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In the case of Alcoy, ‘communitarian industrial relations’ reinforced the symbolic identity of being alcoyano (coming from Alcoy), expressing an extreme ‘pride for Alcoy’. A strong identity is still shared by managers and workers who believe that they have historically fought together against geographical transformations, deficient infrastructures and existential isolation. Of course, capital and labour have had many local conflicts but they both claim to seek the best of outcomes for the town.13 . Here, we also suggest that there is more to collective identity than work-based identification. In the case of Spain, and especially the Valencia region, there is an outstanding feature of civic sociability that forms a strong basis for a solid sense of belonging to the locality or region. We highlighted festivities that are celebrated year after year and that structure an important part of local social bonds. The Valencian Fallas, for instance, are well known nationally and internationally. This is especially so in the case of Alcoy, where the Moors and Christians festivals are the basis for a permanent structure of social relationships, taking place annually (22–24 April) to commemorate a local legend recounting the help that Saint George granted to Christian troops in 1276 to expel Muslim invaders (Mansanet Ribes, 1963). The Moors and Christians parade, as well as other social activities around St. George’s day, take almost a whole year to prepare and display. Several groups (filás) are formed, and in each of these male workers, managers and owners alike participate in the preparations. But this is not an equal participation, rather one that corresponds more or less to the social stratification of the community in terms of social prestige. Bourgeois members tend to lead the Moors’ or Christians’ parade battalions, while workers represent the Middle Ages’ soldiers of both sides. The latent function (Merton, 1963) of these festivities connects historically with communitarian industrial relations: some of the most important filaes were founded and financed by families of factory owners, with their responsibility of ostentatiously covering an important part of these costs, one way of redistributing their economic surplus. At the same time, these filaes have traditionally been organised in a democratic and egalitarian mode, combining the participation of managers, employees (white collar) and industrial workers (blue collar). Metaphorically, in each filá all members parade elbow to elbow with no differences between them. However, female presence is still forbidden and denied the same voice and vote in the filá’s decision making. This includes meeting every week of the year to prepare the following Moors and Christians festivities, sharing social spaces and living experiences (Coloma, 1962).14 These shared activities

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in part solved and channelled industrial conflicts and cleavages between managers and workers inside the filá. Through these forms of cultural expression more cooperative and less conflictive industrial relations are obtained (again symbolically, or metaphorically), weakening and incorporating a labour movement of anarchist origins. Thus a shared community identity might contribute to overcoming earlier conflicts of class identity. Elda also holds Moors and Christians festivals,15 as well as Fallas as elsewhere in Valencia. Here, however, the festivals have always been more egalitarian (costs are not as high as they are for some Alcoyan owners) since the owners never had the economic power of their Alcoyan counterparts. These festivities reinforce a communitarian identity, where all citizens belong to the same territorial entity, even through differences are shaped through class, gender, family, age or trade differences. But how can this collective identity become the basis on which to build an industrial future of any sort? Are there new generations of workers emerging from these industries embracing their traditions, skills and crafts? What kind of new social and collective identities are being formed?

Figure 4.3

Moors and Christians Parade 2009. Comparsa Zíngaros (Elda)

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4.5 Region and regeneration The acute economic crises experienced in these regions, particularly since the 1980s, make it difficult to imagine an economic recovery in the short term of the textile and shoe industries in Alcoy and Elda; neither are the wholesale abandonment of the industries nor the redirection of the labour force elsewhere alternatives. Indeed, both national and central administrations have been bent on preserving the industrial heritage and attempting to relaunch production to avoid the ultimate closing down of factories and workshops. The Footwear Museum in Elda (Museo del Calzado de Elda), or the project to convert an old factory situated on the river in Alcoy into a Museum of Industrial Archaeology are clear examples of the attempt to preserve their legacies. Alongside this, the local and national government agencies, together with regional technological institutes, remain determined to go beyond merely heritage narratives in order to present different proposals for relaunching working industries. In any case, there seems to be a common agreement that relaunching both industries requires the promotion of quality, design and innovation of the product. According to Ybarra and Santa María (2005), relaunching the footwear industry would need reoriention of its productive and business organisation to develop major brands, specialisation in higher value-added production, larger investment in R&D, as well as improvements in the industry’s design, promotion and distribution methods. These concerns seem difficult to address at this point, however, owing to the pervasive and systematic cost-reduction strategies. At the same time the local workforce refuses to work in these industries, reflecting the poor conditions of labour. Moreover, as indicated above, a shortage of qualified labour in Elda underlines workers’ movement to alternative industries. The recent structural crises have hit the labour force hard, and it is implausible that other neighbouring industries – toy manufacturing and nougat production, for instance – in the Alicante region could absorb the loss of jobs in Alcoy and Elda. These other industries, having an identical small business industrial organisation, suffer similar problems to those of the shoe and textile trades. In addition to construction and commerce, Alcoy’s local government administration sees the development of tourism and environment sectors as possible contributors to socio-economic growth. Alcoy tourist action plans (Plan de Acción ‘Alcoi Turístico’ and el Plan de Dinamización Turística de Alcoy) aim to promote Alcoy’s touristic

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potential by creating a brand image, using a restored historical environment and buildings, including the converted riverside factory museum. Among the merits of these plans is the fact that Alcoy’s centre was declared an Historical Artistic Area in 1982. The area has several Art Nouveau-style modernist buildings constructed originally by the local industrial bourgeoisie; it includes several bridges (the most ancient dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and several nature reserves such as the Aitana Sierra and the natural parks of Font Roja and Mariola. Other prominent historical and artistic displays include a unique group of prehistoric cave paintings in the Mediterranean Arch, and in La Sarga. These have been declared ‘Properties of Cultural Interest’ and classified as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Other attractions include the Moors and Christians Festival, declared to be of ‘International Tourist Interest’ by the Spanish Government in 1980, and the Three Kings of Orient Parade, designated of ‘National Cultural Interest’ by the Ministry of Culture. The strategic plan from Alcoy’s Chamber of Commerce (Alcoy, 2005) reveals an attempt to combine industrial tradition with a muchneeded revitalisation of the city, all part of the renewal of the area through tourism. One key aim of Alcoy’s tourist board is to foreground industrial heritage, and thus the region’s historical roots. This regeneration includes the Explora centre, located in an ancient textile factory, which contains a section dedicated to the industrial history of the city. Added to this, an old industrial factory is now being restored and will become the Regional Firefighters’ Museum, the Museum of the Festivals (Fiesta), the Archaeological Museum Camilo Visedo and the Cervantes Anti-Raid Shelter Museum. There is a plan to convert three factories into museums: the ancient Els Solers textile factory, located in the ancient industrial quarter at the head of Molinar river, the Museum of the Epiphany Feast and the Art Collection Museum. In Elda, a recent strategic plan (Plan Estratégico de Elda 2010, IDELSA, 2010) also mentions tourism as a means of stimulating socio-economic growth, although it does not develop or mention guidelines for setting it up and getting it running. In fact, the only real industrial proposal currently on offer at the local Tourist Information Office is a tour of footwear outlet shops. Here, therefore, it does not look as if the development of tourism is a real alternative springboard for relaunching of the area.

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4.6 Conclusions The two areas discussed in this chapter are now passing through highly uncertain phases in their history, with the current context being of decline. In Alcoy, the textile industry can no longer expect to produce a generation of owners to guarantee its continuity, while in Elda the shoemaking industry appears likely to survive, but only under very different conditions (with much reduced but higherquality production). Thus both areas are entering a period of reflection about their own futures, seen in the context of their past (Contreras et al., 2001). However, we suggest that this transformation potentially constitutes the re-enactment of communitarian identities, thereby eluding the feeling of anomie as both the product and expression of loss. Comparing these two modes of working provides insights into questions of identity and cultural forms and traditions. Industrial, social and cultural processes have been explored throughout, underlining both the differences and similarities that are the result of historical changes and the place of social and cultural forms and formations. In our arguments, we saw that shoe and textile companies are predominantly small or medium-sized; in the textile industry mechanisation and investment has been, nevertheless, at a higher level. This resulted in the emergence of relatively larger and economically stronger companies and ruling élites. The Taylorisation of Alcoy’s textile industry barely touched Elda. Other areas of difference between the two cities were marked in forms of social stratification: Alcoy’s neat and clear division between bourgeoisie and workers is not reproduced in Elda. The two histories of industrial relations also differ. During periods of production and growth, paternalism dominated in both areas, while emergent crises in the regions have been dealt with differently. In Alcoy, collective bargaining allowed for a relatively trouble-free industrial decline of the textile industry and, accordingly, more positive industrial relations. In Elda, on the other hand, uncontrolled restructuring and large swathes of illegal employment resulted in much stronger tensions between capital and labour. While internal population migration has been key in both cities, its impact on local identities and cultures has been different. In Elda migration has been a more recent and explosive experience, doubling its population between 1950 and 1970. This element, together with the geographical situation (Alcoy’s relative isolation in contrast to Elda’s

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greater accessibility), may have meant configuration of different relations toward tradition. Alcoy remains proud of its traditions (preserving heritage sites as well as the formation of its festivities), while Elda is proud of its modernity and openness, thus making the integration of incomers easier, as illustrated by the incorporation of Eldian women in its Moors and Christians Festivals. These changes highlight the different processes affecting identity transformation for whole generations of people. The chapter has detailed the impacts of these transitions experienced through the formation or continuation of work-based identities, and the role of the city and region in the evolution or reconstitution of new cultures and identities.

Notes 1. Although this statement is worded through the vocabulary of social identity theory (Tajfel, 1978), it is in line with neo-Marxist thought that considers that class solidarity is stronger when workers are under similar labour conditions (Edwards, 1979), making the separation from management more evident. 2. The idea that Elda and the other industrial cities in Alicante can be considered as proper ‘industrial districts’, in Piore and Sabel’s (1982) terms, is not universally supported. Industrial districts represent a model of organisation of production in which the role of local institutions and community is extremely relevant for the development of the region (Tortajada and Fernández e Ybarra, 2004), but the degree of integration that occurs in Italy is lacking in Elda. 3. FICE (Federation of Spanish Footwear Industries) publishes a year-book that includes the most important industry data. From 2004 to 2008, production (by value) fell by 27.5 per cent and employment by 28.7 per cent (FICE, 2009). Year-books can be consulted at www.fice.es. 4. In Spanish, Sindicato Único del Ramo de la Piel. 5. In these years, Spain also benefited through its own section of the Marshall Aid successor European Recovery Program (ERP), organised and financed by the USA in order to reconstruct European countries after the Second World War and to limit communist influence in Europe (Hobsbawm, 1994, p. 240). 6. Including the Atlantic Shoes Corporation (Miranda, 2001, p. 180), Nina, Caresia, Ralph Cohen, Intershoe, Nine West and Stuart Weitzmann. He still lives in Elda several months a year and is now acknowledged as the creator of the one-million dollar shoes provided to one Oscar nominee every year. 7. Strangely perhaps, most Eldian shoe workers migrated to a small town in Switzerland, Porrentuy – although this migration movement was less marked than those taking place in other Spanish regions (Hernández, 2006b).

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8. Although there are no specific figures for Elda, data regarding shoe company structure (by numbers of workers and firms) in the Valencian Autonomous Community are as follows. Workers Firms

3–9 637

10–19 294

20–49 236

50–99 26

100–200 7

Source: FICE (2009).

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

As there is no reason to think that the Eldian shoemaking industry diverges from this pattern, we estimate that around 60 per cent of the firms in Elda have fewer than ten workers. Two US documentary films illustrate the complete manufacturing processes of this textile industry, as well as providing reflections on their socioeconomic and identity importance for the areas where this activity developed. In spite of their age, The Greater Goal: Human Dividends from American Industry (Textile Information Service-uses, 1953) and How Textile Mills are Modernising (General Electric Company, 1948) are especially outstanding. Both can be downloaded at www.archive.org. It is termed ‘the Petrol Revolution’ because the striking workers used petroleum oil torches at night, and oral sources recalled that for many days the whole city smelled of petrol. This work was first published in English as K. Marx, F. Engels, Revolution in Spain, Lawrence & Wishart, International Publishers, 1939. These are some excerpts from this text that express Engels’ upset about Bakuninist strategies and actions: ‘At the same time the general STRIKE became the order of the day in Alcoy. ( . . . ) And so victory had been won. The Solidarité Révolutionnaire writes jubilantly: "Our friends in Alcoy, numbering 5,000, are masters of the situation." And what did these "masters" do with their "situation"? ( . . . ) we learn that a "Committee of Public Safety", that is, a revolutionary government, was then set up in Alcoy. ( . . . )And what did this Committee of Public Safety do? What measures did it adopt to bring about "the immediate and complete emancipation of the workers"? It forbade any man to leave the city, although women were allowed to do so, provided they . . . had a pass! The enemies of all authority re-introducing a pass! Everything else was utter confusion, inactivity and helplessness. ( . . . )The Committee of Public Safety resigned, and on July 12 the troops entered the town without meeting any resistance, the only promise made to the Committee of Public Safety for this being . . . a general amnesty. The Alliance "masters of the situation" had once again extricated themselves from a tight spot. And there the Alcoy adventure ended.’ The index of textile production increased from 100 in 1870 to 210 in 1890. In 1900, it was 417 and in 1916, 690 (Cuevas, 1999). As demonstrated in interviews conducted by the authors with local trade union officials and managers in November 2008. The Moors and Christians festivities of 2009 and their parades feature in these documentaries: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-oo5IRdxK0 http: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-Zf8_J2UuE&feature=related.

120 Two Spanish Cities at the Crossroads: Changing Identities in Elda and Alcoy 15. The 2009 Elda Moors and Christians parades can be watched in this production: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-O8P4nbnMg.

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122 Two Spanish Cities at the Crossroads: Changing Identities in Elda and Alcoy Moreno, M. (1995) ‘Los acuerdos de zona gris en la Ronda de Uruguay: Especial referencia al acuerdo multifibras’ in Noticias de la Unión Europea, 129, pp. 87–92. Nash, J. (1989) From Tank Town to High Tech, Albany: SUNY. Obiol, Sandra (2007) Vivint en la incertesa: Estratègies de benestar dels treballadors del textil a l’eix Alcoi-Ontinyent, Gandía: CEIC Alfons El Vell. Polanyi, K. (1971) The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press. Ponce Herrero, G. and Martínez Puche, A. (2003) La industria del calzado en el Alto Vinalopó (1850–1977): origen y expansión de una manufactura, Alicante; Universidad de Alicante, Departamento de Geografía Humana. Prieto, C. (2002) ‘La degradación del trabajo o la norma social del trabajo flexibilizado’ en Sistema, número 168–9. Sainsaulieu, Renaud (1977) L’identité au travail, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 3rd edn, 1988. San Miguel del Hoyo, B. (2000) Elche: la fábrica dispersa. Los trabajadores de la industria del calzado, los cambios en las condiciones de vida y de trabajo, Alicante; Instituto de Cultura ‘Juan Gil-Albert’. San Miguel del Hoyo, B. Domingo Pérez, C., et al. (2000) Zapatos de cristal: la mujer como protagonista en la industria valenciana del calzado Valencia, Confederación Sindical CCOO-PV. Santonja Cardón, J. Ll and Segura Martí, J. M. (coord.) (2007) Historia de Alcoy, Alcoy: Editorial Marfil. Smith, A., Enrech, C., Molinero, C. and Ysás, P. (2010) ‘Spanish Textile Workers, 1650–2000’, in Voss L. H. van, Hiemstra-Kuperus, E. and Nederveen Meerkerk, E. van (eds) The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650–2000, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 449–76. Soler, V. (2000) ‘Verificación de las hipótesis del distrito industrial. Una aplicación al caso valenciano’, Economía Industrial, 334. Taylor, Charles (1989) Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tomás Carpi, Juan Antonio and Torrejón Velardiez, Miguel (2001) ‘Flexibilidad productiva y organización del trabajo. La industria textil valenciana’, Sociología del Trabajo, 41, 101–25. Tomás Carpi, Juan Antonio, Torrejón Velardiez, Miguel and Such, Juan (1997) ‘Producción flexible, redes empresariales y sistemas territoriales de pequeña y mediana empresa. La industria textil valenciana’, Sociología del Trabajo, 30, 21–42. Torró Gil, Ll. (1994) ‘Los inicios de la mecanización de la industria lanera en Alcoi’, Revista de Historia Industrial, 6, 133–41. Tortajada, E., Fernández, I. and Ybarra, J. A. (2004). ‘Evolución de la industria española del calzado. Factores relevante de las últimas décadas’. Revista de Economía Industrial, 355–6, Ministerio de Industria, Tecnología y Ciencia. Valero, J. R. et al. (1992). Elda, 1932–1980: Industria del calzado y transformación social. Alicante; Instituto de Cultura Juan Gil-Albert. Valero, J. R. (1992): ‘Esplendor y decadencia de las grandes empresas 1921–1950’ en Valero J. R. et al. (eds), Elda, 1932–1980: Industria del calzado y transformación social, Alicante: Instituto de Cultura Juan Gil-Albert [etc.]. Warner, W. Ll., Low, J. O., Lunt, P. S. and Srole, L. (1963) Yankee City [abridged edition]. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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5 Post-communist Transitions: Mapping the Landscapes of Upper Silesia Kazimiera Wódz with Krzysztof Ł˛ecki, Jolanta Klimczak-Ziółek and Maciej Witkowski

5.1 Introduction This chapter examines the social and cultural consequences of changes in Upper Silesia – or more precisely, in the Silesian Voivodship – that began more than 20 years ago following the collapse of communism in Poland. We begin with a brief overview of the post-war history of Poland in Section 5.1, moving then to a description of the situation of the region under communism and up to 1989 and its collapse in Section 5.2. In Section 5.3, the most important aspects of sociological studies in Upper Silesia, from the mid-1930s up to the present, are discussed and some conclusions are drawn concerning the cultural identity of workers’ communities in the region. Finally, Section 5.4 refers to the most recent transformation of the region, focusing first of all on the social consequences of restructuring of heavy industry. In the closing section we look to the possible consequences of regional transformations for changes that relate to both individual and group identity.

5.2 Socio-economic and political developments in Poland since 19451 The Second World War and the following period radically changed the political and economic situation in Poland. The economic changes in the post-war period aimed at industrialisation and urbanisation, interconnected with nationalisation and a controlling central administration. The most important task Polish people faced after conflict was rebuilding the war-torn country and engaging with economic unification of Polish lands and those that were formerly within German 124

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borders – Silesia, Western Pomerania, the Middle Odra Region and Warmia-Masuria. Consequently, the process of industrialisation of Poland may be divided into three periods. The first period was the stage of rebuilding (1945–50). Industrial production was developed mainly on the basis of the rebuilt and restructured, yet still old, production potential. Thus the structure and spatial distribution of industry was not altered considerably in relation to the pre-war period. The second stage was from 1950 to 1970. This was the time of the first phase of socialist industrialisation. At the beginning of this phase the steel and machine industries expanded. However, in the second decade (1959–70) the development of basic industry began (including deep coal mining), along with the fuel and energy sector as well as the heavy chemical industry. The average annual contribution to the national income amounted to 26 per cent at this time. The third and final stage occurred in the 1970s; this phase saw the implementation of the policy of transition from the industrial revolution to the scientific and technological revolution. This period was marked by the combination and absorption of the post-war baby boom population that was approaching working age and the closer integration of Poland within the international division of labour. The Polish economy at that time was one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. On average, domestic profit grew annually by around 10 per cent. During this time the development of the national industry was largely based on foreign credit. In the mid-1970s Poland’s balance of payments’ collapse resulted in indebtedness, which led to a fall in economic growth, including – towards the end of the decade – an absolute fall in the domestic profit level: in 1979 by over 2 per cent, and in 1980 by over 5 per cent. Moreover, domestic profit per person fell by about 13 per cent. The post-war development of the socialist economy in Poland was fuelled by external credit during the 1970s and, in the 1980s, it began ´ to decline (Kalinski and Landau, 2003). ‘State socialism’ had its own logic of modernisation. Its fundamental characteristics included the necessary imposition of industrialisation; social advancement of the lower segments of social structure/society; and the elimination of inequalities associated with a market economy, but replaced by inequalities specific to this system (Morawski, 2001). Basic structural–social conflicts fell into two groups: the group holding power – the nomenclatura (Voslensky, 1984) – who comprised the party apparatus, the army, the police and the technocratic and administrative apparatus; while in opposition there stood the rest of the society formed through the concept of ‘us and them’ (Dobieszewski, 1994; Ziółkowski,

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2000). State socialism influenced not only the shape of social structure, but it also determined changes in the way institutions functioned and were perceived by citizens. Part of the process was to create a social schism between the family and the state (Nowak, 1979). The concentration on family life, along with the secularisation and centralisation of the remaining areas of social life, led to a common perception that citizens had little if any responsibility for crucial political and economic decisions (Morawski, 1999, pp. 23–4). As a result of the state institutions’ excessive control over civil life there evolved what some came to term ‘internal emigration’, which meant deep distrust in the official institutions and civic disengagement (Nowak, 1979; Koralewicz, 1987). The processes of forced industrialisation and urbanisation generated a form of social mobility: this meant the dislocation of rural populations into towns and the shift from agricultural jobs to manufacturing work and heavy industry. Between 1938 and 1958 the number of work´ ers employed in industry and the mining sector tripled (Szczepanski, 1973, p. 176). The working class developed around heavy industry. State socialism aroused the material and political expectations and aspirations of this working class – being the supposed ‘leading power of the nation’. At the same time there also emerged a new post-war intelligentsia (Palska, 1994). Failure to meet the expectations and aspirations created, however, caused social conflicts and this would eventually contribute to the decline of the system. The period of state socialism in Poland was shaken by regular crises – in 1956; 1968; 1970; 1976; 1980–1 and, finally, 1988–9. There were deep economic grounds for these, but gradually ´ they adopted more political forms, too (Karpinski, 1982; Adamski et al., 1988). The political and economic transitions in Poland were initiated with a compromise between the government and the Solidarity opposition, created during the ‘Round Table’ talks. This resulted in the partly free elections of 4 June 1989 and, later, the establishment of the first postwar non-communist government (though also with the participation of members of the former cabinet), with Tadeusz Mazowiecki – a former opposition leader – as Prime Minister (Adamski, 1993). The new government implemented economic reforms based on Deputy Prime Minister Leszek Balcerowicz’s programme, adopted in October 1989. The crucial element of the transformation towards building a capitalist economy was through privatisation. Several privatisation processes were adopted. First, there was the ‘capital path’. This involved the Treasury selling all the shares in a large company to private investors. Small

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and medium-sized enterprises experienced privatisation through liquidations, when some firms simply disappeared and others acquired their assets. In addition, the process of ‘mass privatisation’ developed through the introduction of National Investment Funds. Between 1990 and 2007 a total of 7364 enterprises, around 84 per cent of the total number of Polish firms, were involved in the privatisation process. By 2007 the private sector was employing almost 75 per cent of the total workforce (Concise Statistical Yearbook of Poland, 2008). In terms of macroeconomic indicators, including GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and inflation, the economic transformation brought positive results. Inflation at a level of almost 350 per cent in 1990 had fallen by 50 per vent in 1991 (to 160 per cent), and since 1998 this has been below 10 per cent. After a rapid fall and negative growth in the late 1980s and early 1990s, 1992 saw positive growth in GDP. Figure 5.1 confirms continued growth during the 2000s. However, the transformation involved large social costs – the occurrence and growth of unemployment, as well as poverty and the lowering of living standards. From 1990 onwards the unemployment rate nearly reached 20 per cent, as shown in Figure 5.2. According to estimates from this time, on average about 10 per cent of Poland’s population lived in a state of prolonged and persistent ‘severe’ poverty while another 20 per cent lived in a state of ‘moderate’ poverty, that is a level entitling them to social aid (Golinowska, 1996). Part of the process of economic restructuring in Poland from 1990 also involved a programme for restructuring the deep coal-mining industry. The restructuring took place from the early 1990s on the basis of a series of restructuring programmes that received considerable state financial support. It resulted in the closure of almost half of the coal mines and

8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 97

Figure 5.1

98

99

2000

2001 2002 2003

2004 2005 2006

2007 2008 2009 2010

Gross domestic product in Poland, 1996–2010

Source: Rachunki kwartalne produktu krajowego brutto w latach 2000–2006, Central Statistical Office, Warsaw 007. www.stat.gov.pl/cps/rde/xbcr/gus/PUBL_rachunki_kw_pkb_ 2000_2006.pdf, /www.gus.pl/wiadomosc/20100126/gus-produkt-krajowy-brutto-2009-roku, gus.pl/content/wskazniki-makroekonomiczne

128 Post-communist Transitions: Mapping the Landscapes of Upper Silesia 25 20 15 10 5 0 93

94

Figure 5.2

95

96

97

98

99 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010

Unemployment (%) in Poland, 1992–2010

Source: Central Statistical Office, www.stat.gov.pl/gus/5840_677_PLK_HTML.htm

450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 90

92

94

96

Figure 5.3 Deep coal-mining 1990–2010 (in thousands)

98

2000

employment,

2002

2004

2006

Katowice/Silesian

2008

2010

Voivodship,

Source: www.gihp.com.pl/bg/1998_05/kogo.html, www.gihp.com.pl; www.gornictwo.wnp.pl (accessed 27 September 2010).

a major decline in coal output, but was combined with a simultaneous growth in labour productivity. The programme also involved considerable job cuts. Employment in deep coal-mining in the Silesian (formerly Katowickie) region fell by over 264,000 between 1990 and 2010, as shown in Figure 5.3 (Jagiełłowicz, 1998; Czarnecki, 2009). Silesia City Center (SCC), a new shopping complex, is located in the oldest district of Katowice city – Dab, ˛ within the area of the former Gottwald coal mine, closed in 1996. The Hungarian TriGranit company redeveloped the existing buildings and commissioned the centre on 17 November 2005. The style of architecture adopted for SCC combines tradition and modernity; the historic buildings of the former coal mine have been renovated and their function changed. At present a restaurant

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Figure 5.4

Shopping centre Silesia City Center in Katowice

Source: Author, Małgorzata Tyrybon and Bo˙zena Pactwa.

and interior decoration shop, as well as the head office of the centre, are located in one of these buildings (Figure 5.4). The social, economic and political transformations involved in the transition from real socialism to the ‘free’ market and political democracy that occurred in Poland after 1990 have significantly changed the lives of Polish people, and Polish society. The social structure changed (jobs, education and income), a new institutional order was created and a new civil society was developed (non-governmental organisations (NGOs), social dialogue). On the other hand, social problems occurred and grew, reflected in increased unemployment, poverty, drug addiction and crime. Winners and losers of this post-communist transformation process appeared. These enormous changes inspired socialist resentment and considerable susceptibility to populist rhetoric, but new strategies were then adopted that involved, on the one hand, long-term investments in oneself and one’s own children and, on the other, contesting strategies (Giza-Poleszczuk et al., 2000; Ziółkowski, 2000). While internal spatial mobility remained marginal, external labour migration escalated (see Figure 5.5). Nevertheless, the most important value for the great majority of Poles remains family life, followed by their circle of friends (CBOS, 2005). Very

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70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1990

1995

2000

2004

2005

Emigration Figure 5.5

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

Immigration

Migration in Poland, 1990–2010 in thousands

Source: http://www.stat.gov.pl/cps/rde/xbcr/gus/PUBL_L_podst_inf_o_rozwoju_dem_pl.pdf (4 July 2011)

low down in their priorities comes social trust – a form of social action manifesting itself in part through the development of NGOs. What is found here, through historical and especially religious traditions, are forms of action constitutive of the maintenance of conservative attitudes in Poland, those compounded by the strong presence of the Roman Catholic Church in the social and institutional life of the country. Thus the neoliberal model of building capitalism in Poland did not sufficiently consider its very social consequences. This created a vacuum for the generalisation of populist public attitudes. Hence, in combination with falling voting turnouts, the political party system has become highly unstable. There has been a repeated process of forming new political parties, as well as frequent reshuffles of the political groups holding power. The implementation of this neoliberal model of capitalism also further opened the way for parties of clearly populist character. The process of change, then, has combined contradictory tendencies. At its heart lay the broad-minded liberal project of a transformation from state socialism to a free market economy. But by disturbing the interests of the social groups that initiated these social changes (principally the workers), other changes took place that, in a longerterm perspective, led to the political defeat of the founders of the reform movement (Ost, 2007). Believing in the automatic and benevolent power of the market (the spontaneous order), they created the

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free market economy using the ‘visible hand’ of the state (Morawski, 1999, p. 98). This transformation towards capitalism (a market economy) effectively coincided with the transition from a global Fordist capitalist model to a post-Fordist one (Harvey, 1989; Amin, 1995). Simultaneously having to embrace both sets of changes in economic forms stimulated responses shaping identities, including the formation of new professional and social identities (Dunn, 2008).

5.3 Silesian voivodship – an industrial past? The Silesian Voivodship in the south of Poland is the country’s most urbanised region. Its population is 4.7 million, 12.3 per cent of the Polish population, and its population density is three times higher than that of any other region. Around 79 per cent of the population live in its 71 towns, of which four have a population exceeding 200,000 and eight between 100,000 and 200,000 (Wódz and Wódz, 2006). The administrative reform of 1998 determined the current territorial shape of the region. As of 1 January 1999 the Silesian Voivodship included four subregions. Although it is the most urbanised region in Poland, Silesia is internally diversified, something manifested in these administrative divisions. Each subregion has its own specificity, resulting from its natural and social potential and historically inherited cultures and local traditions. The pace of change and local priorities therefore differ from the dominant forms set by the central part of the voivodship. The diversification is also favoured by the region’s polycentric character. It is not dominated by a single centre, but by several municipal ones performing central functions. The Silesian Central sub-region – where our SPHERE research was carried out – has over two million inhabitants, nearly 45 per cent of the whole Silesian region. Its biggest city, Katowice, is capital of the Region and 14 other big cities are located there (see Figure 5.6). Together with the Rybnik-Jastrz˛ebie subregion (pop. 400,000) and three big cities, these two subregions constitute the largest industrialised area in Poland. The industrial history of the Region goes back to the first half of the nineteenth century when, under German rule, the first coal mines and iron works were founded in Katowice and other communities. For nearly two centuries the major economic and urban development of the area was closely linked to the growth and the development of heavy industry – mainly coal mining and metallurgy, but also machine and energy production and the chemical industry. The region’s trajectory

132

Figure 5.6

Silesian Voivodship

Source: Reproduced with permission from Mapy Scienne Beata Pietka, Katowice (2007), Poland – road map, p. 243. Scale: 1:1200000.

Kazimiera Wódz with Krzysztof Ł˛ecki et al. 133

was very similar to other industrial areas in Europe, such as Ruhr Basin in Northern Renania-Westfalia, Nord Pas de Calais in France, Wallonia in Belgium and North-East England (for a comparison between NorthEast England and Upper Silesia see Byrne and Wódz, 2001). In Contrast to Western Europe (and the USA), where the processes of deindustrialisation and the transition to the post-industrial economy started in the 1970s, Upper Silesian heavy industry survived practically intact until the end of communist Poland. The Upper Silesian industrial area (including the neighbouring Zagł˛ebie Dabrowskie ˛ basin) played a very special role within the Polish state-commanded economy from 1945 till the col´ lapse of communism in 1989 (Szczepanski, 1994; Gorzelak, 2001). This was the result of the implementation of the ‘forced industrialisation’ imposed by the ruling Communist Party at the behest of the Soviet Union as described above (Morawski, 1980). The consequences of this kind of mono-functional economic development proved to be very negative for the whole country, but for the Silesian Region it was a real catastrophe. Major side effects were the degradation of the natural environment, through the frenzied development of towns, and the failure to address the necessary skills and qualifications potential of the labour force (Wódz, 1993, 1997; Gorzelak, 1994). After the Second World War the industrial part of Upper Silesia, including Zagł˛ebie Dabrowskie, ˛ became the destination for intensive migration of people from villages and small towns across the country. People found employment in old, expanding steelworks and coalmines, but also in many newly established plants that became the embodiment of socialism and ‘progress’. Thus in the early 1970s the huge metallurgical Katowice Steelworks complex was built in Dabrowa ˛ Górnicza. It is worth emphasising that in 1937, mining sector employment in the Silesian Voivodship amounted to 101,500 people, this figure gradually and continuously increasing after the war, despite the huge amount of damage that affected both industry and, in particular, the social fabric. By 1949 the number of people employed in the mining industry had increased to 258,400, and in 1950 it had risen to 318,600. After that the number of people employed in the mining sector rose steadily to a peak of 445,000 in 1980. Ten years later, at the onset of transition, it had fallen to 338,000, and in 2007 the number of jobs in coal mining was 119,300. Employment in metallurgy rose over the same period but stabilised much earlier: in 1937 it was 41,000, in 1949, 101,600, and in 1955 it stood at 149,300. This was effectively the peak, although numbers since have not fallen proportionately by as much as those in coal mining. In 1970 the number of people employed in metallurgy

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was 104,252 and although it rose again to 120,593 ten years later, by 1990 iron and steel employed only 89,000. In 2000 there were 72,819 employees in the metallurgical sector and, in 2006, 68,651 (Statistical Yearbook of Katowice Voivodship, 1974, 1981, 1993; Statistical Yearbook of Silesian Voivodship, 2002, 2007). From 1945 this already traditional industrial area was subjected to the process of extensive industrialisation based mainly on heavy industry. It reduced the region to a role as exploiter of the country’s raw materials and energy base and helped for many years preserve the specific needs of a regional labour market dominated by poorly qualified manual workers. The result was that employment in industrial plants increased significantly over time. While 645,000 people worked in industry in 1950, by the end of that decade this had risen to 731,500. In the early 1970s there were as many as 863,400 employees in industry throughout the region. This level continued for the following ten years and reached, in 1980, a total of 866,100 (Statistical Yearbook of Katowice Voivodship, 1974, 1981). The regional system of education was subordinated to this forced industrialisation. There was a strong predominance of vocational learning linked directly to industries such as mining, metallurgy and steel. While in 1950 the region had a mere 255 vocational schools, this number had more than doubled, to 566, by 1960. In 1970 there were as many as 904, and by 1980, 992. This level remained stable over the next two decades but, at the turn of the twenty-first century, there were some changes in the structure of these schools. Many of the more basic vocational schools were closed, with vocational upper secondary schools aiming at a higher skill mix now starting to appear (Statistical Yearbook of the People’s Republic of Poland, 1955; Statistical Yearbook of Katowice Voivodship, 1974, 1981; Statistical Yearbook of Silesian Voivodship, 2009).

5.4 Workers’ communities in Upper Silesia What were, and are, the social and cultural consequences of profound change from the 1950s to the present, and how has identity formed and re-formed through the transition from communism to postcommunism? We look here at the consequences of industrialisation in the Upper Silesian agglomeration, beginning with a review of three different approaches to analysing the situation. The first approach suggests that under the centrally planned economy before 1989, no ‘working class’ existed in Poland as defined in

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the manner typical of Western capitalist societies. Manual workers differed neither in terms of low wages nor in terms of a relatively high risk of unemployment from others in society. However, after the market reforms began in 1989 there very soon appeared a group of employees who may be termed a specific ‘working class’ according to traditional Western criteria. Despite this, we are today dealing with an analysis of Polish society where using a class paradigm has been generally discredited or considered irrelevant by critics (Dunn, 2008). However, and presenting a challenge to these critics, an important book has recently mapped the role of Polish workers – David Ost’s The Defeat of Solidarity (2007). In this American sociologist’s interpretation, the ten million-strong social movement called ‘Solidarity’, primarily of working-class character, played a significant role in the process of political transformation. This movement, and the working class forming it, was then, Ost claims, ‘betrayed’ by the liberal-minded intellectual elite that had been significant in its evolution. They promoted the idea of a radical economic reform, the so-called ‘shock therapy’. This became possible due to the propagation of a positive mythology concerning the ‘market’ and ‘competition’. The myths did not, however, articulate narratives that mapped the social costs of the reforms, costs paid mainly by workers. As a result of working-class anger at this ‘betrayal’, especially in the early years after the transformation, the left lost worker support and trust, and workers turned to a new political narrative enunciated through populist, anti-communist, right-wing parties. The third approach, taken in what follows, suggests that the identities and identifications of workers of Upper Silesia and Zagł˛ebie Dabrowskie ˛ are in transition. Before 1989, the development of highly prestigious heavy industry in Upper Silesia was key to shaping a sense of community, but also to notions and feelings of identity. At the same time, however, any manifestations of ethnic or cultural otherness, typical of a border region such as Upper Silesia, were constrained (Wódz and Wódz, 2006).We therefore turn now to explore the place of culture in the constitution of regional identity. The social and cultural formation of the whole region was first examined in Father Emil Szramek’s (1934) study, entitled ‘Silesia as a sociological problem’. Prior to the Second World War research into the specificity of the problems of Upper Silesia was also conducted by classical scholars of Polish sociology, such as Paweł Rybicki’s in his ‘Concerning sociological research into Silesia’ (1938). This sociological research focused on mining communities, as in Rybicki’s (1963) ‘Study of mining housing estates’, but in a range of texts it also explored slightly

136 Post-communist Transitions: Mapping the Landscapes of Upper Silesia

´ broader relationships (Chałasinski, ‘Polish vs German Antagonism at the “Coalmine” factory settlement’ (1935)), or concentrated on a single aspect of the phenomenon, typically the family. The history of Polish sociology following the Second World War is complex. Initially, it disappeared completely for many years from universities as it was considered to be a so-called bourgeois science. Later this altered. The revival of sociological research on Upper Silesia dates from the late 1950s, when in 1958 the newly appointed Sociological Commission at the Silesian Scientific Institute commenced an investigation into Silesian workers. In the mid-1960s, a study summarising the research of a team headed by Wanda Mrozek was issued. This concentrated on a mining family. In a broader sense the research developed an analysis of the effects of social transformation on the Upper Silesian mining community. At the same time a series of monographs were published in the Krakow Centre under the theoretical guide of Kazimierz Dobrowolski. These concerned studies on the influence of coal-mining labour on the development of social relationships in the estates that surrounded the coal mine and also, as a separate problem, the influence of technological and organisational change on the social relationships within the mine, including attitudes towards a miner’s work and occupation. In the mid-1970s the Department of Sociology of the University of Silesia was created. The research potential that the Department created for its teams of sociologists yielded a wide range of studies on the problems of the region. Central concerns in these early studies were findings concentrating on industry and industrial culture (Sztumski and ´ atkiewicz, Wódz, 1987; Wódz, 1992, 1993; Swi ˛ 1993; Ł˛ecki and Wódz, 1998). Factory housing became a major area of research. These working-class housing schemes can be divided into the ‘old’ estates, those inhabited mainly by original inhabitants of Upper Silesia dating back to the first half of the nineteenth century, and ‘new’ ones. The latter were connected with the migrants of the 1950s and the 1970s (Wódz and Wódz, 2006; Gerlich, 2003). For a long time researchers had found housing settlements created by Upper Silesian communities particularly interesting. These are perceived as islands of ‘cultural otherness’, easily discernible against the backdrop of the general population. This emerged through a working-class mentality, now more likely to be referred to through the concept of habitus (Bourdieu, 1990). Other key foci included the place of tradition, language and the experience of everyday life. The key characteristics of living in working-class settlements revolved around a sense of community where the chance of expressing one’s own identity existed

Kazimiera Wódz with Krzysztof Ł˛ecki et al. 137

but remained limited to family and neighbours (Wódz and Wódz, 2006). Here, the limited forms of language communication narrowed down to the practicalities of everyday life; for those living there this avoided any abstract categorisation or understanding. Researchers nevertheless also argued that life in the schemes constituted a particularly important dimension as told through individual life histories (Wódz, 1993). The industry was primary to this, as it determined the specific rhythm ´ and routine of everyday life (Bukowska-Florenska, 1987; Gerlich, 2003). Here, identity formation through work and housing became a central consideration for researchers. The research conducted over the last 20 years into older factory housing estates has been inspired by Western interpretations of working-class culture. In particular, frequent references were made to the classical studies of Yorkshire miners contained in books such as Coal is our Life, by Dennis et al. (1956). Here, identity and work is powerfully marked as a ‘way of life’ (see Williams (1958) on class-consciousness). In addition, several theories of modernisation were developed by Polish intellectuals ´ (Szczepanski, 1997; Faliszek et al., 2001). These confirmed the universalism of both models of economic development and of theories explicating the specificity of cultural life within industrial regions. While these regions were experiencing different development trajectories than previously, and ‘ . . . identifying development with westernisation is common knowledge’, the lived cultural experience and life remained ‘true to the state of collective consciousness and [is] not an imposed concept’ (Faliszek et al., 2001, p. 44). In the Silesian Voivodship the mining sector is still, although to a lesser extent than before, one of the main factors shaping social life and cultural forms (Wódz and Wódz, 2006). The industry connected with coal extraction is directly and indirectly connected with dominant modes of life, reflecting Williams’ (1958) argument around the nature of industrial cultures. Thus the standard threads running through social and cultural studies have come to be those of ‘mining culture’ (Faliszek et al., 2001; Gerlich, 2003), ‘mining/steelworks communities’ (Wódz, ´ atkiewicz 1992), life in ‘mining housing estates’ (Swi ˛ and Wódz, 1991; Nawrocki, 2006), heavy industry as a specific ‘labour ethic’ (Jacher, 1984; Nawrocki, 2006) and, finally, the working-class family (Mrozek, 1994). Many social scientists believed this combination reflected a natural pattern of developing regional narratives concerning identity, stressing the importance of cultural forms, traditions and institutions. Since the onset of the economic and political transition in the 1990s, the functionalist sociological approach to describing the working-class

138 Post-communist Transitions: Mapping the Landscapes of Upper Silesia

culture of Upper Silesia and Zagł˛ebie Dabrowskie ˛ has become much more important. This emerged from the necessity to develop labour market programmes geared to the economic restructuring of heavy industry and that could cope with the social costs of the postcommunist reforms (Faliszek et al., 2001). Researchers mainly contemplated the problems of adaptability of the old patterns of working-class culture in new conditions of economic change. Although the experiences of the tough reality of the situation appeared to be relatively short-lived, the impoverishment of workers in heavy industry led to what was called an emerging ‘sub-class’ culture (Wódz, 1993; Wódz and Wódz, 2006). These workers were exposed to economic impoverishment, and an inevitable social and cultural disintegration was carried from generation to generation making a radical mark on the place of culture. Researchers identified miners as attached to a fixed pattern of working-class culture: traditional occupations, with places of work and life in traditional communities over time shaping identity and culture ´ (Szczepanski et al., 1999). This change produced notable effects. For example, the research by Wódz and her collaborators (Faliszek et al., 2001) showed that over 60 per cent of the population of the region failed to use any of the forms of vocational training (despite many opportunities), and over two-thirds had not considered changing jobs recently (despite the fact they were aware they were working in plants threatened by closure). As a result, the traditional class culture was treated as an obstacle blocking the process of transformation: focusing on group conformism as a result of treating group as an autonomous value, fatalism manifesting itself in the sense of lack of control over the outside world, low self-esteem connected with their belief in the low prestige of their job, fear of the future, causing reluctance to think about the future. These are the qualities that will certainly make it difficult for Upper Silesian miners to change their present strategies of adaptation, and their children to acquire in the future other – different from their parents’ – strategies of building their life careers. (Faliszek et al., 2001, p. 162) One view of the apparent failure of this Upper Silesian cultural identity to adapt saw the Silesian Voivodship as ‘an area of catastrophe ´ and a museum piece’ (Szczepanski, 1997, p. 35). Traditional identity and culture are seen to be on the brink of collapse. The Upper Silesian agglomeration is more and more perceived and described through

Kazimiera Wódz with Krzysztof Ł˛ecki et al. 139

its ethnic and cultural otherness and in terms of Silesian separatism. In contemporary sociological and cultural research there is now a clear tendency to anthropologise the region in this way. This, in turn, is replacing the earlier approaches by reducing Upper Silesia and Zagł˛ebie Dabrowskie ˛ to an area that is interesting largely for its (former) industrialisation and little more. This phenomenon of the anthropolisation of the perceived problems of the Silesian Voivodship is connected with more subjective attempts to determine the identity of the Region of Upper Silesia and Zagł˛ebie Dabrowskie. ˛ Before the 1989 political and economic transformation, however, it was not possible to achieve this. In the period of limited freedom under official communist government propaganda, the predominant model was of state ethnic and cultural hegemony. This affected the scientific and journalistic regional narratives concerning the former Katowice Voivodship. Cultural differences were reduced at best to the role of folklore, then simply standing in as ‘the backdrop to various official ceremonies’ (Wódz and Wódz, 2006). But reintroducing civil liberties led to a rapid increase in attempts to define and express the identity forms of regional communities. This phenomenon focused in particular on the subregions of Upper Silesia and Zagł˛ebie Dabrowskie. ˛ The new narrative gained extra impetus after the administrative reform united Zagł˛ebie Dabrowskie ˛ and Upper Silesia into one voivodship. The whole process consisted of the articulation of various identities, interests and phenomena, for which the new situation proved to be an opportunity to produce a new social discourse, or narrative of identity. Wódz and Wódz (2006) argued that this process of constituting identity was highly dynamic within the Silesian Voivodship. Consequently, since the early 1990s a new approach has appeared towards understanding the cultural identity of Upper Silesia and Zagł˛ebie Dabrowskie. ˛ The point of gravity of the new framework has shifted from a ‘sector’ identification, the centre of which saw heavy industry determining cultural phenomena, to a ‘regional’ identification/identity process that reflected a tension between the two processes of identity formation. Tense social and economic experiences during the period of transition quickly established Upper Silesia and Zagł˛ebie Dabrowskie ˛ as regions that were ill-adapted to the new market economy. As a result, researchers’ attention shifted towards defining a new vision of regional development (Klasik and Jacher, 2005). An important innovation came through searching for the sources of cultural subjectivity necessary to define long-term perspectives on development (Juzwa and Wódz, 1996). The vision now emerging for regional development is

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based on an attempt to create a new identity on the basis of highly specialised services (information technologies). What is innovative about these approaches to the issues of regional identity is that they treat culture as a form of symbolic capital, while attempting to make use of it in the concepts of regionalism and the promotion of a ‘new regionalism’. In this regional vision the articulation of Upper Silesian ethnicity is essential. Disputes on the so-called ‘issue of Silesian autonomy’ and ‘Silesian nationality’ highlighted the importance of the processes that symbolically link ethnic traditions and forms to industrial traditions and occupational identifications. This was attempted through the promotion of the notion of an Upper Silesian ‘superiority in civilisation’ compared with the rest of Poland (Wódz, 1996). When comparing the subregions of the Silesian Voivodship, a number of differences in ethno-cultural identity appear. Due to the specificity of historical conditions and the phenomena of migration one should not forget that part of the articulations of ethnicity and class tend to be presented through division: ‘We Silesians’, who are signified as ‘workers’, are distinct from ‘They’, the newcomers, regarded as Germans or Poles, signifying ‘capitalists’, while the inhabitants of the Zagł˛ebie Region constitute the ‘intelligentsia’ or ‘senior management staff’ (Wódz, 1993). The factor that enables us to discern some similarities between Upper Silesia and Zagł˛ebie Dabrowskie ˛ is the predominant character of industrialisation and, consequently, the development of a similarly structured working class (Faliszek et al., 2001). Thus the Silesian Voivodship is a typical cultural borderland area where different patterns of industrial culture blend into a specific and potentially new form. The economic transformations of the early 1990s undermined the foundations on which the traditional regional symbolic order was laid. As Wódz and Wódz (2006) observe, the impoverisation of mining residential areas is a particularly important factor affecting the process of the contemporary regional identity. The miner’s social role has been profoundly weakened. The cultural crisis that arose led to a radicalisation of those areas angrily targeting the government. This expressed itself through a certain vision of regional culture, seen as an articulation of its industrial character and ethnic specificity coupled with some elements of Silesian religiosity (Gerlich, 2003). This phenomenon may be interpreted as the development of ethno-nationalism, similar to the pattern proposed by Hobsbawm (1991) through the creation of the socalled ‘invented’ traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1996). ‘Regional ideology’ developed and became popular in many Upper Silesian communities (Wódz and Wódz, 1999, 2006). Zagł˛ebie Dabrowskie ˛ became a

Kazimiera Wódz with Krzysztof Ł˛ecki et al. 141

clear example of the construction of a negative regional identity, directly connected to the symbolic revaluation of the region’s social divisions. Wódz and Wódz (2006) suggest that an alternative to this project of building the region’s social and cultural identity on the emotions of ethno-nationalism is the individualistic concept of civic participation, which in the case of the Silesian Voivodship might draw its strength from the materially objective and inclusive phenomenon of a pan-regional industrial community. The Upper Silesian agglomeration was formed under the influence of industrialism – it is heavy industry that shaped the life of local communities, their internal organisation and their occupational rituals, patterns of religious and lay rites that remained for decades. The reference point here could be the modernisation of outdated industry and using the opportunities resulting from Poland’s membership of the EU. This kind of solution would help avoid intra-regional disputes and tense relations between the region and the centre. The construction of the region’s cultural identity does not take place in a symbolic void. The popular image of the Upper Silesian agglomeration in the other parts of Poland is constructed by a set of folklore elements. The icons of Upper Silesia – usually not distinguished from Zagł˛ebia Dabrowskiego ˛ – have come to be the miner’s hat plumes, miners’ houses (familoki), blood sausages (krupnioki), colourful folk clothes and, of course, the local dialect and jargon. All these elements are connected either with a plebeian or working-class culture. In particular, the miners’ houses became an artistic symbol almost mythologised in works of film art, photography and painting (Lipok-Bierwiaczonek, 2000). They are presented as romantic and nostalgic memories of the birth and youth of the region. The old working-class settlements are seen as social spaces signifying positive values. Through this, the image of the miner and the miner’s family was often subject to mythologisation (Gerlich, 2003). The main element of such myths became an image of a hardworking, simple but kind-hearted and conscientious miner and his neat and tidy and thrifty wife. Emphasised here, too, was their dedication to home and family, religiousness and reverence towards tradition (Faliszek et al., 2001). In cultural terms what is considered specific to the Silesian Voivodship is the activity of amateur music movements represented by choirs and brass bands. This specificity results from the great popularity of these activities with the local population. Brass bands also signified a cultural form – a significant means of expressing identity and culture, although, following the decline of coal mining, the number of miners’ brass bands

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has fallen from 80 to 30. And although Silesia has never been the only place where such amateur activity was conducted, it was in Silesia where it became the region’s trademark. The popularity of singing in Silesia was connected with the heyday of bourgeois culture, generating new patterns of social and artistic activity. Choir activity during the nineteenth century became a process whereby divisions could be closed in what was then principally a partitioned nation. Polish people viewed membership of a choir as a means of manifesting their national identity; it was an instrument used to fight against Germanisation, and as a vehicle for Polish traditions and culture. The intelligentsia organised singing competitions and rallies to popularise patriotic ideas. It also performed educational and culture functions. In the early twentieth century choral associations formalised their activities by organising federations and unions. Following the Silesian uprisings, this practice served the purpose of better organisation and coordination of the musical amateur movement and song, further underlining the national character and identity. Following the Second World War the choral movement evolved towards less patriotic and more aesthetic practice, achieving a high professional level of performance. The choirs’ significant position drew the attention

Figure 5.7

´ aska, Restored workers’ house (familok) in Ruda Sl ˛ Kaufhaus settlement

Source: Author, Małgorzata Tyrybon and Bo˙zena Pactwa

Kazimiera Wódz with Krzysztof Ł˛ecki et al. 143

´ of distinguished composers, including Józef Swider, the author of much outstanding choral music. Kaufhaus district is characterised by compact development, founded at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a settlement of Huta Pokój – Friedenshutte, built for the families of workers and lower-level technical and administrative staff. The district is a fairly hermetic unit, surrounded at three sides by the premises of Huta Pokój (see Figure 5.7).

5.5 From industrial to post-industrial spaces The collapse of communism in the Silesian Voivodship set in motion dynamic changes which, from the perspective of the past 20 years, may be viewed (at least in part) as both necessary and valuable. Initially, there was, however, a difficult period of transition. The labour market began to decline, along with a growing wave of unemployment, with manufacturing companies losing their markets, with increasing debt of the traditional sectors promising decline and with the reconstruction of the economy leading to social and political resistance. In this transition the Silesian Voivodship experienced the consequences of systemic and economic changes on a scale much greater than in any other regions of the country. Industrial decline impacted on a working-class culture formed primarily through work. As we have already argued, massive unemployment struck hard. Not only was there the winding down of coal mines and steelworks, but the textile industry, which once numbered 30,000 employees, now has only a few thousand workers left. This decline was compounded by a reduction in enhanced work and social conditions linked to heavy industrial occupations and the impoverisation of whole quarters and towns once dependent on the plants. In order to control and limit the social costs connected with the restructuring of the region’s economy, legislative measures were introduced in an attempt to mitigate the social consequences falling on key groups (Wódz and Wódz, 2006). But for many heavy industrial employees restructuring meant unemployment. This was tackled in different ways. First, a number of the newcomers from central Poland went back home. In the target area, however, modernisation meant not only unemployment but major falls in the numbers of the region’s principal, iconic jobs as steelworkers and, especially, miners.

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It should be stressed that the status of the job of a miner had long been characterised by a certain ambivalence. In the 1950s, while miners were being held up as key workers, at the same time mining also came to be viewed as labour performed by prisoners and by so-called ‘ideologically suspicious’ individuals. Subsequently, especially since the 1970s, miners as workers enjoyed material privilege and (officially in the Party and state order) high esteem. High-ranking state authorities attended the celebrations of miners’ holidays called St Barbara’s Day, and the tradition of the miners’ extended family was ostentatiously cherished by state authorities, though less appreciated in wider society. The process of adapting the mining sector to the requirements of the market economy at first proceeded almost spontaneously. Subsequent versions of the restructuring programmes prepared by the State Agency for Deep Coal were met with vehement protests by miners organised by particularly strong trade unions (especially the Solidarity trade union). The Mining Labour Agency was formed in 1995 to limit these social consequences of restructuring. This was followed by the establishment of a Regional Contract for the Silesian Voivodship and, in addition, the creation of an Upper Silesian Fund. Another instrument supporting the processes of restructuring was the Katowice Special Economic Zone, established in 1996. In 1997 the Solidarity union formed a political party, the Solidarity Election Action (AWS). It strengthened the position of trade unions, especially in heavy industry plants, and was influential in restructuring the mining and metallurgy industries. Following the 1997 election, the Economy Ministry prepared a programme, the basis of which became the Mining Social Welfare Package (Wódz and Wódz, 2006). Restructuring the economy was aimed at increasing its innovativeness, reducing unemployment, retraining workers and encouraging foreign businesses to invest in the region. One of 14, the Ministry of Economy’s Special Economic Zone in Katowice was located in an area of 1544 hectares. Within the zone there now stand 200 enterprises employing 37,000 people. The firms operating from the zone have invested ¤3.5 million. Current estimates concerning future places of work and economic forecasts indicate that creation of the zone has actually helped reduce regional unemployment (www.ksse.pl). Education also came to occupy a central role in the post-industrial transition. In the 1950s there were as few as four tertiary schools in the region, and by the 1980s there were six. But over the following decade this number rose to ten, and today in the Silesian Voivodship there

Kazimiera Wódz with Krzysztof Ł˛ecki et al. 145 Table 5.1 Silesian Voivodship and Polish economic indicators, 2007

Capital expenditure (billion PLN) Capital expenditure per head (PLN) Employees per 1000 persons Employees in industry per 1000 persons Unemployment rate (%) Average monthly pay (PLN)

Silesian Voivodship

Poland

19.5 4187 330 97.9

154 4062 338.5 71.2

12.7 2560

14.8 2476

Note: PLN, new Polish zloty. Source: Statistical Yearbook of Silesian Voivodship (2007); Statistical Office in Katowice (2007); Concise Statistical Yearbook of Poland (2007); Central Statistical Office, Warsaw 2007 www.stat.gov.pl

are 44 functioning tertiary (university level) education institutions. The number of students rose from 15,463 in 1960 to 34,048 in 1970. In the 1980s and 1990s there were 43,000 students, but by 2000 there were as many as 178,232 and, by 2007, there were 203,228. Yet, after two decades of economic, social and political change, the Silesian Voivodship still remains the most industrialised region in Poland as shown in Table 5.1. It is one of the most industrialised areas in Europe. The Silesian Voivodship comes second in Poland in terms of the value of industrial goods sold, and the number of employees in the region in the industrial sector accounts for over 17 per cent of all employees in Polish industry. The pillars of the Silesian Voivodship are still the old, traditional sectors so closely interwoven with the region’s history and tradition, alongside the modern industries connected with new technologies and a different corporate culture. On the one hand the predominant sectors are mining, where 38 mines still produce over 90 per cent of all Polish coal, while 18 steelworks produce two-thirds of Polish pig iron. In manufacturing, the automotive industry now dominates, with the Silesian Voivodship producing over 80 per cent of Polish car production, but in a context of still important machine and electrical engineering, chemical and food industries. This social and economic transition, besides restructuring the primary and manufacturing sectors, also triggered the development of the services sector, as shown in Figure 5.8. The new economic system impacted upon the quality and the standard of living of households, leading to a polarisation of incomes and effects on social stratification. The Silesian Voivodship is not exceptional and, as elsewhere in Poland, those most at risk of poverty live in households with five or more people where there is a low education level

146 Post-communist Transitions: Mapping the Landscapes of Upper Silesia

4%

38% 57%

Agriculture, hunting and forestry Industry and construction Services Figure 5.8

Industrial sector shares (%) in the Silesian Voivodship, 2009

Source: Statistical Yearbook of Silesian Voivodship (2009); Statistical Office in Katowice (2009) www.stat.gov.pl

(primary and vocational). Those who benefited most from the transition were three- or four-person households with higher education. What is specific to the Silesian Voivodship is the fact that its population is located on the top rung of the national income ladder, with a monthly average income of PLN 3021 (compared with 2942 for the whole of Poland (Ludno´sc´ , ruch naturalny I migracje w województwie s´laskim ˛ w 2009). In common with the rest of Poland, nearly half of all households in the Silesian Voivodship derive their earnings as employees (48.7 per cent). The second source of revenue, and this is a growing tendency, is taken through social and other welfare benefits, and this totals 38.6 per cent in the Voivodship compared with the lower Polish average of 34.7 per cent (Concise Statistical Yearbook of Poland, 2007). This is a result of the increased use of bridging pensions, long-term sickness and employment benefits, connected to the reduction of industrial employment (Statistical Yearbook of Silesian Voivodship, 2009). Prior to the economic transition, the dominant model of the workingclass family consisted of the man as breadwinner and the woman as the housewife. Now, in the face of market reality post-1989, that model proved to be outdated and inadequate for the new age. In this free

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market, however, men and women needed to fight for status in life, having to balance their family and professional roles. Increasingly, the most important question has come to be not whether to work but how to reconcile professional and family roles. Answers to the latter question have begun to be produced by women activists. This development began in the 1990s with the establishment of women’s NGOs, as well as the newly founded Female Trade Unions of the Mining Sector (the first union of this type in Europe). Answers to women’s changing position can also be found in demographic transformations that illustrate certain tendencies in the choice of life patterns. Demographic data indicate that women are delaying their decision to start a family. The average age of marriage is shifting upwards, from 25–29 to 30–34, while the number of marriages contracted by women 19 years old or younger and those aged 20–24 is falling. The average age of marriage for a woman in the Silesian Voivodship is now 25.3, and for a man 27.3 years. This cultural change, although it does not show any diminution of family values, indicates the increasing importance of other roles and experiences, especially in women’s attitudes. In the Silesian Voivodship fertility is also changing, from 1.219 children per family in 2000 to 1.173 in 2006; and the number of women ready to have more than two children is decreasing. There is, however, a growth in fertility among women with higher education and a decline in fertility among women with primary education; and a shift towards women giving birth between the ages of 25 and 29 and a decline in fertility below 25. However, the number of children born in either civil partnerships or single-parent families (almost 20%) suggests the extent to which the traditional model of the family has been destabilised. This appears to express the rise of the requirement of social consent and a refusal to accept some of the traditional versions of family roles. Many problems in the Silesian Voivodship are connected with the pollution of the environment in the former industrial areas. The total area of wasteland and of devastated and degraded land within the Voivodship is 4809 hectares, accounting for 7.1 per cent of the nation’s spoiled areas. This pollution is endemic within the former industrial areas and has resulted from the exploitation of coal and sand mining. The Voivodship’s separate ecological problems produce social ones, too, as the location of coal tips and slag heaps near housing estates led to constant emissions of pollution into the atmosphere and into surface and groundwaters. The condition of the earth’s surface, road infrastructure and housing fabric is largely influenced by damage from mining,

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which contributes to the deformation of the surface. Inevitably, this devastates natural resources, buildings and technical equipment. Additionally, it leads to poor housing conditions. Excepting water supply, the urban housing resources of the region are characterised by a lower than average availability of equipment in basic utility and sanitation systems. This impacts particularly on the older working-class familoki, located near coal mines that were built at the turn of the twentieth century. Over 22 per cent of the flats currently occupied in the Silesian Voivodship were built before 1945, and only 6.3 per cent were built in the last ten years (Regional Operational Programme for the Silesian Voivodship for 2007–2013, www.mrr.gov.pl). ´ aska, Nowadays, the Voivodship’s biggest cities (Katowice, Ruda Sl ˛ ´ etochłowice and Rybnik) have Dabrowa ˛ Górnicza, Bielsko-Biała, Swi˛ local projects of revitalisation that include long-term programmes of action for regeneration. What made their implementation, and the regeneration concept, possible, was money obtained from EU structural funds. Until recently these were mainly funds allocated before Poland’s 2004 accession, falling within the framework of several PHARE programmes. In the run-up to accession, Poland had rights to apply to the EU Cohesion Fund, the European Regional Development Fund and also to instruments funded within the framework of EU Initiatives INTERREG III, and deriving from URBAN experiences actions within the framework of URBACT I and URBACT II. Under the current programmes for 2007–13 it is still possible to obtain EU support in the scope of revitalisation within the framework of the European Regional Development Programme, which aims to support socially deprived areas, and this has been achieved through the Regional Operational Programme of the Silesian Voivodship for 2007–2013 (RPO WSL).2 The areas benefiting are former industrial areas that have suffered damaging consequences as a result of market transformations, and city centres and residential quarters (with populations of over 50,000) that are deteriorating and becoming eyesores (Regional Operational Programme of the Silesian Voivodship for 2007–2013, www.mrr.gov.pl). It is difficult to be certain as to the direction that concrete revitalisation projects in the Silesian Voivodship will take. Any interest in revitalising polluted former industrial spaces is scant. To date, statesupported projects have concentrated on the restoration and restructuring of the architectural infrastructure, while the transformation of the former industrial spaces or degraded city areas appeals more to private investors from business and banking or from retail and other service industries (Wódz and Wódz, 2005).

Kazimiera Wódz with Krzysztof Ł˛ecki et al. 149

5.6 Conclusion The history of the Silesian Voivodship region since 1945 has gone through several major transitions that have defined place and space, as well as the importance of regional forms and identities. In the 1950s and 1960s the term Katanga was coined to denote the exploitation of the region and its inhabitants. This was followed in the 1970s and 1980s by the notion of an El Dorado, when the use of the region’s resources allowed certain sections of the populace to exercise privileged roles and positions. Finally, since the 1990s the conception of the region as ‘a museum piece’ has emerged. This somewhat negative image of the Katowice Voivodship, commonly presenting it as ‘a burden’ to the rest of the country, has dominated over the last two decades. However, this should be balanced by the attempts described above at changing both the Voivodship’s image and its social capital in attempting to recover from the collapse and to provide hope for new development. As highlighted in the foregoing text, the growth of higher education has multiplied and, since 1989, the region has become Poland’s significant academic centre. The altered family model and the presence of women in the regional labour market mark another important change. However, it should be stressed that the labour market still provides a greater demand for work performed by men; moreover, men still have higher earnings and are promoted faster than women holding the same qualifications. In addition, the programmes used to control and direct restructuring in the region largely – if not solely – serve the male-dominated industries (and exclude women, even when they work in the same sector, as is the case in mining). Thus, for example, female-dominated industries (such as the textile industry) have not been provided with protection or remedial or rescue programmes. Thus women are over-represented among the categories of inactive workers and among the long-term unemployed (Statistical Yearbook of Poland, 2007, p. 250). Finally, we note that one of the most dramatic consequences of the restructuring process has been the material and social degradation of many former workers’ housing schemes. Among these are interesting urban forms such as Nikiszowiec in Katowice, an example of paternalistic housing developed at the beginning of the twentieth century. Other areas, such as big housing estates from the post-Second World War period, provide a more contested legacy of the communist era. Both of these types of area, once a central feature of the region, require integrated and extended revitalisation projects that should be directed

150 Post-communist Transitions: Mapping the Landscapes of Upper Silesia

towards both the improvement of material living conditions and the revitalisation of local communities, which are losing their integrity, self-reliance and sense of place and community founded on a common experience, linked to the still-present but increasingly problematic industrial past.

Notes 1. The authors would like to thank Andrzej Niesporek, who took part in the preparation of a draft version of this section. 2. Under Priority VI. Sustainable urban development; Measure 6.2. Revitalization of degraded areas; Submeasure 6.2.1. Revitalisation – ‘cities’.

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Kazimiera Wódz with Krzysztof Ł˛ecki et al. 151 Gerlich, M., Rytm i obyczaj: cztery szkice o tradycyjnej kulturze górniczej (Zabrze: Muzeum Miejskie, 2003). Giza-Poleszczuk, A., Marody, M. and Rychard, A., Strategie i System. Polacy w obliczu zmiany społecznej (Warsaw: IFiS PAN, 2000). Główne kierunki emigracji i imigracji w latach 1966–2008 http://www: stat.gov.pl/cps/rde/xbcr/gus/PUBL; http://ksse.pl. Golinowska, S. (ed.), Polska bieda. Kryteria,ocena,przeciwdziałanie (Warsaw: Instytut Pracy i Spraw Socjalnych, 1996). Gorzelak, G., 1994, Regional Patterns of Polish Transformation 1990–2005, in K. Wódz (ed.) Transformation of Old Industrial Regions as a Sociological Problem ´ ask (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Sl ˛ pp. 70–107). ´ Gorzelak, G., 2001, Przyszło´sc´ polskich regionów, in M. Szczepanski (ed.) Jaki Region? Jaka Polska? Jaka Europa? (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu ´ askiego, Sl ˛ pp. 99–114). Graczyk, R., Polski ko´sciół, polska demokracja (Kraków: Znak, 1999). ´ Gruszczynski, L. A. (ed.), Kobiety w województwie katowickim’97 (Katowice: Towarzystwo Zach˛ety Kultury, 1997). Harvey, D., The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). Hobsbawm, E. J. and Ranger, T. (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Hrebenda, A., Górno´slaska ˛ klasa robotnicza w latach mi˛edzywojennych 1922–1939, Jagiełłowicz, J. Kogo trzeba zwolni´c Biuletyn Górniczy nr 5 (35) 1998, www.gihp. com.pl/bg/1998_05/kogo.html. ´ Janeczek, J. and Szczepanski, M. S. (eds.), Dynamika s´ laskiej ˛ to˙zsamo´sci (Katowice: ´ askiego, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Sl ˛ 2006). Juzwa, N. and Wódz, K. (eds.), Rewitalizacja historycznych dzielnic mieszkalnoprzemysłowych: idee, projekty, realizacje : materiały z seminarium naukowego 11–12 grudzien´ 1995 – Bytom (Katowice: Wydział Nauk Społecznych Uniwersytetu ´ askiego, Sl ˛ 1996). ´ Kalinski, J. and Landau, Z., Gospodarka Polski w XX wieku (Warsaw: PWE, 2003). ´ Karpinski, J., Countdown. The Polish Upheavals of 56,68,70,76,80 (New York: KarzCohl, 1982). ´ 1996). K˛epna, G., Edukacja dziewczat ˛ i kobiet s´laskich ˛ (Katowice: Wydawnictwo US, Klasik, A. and Jacher, W., Region w procesie przemian: aspekt socjologiczny i ekonomiczny (Katowice: Gnome, 2005). ´ asku Kłosek E., ‘Swoi’ i "obcy’ na Górnym Sl ˛ od 1945 roku (Wrocław: Uniwersytet Wrocławski, 1994). ´ ask, ´ asku Kope´c, E., My i oni na polskim Sl ˛ (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Sl ˛ 1986). Koralewicz, J., Autorytaryzm, l˛ek, konformizm. Analiza społeczenstwa ´ polskiego konca ´ ´ lat siedemdziesiatych ˛ (Wrocław: Zakład narodowy im. Ossolinskich, 1987). Kurczewska, J. (ed.), Zmiana społeczna. Teorie i do´swiadczenia polskie (Warsaw: IFIS PAN, 1999). ´ asku, Ł˛ecki, K. and Wódz, K., Nowe i stare ubóstwo na Górnym Sl ˛ in Kultura i Społeczenstwo ´ no. 2, 1998. ´ aska Lipok-Bierwiaczonek, M., Sl ˛ strona s´wiata. Znaki, symbole, realia kulturowe w filmach Kazimierza Kutza, in A. Gwo´zd´z, (ed.), Kutzowisko. O twórczo´sci filmowej,

152 Post-communist Transitions: Mapping the Landscapes of Upper Silesia teatralnej i telewizyjnej Kazimierza Kutza (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Naukowe ´ ask, Sl ˛ 2000). ‘Ludno´sc´ , ruch naturalny I migracje w województwie s´laskim ˛ w 2009’ http://www. stat.gov.pl/cps/rde; www.stat.gov.pl; http://www.mrr.gov.pl. Morawski, W., Zmiana instytucjonalna (Warsaw: PWN, 1999). Morawski, W., Socjologia ekonomiczna (Warsaw: PWN, 2001). ´ asku, ´ socjologicznych na Górnym Sl Mrozek, W., Tradycja badan ˛ in ´ atkiewicz ´ aska W. Swi ˛ (ed.), Społeczne problemy Górnego Sl ˛ we współczesnych ´ aski, badaniach socjologicznych (Katowice: Uniwersytet Sl ˛ 1994). ´ asku. Nawrocki, T., Trwanie i zmiana lokalnej społeczno´sci górniczej na Górnym Sl ˛ Na ´ aski, przykładzie Murcek (Katowice: Uniwersytet Sl ˛ 2006). ´ azacy. Nijakowski, L. (ed.), Nadciagaj ˛ a˛ Sl ˛ Czy istnieje narodowo´sc´ s´laska? ˛ (Warsaw: Scholar, 2004). ´ asku. Nijakowski, L., Dyskursy o Sl ˛ Kształtowanie s´laskiej ˛ to˙zsamo´sci regionalnej i narodowej w dyskursie publicznym (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sejmowe, 2002). ´ Nowak, S., System warto´sci społeczenstwa polskiego, Studia Socjologiczne, 75 (4), 1979, pp. 155–175. Nowak, A. and Wójcik, M., Kobiety w rodzinie w II Rzeczpospolitej i współcze´snie ´ 2000). (Katowice: Wyd. US, Ost, D., Kl˛eska ‘Solidarno´sci’ (Warsaw: Muza, 2007). Palska, H., Nowa inteligencja w Polsce Ludowej- s´wiat przedstawien´ i elementy rzeczywisto´sci (Warsaw: Wyd. IFiS PAN, 1994). Penn, S., Podziemie kobiet (Warsaw: Wyd. Rosner & Wspólnicy, 2003). ´ aska Pysiewicz-J˛edrusik, R., Pustelnik, A. and Konopska, B., Granice Sl ˛ (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo ‘Rzeka’, 1998). Statistical Office in Katowice 2009, http://www.stat.gov.pl. Statistical Yearbook of Katowice Voivodship 1974 (Katowice: Statistical Office In Katowice 1974). Statistical Yearbook of Katowice Voivodship 1981 (Katowice: Statistical Office in Katowice, 1981). Statistical Yearbook of Katowice Voivodship 1993 (Katowice: Statistical Office In Katowice 1993). Statistical Yearbook of Silesian Voivodship 2002 (Katowice: Statistical Office In Katowice, 2002). Statistical Yearbook of Silesian Voivodship 2007 (Katowice: Statistical Office In Katowice 2007), http://www.stat.gov.pl. Statistical Yearbook of Silesian Voivodship 2008 (Katowice: Statistical Office In Katowice 2008), http://www.stat.gov.pl. Statistical Yearbook of Silesian Voivodship 2009 (Katowice: Statistical Office In Katowice 2009), http://www.stat.gov.pl. Statistical Yearbook of the People’s Republic of Poland 1955 (Warsaw: Central Statistical Office, 1955). Statistical Yearbook of the Republic of Poland (Warsaw: Central Statistical Office, Warsaw, 1929). ´ ask ´ Sułek, A. and Szczepanski, M. S. (eds.), Sl ˛ – Polska -Europa: zmieniajace ˛ si˛e społeczenstwo ´ w perspektywie lokalnej i globalnej: Ksi˛ega X ogólnopolskiego zjazdu ´ askiego, socjologicznego (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Sl ˛ 1998). ´ atkiewicz, ˙ Swi ˛ W. and Wódz, K. (eds.), Tozsamo´ sc´ kulturowa mieszkanców ´ starych ´ aska dzielnic miast Górnego Sl ˛ (Wrocław–Warszawa: Ossolineum, 1991).

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6 Zonguldak Coalfield and the Past and Future of Turkish Coal-mining Communities H. Tarık S¸ engül and E. Attila Aytekin

6.1 Introduction Zonguldak, a province of 620,000 people on the western Black Sea coast in Turkey, was once an industrial powerhouse attracting migrants from various parts of the country.1 The city and the surrounding coalmining basin emerged as the single most important mining centre in the Ottoman Empire. Before 1848, when coal production began in the surrounding area, Zonguldak was a neighbourhood in a small village. In a matter of decades, it had emerged as an important Ottoman town and became one of the ‘workshop’ cities of the Turkish Republic, which was established in 1923. In Ottoman and early Republican times, the region was called the Ere˘ gli coal basin, because the port town of Ere˘ gli was an older settlement and was socially and economically more important to the region than Zonguldak. As Zonguldak grew in size and in importance, the region came to be called the Zonguldak coal basin. The transformation deeply affected the lives of the inhabitants of the region. While the local villagers began to work in underground jobs on a rotational basis, a largely immigrant workforce employed permanently in the above-ground tasks also emerged. In the Ottoman and early Republican periods, despite attempts at regulation and improvement, miners worked under extremely difficult conditions and delays in wage payments, arbitrary fines, work-related diseases and accidents were common. Although Turkey is only one of more than 20 successor states of the Ottoman Empire, it has generally been considered as the main heir and, as a result, many of the debates about Turkey’s present have been linked to its Ottoman past. One such debate concerns Turkey’s failed 154

H. Tarık S¸ engül and E. Attila Aytekin 155

economic development. For quite some time, scholars have linked the Ottoman failure to industrialise with the collapse of its manufacturing sector due to the influx of foreign goods from the later eighteenth century onwards. In particular the Anglo–Ottoman Treaty of 1838 was considered to be the turning point in opening up Ottoman markets to foreign goods. Recent studies, however, emphasise the transformation of Ottoman manufacture in the nineteenth century rather than a collapse. Ottoman manufacturing was transformed from male-dominated, guild- and urban-based production to female-dominated, unorganised spatially mixed production (Quataert, 1993). Moreover, there were emerging proto-industry centres in the Balkans (Palairet, 1997) and in Anatolia (Duman, 1998). Thus, although Ottoman manufacturing did decline in relative terms in global economy, it survived by transforming itself through the diversity of its organisational forms and high level of labour exploitation. On the other hand, the Republic did not inherit a sound industrial infrastructure from the Empire. The profound demographic changes that took place throughout the late Ottoman period, the constant displacement of population groups, the loss of some of the Empire’s richest provinces and the long period of war that lasted from 1911 to 1922 caused great impoverishment in areas that later became part of the Turkish Republic. The Republican regime followed a free-trade economic policy in the 1920s, but replaced it with an aggressive state-led industrialisation campaign in the 1930s. The coal basin, as one of the providers of energy for industry, was directly implicated in the new economic policies of the government. The government nationalised the mines in 1940, by which time the production in the basin was controlled by large, private French, Italian and Turkish companies. French capital had arrived in the basin with a concession given in 1896 and had dominated coal production since then. With nationalisation, a new era began in Zonguldak. The state coal company became a major provider of infrastructural investments including social, cultural and even municipal services. Zonguldak was soon transformed into a company town. Nationalisation did not bring immediate benefits to the workers. The combination of wartime labour practices forced on the locals and the staunch anti-communism of the single-party government that continued during the post-1946 multi-party era – and shared by the opposition party that came to power in 1950 – meant that it was the workers who paid a heavy price for industrialisation. The workers faced police violence, frequent fatal accidents and political pressure. Only in the relatively relaxed political atmosphere of the 1960s did the pressure on

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the working class movement in Zonguldak – as elsewhere in Turkey – diminish. With the ‘import substitution industrialisation’ (ISI) industrial policy of the 1960s and 1970s, the relative weight of the coal basin within the Turkish economy increased once again. The region, which housed intensive mining activity and iron- and steelworks, played an important role in the new industrial policy. Given the built-in foreign currency shortage resulting from ISI, domestically generated energy became all the more important. Towards the end of 1970s, however, ISI entered a major crisis and an alternative neo-liberal development programme began to be demanded by business circles (Ozan, 2010). This period corresponds to the first signs of decline in the basin. The coup d’état of 1980 and the full-blown neo-liberal policies subsequently adopted brought consistent and considerable decline to Zonguldak, increasingly reducing it to a backwater in the economic and social geography of Turkey. In the late 1980s, the government announced its intentions to close down the mines completely. The workers’ response was a strike in 1990 and a huge march on Ankara in the winter of 1990–91. As a result, the government had to drop plans to close down the entire basin, and instead switched to a policy of phasing out coal production through early retirements of workers, not hiring new personnel, and suspending needed investment. The phasing-out policy was followed by all subsequent governments during the 1990s and early and mid-2000s. Currently, some pits are closing while others are being privatised, yet at the same time the state coal company is hiring new workers. Stuck amidst this contradictory policy, and without any comprehensive regeneration plans in sight, Zonguldak is a declining industrial region that is now faced with an even more uncertain future. We will now provide a theoretical framework focusing on the issues of consciousness and identity, as well as on the changes now acting upon community formation. Drawing on the works of David Harvey, Doreen Massey and Pierre Bourdieu, we discuss working-class identity in relation to other identities, and to locality, community, family and the state. The theoretical discussion is followed by a history of the coal basin, from its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century to today, with an emphasis on miners, their working conditions, organisations, struggles and relations with the state. In the following section, we deal with the deindustrialisation process and its impact on the city, region and the workers and the people of Zonguldak. Our goal in this final part of the chapter is to arrive at some preliminary results regarding the impact of deindustrialisation and decline on identity formation in Zonguldak.

H. Tarık S¸ engül and E. Attila Aytekin 157

6.2 Theoretical framework The understanding of a particular locality or region requires, on the one hand, paying attention to its historically defined position within a wider spatial division of labour while, on the other hand, examining the uniqueness of the locality under investigation, a region constituted historically within those wider processes to which we refer. Following Harvey (1989), it is possible to define four different functions assigned to localities. A locality could be a workshop for productive activities. A locality could attain a finance/administrative centre status within the wider division of labour. A third possibility is that a locality might attract activities to make it a leisure centre due to its cultural and natural heritage. Finally, a locality could be a redistributive centre by channelling the resources coming from the government to local people. We must remember, however, that these are ideal types and that in a concrete situation a locality contains activities that could all be considered as part of these four different options. There are cities where all these four functions are at work in a balanced way. Likewise, it is possible to see localities where one of these functions heavily dominates the other functions so that such localities are identified with that function. Mono-industry cities like mining towns are examples of such localities with their workshop-oriented economies. In such cases, the other functions are structured around the workshop function. It is necessary to emphasise that the positions of the localities in a spatial division of labour are largely determined by wider economic and political relations which, in turn, depend on politics at the global, national and local scales. If we look at the period up to the late 1970s, within a power geometry revolving around nation states, the spatial division of labour was largely determined by the national dynamics involving processes such as accumulation strategies and corresponding forms of regulation. In such a situation, the spatial division of labour was defined within the boundaries of a nation state on the basis of compatibility between the localities and regions. Localities, depending on their previous historical and geographical accumulation, specialised in certain functions, and relied on and supported other localities that specialised in different functions. In the more recent age of globalisation, which has undermined the national logic of accumulation, the compatibility principle has gradually given way to the principle of competition with other localities both within and outwith the national boundaries. The localities still have the four specialisation options, but this time within a global spatial

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division of labour that is ever-increasingly defined by a competitive environment. It would be a mistake, however, to assume a passive role for the localities in the process of definition of their position within the spatial division of labour, whether in a nationally or supra-nationally bounded environment. The localities play a part in this process depending on their historically and geographically constituted resources and heritage and the degree of active involvement of the local or locally dependent actors. Massey’s framework is of help in understanding such processes. According to Massey (1984), local economic and social structures and relations are formed by the layering effects of different rounds of investments. In other words, as Warde points out, ‘successive rounds of accumulation deposit layers of industrial sediment in geographical space. That sediment comprises both plant and persons deposited in one round, being of primary importance at the beginning of the next round’ (Warde, 1985, p. 197). One should not, however, assume that such economic processes and the sedimentary layer are the sole forces shaping a locality or a particular community within it. The layers of history which are sediment over time are not just economic; there are also cultural, political and ideological strata, layers which also have their local specificities. And this aspect of the construction of ‘locality’ further reinforces the impossibility of reading off from a ‘layer of investment’ any automatic reverberations on the character of a particular area. (Massey, 1984, p. 120) Perhaps, following this reasoning, we could conclude that intermingling of these various layers and degree of consistence among them determine the ‘structural coherence’ of a particular locality and the position and chances of it in the following rounds of investments (see S¸ engül, 2003). With regard to working-class formation, Massey emphasises the other dynamics that play a part in this process: Broader social structures of community, changing patterns of consumption, the restructuring of spatial forms, the changing national ideological and political climate and the market patterns of geographical cultural differentiation – all of these will combine with changes in the social relations of production in determining both

H. Tarık S¸ engül and E. Attila Aytekin 159

the overall pattern of class structures and the more detailed internal characteristics of those classes. (Massey, 1984, p. 84) 6.2.1 Mining localities and communities In the literature, mining communities occupy a specific place, as they have been considered as the purest form of working-class communities with their relatively homogeneous workforce resulting from singleindustry domination. Therefore, such localities are often considered to be natural nests of working-class communities with a great deal of homogeneity. While such a perspective was highly dominant in the 1950s and 1960s, recent studies have also emphasised the homogeneity thesis. Bulmer, for instance, argues that: The social ties of work, leisure, neighbourhood and friendship overlap to form close-knit and interlocking locally based collectivities of actors. The solidarity of community is strengthened . . . by a shared history of living and working in one place over a long period of time. (Bulmer, quoted in Crow and Allan, 1994, p. 27) In a more recent study, Charlesworth (2000) also finds such a strong sense of working-class community characterised by the existence of a shared experience of commonality, and an underlying coherence to the life of the place resulting from common living conditions and collective experience as workers. But there are also objections to depicting these working-class communities as being highly homogeneous. For instance, Crow and Allan object to such a simplification on the basis that: Constructing a composite picture out of the findings of the various community studies of the 1950s, loses sight of the diversity of these communities with regard to the industries on which they were based, regional variations, difference in the evolving variations of their ‘traditions’. (Crow and Allan, 1994, p. 26) It is hardly possible to deny the role of shared experiences of workers living similar lives in both work and living places. Likewise, spatial proximity and segregated areas of workplaces contribute to workers’ shared

160 Zonguldak Coalfield and the Past and Future of Turkish Coal-mining

sense of community. However, they are not the only factors contributing to community formation. There are other processes working against such shared sense of community. 6.2.2 Identity and consciousness formation The question of identity is a highly problematic area of study. In his seminal work on the urbanisation of consciousness, Harvey provides us with a fruitful set of concepts to study the question of identity with reference to the spatialised form of identity. Harvey identifies five primary loci of consciousness formation, namely individualism, class, community, the state and the family: Individualism attaches to money uses in freely functioning markets. Class under capitalism reflects the buying and selling of labour power and the social relations embodied in the socio-technical conditions of production under conditions of surplus value extraction. Community, as we shall see, is a highly ambiguous notion that nevertheless plays a fundamental role in terms of the reproduction of labour power, the circulation of revenues and the geography of capital accumulation. The state also impinges on consciousness as a centre of authority and as an apparatus through which political-economic power is exercised in a territory with some degree of popular legitimacy. The family, finally, has a profound effect upon ways of thought and action simply by virtue of its function as a primary site of social reproduction through child rearing. (Harvey, 1985, p. 252 [our emphases]) Harvey goes on to argue that no one locus of consciousness formation could be understood independently of its interaction with the others. Perhaps we could define a particular identity, be it individual or community, as an overdetermined outcome of the interaction of these different loci of consciousness. Therefore, the study of questions of identity requires us empirically to investigate these interactions along with the theoretical work. 6.2.3 Changing identities If employment and workplace experiences have a substantial role in the common experiences of the people in a locality, then it is justified to expect that the changes in the economic structure of localities and following occupational changes would make an impact on the consciousness and identity of working-class communities. This is a highly

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relevant issue for those localities and communities undergoing major deindustrialisation, of which mining localities are an excellent example. The decline of the mining industry has created well-documented trauma in such localities across many different countries. Some of these localities are in the process of regeneration and revival, which changes the occupational structure in dramatic ways. However, many localities have been left to their destiny and failed to experience a similar revival for various reasons. The Zonguldak region falls into this latter category, which is why we would like to pay some attention to ‘failed localities and communities’ in the remaining part of this section. The most dramatic impact of the failure of an area to revive has been observed in the working-class population of such localities. Rising unemployment and poverty are the most common characteristic of such communities. Although solidarity and sense of community do not completely collapse, and vary from community to community depending on local conditions, it is nevertheless true that people are increasingly left to their own devices in emerging from this bleak situation. It is important to ask, in such cases, what kind of changes in people’s consciousness and identity take place with the decline of the sense of community and class belonging. The answer to that question is related closely to the strategy and mechanisms of survival involving family, kin and individuals’ personal networks. If we go back to different loci of consciousness, then it should be asked how such a change affects their interaction in ways that may lead to changes in people’s identities. In the empirical analysis of such strategies of survival in relation to different loci of consciousness, Bourdieu’s framework, which involves concepts such as habitus and cultural, economic, social and symbolic capital, is of great help (Bourdieu, 1993). Many studies point to the difficulties faced by mining localities, communities and individual workers in emerging from their long-term experience centred on the mining industry. Part of the reason is the lack of top-down strategies and reluctance of the state to develop and implement (comprehensive) regeneration programmes. But there is also the fact that such a longterm experience creates its own habitus schemes for working-class people and families, which are difficult to change quickly. For this reason it would be fair to argue that, despite the declining importance of the mining sector and Zonguldak as a mining region, the local residents will continue to identify themselves with coal and mining not only as part of structure of feeling but also as a way of life. From a policy-oriented point of view it is more interesting, however, to deploy the concepts of habitus and different forms of capital

162 Zonguldak Coalfield and the Past and Future of Turkish Coal-mining

that the communities and families possess in explaining their survival strategies (for an implementation of this framework in the study of unemployment and poverty-hit groups, see Bourdieu et al., 1999). In such processes, there is a changing form of interaction between the different loci of consciousness that are sometimes in contradiction to each other (see Kirk, 2007, p. 153). The prominent role of the class and the state, as well as the community, gives way to new forms of articulation and disarticulation among these different loci of consciousness, giving rise to family- and individual-oriented practices and perceptions. This does not mean that class and the state as the loci of consciousness completely disappear or totally lose their significance. People do not easily give up their well-established schemes of habitus. Yet, these schemes also undergo a transformation in the face of new, harsh realities. Perhaps the rise of racism and the religious beliefs in some working-class communities are striking examples of such a new interpretation of state- and community-based consciousness.

6.3 Coal and miners in Zonguldak: a short history 6.3.1 The Ottoman period The history of the Zonguldak-Ere˘ gli coal basin can be examined through five periods, from the onset of production of coal to the present: the Ottoman state management period (1848–96); the French company period (1896–1914); the war years and the Republican period until nationalisation (1914–40); the nationalisation period (1940–80); and the deindustrialisation years (1980–present). The operation of the mines in the basin started in 1848, when Sultan Abdülmecid endowed the revenues of the mines to a religious charity. The mines were managed by the Privy Purse (Hazine-i Hassa), which was responsible for overseeing the operations of the pit owners and collecting the revenue. In 1865, the Ottoman government placed the coalmines under the authority of the Naval Ministry. This decision coincided with the restructuring and significant enlargement of the Ottoman navy and reflected the significance of coal as a key military source, as steam engines became standard in warships in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the early years, mining in the basin was carried out through primitive methods. Mainly due to the lack of investment on the part of the operators of the mines, contemporary coal-mining technology was not introduced into the basin. The amount of production, therefore,

H. Tarık S¸ engül and E. Attila Aytekin 163

remained very low and showed no sign of significant growth throughout the period. Although there were slight improvements in infrastructure and organisation under Naval Ministry management, the amount of coal produced remained low and unstable. Trying to change the situation, the Ottoman government decided in 1882 to abolish the Naval Ministry’s purchasing monopoly and announced measures to support private Ottoman capital, including tax reductions, reductions in export duties and customs duties exemptions (Quataert, 1983, p. 47). This brought about considerable change. From the 1880s onwards, relatively large-scale capital invested in the mines led to both an increase in production and a concentration in pit ownership. Small-scale operators were quickly eliminated and, by 1893, four big companies accounted for three-quarters of total production. The concession to exploit the coal mines given to the French Sociéte d’Heraclée (Ere˘gli S¸ irket-i Osmaniyesi) in 1896 was a major event, not only for the region but for the late Ottoman Empire as well. The investment capital of the company was enormous in comparison with that of other foreign companies in the mining sector. The company undertook major infrastructural activity in the region, including the development of the port of the town of Zonguldak (Çıladır, 1977, p. 80). The entrance of a French company into the basin caused a significant increase in coal production, and this company soon eliminated most of its rivals: in 1902 it represented 79 per cent of the total production of Zonguldak-Ere˘ gli coalmines (Quataert, 2006, p. 29). On the other hand, the company had to deal with foot-dragging by the government and hostility from local entrepreneurs and the populace. The Ottoman government’s attempts to control the mines increased under the new (post-1908) regime, but the company managed to preserve its dominant position until the advent of war in 1914 (Aytekin, 2006, pp. 36–9). The company built housing and social services facilities for its personnel in one area of the city. This neighbourhood, which included a church and a school, was later dubbed the ‘French Quarter’. Some of the buildings of the French Quarter are still intact and in use to house state coal company staff. The beginning and intensification of mining in the area has meant much to the people of the region, which has been predominantly agricultural for centuries. The mines and the range of commercial activity surrounding them gradually, but irrecoverably, transformed their lives. Immigrant workers arrived; they were initially Croat and Montenegrin, afterwards Kurdish and Laz. The migrant workers were usually employed above ground and worked full-time. The great majority of local miners were rotational workers; these worked on and off at bi-weekly or

164 Zonguldak Coalfield and the Past and Future of Turkish Coal-mining

monthly intervals and were employed underground. On the one hand, their lives were very different from the lives of peasants elsewhere in the country. They entered into a new world with mining; they had an additional source of income; they suffered the hardships of mining and socialised with co-workers in and around the workplace. Their wives and children were also affected; it meant new responsibilities and extra burdens for them in the rural household. On the other hand, the rotational workers remained peasants and it was quite hard for the mine owners and mine administration to keep the workers in the pits at harvest time. The underground workers thus had not given up their rural connections – simultaneously being workers and peasants was a part of their consciousness formation from the beginning (Quataert, 2006, pp. 7–8). Moreover, the practice of assigning certain jobs to certain villages and recruiting workers on that basis tended to strengthen the workplace–village association. Workplace was not the sole determinant of consciousness for them. The advent and development of mining also brought about big changes in Zonguldak. In a relatively short span of time, Zonguldak was transformed from a tiny settlement to a sizeable city. In this sense, the city owed its existence to coal mining. It mainly functioned as a workshop of industrial activities. It should be noted, however, that the presence of rotational workers, who returned to their villages in their off-periods, operated as an ever-present element of heterogeneity; thus Zonguldak never became a ‘pure’ mining community. A working class was in formation but the process was complicated by a number of factors, including the dual loyalty of the workers – to their land as well as to mining. During the Privy Purse and Naval Ministry administration periods, the miners in the region found themselves in a very unhealthy and dangerous working environment. Fatal accidents in the pits were a common occurrence (Aytekin, 2006, pp. 71–83). The first government attempt to regulate labour relations in the mines occurred in 1867, when a detailed regulation concerning different aspects of mining in the basin was promulgated. Whether the regulation was implemented thoroughly and to what extent it changed working conditions is not clear. Regardless, there is indication that the accidents, health concerns and the problem of irregular payments continued. The entry of French capital into the basin and the formation of the large French company did not change the picture, either. Despite the scale of the infrastructural investments it made, the company failed to provide adequate nutrition, accommodation and training for its workers (Eldem,

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1994, p. 49). In general, throughout the Ottoman period, accident rates in the Zonguldak mines remained dreadfully high (Quataert, 2006). One important period for workers in the Ottoman period was the strikes of 1908. During the second half of 1908, following the Young Turk Revolution, a wave of worker militancy shook the Empire, leading to 111 strikes organised across the country. This level of involvement in worker activism has not been seen again in Turkish history (Güzel, 1996, pp. 31–2). The workers in the coal basin also played their part in the wave of strikes: there were four strikes in the basin before the end of 1908, one of these involving virtually all of the approximately 10,000 workers employed in the area. The government sent troops to the region to suppress the strike; some workers were arrested but they were eventually released. The strikes caused no significant hike in wages, yet there were attempts to address certain problems, including housing (Aytekin, 2006, pp. 45–6, 64–5). The fact that a large, unorganised workforce, probably under the leadership of full-time skilled workers, held four major strikes in the post-revolutionary months was a milestone in itself. Since then, Zonguldak miners have built a tradition of resistance and worker militancy in the basin that has appeared from time to time as a factor capable of changing balances. The concentration of mine ownership in a handful of companies might, at least partly, account for their ability to organise several wildcat strikes between 1908 and 1922.

6.3.2 The early Republican period and nationalisation The Republican government closely monitored the Zonguldak coal basin from the earliest years of its rule. It actually enacted legislation about the basin even during the War of Independence, passing three laws between 1920 and 1922. There were other laws passed in the course of the 1920s and the 1930s, some of these aiming to improve the working and living conditions of miners. Among these, the creation of Amele Birli˘gi, a solidarity and emergency fund, in 1922 is noteworthy. Albeit a positive step towards improving working conditions of the miners, Amele Birli˘gi was directly linked to the mine administration bureaucracy and headed by the director of the administration himself. Moreover, not all of the miners were included in the framework of the fund. The fund could be considered as part of the government attempts to stabilise the workforce in a crucial mining region. Yet, the move to establish the fund must also have stemmed from pressure coming from workers themselves, who remained active even during the First World War.

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The Republican government adopted a corporatist–solidarist ideology that denied class divisions – or even the existence of social classes. There were severe limitations on labour organisation and activity in Zonguldak, as elsewhere. Although there was not a single general law that explicitly banned unions and strikes, other pieces of legislation as well as the authoritarian political atmosphere made sure that legal labour activity took place only within the narrow boundaries determined by the state (Koç, 1998). The early Republican period did not change much in the working conditions of miners, either. Accidents were a common occurrence (Nichols and Kahveci, 1995) and health care facilities for the victims of accidents and work-related diseases were inadequate. The problems of irregular payments, arbitrary fines and absence of overtime payments continued. The situation was particularly bad for the rotational workers who spent half of the year in the pits and half in their villages. Before the entry of French capital in 1886, most of the miners in the region worked for operators who were both capitalist entrepreneurs and tax-farmers. As in nineteenth-century Bolivia, where ‘employers tried to tie their workers through debt or coercive measures’ (Langer, 1996, pp. 33–4), in the Zonguldak region, more often than not, the mine operator was simultaneously a capitalist who exploited the workers’ surplus labour, a tax collector who was in charge of collecting the agrarian taxes and a usurer who lent money to the workers at high interest rates. The outcome of this complex set of relationships in the basin was frequent payments in kind and different forms of forced labour. The French company changed the circumstances, making the great majority of workers in the basin the employees of one big company. The operation of the French company came to a halt during the First World War, which threw France and the Ottoman Empire (afterwards the Ankara government) into opposite camps. The war years (1914–22) and the entry of government-controlled private capital companies to the basin in 1926, however, did not end the presence of foreign capital in the mines. On the contrary, in 1931, approximately two-thirds of total coal production was from pits controlled by foreign capital, while individually owned mines accounted for only 10 per cent of the total sales of coal produced in the basin (Çıladır, 1977, pp. 160–1). By this time, production was heavily concentrated in the hands of large companies of French, Italian and Turkish origin. The crucial moment in the history of the Zonguldak mines came in 1940 when the government nationalised the mines. In some European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Luxembourg,

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land ownership was so fragmented that capital could not flow freely through land owners, and this led to these countries nationalising mining. By contrast, in the UK, the highly concentrated nature of mining lands did not hinder the development of mining and nationalisation took place only in 1948, as a political rather than a technical move (Fine, 1990, pp. 38–41). Turkey did not nationalise coal mining until 1940, and this relatively late date also seems to be related to the concentrated ownership structure in the basin. The nationalisation of the Zonguldak mines should indeed be understood in relation to the economic crisis of the 1930s and the government’s attempt to alleviate the effects of the crisis through a programme of state-led industrialisation. During the 1930s, the state became involved more directly and extensively in the economy. Largescale state economic enterprises were formed. Several key industries, including mining, were nationalised, putting a significant portion of industrial production under direct state control (Timur, 1997, p. 132). In the Zonguldak region, the first nationalisation took place in 1936 and complete nationalisation of all foreign and Turkish companies and individually owned mines was completed in 1940. A low-price policy was put into effect and imports of coal were stopped almost completely; the government then heavily subsidised the steel and transport industries (Kahveci, 1996, p. 184). A major state-owned iron and steel company was founded in 1937–41 in Karabük, a town situated 177 kilometres from Zonguldak and administratively a part of the Zonguldak province. At its peak in 1977–78, up to 14,000 workers were employed in Karabük’s plants (Yazıcı, 1992, p. 96). Nationalisation did not improve the fortunes of the majority of the miners, since a chronic labour shortage in the basin led the government to impose forced labour on local people during the Second World War. The local population had been obliged to work in the mines during the late nineteenth century as well, making this the second period of forced labour they experienced. This time the labour requirement lasted seven years and took a heavy toll on the rural population. The number of fatal accidents increased during these years, and the police and state company officials implemented the forced labour regime using heavyhanded methods. The miners thus paid a heavy price for the operation of the Turkish war economy, although Turkey did not join the war until near its very end. The period from 1939 to 1947 was extremely important in terms of the way miners related to the state. Nationalisation, which made the state the miners’ boss and provider of services hitherto provided by large

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companies, drastically increased the importance of the state in miners’ lives. On the other hand, the forced labour practices of 1940–47 alienated a significant portion of workers. It is plausible to presume that the generation of workers who suffered the forced labour period related to the state as an important, yet largely negatively perceived, entity. After the Second World War, in a somewhat more relaxed political atmosphere, workers throughout the country began to form associations and trade unions to defend their interests. The first labour union of Zonguldak miners was formed in 1946–47, although legal barriers and state opposition continued throughout the 1950s. The first collective agreement between workers and the state mining company was signed as late as 1964. The Democratic Party (DP), the new opposition party, won the second multi-party elections held in 1950. In Zonguldak, the DP got more than 60 per cent of the vote, which could be related to the alienation of a significant part of the local population due to wartime labour practices. As elsewhere in the country, the 1960s witnessed increasing working-class activism in Zonguldak. In 1965 a major strike in the basin was crushed by troops, resulting in the death of two workers (Tuncer, 1998, pp. 70, 84–6).

6.3.3 After nationalisation: good times and decline For more than two decades following the nationalisation of the coal mines in 1940, up until 1965, state investments in the region increased. Major coal-processing facilities and the local railroad network were built and mining equipment renewed (Tüylüo˘ glu and Karaka¸s, 2006, p. 207). With the establishment of a giant, state-owned steel company in Ere˘ gli in 1965, the triangle formed by Zonguldak, Karabük and Ere˘ gli became the spatial focus of Turkey’s import-substitution industrial strategy. In this regard, the mid-1960s can be taken as the major turning point in the history of the region. Between 1965 and 1980, as urbanisation extended throughout the region the population of the city of Zonguldak doubled, while the region’s population increased by 50 per cent (see Table 6.1). Migration to the city and the region, especially from the eastern Black Sea region and adjacent central Anatolian provinces, increased dramatically from the mid-1960s onwards. Although the decline of the mining industry started in the late 1970s, the real blow to the sector and the regional economy came after the IMFinduced structural adjustment programme of 1980 that was followed by a military coup. After the restoration of parliamentary rule, neoliberal

Table 6.1 Year

1950 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2004 2009

Coal mining and population change in the Zonguldak region, 1950–2004 Coal-mining employment

33, 456 43, 043 35, 155 – – 41, 927 38, 231 34, 349 21, 520 19, 151 12, 261 –

Zonguldak Province population (including Bartın and Karabük) 427, 000 569, 000 650, 000 744, 000 836, 000 955, 000 1, 045, 000 1, 074, 000 1, 078, 000 1, 025, 000 968, 000 1, 027, 000

Zonguldak City population 36, 000 54, 000 55, 000 77, 000 90, 000 109, 000 118, 000 117, 000 112, 000 104, 000 97, 000 109, 000

Population of province in relation to Turkey (%) – – 2.07 2.09 2.07 2.13 2.06 1.90 – 1.51 – 1.42

Population of city in relation to province (%) 8.4 9.5 8.5 10.3 10.8 11.4 11.3 10.9 10.4 10.1 10.0 10.6

Note: The population figures are rounded, estimated mid-year values for the period 1991–2004. Source: Tüylüo˘ glu and Karaka¸s (2006, pp. 207–16); website of Turkish Statistical Institute: http://www.tuik.gov.tr/; website of General Directorate for Local Authorities http://www.mahalli-idareler.gov.tr/

169

170 Zonguldak Coalfield and the Past and Future of Turkish Coal-mining

policies revolving around export promotion growth strategy formulated by the military regime remained intact. As one of the premises of the liberal policies and export promotion growth strategy was to reduce government involvement in the economy, along with opening the economy to international competition, the consequences for the region have been highly destructive and traumatic. The end of planned development and state-led industrialisation meant the end of an industrial policy of relying heavily on coal as a source of energy (Kahveci, 1996, p. 183), thus devaluing its strategic place in the state’s economic intervention schemes. Although the energy sector remained significant during the post-1980 era, attention turned to hydro-electricity and huge dam projects as sources of energy. Moreover, the privatisation fever that began in the 1980s, and the negative attitude of the right-wing governments to the trade unions, brought both the economy and the workers of Zonguldak under increasing pressure. Not only their main source of income and livelihoods but also the life-blood of local identity and the basis of their feeling of local self-worth were under threat. The major political interlocutor for the local population and an important source of identity, that is the state, was leaving the region. As we shall see below, their response in the winter of 1990–91 was to march on Ankara, which had begun to make itself invisible in the eyes of the people and workers of Zonguldak. What were the dynamics and consequences of this transformation? The change in the number of coal industry workers is a very helpful indicator in this regard. Table 6.1 shows that, between 1980 and 1995, the number of coal miners was halved, which was a big blow to the local economy. A closer look at the sub-periods indicates that the assault on the miners and the mining industry took place in two stages. Stage one took ten years, from 1980 to 1990. The figures tell us that, in this decade, the workforce in coal mining shrank by 18 per cent, with an annual average of 1.8 per cent. The second, and much more dramatic, decline took place between 1990 and 1995: mining employment fell by 37 per cent at an average annual rate of 7.4 per cent. Between 1995 and 2001 we see the ups and downs in the region, a slowing down of the decline momentum that resumed in 2001. Between 2001 and 2004 the mining work force decreased by around 30 per cent. These figures also reflect a changing ownership structure. The fall in the number of coal workers in the recent past has mainly been due to redundancies in the state-controlled Türkiye Ta¸skömürü I˙s¸ letmeleri (Turkish Coal Company – TTK). Private sector employment is increasing and the share of the private sector in coal-mining employment could

H. Tarık S¸ engül and E. Attila Aytekin 171

soon pass the 50 per cent threshold. This would be a radical change in terms of the economic future of coal workers, their working culture, trade union practices and local culture which, since 1940, have been structured by the presence of the public sector and the state. In addition, not only did the private sector begin to dominate the coal-mining business, but its significance as a general source of employment also increased. The younger generation, or at least those who did not leave the town, are now increasingly being employed in the service and trade sectors (UPL, 2000, p. 196). Economic data showing gross domestic product (GDP) in the region confirm a decline in industry and agriculture and the increasing importance of services. Between 1987 and 2001 the contribution of the province’s industrial sector to GDP shrank at an annual rate of 4.7 per cent, while that of agriculture decreased at an annual rate of 5.8 per cent. When Karabük, home to huge state-owned iron and steel plants, was separated from the province of Zonguldak and became a province itself in 1995, the industrial decline in the latter became even more marked. By 2001, the share of the services sector in provincial GDP was 62 per cent compared with industry’s 30 per cent and the agricultural sector’s 8 per cent (DPT – Zonguldak). In Zonguldak province in 2000, paid employment constituted 35 per cent of total employment, while the national average was 44 per cent. The picture portrayed by these figures can mislead us, given the dominance of rotational workers in the mining sector. Since the agricultural sector inflates the share of unpaid employment in this picture, and given the rural structure of the region, we can conclude that the share of paid employment in the workforce was much larger. For example, according to Kahveci (1996, p. 191), 400 villages out of around 700 had been sending rotational face-workers to work in the mines in 1993 when industrial decline was at its worst. The region’s population increase had already plateaued by the mid-1980s, after which Zonguldak had a very high outward-migration rate (see Table 6.2).

Table 6.2 Net 1975–2009

migration

1975–80

1980–5

10.8

−20

rate

1985–90 −29.4

(per

1000)

1995–2000 −73.8

in

Zonguldak,

2008–09 −71.4

Source: Website of Turkish Statistical Institute: http://www.tuik.gov.tr/

172 Zonguldak Coalfield and the Past and Future of Turkish Coal-mining

Two different channels exist providing state support to a locality: via direct economic investments; and through infrastructural investments, either in the form of physical investments or through administrative resource transfers. We have seen that the state support of the first sort was systematically weakened after 1980. The most important form of state administrative intervention of the second type was the establishment of two new provinces in the region, when two former districts, Bartın in 1991 and Karabük in 1995, were established as new provincial units. When a district becomes a province (a new province is created with the older district at its centre), this amounts to a considerable transfer of new public resources: new government offices are created, bringing in new consumers, especially civil servants, and the public funds to be controlled by that former district are increased. Creation of provinces has been a populist instrument widely and effectively employed by different governments since 1980 to manipulate local political support during elections. In this respect, it is no coincidence that the new provinces were created in 1991 and 1995, when political opposition to the national government(s) was strong. The creation of these provinces did not, however, represent serious attempts to deal with the economic problems of the region. The level of state investments from 1995 to 2000 suggest that the state had totally given up on the region: public investment per capita was TL167 million (¤83 million)2 for the new province of Bartın, TL77 million (¤38 million) for the province of Karabük and TL175 million (¤87 million) for Zonguldak, all well below the national average of TL248 million (¤124 million) and the broader Black Sea region’s TL244 million (¤122 million) (Zonguldak, Bartın and Karabük DPT performance reports, 2008). Carving new provinces out of Zonguldak and the resulting limited transfer of funds was an unsuccessful attempt at a regeneration strategy, and showed that it was not really taken seriously. It is true that public investments such as the university helped the region’s ailing economy. Governments also initiated certain plans to expand tourism and maritime transport. Moreover, the state coal company has recently hired a number of underground workers and is apparently planning to increase production. On the other hand, none of these measures have, to date, changed either the fact or the perception of decline. As a result of the continued closures of state-owned mines, the privatisation of others and its general failure to invest in the region, the state is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the lives of miners and the people of Zonguldak. This

H. Tarık S¸ engül and E. Attila Aytekin 173

is having serious repercussions in terms of identity formation processes in the region.

6.4 Decline and beyond 6.4.1 The end of a glorious past? Continuities and discontinuities with the pre-1980 era The long history of the region suggests that there is a chronological pendulum swinging between private and public ownership of mines (Kahveci, 1996; Tuncer, 1998; Aytekin, 2006). The last stage, the post1980 era, however, has been fundamentally different from the preceding periods. Although the private sector began to play a more important role in running the pits as contractors, the state’s withdrawal from the region, as the owner and manager of the coal mines, was not followed by the flocking of private enterprises to take control of the mines. The consequences are twofold. On the one hand, the region is no longer the arena of struggle between powerful outside forces (including the national state and international capital/actors) to control the region’s natural resources and the lives of the locals. On the other hand, the vacuum created by this ‘attention deficit’ has left workers, their families and a whole regional economy feeling alone and helpless. The problem here is that there is not yet any single actor who could step in to fill the gap created in the identity formation process. It is still plausible to argue that identity formation might be partially assumed by other sites of consciousness – especially the family and community. But the position of patriarchal figures, potential tensions between the younger and the older generations, and increasingly fragile gender relations are all important factors. In the past, when coal was important and strategic, it was largely non-local or foreign actors who enjoyed the benefits. Now, it is left to the people of the region to suffer the costs, and to clean up the mess. By the late 2000s we are dealing with three generations of workers in the urban Zonguldak region – the first migrant generation (plus the local population), now largely retired workers; the second generation, born to the first-generation migrant (or local) families, some of whom are still working, while some are laid off, retired early or unemployed; and the third, and younger, generation, now facing the bitter fact of a stagnant economy, without hopes for a better future in the urban areas, and being forced to leave the region. A study conducted in 1993 notes that the tendency of workers’ sons to become miners was very strong,

174 Zonguldak Coalfield and the Past and Future of Turkish Coal-mining

and ‘[a]ltogether eight out of ten of the miners had fathers who had themselves been miners exclusively or in part (i.e. as miner/cultivator or miner/shepherd)’ (Kahveci, 1996, p. 192; also see UPL, 2000). Taking a cue from this observation, it can be argued that for the people of the region being a mine-worker did not simply mean having a job – it was also the core of a set of cultural practices and world-views articulated around this occupation, to be transmitted from one generation to another through the family (Oskay, 1983, p. 83). Apparently, given the period when this fieldwork took place, those interviewed by Kahveci were second-generation workers. The story for the third generation, given the contraction of the mining sector, is quite different, as mentioned earlier. Here, not only has the generational transmission of a specific culture been disrupted, but also the children, the third generation who were brought up in such a culture, will have to adapt themselves to a different world. As a result, the nature of the habitus formed around mining will make it much more difficult for earlier generations to adapt to the new economic environment, while it could facilitate the emergence of innovative short-term solutions to the economic collapse, by operationalising the family and community, themselves products of a local working-class habitus structured by the presence of a state-controlled local economy. For these generations the withdrawal of the state from the region, both as a source of livelihood and as a site of consciousness, might well endow the state’s by-products, and especially its sense of community, with a leading role as a site of consciousness and survival. For the younger generation, however, the situation seems to be different, for two reasons. First, they grew up at a time when the state had already begun to vacate the region. In other words, they are children of a transition period, and the habitus their parents formed/reproduced has not been transmitted to them; and second, they are developing new skills and survival strategies, and are slowly beginning to establish a new habitus, centred more around individualism, which is likely to provoke tensions between the earlier generations and the third. As for the geography of urbanisation in the region, the relationship between urbanisation and industrialisation in the region is not straightforward. The geographical distribution of the coal mines originally determined the location of the emerging towns. However, the rotational work patterns integrated the rural population with the industrial production in towns, including the city of Zonguldak, without actually locating them in the city or urbanising them. The long history of coal mining in the region thus created villages that do not simply make a

H. Tarık S¸ engül and E. Attila Aytekin 175

living by farming or animal husbandry, or even simply by sending workers to the city; they also specialise in certain industry-specific productive activities, or in sending workers to specific tasks (such as hewers’ villages or wooden chock-makers’ villages) (Kahveci, 1996, pp. 189, 191). The rural settlements of the coal basin itself constituted the major source of in-migration to the city of Zonguldak and to other urban centres in the region, followed to a lesser extent by those in the eastern Black Sea region and inner/eastern Anatolia (Oskay, 1983, p. 84; Yazıcı, 1992). Demographically, the in-migration process feeding the region’s urbanisation has been inward-oriented. Thus, what we face in the case of Zonguldak is a geographically dispersed industrialisation process, not necessarily accompanied by urbanisation of the whole region. In 2000, the urbanisation rate was 26 per cent in Bartın, 41 per cent in Zonguldak and 70 per cent in Karabük (Zonguldak, Bartın and Karabük, DPT performance reports, 2008). This unique feature of the region is one of the main factors shaping both local and regional identity, and the regional/local responses to industrial decline. The sense of decline in the city of Zonguldak itself can be understood via a comparison with the population decline of the province. Between 1985 and 2009, while the province lost 2 per cent of its total population, the population of the city of Zonguldak declined by 8 per cent (see Table 6.1). This may be because in-migrants with roots elsewhere may have left more rapidly, as may have the rotational workers who went back to their villages to find refuge in their older farming and animal husbandry practices. But it may also reflect the city’s third generation being more likely to leave. Thus the impact of industrial decline on different parts of the rural Zonguldak region will also have varied according to the degree of earlier integration of these villages into coal mining and its related industries. What conclusions can be reached about the political-economy of this trauma? First, it is interesting to note that the onslaught at first was rather slow when compared with the following periods, even despite the fact that possible worker resistance was minimised due to military rule and the banning of union activities. Reduction in the workforce became more aggressive later, at a time when worker activism again rose nationally, led by the coal miners of Zonguldak. The memories from the early and mid-1990s are of bitter confrontation with the national government and disillusionment with the state. It is worth noting that this disillusionment created a critical turning point in the history of the city and the region, and people began to leave in large numbers. Many workers of the second generation who were politically and industrially active

176 Zonguldak Coalfield and the Past and Future of Turkish Coal-mining

during the worker mobilisation of the 1990s then took early retirement or were laid off. Finally, since 1995 the cyclical employment pattern in the industry has reflected the dominance of private companies, essentially responding to global economic conditions and crisis. Zonguldak today is subject to different economic forces than it was before the 1990s. 6.4.2 Further inputs to the identity and habitus formation process Zonguldak coal mining produced two types of workers: underground workers, mainly drawn from the rural areas, less skilled, employed on a rotational basis (working for a while, then taking some time off, and then back to work); and surface workers, who settled in the town, were skilled and were permanently employed. The former constituted the largest section of the coal workforce and, ‘as late as 1990, when a policy of increasing the proportion of non-rotational workers was being implemented, seven out of ten hewers were still employed on a rotational basis, as were nearly 50 per cent of all underground workers. In 1993, almost two-thirds of hewers and 40 per cent of all underground workers worked on a rotational basis’ (Kahveci, 1996, p. 191). This differentiation of the workforce had a number of consequences in terms of the formation of a local identity and for the internal politics of the labour activism. First, as noted earlier, the rotational work had integrated the rural population in the region into the industrialisation process without actually urbanising them. Thus, it is hard to claim that there has been a complete overlap between the processes that have produced the urban local identity (of Zonguldak city and of other major industrial towns), and the formation of the working class culture. It could be suggested that permanent workers, mainly settled in the city of Zonguldak and other major towns, distilled their class identity not only in the workplace, but also in their neighbourhoods. For the rotational workers, however, the main site of communication with their co-workers has been the workplace. Yet their workplace solidarity has also built upon their rural ties, as they have mainly worked in the pits with their relatives and friends from their home villages (cf. Oskay, 1983, pp. 100–5). Moreover, the absence of a direct correspondence between industrialisation and urbanisation must have affected the tier that the expansion of industry created in the city. Second, according to Kahveci, the division of labour at work found its reflection in intra-union politics. The permanent and/or surface workers were more dominant in the union, despite the greater

H. Tarık S¸ engül and E. Attila Aytekin 177

numbers and motivations of underground, and mainly rotational, workers (see also Oskay, 1983, pp. 125, 169–70). Kahveci also mentions that the former have been more collaborative in dealing with the employers (mainly the state managers) (1996, pp. 194–6). This could have laid the ground for the potential rifts between these two factions of coal workers. There could also be an ethnic dimension to this divide, since it was primarily the workers of eastern Black Sea coast origin who were employed as surface workers, while the natives of the region worked as underground workers. Yet Tuncer (1998), himself a union activist, argues that ethnicity has not played a divisive role in union activism. There is a tendency to see ethnic identities as an impediment to working-class identity (Harvey, 2001), and this could be the case under certain circumstances. However, in some other cases ethnic identities could be integral to working-class identity. In the case of Zonguldak, ethnic ties could determine the potential survival strategies out of the economic depression and trauma in the region. The networks they provide could facilitate access back to jobs in the sector, or help the retired or laid-off workers to engage in different economic activities, as entrepreneurs for example (a tendency commonly observed across the ex-workers of various state-owned enterprises in different sectors – see Tansel, 1998). Moreover, the persistence of such networks or ties could prevent migration from the region of the third generation, and most importantly of the second. The role ethnic ties have played in the social and cultural capital employed by some workers needs further research. The salaried workforce in the region, and especially in mining, has been and is predominantly male, and even in decline the industrial structure has sustained this exclusiveness. As recently as the early 2000s the rate of women’s participation in the paid workforce was quite low (UPL, 2000, pp. 162–80; Ersoy et al., 2000), but higher than the national average (Turkey (2000), 22 per cent; Zonguldak, 27 per cent). The recent statistics show a visible increase in this rate, and these figures are well above national figures (see Table 6.3). Table 6.3 Women’s participation in the workforce in Zonguldak (including Bartın and Karabük) by age group (%) Year

15–19

20–24

25–34

35–54

55+

2005 2009

25.5 22.0

43.0 50.4

36.6 47.8

34.4 47.7

20.4 33.2

Source: Website of Turkish Statistical Institute: http://www.tuik.gov.tr/

178 Zonguldak Coalfield and the Past and Future of Turkish Coal-mining

The transformation of the economic structure of the region has not directly influenced or dissolved the pre-established gender relations of work in the region. Men’s working hours negatively affect family life and their socialisation process, due to their shift-based jobs with long working hours (UPL, 2000, p. 174). In this regard, it is mainly up to women to establish and sustain the social (neighbourhood, family and ethnicitybased) networks. This might, however, alter intra-family balances under the conditions of economic depression, turning women into strategic actors in the formulation and implementation of survival strategies. Moreover, according to Oskay, the patriarchal nature of social relations in Zonguldak gave the miner’s wife a critical role within the family, especially as the sole channel of communication between the father and the children (1983, pp. 106–9, 121–2), thereby keeping the family together. The miner’s wife has had to facilitate the socialisation of the miner’s family. What can be said of local self-perception and the broader sense of local community identity? Tuncer emphasises the fact that the workers of Zonguldak and the region had to start out from scratch in their quest to build a local political and/or urban culture, as neither did they have a proximate source of learning, nor did they inherit intellectuals. Tuncer draws our attention to the fact that the coal miners of Zonguldak are geographically separated from other workers (from different industries), whose experience in political struggle would have helped the workers of Zonguldak, and whose physical presence would have strengthened class solidarity (Tuncer, 1998, pp. 12–14). Focusing on the relationship between class identity and community identity, it is possible to detect the coexistence of two opposite feelings constituting the miner’s perception of place: pride and frustration. We cannot count on either alone to explain how a miner’s community responds to deindustrialisation. It can be argued that it is the coexistence of and the interplay between these two feelings that links class identity to local identity in a miner’s community. Pride can partially be related to the fact that Zonguldak has no past as a ‘place’, before the birth of mining as an economic activity in the region. In other words, similar to the city of Karabük, an industrial centre that mushroomed after the founding of iron- and steelworks, and in contrast to Ere˘ gli, also an industrial centre but a town with a history prior to industrialisation, the history of the city of Zonguldak is the history of mining and mine workers. In this regard, the local citizens’ attachment to their town(s) can be expected to be similar to that of an artist to her/his creation: Zonguldak as a product of the mine workers, a city built upon labour,

H. Tarık S¸ engül and E. Attila Aytekin 179

by labour. This pride, it can be argued, has been further inflated by the self-perception of mine workers as producers. Oskay, for example, found that miners regarded ‘hard work’ and ‘honesty’ as two major values, the former being the most important. Once adopted wholeheartedly, they would inevitably bring achievement and happiness (1983, pp. 224–5). On top of this, the significance attributed to their job, as a service to the interest of the whole nation, completes the picture. Arguably, the peak of this pride resulting from the community–class association came in 1990–91 when workers marched on Ankara following a strike in order to protest against government plans to close down all pits (Türkiye Sendikacılık Ansiklopedisi, 1996, pp. 550–7). The march was halted half-way to Ankara by troops, and brought about mixed results regarding the immediate demands of the workers. On the one hand, the strike and the march intensified the feeling of isolation on the part of the workers and the community, because of the indifference of other trade unions in Turkey. But it also created a very strong sense of community based on class identity when not only the workers, but families and relatives, hit the road on foot. Women figured prominently during the march, an interesting development given the male-dominated structure of the mining sector. Artisans, professionals and the municipality gave full support and some neighbouring towns offered hospitality to marchers. It was a strong display of (local and regional) unity against a state that was threatening their very survival as a community. The strike and march seems to be one of the reasons why local pride in mining and the community–class association survived decades of economic decline. Frustration, on the other hand, could be related to the difficult and dangerous nature of the job and dependence on mining as the sole source of livelihood – the feeling of being captives (Oskay, 1983, pp. 93–9), and to the geographical isolation of the region – the feeling of loneliness. Oskay’s field research was conducted in 1977, when mining was still a nationally strategic sector. Even then, he found that in the eyes of the workers, mining was not their top choice of job. They were forced to work there, as there were no other jobs. Plus, they did not want their children to become miners, although their own fathers were miners. So, living in Zonguldak, or commuting there for work, was imposed upon them, was their destiny. Indeed, the duration of employment and the rather high average age of workers indicated that once you were into mining, you were there until you retired (Oskay, 1983; Yazıcı, 1992). Job stability seems to have solidified workers’ comradeship in many ways. Oskay, for instance, reports that what workers found most

180 Zonguldak Coalfield and the Past and Future of Turkish Coal-mining

positive about their job was friendship in the workplace, followed by the relatively higher wages (1983, pp. 149–50). Nevertheless, it is hard to argue that this comradeship positively contributed to the formation of a place-based class consciousness. The significance and content of friendship varied according to the type of the worker. For rotational workers, there has always been a tendency to restrict the friendship circle to relatives and other villagers, constituting smaller, tightly knit, closed groups (ZMA Belediyeler Birli˘ gi, 1976, pp. 50–4) whose roots are in the village – not in the city. As for surface workers, mainly living in the city of Zonguldak, the exhausting nature of their job does not allow them much time to socialise, compelling them to stay at home during nonworking hours. When they go out they tend to frequent coffee houses (Oskay, 1983, p. 123).

6.5 Conclusion Zonguldak played a key role in the industrial development of Turkey, during both the Ottoman and Turkish Republic periods by providing one of the key inputs, coal, for industrial production. The economic structure, social life, administrative institutions and spatial structure of the region were formed around mining and evolved in line with the changes taking place in the mining industry. Economic and social structures and corresponding relations in Zonguldak region may thus be conceived as having been formed by the layering effects of different rounds of investments around coal mining. Accordingly, successive rounds of accumulation deposited layers of industrial sediment in geographical space. However, as argued above, these layers were not just economic. They also included cultural, political and ideological strata, layers that have their local specificities and whose intermingling and degree of consistency ultimately determines the ‘structural coherence’ of the Zonguldak region. The working-class communities formed during this long period thus had their own ‘structures of feeling’ and habitus. In the late 1970s, the mining sector began experiencing an irreversible decline due to the shift from an import-substitution industrialisation policy to an export-promotion growth strategy. Although the mining sector did not completely collapse, its relative importance declined in the following decades, causing a dramatic reduction in the workforce of the region. Yet the Zonguldak region still revolves around the mining industry, as no alternative sector has emerged to replace it. In line with this, there is a strong attachment to coal mining among the working people whose lives were shaped by it for decades. However, such an

H. Tarık S¸ engül and E. Attila Aytekin 181

attachment is not limited to the working class. Other segments of the population of this region have also created forms of attachment to mining, and it is these that create a kind of ambivalence about the future of the region. At times people express their frustration by blaming the long-term dependency of the region on coal mining which, supposedly, prevents the development of an alternative vision. At other times, realising that no alternative has emerged, local communities turn to the state to demand the strengthening of coal mining. Meanwhile the region’s population continues to fall as a result of outward migration to other developed regions of Turkey. It could be argued that the state, as the main employer in the region through its coal company, has been seen as a father figure by local working-class and other communities. Regional decline and partial administrative withdrawal of the state have been seen as failures of this father figure. Many now blame the state for creating a form of dependency that does not allow them to think and develop outside this state-induced logic. Such an ambivalent attitude towards the state reflects the current situation of the region. On the one hand, through its involvement in mining the state is still a major force; on the other, mining is now far from providing the region with a future through which communities can thrive.

Notes 1. The authors would like to thank Mustafa K. Bayırba˘ g for his contribution to the chapter. 2. All conversions to euros are approximate and based on exchange rates valid in late 2010.

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H. Tarık S¸ engül and E. Attila Aytekin 183 Ozan, E. D. ‘Kriz, Sınıf Mücadelesi ve Devlet: Türkiye’de Sermaye Sınıfı, 1977– 1980.’ Unpublished PhD dissertation, Ankara University, 2010. Palairet, P. The Balkan Economies, C.1800–1914. Evolution without Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Quataert, D. Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Quataert, D. Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire: The Zonguldak Coalfield, 1822–1920 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006). Quataert, D. Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881–1908. Reactions to European Economic Penetration (New York: NYU Press, 1983). S¸ engül, H. T. ‘On the Trajectory of Urbanisation in Turkey: an attempt at periodisation’, International Development Planning Review, 25/2 (2003), 153–68. ˙ sten Çıkarılan I¸ ˙ sçiler: Çıkarılma Tansel, A. ‘Türkiye’de Özelle¸stirme Nedeniyle I¸ Öncesinde ve Sonrasında Durumları’, ERC Working Paper Series 6 (Middle East Technical University, 1998). Timur, T. Türk Devrimi ve Sonrası (Ankara: I˙ mge, 1997). TÜI˙ K (Turkish Statistical Institute), ‘Göç: Tarihsel Geli¸sim’, http://www.tuik.gov. tr/VeriBilgi.do?tb_id= 38&ust_id= 11, accessed 20 October 2008. Tuncer, K. Tarihten Günümüze Zonguldak’ta I˙s¸ çi Sınıfının Durumu. Kumpanyalar Dönemine Geri Dönü¸s (I˙ stanbul: Göçebe, 1998). Türkiye Sendikacılık Ansiklopedisi (I˙ stanbul: Kültür Bakanlı˘ gı ve Tarih Vakfı, 1996). Tüylüo˘ glu, S¸ . and D. N. Karaka¸s, ‘Bölgesel Kalkınma ve Ekonomik Durgunla¸sma Süreci: Zonguldak Örne˘ gi’, Amme I˙daresi Dergisi, 39/4 (2006), 195–224. UPL (Urban Policy Planning and Local Governments Studio, Middle East Technical University) Sanayisizle¸sme Sürecinin Kentsel Ya¸sama Etkileri: Zonguldak Örne˘gi (Ankara: 2000). Warde, A. ‘Spatial Change, Politics and the Division of Labour’ in D. Gregory and J. Urry (eds.) Social Relations and Spatial Structures (London: MacMillan, 1985). Warwick, D. and G. Littlejohn. Coal, Capital, and Culture: A Sociological Analysis of Mining Communities in West Yorkshire (London: Routledge, 1992). Yazıcı, E. Karabük’te I˙s¸ çi Ailesi (Ankara: I˙ maj, 1992). Zonguldak Metropoliten Alanı (ZMA) Belediyeler Birli˘ gi Planlama Örgütü Ba¸suzmanlı˘ gı, Gruplu Maden I˙s¸ çileri (1974) (Zonguldak: 1976). Zonguldak, Governor’s Office, http://www.zonguldak.gov.tr/, accessed 20 October 2008.

7 Representing Identity and Work in Transition: The Case of South Yorkshire Coal-mining Communities in the UK John Kirk, with Steve Jefferys and Christine Wall

7.1 Introduction This chapter explores the changing face of the former South Yorkshire coalfields.1 The place of coal mining in this area was essential to the economy of the region from the turn of the twentieth century, intensifying and consolidating its production following the Second World War. These developments powerfully transformed and shaped the region, embedding cultural traditions and social identities that defined South Yorkshire through the working of both coal and steel. However, since the wave of pit closures in 1992 in the UK, coal mining has ceased to operate in any meaningful sense, and South Yorkshire was one of the areas hardest hit. This chapter tracks some of the broad implications of these changes – in terms of working lives, identity formation and cultural practice. The discussion takes two main approaches: first it traces the development of mining in the area, placing these developments within a wider context of national economic policy in the UK since the end of the Second World War. The chapter then moves on to consider the cultural and social coordinates characterising mining life and culture. To do this it examines the significance of embedded cultural forms and traditions shaped through generational interactions and community settings, and the chapter considers how coal-mining communities have come to be figured historically in a wider discourse around identity, work and place. Finally, the chapter examines the implications of deindustrialisation for communities, and the effects of processes of regeneration – of both economy and of ideas and experience of place – currently under way in these regions. There are two 184

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key aims here: first to outline the extent of socio-economic change in these former industrial areas; second, to consider the impact and ramifications of economic restructuring on specific regions in relation to notions of identity as a product of forms and practices established over time.

7.2 Post-war UK: the evolution of a typical coal-mining region in the UK At the end of the Second World War a Labour Government was voted into power, with an unexpectedly high majority, on its promise to deliver a Welfare State providing ‘cradle to grave’ support for its citizens. The framework was laid out in the Beveridge Report, published in 1942, and based on three ‘assumptions’: a free national health service, child allowances and full employment (equivalent to less than 8.5 per cent unemployment).2 It was designed to eradicate ‘want and disease’ through the state guaranteeing ‘the maintenance of a family’s income at a minimum subsistence level in health and sickness, work and unemployment, maturity and old age’ (Gregg, 1967, p. 21). However, the new government inherited a country on the verge of bankruptcy and with severe problems in its balance of payments. The programme of social welfare reforms on which their manifesto was based and the enormous task of physical reconstruction of war-damaged towns placed the new government in economic crisis. This was solved, initially, by a grant from the USA of US$1263 million in 1948 under the Marshall Plan, a solution that had far-reaching consequences and was the basis for the continuance of the UK’s ‘special relationship’ with the USA, which was to figure in both social and economic developments of the UK post-war period.3 In economic policy terms the 1945 Labour government revealed a distinct aversion to Soviet-style socialism and centralised planning, preferring a Keynesian ‘managed’ economy. In their approach to industrial relations they also dismissed any form of worker control, as summed up in the Chancellor’s words below. From my experience there is not as yet a very large body of workers in Britain capable of taking over large enterprises. I have on many occasions tried to get representatives of the workers on all sorts of bodies and working parties. It has always been extremely difficult to get enough people who are qualified to do that sort of job, and

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until there has been more experience by workers of the managerial side of industry, I think it would be almost impossible to have worker-controlled industry in Britain, even if it were on the whole desirable. Sir Stafford Cripps. The Times 28 October 1946

Similarly, they did not emulate West Germany’s mitbestimmung form of industrial relations or French corporatism but rather, under Ernest Bevin’s demands, a continuation of free collective bargaining.4 This, according to some commentators, prevented the basis for future coherent socialist planning and for the trade unions to take up their place in their ‘new social role in a full employment economy’ (Francis, 1997, p. 43).5 The historiography of the British post-war period has been interpreted by successive generations of historians: those who saw the coalition wartime government giving rise to a social consensus that underpinned the formation of the welfare state and its administration by an elite group of bureaucratic civil service ‘mandarins’ (Calder, 1965; Addison, 1994), those historians of the 1960s, and later, who perceived the Attlee government as failing to implement socialist reforms (Crouch, 1977; Campbell et al., 1999), and those who interpret the whole of the post-war period as a time of decline for the UK, both economically and politically. Of the latter, Corelli Barnett (1986) blamed the weakness of UK industry on the Labour Party’s whimsical Jerusalem fantasies, while Martin Wiener (1981) identified lack of technical training and knowledge as the key factor. More recently Peter Hennessy (1993) has described the importance of the UK in the cold-war era, and David Edgerton (1996) has argued that the inclusion of military technical and scientific expertise in post-war histories refutes the concept of decline. For our purposes, we will here focus on the economic and industrial policies that shaped the post-war mining industry.

7.3 Nationalisation The idea of state-controlled industries was not new: the Conservative governments of the 1920s and 1930s had introduced state corporate involvement in both civil aviation and electricity. Between 1945 and 1947 public ownership of the Bank of England, cable and wireless,

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civil aviation, coal, electricity and road and rail transport were carried through (Morgan, 1999, p. 33), with coal the first industry to be nationalised. Nationalisation of the coal industry had been suggested by the socialist scholar R.H. Tawney in the 1920s and had since become an integral part of Labour Party policy; however, when the time came to put a Bill before parliament it was discovered that there was no detailed blueprint for the creation of a nationalised industry (Ibid., p. 35). Although the industry had been under government direction during the war it was highly fragmented and controlled by a large number of private firms. A National Coal Board (NCB) was appointed in 1945 to oversee the management and development of, in terms of employees, the ‘largest single industrial undertaking in the non-communist world’ (Ashworth, 1986, p. 31). The main functions of the NCB were to decide and set objectives for the industry, to lay down policy directives and the limits within which management must work, to hold management to account and to provide for the future by means of research and development and the recruitment and training of staff. It was also responsible for promoting the safety, health and welfare of employees, conducting national negotiations, obtaining capital and providing common services such as scientific research. The model was that of a public board upholding highly centralised financial and administrative rule: a system that did not include any viable industrial consultation with the workforce and relied on remote managerial control. Nevertheless nationalisation, implemented hurriedly in January 1947, was greeted with enthusiasm by the workforce and as a solution to disputes over wages and working conditions. There was little resistance from the mine owners, due largely to the generous terms of settlement for the compulsory purchase of mines and equipment. Because of the range of commercial activities associated with coal mining (coke, gas, bricks and shipping, for example), as well as a huge housing stock, the state acquired assets and property rather than firms, leaving the former colliery companies to continue independently (Supple, 1987, p. 635). Some of the smaller enterprises were not included and remained in the private sector. The speed at which the process of nationalisation took place was deemed ‘disastrous’ and with no clear policy on how to keep the industry working efficiently, combined with a very severe winter, the UK slipped into a fuel crisis that lasted for a year (Ashworth, 1986, pp. 132–7). By the early 1950s the early shortages of both manpower and planning had been resolved, regional boards had been set up and the machinery for running the coal industry was in place.

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7.4 Full employment and industrial relations Post-war economic policy promised full employment, a goal that some commentators predicted could only ever have been achieved through moral restraint and ‘unselfishness’ on the part of employers and workers (Hennessy, 1993, pp. 193–4). Under these conditions worker productivity assumed even greater prominence than during the war years. Although in the 1940s management strategies were not applied to any great extent in British industry, ‘the productivity problem’ was frequently discussed. As Tomlinson (1994) has pointed out, it was widely and erroneously believed that labour productivity was synonymous with intensity of labour effort.6 This was especially true of industries such as mining with a large workforce of manual labourers, and probably encouraged by investigations into productivity and statistical information on worker output published by the Ministry of Fuel and Power. This peculiarly UK method of measuring productivity, which did not allow for the complexity of teamwork found in mining, was introduced by a civil servant at the Board of Trade in the 1940s in order to compile national productivity figures and consists of using one highly specific measure of productivity, that of physical output per person. Despite this, nationalisation greatly increased productivity from an ‘output per manshift’ at the face of 3.14 tonnes in 1949 to 5.26 tonnes in 1964–5 and 8.53 tonnes in 1978–9 (NCB Statistics in Ashworth, 1986, see Table 7.1). This period, however, was accompanied by accelerated technical change in the techniques of mining so that many jobs at the coalface had to be done in new ways. Both official histories and oral histories report that mechanisation, introduced from the 1930s onwards, was a slow process, often met with resistance, in mining. According to the oral historian George Ewart Evans, mechanisation affected the ‘craft’ of mining, and the oral culture that existed underground between the men and boys. In the words of a former collier interviewed in 1973,

these days with the latest machinery you are working with noise all day; and you are confined in a very small space. And it isn’t you who makes the pace of the work, it’s the machine. I think there’s a lot of contentment gone out of the industry. (Evans, 1976, p. 171)

Evans also argued that it not only broke up the old hierarchy underground but also affected the wider community, in that the work status

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of colliers had in the past frequently carried over into their position in the affairs of the local community. But by 1945 partial mechanisation, mainly in the use of chain coal cutters at the face, accounted for 72 per cent of coal produced. An improved face cutter and conveyor, originating from Dortmund, became the key technical change from the 1960s onwards; this, together with improved communications, transport and research and development, combined to make coal, by the 1970s, a more rationalised and standardised industry (ibid., pp. 75–117). Yet modernisation of the industry did not save it from the shrinking market for coal, which resulted in the closure of many collieries and created job insecurity. However disputes were, initially and up to the late 1960s, few, as redundancies were handled carefully with offers of other jobs for displaced workers. The NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) was in principle committed to the establishment of national wages; however, there was potentially enormous conflict between its members owing to the historic complexity of the different systems in use for calculating wages and the persistence of piecework rates. Nevertheless, rationalisation of the wage system continued alongside the mechanisation of production so that by 1971 the NCB and the NUM had jointly worked on an agreement that aimed to ‘narrow the disparity in wages between face and other workers in the pits’ (Ibid., 1987, p. 294). But miners’ wages, although gaining parity within the industry, had fallen behind in comparison with other industries and, in 1972 and 1974, there were two successful national strikes over wages. The 1972 strike was the first nationwide miners strike since 1926; it started in January and had a rapid impact, causing power cuts and forcing the Conservative government under Edward Heath to instigate a three-day week. The miners proved to be far better organised than either the police or the government, and mass picketing in support of what was felt to be a just wage claim was the norm. Arthur Scargill, then a young official with the Yorkshire Miners, organised ‘flying pickets’ most famously at the Saltley coke works, where a human shield of 15,000 prevented coal deliveries to the works. After six weeks the strike was called off when the miners won a pay award of up to 24 per cent on wages plus improved holiday and pensions agreements. For the labour movement the 1972 miners strike was a powerful impetus towards militant direct action, while politically it marked the grave weakening, if not the end, of the post-war social consensus (Morgan, 1999, p. 328).

190 Representing Identity and Work in Transition Table 7.1 Labour statistics, NCB mines 1948–75

Av. colliery manpower (thousands) Output per man–shift at face (tonnes) Av. cash earnings per week (£)

1948

1950

1955

1960

1965–6 1970–1 1975–6

716.5

690.8

698.7

602.1

455.7

287.2

247.1

3.02

3.24

3.34

3.81

5.57

7.30

7.89

7.85

8.73

12.46

14.70

20.15

27.07

74.00

Source: From Ashworth (1986), Table A2, pp. 677–80.

7.5 Neo-liberalism and the new right after 1979 The Conservative Party’s General Election victory in the UK under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 heralded a decisive break within British political culture, and a turn away from the Keynesian consensus in place since 1945. The Conservatives’ determination to stress the fight against inflation, their anti-public spending rhetoric and abandonment of the nostrums of full employment had, in fact, been taken up by the Labour government as early as 1976, in the face of a growing economic crisis set in motion (on both a national and international scale) with the first major post-war recession in 1973 brought on by the oil crisis. Even so, ‘Thatcherism’ would accelerate the shift away from the collectivist ethos of post-war Keynesianism and the welfare state. This shift was driven by an emergent New Right politics eager to exploit the growing contradictions of social democracy and to construct, over the latter period of the 1970s up to Thatcher’s victory, an alternative vision of British society, a new political ‘common sense’ (see Hall, 1988). David Harvey identified the economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s with a new kind of ‘re-distributive politics, with controls over the free mobility of capital, public expenditures and welfare state building’, and this had gone ‘hand in hand with relatively high rates of capital accumulation and adequate profitability in most of the advanced capitalist countries’ (2006, p. 14). But post 1979, in both the UK and the USA, the emergent neo-liberal agenda became the dominant ideology. Propagating a free market economic agenda, and mobilising a compliant

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media that promoted anti-collectivism (particularly in relation to trade unionism), collective identities gave way to new notions of ‘individualism, freedom, liberty as opposed to trade union power and stifling bureaucratic ineptitude on the part of the state’ (ibid., p. 16). This was the vision of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘no alternative’ in practice, propagating, in her own terms, that there was ‘no such thing as society’. According to Harvey, ‘all forms of social solidarity were to be dissolved in favour of individualism, private property, personal responsibility and family values’ (ibid., p. 17). The market economics driving this resulted, between 1979 and 1982, in the collapse of major British industries. Thus there can be witnessed a radical reorientation of the UK economy from manufacturing and industry to an emerging service sector economy (Table 7.2), and this led to the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs – particularly in the North of England, and in Wales and Scotland – in once staple industries such as textiles, coal and steel (see Hudson and Williams, 1986; Beynon et al., 1991). Economic liberalisation, combined with an anti-trade union stance, marked the Thatcher administration’s neo-liberal agenda. Rejecting any support for the public ownership of industry meant changes in the way the UK energy market operated, encouraging a move away from coal and towards nuclear power and gas, with an increased reliance on energy resources from overseas. There was a further, crucial dimension to this, too. This lay in the barely concealed aim of the Conservative Party to break trade union power across the board, resulting ultimately in a clash with the NUM, led at the time by Arthur Scargill, who was determined to resist any attempts made by government to close pits. Based in South Yorkshire, Scargill was to lead the union into the momentous strike over closures that was to last over a year, from 1984 to 1985. The outcome for the NUM, and as it soon turned out, for UK coal mining, was defeat and eventual extinction. The slow rundown of British coal mining followed: ten years later – December 1994 – the coal industry was fully privatised by the then Conservative Government and what was left of the industry went to RJB Mining. Leading up to this, British Coal announced that 31 collieries would be either closed or mothballed. The closure of pits increased until, finally, the industry shrunk to near oblivion. The number of collieries fell from 169 to 12 following the miners’ strike of 1984–5. People employed in the industry declined from 170,000 mine workers to 7000. This represented perhaps the most dramatic example of the processes of deindustrialisation sweeping across many industrial districts in the UK after 1979.

192 Representing Identity and Work in Transition Table 7.2 Employment in manufacturing as a percentage of civilian employment 1960

1974

1980

1985

% change 1980–90

USA Japan UK Germany France Italy Sweden

26.4 21.3 38.4 34.3 27.3 24.2 31.5

24.2 27.2 34.6 35.8 28.3 28.0 28.3

22.1 24.7 30.2 33.9 25.8 26.8 24.2

18.0 24.1 22.5 31.5 21.3 22.5 21.1

−19 −2 −25 −2 −17 −16 −9

Total OECD∗ Europe

27.3

28.0

25.9

22.1

−15

∗ Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Source: OECD Historical Statistics 1960–1990, Table 2.11, cited in Michie and Grieve Smith (1994, p. 64)

7.6 Digging in: a brief history of the development of the South Yorkshire coalfields This section examines the development of coal mining as a core industry in the South Yorkshire region, highlighting its centrality within the UK coal-mining sector (Figure 7.1). After outlining its historical development and consolidation, the section concludes by describing the industry’s demise in the region in the 1990s. At the heart of that industrial dispute to save jobs and communities in the 1984–5 strike, and the protests against closures in the early 1990s, was the South Yorkshire coalfield. With Barnsley as its main town, this region covers some 127 square miles, with a population of 230,000 – a region that has mined coal for nearly 200 years. At the turn of the 1980s it contained 16 pits, employing 15,000 people. South Yorkshire was never fully mono-industrial, however, with a manufacturing and industrial sector based around linen and glass making. Coal mining first started in the Silkstone area to the west of Barnsley and at Mexborough, near Rotherham, as far back as the thirteenth century (Hill, 2001), and developed gradually. But it was the expansion of the railways after 1850 that shaped the development and location of collieries and saw the coalfields develop in earnest. This entailed a move from shallow workings and drift mines to larger pits, with an expansion east from Barnsley, across the breadth of the county to the once agricultural town of Doncaster. The first two decades of the twentieth century saw the area’s rapid industrialisation. From the 1900s the South Yorkshire area became more and more important in coal production,

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Northumberland

Durham

Yorkshire Lancashire Nottinghamshire North Wales

Derbyshire North Staffordshire South Staffordshire

South Derbyshire/ NW Leicestershire

North Warwickshire

South Wales

Kent

Figure 7.1

Location of South Yorkshire coalfield, and other major UK coalfields

Source: C. Beatty, S. Fothergill and R. Powell, ’Twenty years on: has the economy of the coalfields recovered?’, Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, Sheffield Hallam University, March 2005 (p. 9).

increasing its output from 3.3m tons at the turn of the century to 31m tons per annum by 1926 (see Hill, 2001, pp. 16–17). This expansion was driven by technological developments, in particular the introduction of the steam winding-engines that enabled pits to be sunk deeper, producing more coal. The transportation of this coal was revolutionised by the mid- to late nineteenth century with the expansion of a substantial rail network. This network fed coal supplies to the emerging industries in the county and beyond: specifically iron and

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steel in Sheffield and Rotherham and the textile mills of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Domestic supply increased, and the railways took large amounts of steam coal. As Hill notes: ‘South Yorkshire coal was high grade, its steam-coal was second to none . . . As well as being exported, it was heavily used by steamship lines, railway companies, manufacturing industry and for power generation over the whole of the eastern and southern counties of England’ (2001, p. 19). Indeed, the Barnsley bed seam was one of the most famous in the world, producing steam coal of greater quality even than that of South Wales. Because of this profits were high, and South Yorkshire miners ‘enjoyed the reputation of being the highest paid in the kingdom . . . ’ so that by the 1930s ‘stories of the colossal earnings of hewers in the Barnsley bed were rife throughout the coalfields of Britain’; while this coal seam, in the same period, covered a distance of 600 miles and ‘provided direct employment for 60,000 men in the 1930s’ (ibid., pp. 21–2). Prior to nationalisation in 1946, ownership of the collieries was divided into two groups. One major group controlled the manufacture of iron and steel and regarded collieries as necessary ancillaries to steel production, while the second group principally comprised colliery owners taking profits from coal production (ibid., pp. 25–6). The Coal Industry Nationalisation Act (1946), passed by the Labour Government, saw the industry nationalised along with the railway, gas and electricity industries, with notices placed on every colliery in the UK reading: ‘This colliery is now managed by the NATIONAL COAL BOARD on behalf of the people’. Though the coal industry experienced severe contraction in the 1960s (as discussed above), the Yorkshire coalfield was deemed in 1967, by the journal the Colliery Guardian, to have the biggest potential of any coalfield in the UK, with ‘proven reserves in excess of 4000m tons’ (Hill, 2001, p. 45). The 1974 Plan for Coal saw the reconstruction of the South Yorkshire coalfield area, intensifying its role as the central energy feeder to nearby industries and the electricity grid, with the rapid development of new and highly productive drift mines across the region including the Royston drift, which broke European and world productivity levels (ibid., p. 239). From 1979 to 1984, the Barnsley area underwent reorganisation to intensify and consolidate production. Yet the worldwide fall in energy prices would impact on all this – a development compounded by the decision of the Thatcher government to run down the coal industry. The South Yorkshire colliery of Cortonwood was the first earmarked for a wave of new closures in 1983 – a sudden and unexpected decision on the part of the NCB, and one that triggered the year-long miners’ strike, with South Yorkshire at its heart.

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The defeat of the miners during the strike of 1984–5 would speed the demise of coal mining, transforming a way of life in the area definitively. One journalist, investigating the effects of these developments in the mining village of Grimethorpe barely months after the 1984–5 strike, had already noted, ‘vandalism and glue sniffing – activities associated more with blighted inner-cities. Glue-sniffers, all local children from the village, were discovered at the condemned remains of the Grimethorpe Empire’, a discovery that ‘has clearly stunned the village’. The colliery had ceased to take on new workers during the previous two years, with an estimated one-fifth of the workforce likely to take redundancy in the following 12 months. Such developments underline the correlation ‘between vandalism and solvent abuse and the lack of job prospects for local youth’ (Waddington and Parry, 1995, p. 19). More significantly, these developments – as we will see below – mark the shift from communities characterised by cohesion and collectivity to ones signified by increasing disintegration. The removal of the primary economic base through the nationwide closures, biting hardest from 1992 and through the subsequent years, thrust the coalfield communities, and South Yorkshire in particular, into a state of crisis and decline, already anticipated in the argument above. The decline of the regions was not fully addressed by central government in any meaningful sense until the election, in 1997, of the Labour Party, with a promise to tackle the long-term problem of the coalfield areas with its Coalfield Taskforce Report.7 Amid ‘allegations of indifference to their plight’ by consecutive Conservative governments in the 1980s and 1990s (Waddington, 2003, p. 1), a returning Labour Government initially promised a more proactive response to conditions of high unemployment and increased poverty in areas like South Yorkshire. Thus in October 1997, the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott underlined the need ‘to explore the needs of England’s mining communities and recommend possible ways of addressing them’ (Waddington, 2003, p. 1).

7.7 Studies in coalfield communities: place, culture and class We used to play on the road. It was beautiful. It was a wonderful place to grow up. Now it’s gone to rack and ruin. (Resident of a pit village, quoted in Turner, 2000, p. 53)

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This section is concerned primarily with examining the historically constituted understandings of these regions as developed in a number of influential accounts and studies. Its focus is on the ways such localities have been defined historically in a range of work establishing ‘understandings’ of such areas, mainly in the shape of the sociological studies that have defined the localities over time. Of central concern here is the way identity formation and cultural forms are articulated through a range of discursive practices seeking to establish the nature of coalfield communities.

7.7.1 Coalfields and community The importance of community – whether examined in the context of its desirability or otherwise – has often been in the foreground of discussions and understandings of UK coalfield areas. Indeed, we could argue that ideas of community and class have often been tightly bound together in discussions and understandings of identity and culture within such localities. Large coal-mining regions – like South Yorkshire, or the South Wales coalfields – disclosed very clearly defined characteristics, the product of long historical development. Such cultures became the object of intense study for academics in the fields of history and the social sciences, as well as the subject matter of social commentary and broader cultural production, such as film and the novel. The emergence of community studies in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s produced a number of seminal studies focused on working-class life (see for example Young and Wilmott’s Family and Kinship in East London (1957), Brian Jackson’s Working Class Community (1968) and, of course, Dennis et al.’s Coal is our Life (1969), as key examples of this type of work). These studies emerged from a wider context of debate that was linked to an underlying concern with class cultures and formations – more specifically, the ‘death’ or decline of class in the face of new ‘affluence’ following the post-war settlement and the emergence of the welfare state. This brought working-class cultures and communities into view, underlining a concern, even anxiety, about the impacts of consumerism, mobility and individualism as developments heralding the ‘end’ of the working class. Thus studies began to take the working class as their object of concern, but in the context of decline or demise: an emergent narrative orientation documenting the waning of working-class community, deprecating the dubious pleasures of popular and consumer culture, or celebrating (or lamenting) the rise of affluence.

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Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy proved a seminal text in this formation, with the contention that the moral economy of prewar working-class culture, the solidarity and collective care of these communities, was increasingly undermined by relative affluence and the mass culture of the 1950s ‘candy-floss world’ (1957, p. 245). Mike Savage suggests that in such work we see a ‘critical turning point in the elaboration of the idea that individualised identities were gaining prominence and that these spelled the erosion of class loyalties’ (2000, pp. 23–4). Yet mining life and mining communities seemed to contradict these changes. ‘Older’ solidarities and collective structures appeared to keep their shape here, and drew academics and social commentators concerned with what constitutes the ‘good’ community. Dicks has explored this compulsion in Heritage, Place and Community, identifying two central images shaping accounts: (1) community is characterised by ‘shared human values, founded on common experience of living in a certain place and sharing similar occupational and working lifestyles’; and (2), community reflects shared collective interests, ‘rooted in a consciousness of solidarity and the potential for collective action’ (2000, p. 103). Such frameworks characterised many emerging accounts of mining communities, as we shall see below. Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter’s Coal is our Life holds a central place in post-war studies of mining life in the UK. A formative sociological study of the coalfields in the post-war period, it highlights the centrality of notions of work, community and class, but also reveals the importance of gender relations, through a broadly structural–functionalist approach, viewing roles mapped out on the basis of ‘need’ or function. The division of gender in these communities best exemplifies this, and the study itself suggests that mining communities were constructed and ‘controlled’ around a male norm. Work occupies the primary point of identification, and trade unionism and its institutional frameworks the shaping factor for political and cultural mobilisation within the context of community (Dennis et al., 1956). Out of these institutional forms and experiences came a distinctive sense and experience of place, where identity practice takes shape through the collective contexts of class, gender and community and is underpinned by occupation. The physical growth of the town was shaped decisively by the development of the colliery, and therefore ‘the pit is the village, paying its wages, supporting its shops, keeping the community together’ (Marshall, in Richards, 1996, p. 21). Mining coal, then, was bound up with every aspect of life, representing one of the few industries in which the provision of leisure activities, for instance,

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was required by law (Dennis et al., 1956, p. 122). Identity, in this historical development, is work, producing culturally distinct traditions that shape everyday life: the local miners’ welfare, the working men’s clubs and a range of sporting associations and activities deriving their raison d’être from the ‘organic’ connections to the pit. The South Yorkshire coalfield was no exception. One distinctive feature of the pit village was the brass band, a cultural expression of identity practice articulating both a local identity (the village) and a wider occupational affiliation bound up with complex expressions of class and culture that stretched beyond the village identity itself. Dennis et al.’s focus of study on a mining town in the Yorkshire coalfield – in their view, a paradigm case for understanding of the nature of mining life overall – was taken up by writers and scholars in later decades and, in a number of key respects, confirmed the relatively stable nature of coalfield communities. Thus Bulmer’s (1978) later account of the cultural fabric of ‘archetypal’ mining communities is worth quoting at length here: The traditional mining community is characterised by the prevalence of communal social relationships between miners and their families which are multiplex in form. The social ties of work, leisure, family, neighbourhood and friendships overlap to form close-knit and interlocking locally based collective actors. The solidarity of the community is strengthened not only by these features themselves but by a shared history of living and working in one place over a long period of time. From this pattern derives the mutual aid characteristic in adversity and through this pattern is reinforced the inward-looking focus on the locality, derived from occupational homogeneity and social and geographical isolation from the rest of society. Meaningful social interaction is confined almost exclusively to locality. (Quoted in Dicks, 2000, p. 107) What comes into view are distinctive industrial cultures, and although Bulmer’s description suggest an ‘ideal-type’ construction that, in reality, missed significant internal differences within and between mining communities, many of the features represented remain core characteristics of such regions (but for a critique of the miner as archetypal proletarian, see Harrison, 1978 and Gilbert, 1995). The nature of coalfield areas such as South Yorkshire and their mining villages did confer on them a distinctiveness not always replicated in other places shaped by industrialism. This ‘specialness’ could be

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marked negatively, too, however: not fitting with the ideological image of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’, an ‘otherness’ thus comes into view, one articulated in George Orwell’s (1937, p. 145) spectre of miners emerging from the pit as ‘strange and slightly sinister’ (not to mention Thatcher’s labelling of them in 1984 as the ‘enemy within’). Thus in some commentaries (occasionally, in the same text) binary structures mark out the nature of such localities and their people. This might be characterised by a contradictory amalgam, so that what emerges is a dichotomy that presents ‘hardness, ugliness and danger on one side, friendliness, closeness and solidarity on the other . . . and while there is a clearly felt stigma in and about pit villages, there is also a sense of a shared glory and pride’ (Warwick and Littlejohn, 1992, p. 17). Studies, as we can see, place the pit village and community both inside and outside the discursive constructs constituting not only a regional or occupational sense of place, but also what is, or is articulated as, a definable national identity. Often, for those outside the community looking in, the pit village is marked by difference; for those living within it is characterised by a sameness built around a range of cultural traditions and alignments forged through generations and over time. 7.7.2 Redundant places In the mid-1980s, commenting on coalfield communities Massey and Wainwright argued: ‘The social structure of mining communities reflects the industry which is their livelihood: lack of white-collar jobs, their proletarian nature, their overwhelming dominance of male, manual labour . . . They are predominantly white; they are socially conservative; traditional sexual divisions of labour – woman as home-maker, man as bread-winner – have been deeply ingrained . . . Their politics have been workplace-based’ (in Beynon, 1985, p. 149). By the early 1990s a very different assessment can be found, one suggesting a wholly different understanding of the mining communities and their cultural and political significance. Here Samuel places the industry within the wider context of development – the space that is the North and its economic and social structures, as well as its symbolic significance in understanding the polity and the cultural affiliations of the region: The very qualities which had recommended it [the North] to the ‘new wave’ writers and film-makers now served as a talisman of narrowness. The rich associational life, such as that of the workingmen’s club, was seen not as supportive but as excluding, a way in which the

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natives could keep newcomers and strangers at bay . . . The solidarities of the workplace were reconceptualised as a species of male bonding, a licence for the subjugation of women; while the smokestack industries which had been the pride of the North now appeared, retrospectively, as ecological nightmares. In another set of dialectical inversions, the modernisations of the 1960s were stigmatised as planning disasters, imprisoning the local population in no-go estates and tower blocks. (Samuel, 1994, p. 160) With the later decline of coal mining, and its gradual extinction, new studies were more preoccupied with change than continuity (Richards, 1996; Bennett et al., 2000; Waddington et al., 2001). Indeed Andrew Richards was concerned specifically to map difference in his study, Miners on Strike (1996), by looking at attitudes to industrial action and organisation in different coalfield areas, suggesting a more refined account of the historical development of mining communities. In this he contests Dennis et al.’s (1956) argument that the sexual division of labour was fixed in such a complete sense, quoting Warwick and Littlejohn’s (1992) view that ‘where mining was not quite so dominant, there could be equal status for both genders’ (in Richards, 1996, p. 25), while adding that this was a marginal case overall. Jane Parry (2005), however, in her study of the post-1984–5 mining communities suggests a much more complex account of the way communities function and the place of work – here much more broadly conceived than paid employment – within them. Waddington and Parry’s (1995) research into coalfield regeneration examines three areas: South Wales, Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire. Within South Yorkshire regeneration emerged initially in the shape of leisure complexes and the transformation of former colliery sites through environmental projects, led by the Dearne Valley Partnership. Inward investment – often in the shape of call centres – was backed by grants as Enterprise Zones locations, yet Parry still identified overwhelming evidence that the former coalfield areas, at the time of his writing, remained economically marginalised. Beynon et al.’s (1999) research from around the mid-1990s also confirmed this, producing a comprehensive attempt to analyse the longer-term effects of closures. The new labour market, heavily dependent on the emergence of a number of large call centres in the area, had taken the place of coal mines in the South Yorkshire region and in particular in the Dearne Valley area.

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Figure 7.2

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A call centre on the site of a former coal mine

Source: Stuart Harman

The Coalfields Task Force, set up after the Labour Party election victory in 1997, issued the following address a year later: ‘the focus now must be on the creation of a new economic base which integrates the communities into the wider regional economies’ and this inevitably involved ‘exploiting new technologies’ (quoted in Beynon et al., 1999, p. 3). Thus the call centres appeared to mark definitively the shift from (male) industrial work and culture to more feminised service-orientated employment – while also signifying the ‘death’ of the old and the ‘rise’ of the new (Figure 7.2). The ramifications of this, though, were not always perceived in a favourable light by observers. The theme of loss marks much research on the post-coal communities – and a different kind of difference begins to emerge from the ones earlier outlined. Thus two recent studies of the condition of industrial cultures and communities map bleaker pictures of denuded landscapes, broken communities and fractured social relations. Simon Charlesworth’s A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience takes as its focus of study Rotherham, a former steel town in South Yorkshire and the nearest neighbour to the former pit town of Barnsley. Steel closures in the early 1980s had produced a wave of redundancies; later pit closures exacerbated this. Thus Charlesworth finds on his ethnographic explorations in the area chronic unemployment,

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welfare dependency, poverty, poor housing and pointless job-retraining schemes, all combining, he concludes, to deny any meaningful form of human development and wider civic involvement. Thus he presents the people of Rotherham moving within this social and existential terrain, ‘wearing clothes already out of date, the dirt in skin and cloth, faces prematurely aged, the look of ill-health and the dispositions of absurd bodies between hyper-sensitivity and an absolute hardness’ (2000, p. 48). Charlesworth argues that a once recognisable trajectory marking the unfolding life of the community – that of school, the local pit or steelworks, a home and family – had disintegrated, leaving behind a sense of incoherence. Interestingly, his argument emphasises the importance of the presence of a working community, and considers the implications of its absence. Work, he argues, gives meaning to working-class lives. It does so because it provides the essential narrative drive onto which meaning can be ascribed. For Charlesworth – and here he echoes Dicks – the working community is not merely a material reality, but a collectivist imaginary, where the sense of purpose and endeavour is a shared one; individualist consumption – which has now in so many ways seemingly eclipsed work as a social/personal act – constitutes by contrast an atomised experience of self-fulfilment. The bleakness of the story Charlesworth presents is emphasised in his closing comments, where he views the negative spaces of the (post-)industrial world as akin to what one geographer has defined as ‘engaging spatialisations’ (Soja, 1989, p. 18), where little can flourish and where ‘traditional’ values of solidarity, mutuality and respect are moribund, so that the individuals who inhabit these negative spaces are constitutionally incapable of ‘improvement’. Here, we are a long way from the mutuality, self-respect and communal confidence once ascribed to such regions. A number of these arguments are mirrored in another work published around the same time. In 2000, Royce Turner’s Coal Was Our Life took its title quite deliberately from Dennis et al.’s early thesis on mining life. But here the use of the past tense in the title works to underline newly emerging conditions and themes. Turner explores the ex-coalfield areas in neighbouring West Yorkshire, suggesting that the demise of these particular industrial cultures renders working-class life in these areas precarious, and in certain, significant senses, empty. Speaking with former mine workers now bereft of position and place, he notes: ‘Billy’s days as a miner were long gone. But he still clung to them. They conveyed a legitimacy. They were a testament to the days when he could make a worthwhile contribution to the economy, to society’ (2000, p. 25). But the

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memory of such work still lives on. Local people give accounts of the dangers of the work and the conservatism of aspects of the culture, while disclosing its strengths: for its people providing a sense of identity, an acceptance of mutuality, a recognition of one’s place within the wider civic and economic order. That order has given way to unemployment, drug addiction and crime. Turner tracks through ex-pit villages finding dismay and disintegration, contrasting sharply with the heyday of pit, pubs and working men’s clubs, powerful unions, collective and individual pride (those very features underlined by Dennis et al. in their 1956 study) – days when almost every aspect of a person’s life represented a by-product of the work they did. Thus the pit village – as we have discussed – was defined by its industry, in all senses of the word: a dynamic place of production and consumption, contrasting starkly with an inertness now powerfully evident. The real absence for Turner, though, is that celebrated mining ‘spirit’ – one ‘which had developed over generations, based on collectivism, kinship, advancement by co-operation rather than individuality’ – and the disappearance of the social and political institutions that nurtured and advanced it (2000, p. 4). We will return to this throughout the course of this study. In much of this writing, the importance of gender and generational relations in any understanding of identity practice as it has been historically formed and articulated in these areas stands out. We could suggest that the ‘crisis’ identified in later studies is one linked to ideas of working-class masculinity and social role, as well as an understanding of the importance of work itself as a means of livelihood and identity formation (see Sennett, 1998). Identity and work, culture and community are the key processes in the constitution of the contemporary and historical formations and traditions under investigation here. These were essentially industrial cultures. Dicks suggests that the narratives that describe such formations have produced a conception of the industrial working class as ‘experiencing a special and other way of life in particular bounded places’ (2000, p. 107), as we revealed above. For her such imaginary communities emerged within three distinct modes ‘through which the specificity of community identity is configured’, and she explains them in the following way. Community is ‘the product of ways of life and shared meanings (the social and cultural), history and duration (the temporal) and locality (the spatial)’ (ibid., p. 109). Below I will add another dimension influential in understanding these historical formations, one that has further underlined the often iconic status of such localities in the wider culture.

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7.8 Representation: industrial culture and the national imagination Cultural production linked more clearly with the arts and producing such representations of working-class life found, for instance, in literature and film has been instrumental in defining understanding of mining communities for the wider culture. Consequently, as I suggest above, it is necessary to add a fourth category to Dicks’ earlier account: that of representation itself. This means underlining the important ways communities and cultures are mediated through discursive practices concerned with defining a particular quality of experience – traceable structures of feeling that attempt to articulate the everyday and the lived-through narrative modes of storytelling. Representations situate cultures and identities within the public imagination, even if there remains more to such formations and traditions than their representation alone. Histories of the industrial working class have given mining and the coal miner a central place. Whether in sociology, social history or political discourse (as noted above), or via representations in literature or film (as we explore below), depictions of mining life disclose a set of discursive orientations that shape understanding of a distinct culture and habitus – articulating structures of feeling embedded in the historical coordinates of gender and class, culture and locality, work and livelihood. These discourses are constitutive of, and in turn help constitute, the historical identities and cultural formations that emerge within a given time and place and are thus important for our understanding of coalfield cultures and communities. Raymond Williams argued, ‘the arts of a period . . . are of major importance. For here, if anywhere, [the structure of feeling] is likely to be expressed’. This may or may not be a conscious articulation; nevertheless in the production of culture, ‘the actual living sense, the deep community that makes the communication possible, is naturally drawn upon’ (1965, p. 64). But it is not merely the arts, in any specific sense, that articulate structures of feeling linked to historical identities; consequently, Williams’ assertion ought to be extended to take in understandings of narrative more broadly conceived, across a range of cultural forms, as we shall see later in the context of regeneration. By accepting what Williams calls ‘the multiplicity of writing’ that works to define places and cultures – as well as recognising one’s own contribution within this discursive matrix as the producers of just other forms of representation – it becomes possible, at this point in our discussion, to turn briefly to the place of literature and film

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and to examine the significance of this in the narrative construction of place.

7.9 Imagining industrial cultures Depictions in the arts, particularly in literature, of mining life find some early expression in the writing of D.H. Lawrence. His early-twentiethcentury portrayals of mining life reveal a contradictory picture of alienation and communality, where in the fictional village of Wiggiston, as he defines it in his epic novel focused on epochal social and economic change, The Rainbow the pit looms large. Indeed, it ‘owns everyman. The women have what is left. What’s left of this man, or what’s left of that – it doesn’t matter altogether. The pit takes all that really matters’ (1915, p. 293). The novel is in part concerned with the consequences of industrialism, and thus the mine itself is the subject of agency in the narrative, the men subordinated to it, subdued by it. But as a native himself of such communities, Lawrence’s response to the industrial landscape was contradictory. Thus in other moments, as in his essay ‘Nottinghamshire and The Mining Country’, he sees differently: ‘the physical awareness and intimate togetherness was at its strongest down pit . . . They did not know what they had lost till they lost it. And I think it is the same with the young colliers of today’ (Lawrence, 1936, p. 139). Here mining work – the process of livelihood that gives space to identity and belonging – shapes a more positive identity for Lawrence. Later 1930s’ social documentary discourse focused on the industrial working class, often highlighting coal mining’s danger and thus underlining the ‘heroic’ character of the miner himself, none more so than Orwell’s depiction of the strength and physical capacity of the coal miners he encountered in his journey to the North (in fact, around Wigan and Barnsley), describing those lines ‘of half-naked kneeling men’, their physiques honed to perfection through the daily grind so that ‘there was not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere’ as they wielded ‘huge shovels . . . with tremendous force and speed’ (1937, p. 21). The many social documentaries produced at that time for the GPO (General Post Office) aspired to ‘speak for the people’: principally for working people during a contradictory period of social and economic development on the cusp of world war. We would argue that the John Grierson documentary approach encouraged, though often obliquely, national social integration and, in turn, the nation’s renewal as an ‘organic’ community framing the emergence of a society shaped by an idealised sense of the need, but also the desire, for work. We see this

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symbolised in narratives like Night Mail (1936), probably one of the best-known social documentary films produced at this time. But another narrative highly significant to our discussion here is Coal Face (1936). Coal Face opens with ‘hard’ facts: ‘Coalmining is the basic industry of England’, we are told through a male voice: ‘750,000 men’ work at the pits across the country, in dangerous conditions to produce the ‘nation’s prosperity’. Benjamin Britten’s musical score is incorporated to back the 12-minute documentary, supported by the lyrical choral setting of voices ‘chanting’ in the background, articulating details of labour and descriptions of work experience written by Auden. Grierson describes miners’ conditions below ground, and the production of ‘40 million tons of coal sold every year for domestic use . . . 10 million for electrical power . . . 12 million for locomotives . . . 54 million for export . . . 85 million for industry’. Mid-distance camera shots capture the streets and houses of mining villages, and the superstructure of the pit itself: the turning machinery, and the coal-filled locomotives coming and going. The men themselves then occupy the screen as they march through the yard to be lowered to the coal face itself, and all the while the formal commentary and quiet chanting supports, and interacts with, the images. Through a tight, fast-moving modernist style, Cavalcanti as director constructs a montage of machinery and men interacting at work, bound to an industrial landscape. And the trek of the men from surface to coal face and back after the shift expresses a mode where both narrative form and content – in distinctively modernist style – underline the struggle for the dignity of work while revealing the ever-present danger the men have to tolerate underground. These are parables of labour, community and class. The story reveals some central concerns of the movement under Grierson, ones that found innovative expression in such films as Coal Face. At the same time, the work of fiction from working-class novelists in the 1930s such as Walter Greenwood and Ellen Wilkinson, and films like The Stars Look Down (1939) and How Green Was My Valley (1941), centred the place of heavy industry – particularly coal mining – in discursive constructs that accentuated scenes of heroic last stands against exploitation, bravery and fearlessness in the face of terrifying working conditions, and the sense of community and comradeship in adversity (see Kirk, 2003, 2007). But with the rapid contraction, then virtual disappearance, of the industry after 1984–5, new motifs emerge in fiction to define and articulate these formations. As a consequence mining life took on a different hue: in the 1970s for some commentators coal miners became the

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archetypical proletarian, but by the mid-1980s they were also positioned as the ‘enemy within’ – Prime Minister Thatcher’s description of miners on strike in the 1984–5 dispute to save jobs and communities: a bitter and protracted conflict that would herald the end of coal mining in the UK with the defeat of the NUM. Later fiction and film represented industrial cultures in decline, mining among them. These included the BBC television drama Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) and the novels of industrial blight and unemployment in James Kelman’s stories of Scottish working-class life; while such films as Brassed Off (1996), The Full Monty (1997) and Billy Elliot (2000) traced the decline of coal and steel, and the communities and identities such industries sustained. Brassed Off is particularly significant here, with its locality in the South Yorkshire mining area. Yorkshire-based novelist Barry Hines’ work often focuses very precisely on the South Yorkshire coalfields. His 1994 novel The Heart of It reflects back on the 1984–5 Miners’ Strike in South Yorkshire and its tragic aftermath. It is, in a very Lawrentian sense, a story about generational conflict between son and parent. Cal Rickard, son of communist and union militant Harry Rickard, is a film-writer living in France, estranged from his working-class origins and his father’s politics. His father is making a slow recovery from a debilitating stroke and Cal is compelled to return home for a family visit. Through conversations with family and friends, the reader learns of the events surrounding the strike (his father being a prominent activist) and witnesses the consequences of defeat for the mining community. Despite this, Christine, the wife of Cal’s brother, tells him at one point: ‘A lot of people came out of it [the strike] a lot stronger than when they went in. Especially the women. I mean, look at your mother. She was always a lovely woman, but totally dominated by your dad. She wasn’t after the strike ended, though. They came out on equal terms’ (1994, p. 80). In a number of ways, then, the narrative is about Cal’s mother, and other women like Christine, who, during the 1984–5 dispute, became active political voices on the picket lines. Later films dealing with deindustrialisation contain similar narrative orientations. In Brassed Off, a film set in South Yorkshire dealing with the massive pit closures of 1991–2, it is the miners’ wives who picket to save the jobs and the community; when this fails it is a woman again (the insider/outsider, Gloria) who provides the necessary capital to enable the band to compete in the brass band finals in London and retain their dignity (if not through labour, then through culture). In The Full Monty (set in Sheffield following the decline of the steel industry there), the gender reversal sees women as the breadwinners

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who enjoy nights out at the club, entertained by male strippers. Men have to re-find themselves by tapping into a domain previously occupied (in the sense of work) primarily by women (the strip joint). These are important moments, reflecting the way gender positions in such communities lurched into crisis following pit closures and the demise of other industries.

7.10 Regeneration, heritage and the ‘selective tradition’: from market town to mining and back again? Place has been shown to be crucial . . . by the explosion of the international economy and the destructive effects of deindustrialisation upon old communities. When capital has moved on, the importance of place is more clearly revealed. (Williams, 1980, p. 242) The following discussion examines selected responses to the decline of the industrial economy in this region and examines some of the practices associated with regeneration increasingly set in place. It is concerned with the new meanings established to define these localities and some of the discursive practice employed to constitute a new sense of place. The former South Yorkshire coalfield has been the recipient of EU initiatives for financial aid under European Objectives 1 and 2 and RECHAR programmes. These initiatives aim to regenerate former industrial regions – in terms of physical infrastructure and the region’s ailing economic base. Yet, reshaping the physical environment alters both the material and the cultural landscape in which people interact, and this tells us something about the importance of the built environment’s effect upon identity in the contexts of neighbourhood, community and place. This view might be seen as particularly apposite in relation to mining communities, considering what has been argued above. Table 7.3 reveals the transition in this region in terms of work and employment, underlining the demise of coal and marking out the new modes of production that have replaced it. The new contrast between mining and ‘services’ is plain. In recent years the transformation has been powerfully motivated through processes of regeneration. Regeneration represents a process designed to transform the very fabric, the constitutive setting, of community identity. Such processes are, in large part, about ‘re-imagining’ community

Table 7.3

Numbers employed in different sectors in the Yorkshire and Humber Region, 1841–2001

Year

Agriculture

1841 1881 1931 1951 1971 1981 1991 2001

2, 451 2, 390 2, 030 1, 926 790 850 900 819

Mining 1, 012 12, 238 38, 969 29, 088 20, 760 n/a 4, 410 821

Manufacturing 8, 859 9, 731 12, 191 19, 646 28, 680 23, 250 16, 290 17, 888

Construction 773 2, 246 3, 591 5, 046 5, 180 5, 690 8, 020 7, 924

Utilities

Services

1, 006 3, 281 6, 873 15, 539 5, 090 23, 410 10, 110 6, 333

3, 220 7, 417 18, 228 24, 058 31, 160 38, 160 44, 960 51, 464

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.1.0

209

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and place, ‘reinventing’ or ‘reshaping’ traditions and formations, and such objectives implicate these acts in more broad, ideological processes of social, cultural and economic transformation. This view is captured – perhaps somewhat unwittingly – in a cartoon from the current regeneration literature calling for the ‘re-making of Barnsley’, the main town situated in the former South Yorkshire coalfield. Here we are presented with a simple and straightforward narrative, at least on the face of it. A miner emblematises Barnsley, represented by the fusing of the town hall into the body of the miner himself – the miner, linked with a long tradition, embodies the town (though this is rather an individualised conception of mining culture!). But this, in essence, is a story of transition, structured around a number of key oppositions, which turn on notions of old/new, present/future, hard/soft, ‘dirty’/‘clean’. With the pithead receding in the background, our coal miner treks warily towards an uncertain fate. In the next image, we see him cleaning up. Low-tech work tools – the detritus of the industrial revolution, symbolised by the miner with his pickaxe and the steel toe-capped boots – are scrubbed away (though a fire still blazes in the background), in the process yielding effortlessly, in images three and four, to a post-industrial, high-tech and digitised work space, where the wearing of comfy slippers offers a more alluring prospect than the old hobnails, and where computer screen and swivel chair replace coal seams and cutting machines. Clean-shaven and streamlined – indeed, more feminised, it would seem – as the cartoon narrative draws to a close, our former pitman can take his place in the brave new world of production. But this process of self-fashioning is a curious one, offering a representation that plays fast and loose with history and tradition. Tin baths in front of a coal fire provide a certain anachronistic slant – pithead baths long ago did away with this form of cleaning up after a shift – thus offering an image more suited, perhaps, to the idea of industrial cultures and work as superannuated and moribund, while the invisible super-highways of the technological revolution – emblematised in the computer, of course – promise a future where the very divide between work and leisure might well belong to the past, too (Figure 7.3). In regeneration literature focused on Barnsley (as the region’s main town, its historical ‘hub’), the emphasis falls on its history prior to the emergence of extractive industry, especially mining. Hence the renaissance of the town revolves around a new identity that is old – its former market town status. Thus in presenting the past as the future, the key question becomes: which past will do? A more difficult question arises,

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Figure 7.3

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Representations of South Yorkshire past and present/future

Source: Barnsley Borough Council

too – if the present is the product of the past, then how can the industrial past be safely laid to rest? Bella Dicks suggests that ‘which version of the community’s past ends up on display is crucial to the public communication of the community’s cultural identity’ (2000, p. 77), an identity inevitably formed over a long historical process of development and continuity. At the same time, the heritage practice to which Dicks refers is necessarily embroiled with regeneration work, sometimes contradictorily and uncomfortably so. Thus Dicks’ ‘versions of the past’ are echoed in Raymond Williams’ term for such ideological appropriation of historical formation, that of the ‘selective tradition’ (see Williams, 1977; also Kirk, 2007). The past, then, can be constituted for the purposes, primarily, of the present. As Williams remarks, an hegemonic or dominant culture ‘is always an active process’, one that organises and places often diverse (alternative or oppositional) meanings within an incorporative relationship to itself, and this comment corresponds to Williams’ understanding of the place of tradition. Williams goes on to argue that ‘tradition is . . . always more than an inert historicised segment: indeed it is the most powerful practical means of incorporation. What we have to see is . . . a selective tradition: an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification’ (1977, p. 115). Establishing traditions is an institutional and hegemonic process, the past and its artefacts made and remade in and for the present. Barnsley’s mining past is not the tradition that helps constitute its current identity, which underlines the view that memory/history can be as much about forgetting as remembering.

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7.11 Conclusion Recent research on the coalfields’ economies since the closures has found a mixed picture. Beatty et al.’s findings in 2005 suggest some diversity of experience across the regions, with the Yorkshire area making considerable progress in recent years helped, they emphasise, by ‘the huge efforts from local authorities, development agencies, central government and the European Union’ (2005, p. 3). Thus substantial investment in the South Yorkshire coalfield by regional, national and European agencies has proved crucial, and this has been helped by the geography of the area. The region is close to major motorways and is centrally located within the UK. Geographical detachment is not a problem as it appears to be, for example, in the more remote South Wales coalfield area, where recovery has been slow by comparison. Steve High, in discussing the decline of North American industry, spoke of the presence of the village and the mine. The ‘industrial cathedral of the north’ in the USA articulated the meaning, metaphor and the material form that signified and helped shape generational experience over decades. Now industrial demolition signifies loss/transformation. New narratives of place emerge: in North America, the ‘rust belt’ constitutes industry as broken and in decline; in the UK, coalfields were rapidly erased from the landscape altogether. But what has been the impact of the demise of the coalfields in terms of the coordinates once so central to this area and explored above – that is: What is the impact of economic restructuring on notions and experiences of community, culture and identity? These are necessarily more difficult to grasp, and thus this chapter has been concerned with ‘mapping’ how those cultures and identities have been shaped and found expression in discursive forms and cultural practice in the past and the present. This reflects Steven High’s view that processes of deindustrialisation are ‘not simply economic processes, but cultural ones as well’ (2007, p. 2). Referencing Cowie and Heathcott (2003), he argues that cultural meanings are vital for understanding the meanings of economic restructuring and its variable impacts – and thus it is necessary to explore change as lived and articulated through structures of feeling within the historical contexts and economic situations that shape people’s lives. The deindustrialisation and economic restructuring of former industrial areas represent processes of transition that impact decisively on established cultures nurtured over time, and it is as a result of such deep shifts and transformations that notions of identity and culture loom ever larger. Europe’s social and cultural landscapes are marked by

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these transformations. Their impact on the identities and cultures that derive from the range of experiences, customs and traditions that earlier ways of living and working brought into being, however, is largely under-researched. Yet it remains vital to an understanding of the future cohesion and identity of the regions themselves, as well as for making sense of the historical formation and cultural diversity of the European regions we have examined in this book.

Notes 1. Steve Jefferys (London Metropolitan University) and Christine Wall (Westminster University) made helpful contributions to this chapter. 2. The report was entitled Social Insurance and Allied Services and is discussed in detail in Pauline Gregg’s (1967) The Welfare State, London: George Harrap. 3. Peter Hennessy (1993), Never Again. Britain 1945–51, London: Vintage, Chapter 9, p. 359 and Alan Sked and Chris Cook (1984), Post-war Britain, a Political History, London: Penguin, pp. 34–5. 4. See V. Berghahn and D. Karsten (1988) Industrial Relations in West Germany, Oxford: Berg. 5. For a full account of both social and economic reforms, see K.O. Morgan (1985), Labour in Power 1945–51, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 6. J. Tomlinson (1994) ‘The politics of economic measurement: the “productivity problem” in the 1940s’ in A. Hopwood and P. Miller (eds.) Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See also J. Tomlinson (1991) ‘The Labour Government and the Trade Unions, 1945–51’, in Nick Tiratsoo (ed.) The Attlee Years, London: Pinter. 7. This involved a ten-year programme and widespread consultation, with £354 million made available by government and an extra £200 million going to English Partnerships to bolster the role in the renewal. These areas became recipients, too, of EU aid, under Objectives 1 and 2. Central to this initiative was to find ways to encourage investment and stimulate the economy.

References Ackers, P. (1996) ‘Life after Death: Mining History without a Coal’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 1, pp. 159–70. Addison, P. (1994) The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War, London: Pimlico. Ashworth, W. with the assistance of Mark Pegg (1986) The History of the British Coal Industry. Vol. 5, 1946–1982: The Nationalized Industry, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barnett, C. (1986) The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation, London: Macmillan. Bauman, Z. (1998) Work, Consumption and the New Poor, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

214 Representing Identity and Work in Transition Beatty, C., Fothergill, S. and Powell, R. (2005) ’Twenty years on: has the economy of the coalfields recovered?’, Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, Sheffield Hallam University, March 2005 Beck, U. (1986) Risk Society, London: Sage. Bennett, K., Beynon, H. and Hudson R. (2000) Coalfields regeneration: dealing with the consequences of industrial decline, Bristol: Policy Press. Beynon, H. (1985) Digging Deeper, London: Verso. Beynon, H. and Gavanis, P. (eds.) (1999) Patterns of Social Inequality, London: Longman. Beynon, H., Sadler, D., and Hudson, R. (1991) A Tale of Two Industries, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Biernacki, R. (1995) The Fabrication of Labor. Germany and Britain 1640–1914, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bleasdale, A. (1982) Boys from the Blackstuff, BBC 2, October/November. Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bulmer, M. (ed.) (1978) Working-Class Images of Society, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Calder, A. (1965) The People’s War, London: Jonathan Cape. Campbell, A., Fishman, N. and McIlroy, J. (eds.) (1999) British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics: The Post-war Compromise, 1945–64, Monmouth: Merlin Press. Charlesworth, S. J. (2000) A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chester, Sir Norman (1977) The Nationalisation of British Industry, London: HMSO. Cowie, J. and Heathcott, J. (2003) Beyond the Ruins: The Meaning of Deindistrialisation, Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Critcher, C., Schubert, K. and Waddington, D. (eds.) (1995) Regeneration of the Coalfield Areas: Anglo-German Perspectives, London: Pinter. Crouch, C. (1977) Class Conflict and the Industrial Relations Crisis: Compromise and Corporatism in the Policies of the British State, London: Heinemann. Dahrendorf, R. (1959) Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, London: Routledge. Dennis, N., Henriques, F. and Slaughter, C. (1969 (1956)) Coal is Our Life: An Analysis of a Yorkshire Mining Community, London: Tavistock. Dicks, B. (2000) Heritage, Place and Community, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Edgerton, D. (1996) Science, Technology and the British Industrial ‘decline’ 1870– 1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2005) Warfare State: Britain 1920–1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans, E. G. (1976) From Mouths of Men, London: Faber and Faber. Francis, M. (1997) Ideas and Politics under Labour 1945–51. Building a New Britain, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Other in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press. Gilbert, D. (1995) ‘Imagined Communities and Mining Communities’, Labour History Review, 60(2), pp. 47–55. Gregg, P. (1967) The Welfare State, London: George Harrap. Hall, S. (1988) The Hard Road to Renewal, London: Verso. Harrison, R. (ed.) (1978) Independent Collier: The Coal Miner as Archetypal Proletarian Reconsidered, Brighton: Harvester.

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Harvey, D. (2006) Spaces of Global Capitalism, London: Verso. Hennessy, P. (1993) Never Again. Britain 1945–51, London: Vintage. High, S. (2007) Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialisation, Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Hill, A. (2001) The South Yorkshire Coalfield: A History and Development, Gloucester: Tempus Publishing. Hines, B. (1994) The Heart of It, London: Michael Joseph. Hoggart, R. (1957) The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments, London: Chatto and Windus. Hudson, R. and Williams, A. (1986) Western European Economic and Social Studies: United Kingdom, London: Sage. Jackson, B. (1968) Working Class Community, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kirk, J. (2003) “’Northern Exposure:’ Mapping the Remains of the Post-Industrial Landscape,” Space and Culture: International Journal of Social Spaces, pp. 178–86. ——— (2007) Class, Culture and Social Change: On the Trail of the Working Class, London: Palgrave. ——— (2009) The British Working Class in the Twentieth Century: Film, Literature and Television, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Klaus, H. and Knight, S. (eds.) (2000) British Industrial Fictions, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1936) ‘Nottingham and the Mining Community’, Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H Lawrence, London: Heinemann. ——— (1995 [1915]) The Rainbow, Ware: Wordsworth. Lockwood, D. (1975) ‘Sources in Variation in Working-Class Images of Society’, in Bulmer, M. (ed.) Working-Class Images of Society, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Michie, J. and Grieve Smith, J. (eds.) (1994) Unemployment in Europe, London: Academic Press. Morgan, K. O. (1985) Labour in Power 1945–51, Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——— (1999) The People’s Peace. British History 1945–1990, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orwell, G. (1937) The Road to Wigan Pier, London: Penguin. Parry, J. (2005) ‘Care in the Community? Gender and the Reconfiguration of Community Work in a Post-Mining Neighbourhood’, in Pettinger, L., Parry, J., Taylor, R. and Glucksman, M. (eds.) A New Sociology of Work?, Oxford: Blackwell. Peck, J. and Tickell, A. (1994) ‘Searching for a New Institutional Fix: The AfterFordist Crisis and the Global-Local Disorder’, in Amin, A. (ed.) Post-Fordism: A Reader. London: Blackwell. Priestley, J. B. (1979) English Journey, London: Penguin. Richards, A. J. (1996) Miners On Strike: Class Solidarity and Division in Britain, Oxford: Berg. Samuel, R. (1994) Theatres of Memory, Vol 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, London: Verso. Samuel, R. et al. (eds.) (1986) The Enemy Within: Pit Villages and the Miners’ Strike of 1984–5, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Savage, M. (2000) Class Analysis and Social Transformation, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Sennett, R. (1998) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, New York: Norton.

216 Representing Identity and Work in Transition Sked, A. and Cook, C. (1984) Post-war Britain, a Political History, London: Penguin. Skeggs, B. (2004) Self, Class, Culture, London: Routledge. Soja, E. (1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, London: Verso. Supple, B. (1987) The History of the British Coal Industry. Volume 4, 1913–1946 The Political Economy of Decline, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tomlinson, J. (1991) ‘The Labour Government and the Trade Unions, 1945–51’, in Tiratsoo, N. (ed.) The Attlee Years, London: Pinter. ——— (1994) ‘The Politics of Economic Measurement: The “productivity problem” in the 1940s’, in Hopwood, A. and Miller, P. (eds.) Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomlinson, J. and Tiratsoo, N. (1998) The Conservatives and Industrial Efficiency 1951–64. Thirteen Wasted Years?, London: Routledge. Turner, R. (2000) Coal was Our Life, Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam Press. Waddington, D. (2003) Regenerating Coalfields Communities: Breathing New Life into Warsop Vale. Bristol: The Policy Press. Waddington, D. and Parry, D. (1995) ‘Coal policy in Britain: economic reality or political vendetta?’ in Critcher, C., Schubert, K. and Waddington, D. (eds.) Regeneration of the Coalfield Areas: Anglo-German Perspectives, London: Pinter. Waddington, D., Critcher, C., Parry, D. and Dicks, B. (2001) Out of the Ashes? The Social Impact of Industrial Contraction and Regeneration on British Mining Communities, London: Routledge. Warwick, D. and Littlejohn, G. (1992) Coal, Capital and Culture: A Sociological Analysis of Mining Communities in West Yorkshire, London: Routledge. Williamson, B. (1982) Class, Culture and Community. A Biographical Study of Social Change in Mining, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wiener, M. (1981) English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, R. (1958) Culture and Society, London: The Hogarth Press. ——— (1961) The Long Revolution, London: Penguin. ——— (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (1980) Culture, London: Fontana. Winterton, J. and Winterton, R. (1989) Coal, Crisis and Conflict: The 1984–85 Miners’ Strike in Yorkshire, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, I. (2000) Austerity in Britain. Rationing Controls and Consumption, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

8 A Skyline of European Identities Sylvie Contrepois, Steve Jefferys and John Kirk

This book set out to raise questions about the impact of deindustrialisation in several regions of Europe. Our objectives were to look at the effects of economic restructuring central to the remaking of distinct areas characterised by work patterns that had been formed from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution up to the late twentieth century and had constituted distinctive cultures, communities and identities. The implications of these altered conditions would prove profound, playing a significant role in transforming many European landscapes and spaces. These changes impacted not only on the regions themselves as geographical spaces, but also reshaped the very nature of national and regional identity forms in important ways. They reflected the impact of a global transformation seen to result in the decline of traditional work in its stereotyped ‘modernist’ forms, with its partial replacement by more ‘postmodern’ forms of work, culture and identity. These central changes have occupied many of our arguments here. Deindustrialisation in these European towns and regions has suggested to many commentators the very end of work itself. It became a dominant trope and standpoint, pointed to by academics and commentators: an argument that was seen to characterise the end of those regions characterised by industrial labour. Some saw this as the shift from a ‘Fordist’ to a ‘post-Fordist’ conception of a ‘new capitalism’. The closures of Polish and UK coal mines and steelworks, the disintegration of the communities attached to them, for instance, the demise of longestablished Spanish textile and shoe-making industries, the decline of French and of German industrial labour, all pointed to the significance of economic and social transformation. The emergence of globalisation enabled industrial production to migrate to so-called ‘Third World’ 217

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locations around the globe. In the already industrialised countries, service work increasingly replaced industrial work as the central form of production and employment. Thus the chapters above focused on the rapid alteration of once firmly established regions, describing in six former major manufacturing or heavy industrial regions the consequences of such transformation. In some areas these changes were rapid, in others the processes of deindustrialisation are still under way. In the Dearne Valley (UK) the coal industry disappeared while in the Zonguldak (Turkey) and Katowice (Poland) regions coal is still being mined; in Nuremberg (Germany), Alcoy, Elda (Spain) and Corbeil-Essonnes (France) jobs in the ‘old’ manufacturing companies are still present, and ‘new’ manufacturing has also appeared. Thus in our conclusion we look at the way the old and the new in our investigation have been re-formed, remodelled or refashioned – or remain powerfully in tension. And we note that many of the forms of ‘post-industrialism’ heralded as representing ‘new times’ may be seen to have stalled – especially since the financial crisis of 2008. Contrasting the different chapters from our European skyline raises new questions: how can the socio-economic landscapes and formative impulses of the opening decade of the twenty-first century best be understood? What features of change and of continuity are held in common? Can we provide an overall vision from these rooted examples? Are analyses using social class as a meaningful category redundant when exploring identity formation in these changing communities? How has the gendering of identity changed over time in the different regions considered? Comparative commentary always reduces what we know, deep down, cannot be reduced. There is always so much more in the detail, in people’s lives. Nonetheless it is important to attempt it. While identity formation reflects the structures of feeling that depend on place and space in the present and in the past, we must ask whether any or many of these structures are experienced similarly across country and regional borders. Much has still to be researched, but some tentative indicators of a European skyline of identities can be discussed here.

8.1 Industrial change and identity Transformations of space and place – through the alteration of economic structures and the closure of heavy industry and recent regeneration – articulate history in particular ways. These ways are separated from practical consciousness and experience yet are bound to residual or emergent

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structures of feeling that still claim and acknowledge identities and identity formations, institutional modes and traditions – at least where they are embedded in the region and in family ties dating back decades. The six preceding regional country-based chapters have sketched complex patterns of historical and contemporary change. Industrial structures have been refashioned within a quarter of a life span – sometimes totally, more often partially. Everywhere, the assumptions of permanence in the link between particular occupations, work and industry and a defined geographical location have gone. Yet new identities linking individuals to territory and work (or its absence) are emerging alongside the residual to reform the relationship of place and space. Deindustrialisation in the UK was illustrated by the strong case of the mining region of South Yorkshire. The South Yorkshire coalfields had not only developed a distinct regional identity over more than a century, but once held a central place in the national imagination, too. But today only the ghost of an industrial experience around work and community in its older forms haunts many of the locations we explored. The end of coal mining was swift; the forced economic and social change proved harsh, drawn and complex and continues to be so. At the outbreak of the miners’ strike in 1984 there were still 170 collieries employing almost 200,000 miners across the UK, and 21 collieries in the Dearne Valley that employed 23,000 men; this accounted for 22 per cent of all workers in the area. By 2010, there were fewer than 6000 miners in the UK in total, and only one pit in Yorkshire and none at all in the Dearne Valley. Rapid change also occurred in the other regions discussed earlier, but in these cases at least some of the original industrial activities remained. Several steelworks closed (in Silesia), many coal mines closed (in Silesia and Zonguldak), long-established engineering, paper-making and printing, textile and shoe industries contracted drastically (in Nuremberg, Corbeil-Essonnes, Alcoy and Elda). Yet in all these regions, beyond the traces of the past on people’s lives, there are also ‘survivors’ – people still working in the same occupations or industries as had their parents or their parents parents. In the case of the Silesian Voivodship the consequences of the systemic and economic changes after 1989 were greater than in any other region of Poland. Having been the most industrialised area with the highest density of population, with a strong working-class culture connected with heavy industry (especially coal mines and the steel industry) and relatively affluent households, the region became confronted with very rapid industrial decline. In 20 years three-quarters of the 400,000 coal

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miners who were working in 1990 have lost their jobs. The community experienced a brutal descent into forms of economic instability accompanied by radical changes in everyday life that impacted upon social networks and family relationships. The economic revolution of the 1990s undermined the foundations on which the traditional regional symbolic order had been laid. The emerging impoverishment of mining and steel quarters is a particularly important factor affecting the process of the contemporary regional identity, and continues to be the case. There has been the material and social degradation of many older workers’ towns, among them some classical areas such as Nikiszowiec in Katowice, an example of paternalistic housing dating from the beginning of the last century. These areas, like others, demand the revitalisation of local communities, yet as they undergo such rapid changes these are losing the integrity and self-reliance that were founded on a common experience. The changing landscape of the region is both embedded in the present and being rooted in the more and more problematic industrial past. Part of the complexity is that social and demographic change and the abandonment of the cultural tradition of a mining Silesia are moving faster than is the economic structure: after two decades of transformation that involved a more than tenfold increase in the number of students in higher education since 1990, the Silesian Voivodship still remains the most industrialised region in Poland and one of the most industrialised areas in Europe. In other regions, such as the coal-mining area of Zonguldak in Turkey, we have seen how the changed nature of work in newer, ‘freer’ market conditions exposed workers to feelings of loneliness and frustration. These were exacerbated by the region’s geographical isolation, and by the rather disinterested attitude of other unions in the country to their 1990–1 protest against economic decline when the mining workers of Zonguldak marched on Ankara. It was a strong display of (local and regional) unity against a state that was threatening their very survival as a community. The strikes and march seem to be one of the reasons why some local pride in mining and in community-class association has survived the decades of economic decline that followed the extraordinary protest. The 34,000 miners of the region in 1990 became just 12,000 by 2004. Today many mines still survive – a majority have been privatised – and with the higher coal prices, some have even started hiring miners again. But what was left behind, pervading the region’s ethnically and occupationally adjacent identities, were the notions of uncertainty and decline. Since the mid-1980s the area has seen a continuous decline in

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population. The younger workers who stay in Zonguldak are now primarily employed in the service sector and in commerce. There is a deep sense of loss of economic power and influence, and of regional and local pride. Partial but highly significant change is also highlighted in the chapters on Nuremberg, Corbeil-Evry and Alcoy and Elda. In all these city regions manual industrial labour has been in long-term decline. In all of them marketing has become more important in selling the region as the cities see themselves in stronger competition for tourism, investments and for attracting the highly qualified staff and the socalled ‘creative class’ (cf. Florida, 2003) who are considered as being likely to fulfil the growing needs of the service sector for qualified employees in an ageing society that also needs urban development. Yet none of these has, as yet, totally succumbed to the neo-liberal models embraced so enthusiastically by governments in the UK in the 1980s and in Poland and Turkey in the 1990s. A mayor of Nuremberg, Ulrich Maly, for example, has said that ‘it is no longer an industrial city’ – although it is still a city where industry is important. Change and adaptation can be seen as dominant cultural patterns within the Nuremberg area, where education, flexibility and mobility are prized. More than two-thirds of the City’s employees now work in the service sector in companies such as DATEV, GfK or the Nürnberger Versicherungsgruppe and, in 2007, larger companies still employed some 50,000 people in companies like MAN, Siemens or Bosch, although some prominent factories like AEG, Grundig and Hercules have closed entirely. For male manual workers, in particular, job cuts and plant closures have become a continuous challenge to their everyday life and identities. Yet the Nuremberg South (Südstadt) neighbourhood as a whole, the old industrial heart of the city, its families and individual inhabitants, is also identified as being at particular risk of being ‘left behind’ to become the subject only of welfare and antipoverty measures. About one-third of its population are migrants and it has a high proportion of the city’s 30,000 unemployed (two-thirds of whom are manual workers), with unemployment in certain areas four times higher than in other parts of Nuremberg. The area has also seen a growth in xenophobic votes as some long-established residents express their resentment against change and the arrival of new, ‘non-German’ residents. A feeling of contrast, of being a ‘problem’ area compared with other parts of Nuremberg, and even between different parts of the South where some old factories have been converted into up-market flats, is becoming embedded in local identities.

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A similar deindustrialising and postmodernising condition and increasing complexity of identity formation well describes the two towns of Corbeil-Essonnes and Evry. Similar changes involving a gradual decline in manual work and rapidly increasing migration have taken place in two huge waves of economic and urban transformation, although the outcomes in the two towns are quite distinct. In the much older Corbeil-Essonnes job losses were substantial, but pockets of industrial work survived with huge new high-rise estates being built on some industrial sites that had closed. In Evry, the realisation of a planner’s dream of a structured new town of mixed high-rise and low-level housing, its status as County (departmental) capital and location for a new university helped encourage new hi-tech industries and service sector headquarters to appear. However, as in adjacent Corbeil-Essonnes, the combination of a range of local employment opportunities, close proximity and good access to Paris, and the availability of lower-cost or rental housing continued to draw in migrants from the rest of France and overseas. Over 100 nationalities, sharing a sense of injustice and of being frozen out of wider French society, live in just two huge housing schemes in the two neighbouring towns. The area reveals many traces of an earlier industrial past interwoven with and cutting through the presence of both high levels of unemployment and poverty and of new technology and service industries. In their continued contexts of long-term economic crisis, the Alcoyan and Eldian populations of Eastern Spain also suffer from high unemployment. Even the construction sector has today joined the longstanding industrial decline. The future economic and industrial development of Alcoy is framed by the almost total disappearance of the textile sector, maintaining less than a dozen competitive textile companies (technical textile and design processes), while new sectors fail to emerge to rescue the deep industrial crisis, although the city itself is eagerly looking for new industries that would eventually replace the old. In Elda, the crisis of unemployment has watched the shoemaking sector continually experience the same general extremely bad working conditions. The sector can resist globalisation in two different ways: by either deepening its cost-reduction strategy or betting on higher-quality production. In both scenarios, the sector may resist foreign competition, although employment in the sector will never be as it was. Tourism might be a new livelihood for Alcoy, thanks to its festivals and their environment, while its strategic situation could make Elda a commercial and logistics node. The general improvement of communication and the growth of seaside towns, especially Alicante, the capital

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city of the province, can assist them to become commuting cities or dormitory towns – a process already under way. The relatively poor quality of much employment in the region contributes to the emigration of the better-skilled, qualified workers – who are attracted to professional careers in Madrid, Barcelona or outside Spain – while other workers find fewer motives for migration and prefer to stay in town or in the region. Economic change and changes in the physical spaces people live in have had a huge impact on the highly significant markers of identity – the work people do, or don’t do, and on how they see their localities. The disappearance or sharp decline in much ‘old’ work in all the regions described has dissolved traditional male working-class identity bonds, while the emergence of new industries and the arrival of new migrants have created new ways of living and working, as well as new uncertainties and higher levels of involvement in civic and working life by women.

8.2 Class and identity The structural changes sketched above had major impacts on the frontiers and understanding of social class in all the regions considered. In all areas social classes are present, but their boundaries and meanings have changed in different ways. Work and the local community were the dominant socialising process, but everywhere the balance between the two has evolved with changes in both work and communities. Perhaps the least level of movement among the local ruling classes or elites took place in the Spanish towns of Alcoy and Elda. In those two towns the local capitalists tended to do deals with national and international capitalists that preserved for them a degree of autonomy. In Alcoy this permitted a particular form of paternalism to survive in some parts of the declining textile industry, and to be reflected and reinforced in the annual Moors and Christians festival. In Corbeil-Essonnes, in contrast, where a local capitalist class operating paternalist management had been actively present up to the 1950s or 1960s, the new global employers now appeared much more remote to workers than in the past. However, the reappearance of one of France’s major industrialists as the town’s mayor created a new paternalistic connection with the past, and reinforced a more active sense of class divide for many in the area. In Nuremberg local ruling class paternalism also gave way to more modern management methods in the post-war boom, including the eventual embrace by the larger and more successful firms of employee

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involvement in the quite powerful German Works Councils. When restructuring occurred, it did so in very similar ways to CorbeilEssonnes–Evry: the oldest industries disappeared but were replaced by some very new high-technology ones, whose owners were now entirely remote from the changing Nuremberg workforce. In the three coal-mining areas there were quite divergent developments. In the Dearne Valley, the old coal owners effectively disappeared at nationalisation in 1947, so the ending of coal mining had little effect on local class relations. Yet the imposed ending of work for many unskilled and semi-skilled male workers in what had been relatively well-off pit villages fed a deep class resentment, that became a sense of desperation in the aftermath of the defeat of the 1984–5 miners’ strike. Similarly, in Katowice, the coal owners also disappeared at the end of the Second World War with the introduction of ‘socialism’. Yet unlike the case of the Dearne Valley, many state-owned coal mines there are still operating. The competition between the old industrial and the new post-industrial landscape is strong. The context where ‘social class’ was used rhetorically to defend earlier/older state management power, through giving special privileges to manual workers, has fragmented sense-making along social class lines as industry here too shifts slowly and ambiguously towards a more educated service sector workforce. The boundaries describing the new Polish capitalist elite and its relations with international capital are still in flux. In Zonguldak in Turkey, nationalisation of the coal mines in the 1930s took power away from multinational companies and put it into the hands of the state. Yet the liberalisation of the 1980s involved both closures and the sale of half the industry back into private (mainly Turkish) hands. In this region, as in Upper Silesia, the local employers are not yet a clearly delimited class stratum – and it is not even clear whether they will ever become one as global capital returns to play an ever more crucial role in the country. In those regions where industrial companies survived the restructuring, such as Nuremberg and Corbeil-Essonnes–Evry, the composition of their workforces generally changed quite dramatically. Up to the 1970s, workers in large firms tended to be semi-skilled or skilled manual workers, and they often used to stay in the same company throughout their adult lives. Today they are increasingly highly qualified technical, whitecollar, professional engineers and managerial workers, while unskilled workers are increasingly rare. Alongside these new strata, however, less skilled and less educated workers are now increasingly found in the service industries, and these workers tend to be much more mobile between

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jobs and during their life courses. Many are migrants, and this status often denies them access to the quality of work to which their own home-country qualifications entitle them. The emergence of these overlapping social strata has, nearly everywhere, moderated the acute sense of a confrontation between ‘us and them’, without removing social conflict altogether. In Elda and Alcoy, Corbeil-Essonnnes–Evry and Nuremberg, as in all three mining regions, historically strong collective identities linked to the local industrial past still play an important part in inhibiting local workers from emigrating elsewhere in the country or in Europe. This collective identity manifests itself in particular in local pride in the preparation and enactment of festivals that produce and reproduce a dense network of social relationships. The celebration of the community in local activities, from brass bands to markets and fairs and festivals, has a momentum that attracts or helps fix people to the region. However, this development is not unequivocal. Many in the younger generation see the old industries as an image of a useless past or as obstacles to regeneration. Nearly everywhere strong working-class cultural identities are becoming a memory of times past, although still present symbolically, and they remain important to local identities, but they are now more dependent on local rather than work identities to mobilise or structure in practice. How, then, are collective identities surviving in this context of economic difficulties and changes? In the new town of Evry, as well as in the older Corbeil-Essonnes, the opportunities for social mobility remain limited, particularly for the relatively high proportions of manual workers, many of whom are migrants or from migrant origins and living in the huge ‘problem’ housing schemes. Some, including white-collar technical workers, respond by joining or keeping their membership of trade unions or other local associations with a collective voice. Others, the younger, excluded generation, respond by forming gangs or groups encouraging self-help or constructive outlets for leisure. Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Evry town council in particular continued to support voluntary associations to help with integration, culture and education. All these actions and initiatives create a latticework of local identity that reflects collective experiences, but also a diversity of expression. The ways in which the regions, cities and communities emerge from contemporary restructuring, decline and regeneration vary in extremely important ways. Yet although local institutions are trying to contribute to economic recovery and to create new livelihoods, the feeling in

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several regions is that their efforts are not having much success. In the same vein, local populations do not trust much in the innovative character of dominant entrepreneurs or companies, especially as their capital is becoming increasingly mobile in the era of globalisation. Experiences of regional frustration may, however, also contribute towards the formation of a stronger sense of local identity. In Upper Silesia the sense of the world being turned upside down, with the miners moving from heroes to villains within their own lifetimes, reinforced a collective regional sense of being victimised; there has been a reemergence of local language and calls for greater local autonomy and pride in regional traditions. Struggles to keep work in Corbeil-Essonnes or in Nuremberg also intertwined and embedded class and locality. In Turkey the 1990–1 miners’ mobilisation was not simply an uprising of workers – it was rather a powerful display of local unity and cohesion, with the Zonguldak municipality and the local shop owners who actively supported the workers. The children and women who joined the miners on their march are now themselves part of the formative events contributing to the current pattern of local consciousness and community identity. Yet other transformations of local collective identity are also taking place. In Nuremberg the earlier class-based and political identities constructed around the community garden movement, the trade union or Socialist Party, the peace movement or the hugely popular local sports clubs are slowly but steadily moving on. They are fragmenting into scattered, leisure-related activities that still possess collectivity, but of a much more fluid character – such as public viewing of sports events, going clubbing together and ‘hanging out’ in public spaces. This process is also happening among the Nuremberg migrants, although in their case two other patterning forms have appeared: religious organisations that have partly take over some of the organising space from the former migrant workers’ clubs and traditional, country-of-origin political parties; and local migrant entrepreneurs’ societies and clubs. In CorbeilEssonnes the old Communist Party dominance on the left has been shattered, leading to the rebirth of a broader social movement. In all the regions social class appears to be present, but with different dimensions than in the past. One, two or three decades ago the principal dimensions of class identity were occupational and family, being largely defined by where an individual worked, by the numbers of workers with whom they worked and the similarity of work content carried on, and by whether their own father was a manual or white-collar worker. Today class dimensions are broader, emphasising the importance of the

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neighbourhood and education achieved, along with the level of income and whether someone has work or not, rather than where it is and alongside whom it is done.

8.3 Gender and identity Restructuring away from what were most frequently male-dominated mining or manufacturing industries has produced major changes on both family cohesion and work itself, right across Europe. In all the regions the changes in work were linked to changes in gender representation and expectations and to relations between generations. Parry (2005), writing about the UK, argued that new forms of community work impacting on regions can foster new ideas and feelings for place. Thus identity is reaffirmed while necessarily altering in key ways. Changing gender roles – though these should not be exaggerated – provide an example of this. In South Yorkshire, the seismic shock of the defeat of ‘the men’ in the 1984–5 miners’ strike followed by the aftershocks of men’s jobs in coal disappearing and the opening up of more work for women are still reshaping families and identities, and working their way through into the ‘post-coal’ generation of families and relationships. As in Upper Silesia, there are still brass bands, but many fewer than in the days when nearly every pit village had one. In Poland, the equally dominant model of the working-class family, with the man as breadwinner and the woman as housewife, was also shaken after 1989. In the new ‘free’ market men and women began to fight for position, both needing to combine their family and professional roles and jointly to maintain life by themselves or together through their families. Whereas the most important question for many women had concerned whether they should work, this changed to how they could reconcile their professional with their family roles. Previously the family model could work with one male income; today this is no longer possible. This change was illustrated by the emergence of women trade unionists and union leaders, leading to the Association of Women Mining Trade Union Branches and the establishment of women’s nongovernmental organizations. Many more women are now looking for work, whether temporary or poorly paid. Polish demographic data also indicate that women are delaying their decision to set up a family, or to have a child. There is a shift towards women giving birth between the ages of 25 and 29 and a decline in fertility below 25. A majority of children are born in legally contracted marriages (82.2 per cent) but the rest, born in civil partnerships or in single-parent families, confirm

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a destabilisation of the traditional family model. Social consent is more important, and there is less readiness to accept some of the traditional versions of family roles and the mythology of the kind-hearted and conscientious miner and his neat and tidy, thrifty and religious wife. A not dissimilar change process has been affecting identity dynamics in both Alcoy and Elda in Spain. Here, while women have remained in their traditional subordinated position at work, their subordination appears more fragile and contested. Of course women were always present in the industrial workforce. In the 1820s the first Luddite actions took place in Alcoy, when both men and women workers from Alcoy and neighbouring Cocentaina destroyed early mechanical looms. History accelerated after the declaration of the Second Republic and its ambitious social, economic and political reforms, including an extension of the suffrage that allowed women the right to vote in 1931. Despite this, the Alcoy Moors and Christians parades, while bringing textile industry managers, employees (white collar) and industrial workers (blue collar) together, still deny women the right to vote in the filá’s decision making. This is unlike the shoe-making town of Elda. There, where the economy has traditionally involved home-working and a clear sexual division of labour, with sewing and storage for women and design and cutting for men, women appear less subordinated. Proud of its modernity and openness, in contrast to the more geographically remote and ‘traditional’ Alcoy, Elda appears to integrate new people more easily, and now includes women in its Moors and Christian Festival organisation. However, young people, especially women, no longer wish to work at all in the shoe industry and seek instead other sectors, such as the retailing and tourist industries. In Germany, the new industrial balance and changes to neighbourhoods have been accompanied by increases in reports of depression and other psychiatric illnesses. This has particularly affected younger men and women and the unemployed. An important element in this is the weaker articulation of supportive work cultures. This weakening involves many dimensions of identity, including ethnicity, nation, class, milieu and gender, and cannot simply be interpreted as a decline in ‘male’ work identity or culture. The expression of their identities by Turkish male workers, for example, is lived differently to those lived and learned by male German industrial workers. In Turkey the decline in coal mining and the region as a whole left identity formation to be more broadly assumed by other sites of consciousness – in particular by the family and community. When the 1990–1 protest against mine closures took place whole families

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hit the road on foot. Women figured prominently during the march, an interesting development given the male-dominated structure of the mining sector. During the subsequent long decline, however, the male bias of the region’s labour market maintained its exclusiveness. Yet the extremely long hours worked by men left it mainly up to women to establish and sustain the region’s social (neighbourhood, family and ethnicity-based) networks. As internal family balances alter under the conditions of economic depression, women are becoming more strategic actors in the formulation and implementation of survival strategies. At the same time this greater strategic role can lead to tensions between the strong patriarchal traditions within the family and community. In the Corbeil-Essonnes–Evry region the presence of women working in industry has declined. While women were significant in traditional industries, today they are much more marginal in the advanced technology industries that have established themselves in the area. The overall level of women’s participation in the labour force is, nonetheless, roughly the same as that of men, since they have benefited from the growing importance of the service sector. Despite this, considerable inequalities still exist. Women have a higher rate of unemployment than men, they are more often found in small and medium-sized firms, have lower average wages and are more frequently found among the poverty-level workers. After the great movement for women’s emancipation after 1968, over the last ten years mobilisations have focused on defending women’s rights. Thus the women’s rights organisation, ‘We’re not whores or submissive’ (Ni Putes Ni Soumises) established a successful branch in Evry.

8.4 Identities and livelihoods In the chapters of this book, and following on through some of these closing remarks, we have engaged with the significance of radical socioeconomic transition, noting changing places, labour and life. One major factor that historians of deindustrialisation in North America noted, and we have marked to some degree too, is the manifestation (or meanings) of what have long been defined as industrial smokestacks – and the myriad other material structures linked to the production of coal, steel, paper or textiles. Here working-class districts found dramatic articulations, shaping landscapes and defining a sense of place, and in the process a sense of self for those living in these regions. How new communities and geographies are imagined and lived in altered radically, and

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altering material circumstances remains a key factor in our investigation of identity formation and working life. This leads to some final comments on economic transformations and regional transitions, and provides some modes of exploration for making sense of these changes for the communities and cultures we have already discussed in detail. One need is to explore further the representation and reconstitution of spaces and places of being and belonging in recent history. What has occurred in some of the localities our chapters examine is a profound reshaping of lived landscapes and communities: a range of places, deprived of their previous identities as manufacturing hubs, tipped into permanent decline in some cases, and others that – as we explored – have been compelled to reinvent themselves, either as tourist destinations or centres for consumption (the boom of the shopping mall; the night-time economy). Such transformations in former coalfields such as South Yorkshire, Upper Silesia and Zonguldak have been slower and very difficult to achieve, but they still have an inevitable impact in an immediate and visible sense, as the defining features of mine, pithead and village life close, are demolished, become museums or are forced to alter themselves in new forms as stylish offices or housing blocks. What are people’s responses to all this? The North American historian, Steve High- who described similar areas in Canada and the USA – defined ‘place attachment’ as a ‘complex phenomenon that involves affect, emotion, feeling and memory’ (High and Lewis, 2007p. 32). He goes on, quoting Altman and Low, to argue that ‘rituals and the linguistic act of narrating, either through storytelling or naming, are important in establishing and maintaining place attachment (symbolic bond), and in communicating identity’. How to keep alive a sense of place appears to concern him here. Landscapes form places of belonging, the product of social relations weaved together over time, so that ‘when people invoke “place” and its attendant meanings, they are imagining geographies and creating identities’. What new imagined geographies and communities emerge in regional spaces? Through this, how are residual identities and forms reinvented and rearticulated alongside new, emergent ones that inevitably find articulation over time? How, too, does place ‘detachment’ occur, when the symbolic bonds are severed, and with what consequences? Mapping such formations from the distance of a generation and more demands an understanding of absence in these areas as much as an engagement with what is present, with what exists and compels and pressures. We suggest that regional landscapes are not simply repositories, or inert things – ‘containers’, almost, into which memories drift or

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coalesce. Geographies have histories and the histories they contain are in variable ways concretised in the physical landscape and setting and the continued living of everyday life. Radically altered landscapes, places ‘reaccentuated’ for new, contemporary times and occupations, for instance, invoke a range of responses, acting as markers for identities lost, rendered redundant or – in other ways – for ones about to come into being. Regions encompass, and are held by, forms of the historical, cultural and economic that shape conceptions and experiences of place. Through this form the terrain on which identities (and cultures) take shape is experienced, becoming expressed and articulated in a range of forms that constitute the importance of livelihood. Parry argues that the decline of regional or community forms ‘might be more accurately described as a decline of a particular (traditional and homogeneous) form of community’ (2005, p. 164), one that cannot be simply or straightforwardly – nor even feasibly – sustained in the age of the internet, never mind economic dislocation. Nevertheless, the people who continue to live in the former coalfields that Parry surveyed are still ‘held together by multiple bonds of interest, place and perception, which are maintained and realigned through their involvement in diverse forms of community work, reflecting their differing attachments and priorities’ (2005, p. 165). Here work itself is reconceptualised beyond the limits of paid employment, and the full range of fields of human activity is figured as necessary production – including identity production, across a range of areas – and it can be captured, too, we would argue, in the concept of livelihood. People live and breathe and work and play in spaces and places with pasts, presents and futures, and as they do so they build, fix and evolve identities. This book points to a real need for further investigation of these deeply structural, cultural and affective transformations in the different regions of Europe.

References Florida, R. (2003) The Rise of the Creative Class, New York: Basic Books. High, S. and Lewis, D. W. (2007) Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Parry, J. (2005) ‘Care in the Community? Gender and the Reconfiguration of Community Work in a Post-mining Neighbourhood’, in Pettinger, Lynne et al. (eds.) A New Sociology of Work?, Oxford: Blackwell.

Author Index

Adamski, W., 126 Addison, P., 186 Allan, G., 159 Altvater, E., 30 Amin, A., 131 Anderson, B., 45 Andréani, T., 68 Arensberg, C. M., 108 Aron, R., 68 Ashworth, W., 187–90 Aytekin, E. A., 154–81 Bacher, J., 51 Bähr, J., 43 Barnett, C., 186 Beatty, C., 193, 212 Beck, U., 1, 48 Beer, H., 36, 43 Beneito, A., 104–6 Bennett, K., 200 Bensussan, G., 69 Berg, M., 104 Berg Said, E., 9 Bernabé, J. M., 102 Berndt, C., 42 Berth, F., 31 Beynon, H., 4, 191, 199–201 Bianchi, S., 86 Bilbao, A., 99 Billig, M., 45 Boeckler, M., 42 Boltanski, L., 32, 44 Bouffartigue, P., 70 Bourdieu, P., 5, 11, 20, 45, 47, 68–9, 136, 156, 161–2 Bröckling, U., 32 Bude, H., 44 ´ Bukowska-Florenska, I., 137 Bulmer, M., 159, 198 Butler, J., 45–6 Butterwegge, C., 30 Byrne, D., 133

Cachón, L., 100–2 Calder, A., 186 Campbell, A., 186 Campbell, B., 9 Capó Vicedo, J., 103, 108 Carpenter, M., 3 Carpi, T., 16, 103, 108–9 Casanova, J., 96 ´ Chałasinski, J., 136 Charlesworth, S. J., 18, 20, 159, 201–2 Chiappello, E., 32, 44 Çıladır, S., 163, 166 Clark, C., 28 Coloma, R., 113 Contrepois, S., 1–20, 57–88, 217–31 Contreras, N., 109, 117 Costa, M. T., 107 Cowie, J., 212 Cresswell, T., 47 Crouch, C., 186 Crow, G., 159 Crozier, M., 68 Cuevas, J., 104–6, 119 Czarnecki, D., 128 Darmagnac, A., 86 Davis, K., 108 De Castro, C., 91–120 Dennis, N., 7, 137, 196–8, 200, 202–3 Deppe, W., 45 Desbrousses, H., 68 Dicks, B., 197–8, 202–4, 211 Dingeldey, I., 32 Dobieszewski, A., 125 Dörre, K., 38, 40 Dubar, C., 112 Duch, N., 107 Duman, Y., 155 Dunn, E., 131, 135 Durand, J.-P., 68 232

Author Index Edgerton, D., 186 Egea, P., 99, 101 Ehrenberg, A., 44 Eldem, V., 164–5 Engels, F., 105, 119 Ersoy, M., 18, 177 Espiago, J., 104 Evans, E. G., 188 Faliszek, K., 137–8, 140–1 Fernández, I., 118 Fernández Villanueva, C., 111 Fine, B., 167 Florida, R., 221 Fothergill, S., 193 Fourastié, J., 28 Francisco, J. T., 91–120 Francis, M., 186 Frers, L., 47 Frick, J., 31 Gallego, B., 109 García Domínguez, R., 104 Geertz, C., 6 Geiger, T., 24, 48 Geißler, R., 48 Generalitat, V., 16, 103, 109 Gerlich, M., 136–7, 140–1 Gilbert, D., 198 Girault, J., 87 Giza-Poleszczuk, A., 129 Glaser, H., 43 Glucksman, M., 20 Godard, F., 70 Golinowska, S., 127 Gorzelak, G., 133 Grabka, M., 31 Graham, H., 96 Gramsci, A., 47 Gravier, J.-F., 86 Gregg, P., 185, 213 Grieve Smith, J., 192 Gueilhers, S., 65, 74, 86 Güzel, M., 165 Hall, S., 9, 45–7, 190 Harrison, R., 198 Harvey, D., 3, 6, 9, 30, 131, 156–7, 160, 177, 190–1

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Häusler, H. H., 34 Heathcott, J., 212 Hennessy, P., 186, 188, 213 Hernández, R., 109, 118 High, S., 13, 212, 230 Hildebrandt, E., 27 Hill, A., 192–4 Hines, B., 207 Hirsch, J., 27 Hobsbawm, E. J., 140 Hoggart, R., 18, 197 Hradil, S., 48 Hudson, R., 4, 191 Jacher, W., 137, 139 Jackson, B., 196 Jagiełłowicz, J., 128 Jefferys, S., 1–20, 184–213, 217–31 Jordá Borrell, R., 104, 106 Juzwa, N., 139 Kahveci, E., 18, 166–7, 170–1, 173–7 ´ Kalinski, J., 125 Karaka¸s, D. N., 168 ´ Karpinski, J., 126 Kern, H., 48 Keupp, H., 47 Kirk, J., 1–20, 162, 184–213, 217–31 Klasik, A., 139 Klimczak-Ziółek, J., 124–50 Klumpp-Leonard, O., 51 Koç, Y., 166 Koralewicz, J., 126 Kudera, W., 45 Labica, G., 87 Lahera Sánchez, A., 91–120 Lallaoui, M., 86 Lancaster, B., 6 Landau, Z., 125 Langer, E. D., 166 Lawrence, D. H., 205 Łecki, K., 124–50 Lefranc, G., 87 Leibfried, S., 31 Leisering, L., 31 Lessenich, S., 32 Lewis, D. W., 13, 230

234 Author Index Linkon, S., 13 Lipietz, A., 28 Lipok-Bierwiaczonek, M., 141 Littlejohn, G., 199–200 Llopis, J., 109 Low, J. O., 108 Lutz, B., 28–9 Maciej, W., 124–50 Madzou, L., 84 Mahnkopf, A., 30 Maisonnial, A., 67 Mallet, S., 70–1 Mansanet Ribes, J. L., 113 Marcuse, H., 47 María, A., 91–120 Marshall, A., 111 Martínez, F., 97, 99 Masía Buades, E., 103, 108 Massey, D., 156, 158–9, 199 Meier, L., 23–52 Merton, R. K., 113 Michie, J., 192 Miranda, J. A., 95, 97, 99, 118 Mitchell, W., 47 Moore, W. E., 108 Mooser, J., 24, 46, 48 Morawski, W., 125–6, 131, 133 Moreno, M., 99, 101 Moreno Sáez, F., 107 Morgan, K. O., 187, 189, 213 Mrozek, W., 136–7 Müller, A., 34 Nácher Escriche, J., 109 Nash, J., 108 Nave, O., 63, 86 Nawrocki, T., 137 Nayak, A., 12 Netter, J.-J., 65 Nichols, T., 166 Nowak, S., 126 Obiol, S., 16, 109 Orwell, G., 18, 199, 205 Oskay, Ü., 174–80 Ost, D., 130, 135 Ozan, E. D., 156

Palairet, P., 155 Palska, H., 126 Parra Pozuelo, M., 107 Parry, D., 195 Parry, J., 12, 200, 227, 231 Pettinger, L., 20 Polanyi, K., 108 Pongratz, H. J., 43 Popitz, H., 45, 48 Powell, R., 193 Preiser, E., 24 Pries, L., 27 Prieto, C., 99 Promberger, M., 23–52 Quataert, D., 17, 155, 163–5 Ranger, T., 140 Reay, D., 13, 20 Reese-Schäfer, W., 47 Renzsch, W., 46 Revilla, J. C., 91–120 Richards, A. J., 7, 200 Rosa, H., 32 Roth, R., 27 Röttger, B., 38, 40 Ruppert, W., 45 Russo, J., 13 Sainsaulieu, R., 112 Samuel, R., 199–200 San Miguel del Hoyo, B., 100, 102 Santa María, M. J., 99 Sauer, D., 44 Savage, M., 197 Sayer, A., 11, 20 Schelsky, H., 26, 48 Schmidt, R., 24 Schumann, M., 48 Schumpeter, J., 31 Seltz, R., 27 S¸ engül, H. T., 18, 154–81 Sennett, R., 1, 44, 203 Sked, A., 213 Skeggs, B., 6, 20, 47 Smith, A., 107 Soja, E., 202 Soler, V., 94, 116 Steedman, C., 9

Author Index Stumberger, R., 45 Supple, B., 187 ´ atkiewicz, Swi ˛ W., 136–7 ´ Szczepanski, J., 126 ´ Szczepanski, M. S., 133, 137–8 Szramek, E., 135 Tansel, A., 177 Taylor, C., 8, 112 Terrail, J.-P., 69 Thelot, C., 87 Thornley, C., 1 Thrift, N., 47 Timur, T., 167 Tiratsoo, N., 213 Tomlinson, J., 188, 213 Torrejón Velardiez, M., 108 Torró Gil, Ll., 105 Tortajada, E., 118 Touraine, A., 68, 70–1 Tuan, Y. F., 47 Tuncer, K., 20, 168, 173, 177–8 Turner, R., 20, 195, 202–3 Tüylüo˘ glu, S¸ ., 168 Tyrybon, M., 129 Ullrich, V., 46 Valero, J. R., 95–6, 100 Varin, J., 72, 81, 88

235

Verret, M., 69 Voslensky, M., 125 Voß, G., 43 Waddington, D., 195, 200 Wall, C., 20, 184–213 Warde, A., 158 Warner, W. Ll., 108, 110 Warwick, D., 199–200 Weber, M., 46, 48 Wegrzecki, M., 65 Wenzig, C., 51 Whyte, W. F., 108 Wiener, M., 186 Williams, A., 10, 191 Williams, R., 6, 10–12, 14, 44, 137, 204, 208, 211 Willisch, A., 44 Willis, P., 45 Wills, J., 9 Wódz, J., 131, 135–41, 143–4, 148 Wódz, K., 124–50 Wright Mills, C., 69–70 Yazıcı, E., 167, 175, 179 Ybarra, J.-A., 94, 99, 101–2, 115, 118 Ysás, P., 122 Ziółkowski, M., 125–6, 129

Subject Index

Abdülmecid, Sultan, 162 Accor, 15, 77 Activism, 7, 20, 165, 168, 175–7 AEG, 15, 36, 38, 40, 221 Agency, 11–12 Agriculture, 61, 64, 94, 103, 146, 171, 209 Aguado, Paul, 62 Air Liquide, 77 Albacete, 97 Alcoy, (Alcoià) 13, 218 Chamber of Commerce of, 116 collective identities in, 225 communities of, 105, 113 familial structures in, 110 geographical location of, 103 as Historical Artistic Area, 116 identity dynamics in, 94, 228 industrial activity in, 92, 104–5 industrial cultures of, 110 industrial growth in, 104–5 labour market in, 91 Luddite actions in, 105 migrant workers in, 111 paternalism in, 223 political development in, 105 population statistics of, 92, 103 regional cultures of, 110 social differences in, 92, 94 technological innovations in, 104 textile industries in, 106 tourism in, 115–16, 222–3 trade unions in, 105 traditional culture in, 94 workers’ movements in, 105 Alcoyano, 113 Alfonso XIII, 96 Alicante, 16, 92, 97, 222 Altis Semiconductor, 77 Amele Birligi, 165 Anatolia, 155, 168, 175 Anglo-Ottoman Treaty, 155

Ankara, 170 ANPE, 75 Arbeitskraftunternehmer, 43 Arianespace, 15, 67, 78 Aufseßplatz, 49 Aunettes neighbourhood, 64, 85 Avebe-Doittau, 76 Balcerowicz, Leszek, 126 Barnsley, 192–4 Basque Country, 8, 110 Bayrische Landesbank, 42 Beveridge Report, 185 Bevin, Ernest, 186 Bielsko-Biala, 17, 148 Billy Elliot, 207 Black Sea region, 168, 172 BOC Edwards, 77 Bois-Sauvage neighbourhood, 85 Bondoufle, 62 Bosch, 32, 221 Boys from the Blackstuff, 207 Brassed Off, 207 British Coal, 191 Britten, Benjamin, 206 Bürgerinitiative Ausländerstopp, 42 Call centres, 14, 18, 38, 200–1 Capital/capitalism, 43, 59, 87, 160, 190, 208, 217, 224 and labour, 69, 108, 113, 117 Anglo-Saxon, 26 cultural, 47, 69, 161, 177, 207 economic, 17, 69, 161 in Germany, 43–4, 48 in Poland, 126, 130–1 in Turkey, 155, 166–7 models of, 26 social, 69, 149, 161, 177 symbolic, 69, 140, 161 Carrefour, 15, 77 Catholic, 25, 75, 96–7, 130 236

Subject Index Centralisation, 126 Centre Urbain Nord neighbourhood, 85 CFDT, 75 CFTC, 75 CGC, 75 Confédération générale du travail – CGT, 71, 75, 83 Chaix Desfossés, 74 Champs-Élysées neighbourhood, 62 Champtier-du-Coq neighbourhood, 62, 85 Citizenship, 19 Civil War, 96 Class, 45, 160, 166, 206 agenda, 26 capitalist, 105, 223–4 concepts of, 48 cultures, 8, 18 formation of, 47, 164 identities, 8, 48–9, 94, 114, 178–9 in Poland, 12, 126, 134–5 social, 68–70, 166, 224, 226 struggle, 105–6 white collar, 68 see also middle class; working class Closures, 9, 14–15, 40–1, 44, 49, 77, 172, 184, 191–2, 194–5, 200–1, 207–8, 217, 221, 224, 228 CNT, 106 Coal Face, 206 Coal Industry Nationalisation Act, 194 Coal is our Life (Dennis), 137, 196, 197 Coal mining cultures, 12, 137, 141–2, 184–5, 192–3, 202, 204–8, 210, 228–9 environment, 147 Female Trade Unions, 147 identities, 18, 134–6, 140, 159–60 habitus, 136, 157, 161, 174–80, 204 industry, 17–18, 125–8, 131–4, 144–5, 154–6, 162–172, 180, 209 spirit, 203 Coal Was Our Life, 202–3 Collective action, 5, 68, 70, 76, 91–2, 197 association, 87 bargaining, 27, 110–1, 117, 168, 186

237

consciousness, 137 cultures, 44, 91–2, 110, 159, 203 identities, 6, 8, 45, 16–7, 19–20, 68, 91–2, 102, 108–9, 112–4, 191, 225–6 memories, 43, 111 movements, 82, 94, 111 Combrisson, Roger, 61, 72, 81–2 Communautes d’agglomérations, 57, 86 Communism, 17, 124, 141, 143 Communist Party, 59, 118 French, 71, 81 German, 25–6, 43, 48 Corbeil-Essonnes, 72, 75, 81–2, 226 Poland, 133, 139, 149 Spain, 96 Communities, 6, 160 of Alcoy, infrastructure of, 105 complex solidarity’s in, 9 industrial relations in, 113 politicized acts and, 12 re-imagining, 10 reshaping of, 12 in South Yorkshire, 19 structures of feeling in, 8 traditional mining, 198 Community, 160, 197, 203 cultures, 15, 25 formation, 156 identity, 18, 178–9 Compagnie papetière, 76 Comtat-Cocentaina, 103 Consciousness, 68, 71, 156, 161–2 class, 26, 48, 70, 137 false, 47 formation of, 160, 164 place, 13, 180, 226 practical, 11, 218 sites of, 174, 228 Conflicts, 24, 27, 31, 95–6, 105, 108, 113–4, 125–6 Conservative Party, 190, 191 Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), 78 Corbeil-Essonnes, 218 collective identities in, 225 Communist Party of, 72, 81–2, 226 districts of, 57 economic activity in, 64, 67

238 Subject Index Corbeil-Essonnes – continued economic crisis in, 81–2 economic development in, 58 economic influence of, 59–60 economic reconstruction in, 13 economic transformations of, 64 employment statistics in, 58 engineering companies in, 15 Evry and, competition with, 58 factory closures in, 77 French Communist Party in, 81 geographical location of, 57 high-technology industries in, 78 hi-tech giants in, 67 housing schemes in, 76, 81 industrial decentralization in, 15, 66 industrial transformation in, 15, 60 local working-class action in, 82–3 manual working class in, 78 new industrial sectors in, rise of, 64 paper manufacturing in, 15, 64–6 paternalism in, 72, 82, 85, 223 population identities of, 61, 75–6 poverty rates in, 84 restructuring plans in, 77 social history of, 58 social house building in, 83–4 social structure of, change in, 15, 59, 61 spatial organization in, 64 unemployment in, 78 urban development of, 61, 84 working class movement in, 72, 75, 81 Courcouronnes, 62 Crafts, 5, 14, 32–3, 114 Crété, 60, 64–5 Cultural/culture, 6, 11 bourgeois, 142 capital, 161 class, 8, 18 community, 5,15, 25, 134–8 events, 49–51, 61, 83, 86–7, 114 family, 24, 147 formation, 2, 6, 11, 19, 135–6 hegemony of capital, 47 industrial, 7, 8, 12, 18, 43, 45, 51, 91, 110–1 managerial, 74, 107–8, 145

mining, 7, 12 Ministry of, 116 practices, 8, 10, 19, 174 regional, 6–9, 12, 110, 140–1, 155, 178, 217, 231 tradition, 7, 17, 94, 117, 220 transition, 5, 221 working-class, 15, 37, 44–5, 48, 71, 137–8, 141, 143, 176, 219, 225, 228 Cultural identities, 1, 6, 43–5, 68–76 ethnicity, 140–1, 177 gender and, 8, 228 in Silesian Voivodship, 138–8 in Upper Silesia, 138–41 in Zonguldak, 18 of Poland, 141 of Zaglebie Dabrowskie, 139–41 migration and, 117–8 narratives, role in constituting, 13 Cultural studies, 44, 137 Dabrowa Górnicza, 17, 133, 148 Darblay Paper Mill, 72, 75 Dassault, Serge, 5, 81–2 DATEV, 32, 38, 221 Dearne Valley Partnership, 200, 218, 219, 224 Decauville, Paul, 15, 60, 65 Decentralisation, 59, 66, 74, 86–7 Defeat of Solidarity, The, 135 Deindustrialisation, 4–5, 8, 18–9, 59, 109, 133, 191, 207–8, 212, 217–19 Del Ducas, 65 Delocalizations, 97–9 Democracy liberal, 98 political, 129 in Spain, 99 Democratic Party (DP), Turkey, 168 Demography, 62, 147, 155,175, 220, 227 Depression, 44, 228 Dicks, Bella, 211 Diehl, 36 Dobrowolski, Kazimierz, 136 Doitteau, 65 Doncaster, 192

Subject Index Ebert, Friedrich, 25 Economic activity, 64, 67 Economic capital, 69, 161 Economic changes, 137–8 Economic crisis, 76, 81–2, 96, 115 Economic development in Corbeil-Essonnes, 58 in France, 5 in Poland, 4, 124–7 in Silesian Voivodship, 137–8, 143, 219–20 of Germany, 23–4 Economic influence, 59–60 Economic liberalization, 4, 191 Economic policy, 29–30 Economic reconstruction, 1, 8, 10, 13, 17, 19, 127–8, 144 Economic reform, 5, 96 Economic transformations, 2, 3 of Corbeil-Essonnes, 64 of Evry, 64 of Upper Silesia, 140–1 in Spain, 5 in Turkey, 170 Economic transitions, 10, 126 Economy Ministry, 144 Education, 134, 144–6 Eisenwerk Tafel, 40 Elda, 218 agriculture in, 94 ‘assembly-like’ workers’ movement in, 99–100 collective identities in, 225 communication, as important axis of, 94 identity dynamics in, 94, 228 industrial activity in, 92, 94 industrial cultures of, 110 labour market in, 91, 95 migrant workers in, 111 Moors and Christians festivals in, 114 population statistics of, 92 regional cultures of, 110 roaring twenties in, 95–6 shoe manufacturing in, 94 social differences in, 92, 94 solidarity in, 112

239

traditional culture in, 94 worker mobilization in, 112 Electrical industry, 33–4 Els Solers, 116 Emergent structures of feeling, 12, 218–9 Energietechnologisches Zentrum, 50 Energy supplies, 17 Engineering industry, 3 in Corbeil-Essonnes, 15 in Germany, 14, 27–8 high-technology, 14, 38–9 in Nuremberg, 33–4 Entproletarisierung, 48 Entrepreneurs, 105 Environmental pollution, 147–8 Épinettes neighbourhood, 64, 85 Eregli, 154, 168 Erlenstegen, 40 Essonne Department, 61, 62, 78 Nanopole, 77 River, 59, 61 Essonnes, 57, 59–60, 66–7 economic influence of, 59–60 industrial transformation in, 60 working-class of, 72 Ethnic, 140 identities, 177 cultural identity, 140 nationalism, 141 Euromarché, 68 European Centre for Power Electronics, 50 European Economic Community (EEC), 64, 97, 107 European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), 49, 148 European Social Fund (ESF), 49 European Union (EU), 1, 12, 3, 100, 148 Evry aerospace in, 78 collective identities in, 225 Corbeil-Essones and, competition with, 58 County Centre of Government in, 67 economic activity in, 64, 67

240 Subject Index Evry – continued economic development in, 58 economic transformations of, 64 employment statistics in, 57–8 Essonne Department, capital of, 62 evolution of, 61–2 factory closures in, 77 geographical location of, 60–1 high-technology industries in, 67, 78 income statistics in, 78, 81 industrial transformation in, 60 industrial zones in, 67 leisure-time activities in, 67–8 local government of, 61 local identity in, 75 manual working class in, 78 population identities of, 62, 75–6, 84 poverty rates in, 84 Pyramides in, 62–3, 84–5 research centres in, 67 restructuring plans in, 77 retail activities in, 67–8 social history in, 58 social house building in, 83–4 social identities in, 58 Socialist Party in, 15, 83 spatial organization in, 64 unemployment in, 78 urban industrial development in, 77–8 urban renewal in, 85 working-class culture in, 15, 81 Exona, 65 Factory housing, 136–7 Family and Kinship in East London, 196 Fascism, 25–6 Female trade unions, 12, 147 Fertility rates, 147 Filaes, 113–14 Finance centre, 157 First World War, 24, 95, 106, 165 FO, 75 Folklore, 141 Fordism, 27–8, 74

France economic change in, 5 economic crisis in, 76 labour force in, reduction of, 76–7 manual worker unemployment in, growth of, 5 restructuring plans in, 76 utopian beliefs in, 5 see also Paris Franco, General, 98, 106–7, 111 Franken Campus, 41 French Aerospace Industry Group (GIFAS), 81 French Association against Myopathies (AFM), 78 French Communist Party (PCF), 71, 81 Friedenshutte, 143 Full employment, 185–6 Full Monty, The, 207–8 Fürth, 33 Galgenhof, 35, 40, 49 Gartenstadt, 34 Gender class cultures and, 8 inequalities, 102 in Germany, 14, 29, 45 in Poland, 12 in Spain, inequalities of, 102 in United Kingdom, 9, 227 significance of, 10 General strike, 105 Genopôle, 15, 78 German Communist Party (KPD), 25, 36 German Trade Unions Federation (DGB), 26 Germany anti-nazi action in, 27 call centres in, 14, 38 capitalism in, 43–4 Christian labour movements in, 25 city planning in, 24 co-determination laws in, 27 community cultures in, 15, 25 craft shops in, 14, 32–3 depression in, 44, 228

Subject Index economic policy in, 29–30 economy of, 23–4 engineering industry in, 14, 27–8 fascism in, 25–6 Fordism in, 27–8 gender structures in, 14, 29, 45 Gl obalization in, 29 gross domestic product of, 23 high-technology engineering in, 14, 38–9 reconstruction in, 47 regional identity of, 14, 28, 45 restructuring in, 14, 23 social identity in, 46–7 socialist labour movements in, 25 social security system in, 28 socioeconomic developments of, 32 structural changes in, 5, 29–31 technical change in, 29 trade union-organizing in, 14, 24, 26–7, 40–1 traditional blue-collar metalworking in, 14–15, 24 unemployment insurance in, 31 unification of, 28 union-bashing in, 30 wage differentials in, 31 welfare state interventions in, 27 working-class identity in, 15, 24–5, 45–6, 48 work-related cultures in, 44–5 GfK, 32, 38, 221 Gilardoni, 65 Glass-making industry, 18 Globalisation, 2–3, 5, 16, 28–9, 58, 100–1, 107, 157, 217, 222–4, 226 Godesberg conference, 26 González, Felipe, 99 Gostenhof, 34 Gramsci, Antonio, 47 Grands Moulins, 65 Greenwood, Walter, 206 Grierson, John, 205 Grimethorpe Empire, 195 Gross domestic product (GDP), 23, 127, 171 Grundig, 38, 40, 221 Guyard, Jacques, 83

241

Habitus, 8, 20, 204 concepts of, 11, 161–2 internalized structure of, 11 nature of, 174 schemes of, 161–2 working-class, 47, 136, 174, 176–180 Hachette group, 76 Hartz Reforms, 30–2 Heart of It, The, 207 Heath, Edward, 189 Hélio, 76 Hercules, 38, 221 Heritage, Place and Community, 197 Heritage, 14 Hitler, Adolf, 36 Housing, 24, 34, 42, 46, 59, 61, 63, 72, 74–6, 81, 105, 135–7, 147–9, 163, 165, 187 How Green Was My Valley, 206 Hubertus Cultural Centre, 49 Hungarian TriGranit, 128 Huta Pokój, 143 IBM, 15, 66, 74, 76–7 Identities, 9 agency and, 11–12 class, 8 coal-mining, 18 communitarian, 111 community, 18, 178–9 concept of, 6, 10 cultural co-ordinates of, 6 cultural practices and, 10 established, 15 ethnic, 177 evolution of, 6 feelings of, 19 formation of, 8 in historical development, 7 individual, 19 industrial, 8, 91 local, 18, 75 local collective, 226 national, 199 occupational, 13–14, 45 in Poland, 17 regional regeneration of, 9 shaping of, 12

242 Subject Index Identities – continued work-based, 113, 135 workers, 8, 49, 135 working-class, 15, 24–5, 45–6, 48 see also class, identities; population identities; social identities Identity dynamics, 94, 228 Identity formations, 13, 19 complexity of, 6 fluid understanding of, 11 place of, 12 in Poland, 12 in South Yorkshire, 19 in Spain, 16 in Turkey, 228–9 in Zonguldak, 18, 156 Identity and belonging, 9–10, 13, 47, 87, 110, 113, 161, 205, 230 production, 231 reconstruction, 47 transitions, 16 Immigration (migration), 9, 12, 14, 25, 83, 111, 117–8, 126, 129–30, 133, 140, 168, 171, 175, 177, 181, 222–3 Import substitution industrialisation (ISI), 156 Income inequalities, 31 Individualism, 3, 8, 48, 160, 191 Industrial cultures, 91 of Alcoy, 110 of Elda, 110 in Germany, 45 of Ottoman Empire, 155 of South Yorkshire, 18 in Spain, 91 trade-based, 110–11 Industrial development in Alcoy, 104–5 in Evry, 77–8 in Spain, 108 urban, 77–8 Industrialisation, 33–4, 125, 126, 134, 141, 155–6 Industrial landscapes, 14 Inequalities, 26, 31, 102 INSEE, National Institute for Economic Statistics, 74–5

Institutions, importance of, 12 Integragen, 78 Intergraphique Companie, 65 International architecture competition, 62 International competition, 5, 58, 64, 77, 100–1, 107, 135, 157, 170, 221 International economic crisis, 96 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 4, 97 Karabük, 168, 172, 175, 178 Katowice, 128, 131, 144, 148, 218, 224 Katowice Voivodship, 139 Kaufhaus, 142 Kelman. James, 207 Kolping, Adolph, 25 Krakow Centre, 136 Kulturtreff Bleiweiß, 50 Kurdish, 163 Labour, spatial division of, 157 Labour Government, 185, 194–5 Labour markets/movements in Alcoy, 91 Christian, 25 in Elda, 91, 95 in France, 76–7 in Germany, 14, 24–6, 28 regional, 16 socialist, 25 Labour Party, 186–7, 201 Labour socialization, 16 La conscience ouvrière, 70 Landscape, 12–16, 20, 30, 49, 61, 75, 124, 201, 205–6, 208, 212, 217–8, 220, 224, 229–31 Lang, 65 La Sarga, 116 Laz, 163 Leo XII, 25 Levante industrial region, 16 Liberalization, 4, 18, 191 Liberal policies, 170 Lisses, 62 Livelihood, 231 Local collective identity, 226 Local community identity, 178 Local identities, 18, 75

Subject Index Localities economic structure of, 160–1 emergence of, 6 functions associated with, 157 regeneration process of, 161 revival of, 161 significance of, 12 working-class of, 82–3, 161 Lucent, 38 Luddite actions, 105, 228 Madrid, 110, 223 Major Town Project (Grand projet de ville – GPV), 85 Maleterre, Henri, 75 Maly, Ulrich, 221 Managerial workers, 69 MAN Company, 32, 34, 36, 38, 41–2, 221 Mandarins, 186 Manual working class, 7, 17, 48–9, 68 in Corbeil-Essonnes, 78 in Evry, 78 industrial, 47 in Paris, 76 Manufacturing employment, 3–4 Manufacturing industry, 15, 32, 36, 64–6 Manufacturing workers, 7, 49 Marcel Cassé, 65 Marienberg, 40 Marx, Karl, 48 Marxism, 25, 46 Masculinity (male) domination, 149 spaces, 8 Mass consumption, 27 Mass production, 14, 27 Mennecy, 74 Metalworking, 8, 14–5, 33–4, 36, 38, 110 Mexborough, 192 Middle class, 24, 26, 31, 96, 107, 110 districts, 40, 84 Middle Odra Region, 125 Migrant workers in Alcoy, 111 in Elda, 111 in Germany, 28, 46

243

in Nuremberg, 37–8 in Silesian Voivodship, 133 in Zaglebie Dabrowskie, 133 in Zonguldak, 171 Miners on Strike, 200 Miners’ Strike (1984–1985), 4, 12, 207 Miners’ unions, 7 Mining industries, 17, 19, 133, 137, 167–70 Mining Labour Agency, 144 Mining Social Welfare Package, 144 Ministry of Culture, 116 Mitbestimmung, 186 Mitterrand, François, 75 Molinar river, 116 Mono-industries, 18 Moors and Christians festivals, 109, 113–14, 116, 118–20, 223, 228 Multi Fibre Agreement (MFA), 98 Murcia, 97 Museums, 115–6 Music movements, 141–2 National Centre of Space Studies (CNES), 67 National Coal Board (NCB), 187, 194 National Cultural Interest, site of, 116 National culture, 6 National identity, 142, 199 National Institute of Telecommunications, 67 National Investment Funds, 127 Nationalisation, 87, 124, 155–8, 167–8, 186–8, 194, 224 National Stabilisation Plan, 107 Naval Ministry, 162–3, 164 Nazis, 25 Néogravure, 65 New Right politics, 190 Night Mail, 206 Nomenclatura, 125 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 130, 147 Nord Pas de Calais, 133 North Bavaria, 7 North-East England, 133 Northern Renania-Westfalia, 133 North of England, 191 Nostalgia, 9

244 Subject Index Nouvelles Galéries, 68 NUM (National Union of Mineworkers), 189, 191, 207 Nuremberg, 218 bombing of, 36 characterizations of, 36 collective identities in, 225 Conservative interruption in, 42–3 economic reconstruction in, 13 electrical industry in, 33–4 engineering in, 33–4 German ‘iron road’ in, 33 Gostenhof, incorporation of, 34 history of, 32 industrialization in, 33–4 local collective identity in, 226 low-end businesses in, 42 manufacturing industries in, 32, 36 manufacturing workers in, 49 metal manufacturing in, 33–4 migrant workers in, 37–8 occupational identities in, 13 political developments in, 41, 43 population statistics of, 34, 37–8 poverty rates in, 50 public image of, 42 pubs in, 36 ruling class paternalism in, 223–4 service sectors in, 32 social landscapes of, 15 social problems in, 49–50 socioeconomic transformations in, 40–1, 43 spatial landscapes of, 15 structural changes in, 38 Südstern, establishment of, 50–1 trade unions in, 40–1 transportation route systems in, 36–7 unemployment in, 39–40, 50 Wöhrd, incorporation of, 34 workers’ sports clubs in, 36 workforce employment in, 39 Nuremberg South, 221 Nürnberger Versicherungsgruppe, 32, 221 Occupational formations, 8, 12 Occupational identities, 13–14, 45 Occupational transitions, 10

Otherness, 10, 135–6, 138 Ottoman Empire, 17, 154–5 Outward migration, 9 Özal, Turut, 4 Paper manufacturing, 15, 64–6 Parc-aux-Lièvres, 62 Paris, 5, 15, 57–88, 245 Paternalism, 72–4, 82, 85, 100, 105, 107, 117, 220, 223–4 Périodic Brochage, 76 Petrol Revolution (1873), 105 PHARE, 148 Phenomenology of Working Class Experience, A, 201–2 Philips, 40 PKI, 38 Place, 10–14, 44–7, 92, 94 in Poland, 17 of traditions, 12, 211 public, 51, 67 transformations of, 218–23 Place attachment, 230 Planning, 3, 67, 86–7, 185–7, 200 Alcoi Turístico, 115 city, 24 for Coal, 194 Poland balance of payments in, collapse of, 125 capitalism in, 130–1 capitalist economic system in, 17 class in, 12 communism in, 124 cultural identity of, 141 cultural traditions in, 17 economic developments in, 4, 124–7 economic restructuring in, 17, 127–8, 144 economic transitions in, 126 education in, 144–6 female trade unions in, 12 ‘free’ market in, 129 gross domestic product in, 127 identity formations in, 12 identity in, concept of, 17 independence of, from Soviet influence, 17

Subject Index

245

Québécor, 76 Quelle, 40

Reconstruction, 8, 10, 13, 47, 143, 185, 194 Redistributive centre, 157 Redistributive politics, 190 Reforms, 5, 30, 96, 126, 135, 138, 185–6, 213, 228 Regeneration, 9–10, 19, 148, 161, 172–3 Regional formations, 12 Regional identities of Germany, 14, 28, 45 in France, 59, 71–3 significance of, 12 in Zaglebie Dabrowskie, 141 Regionalism, new, 140 Regional labour markets/movements, 16–17 Regional landscapes, 230–1 Regional regeneration, 9 Reichsparteitag, 36 Reichstag, 25 Representation, 10, 14 Rerum Novarum (Leo XII), 25 Residual structures of feeling, 12, 218–9, 230 Restructuring plans in Corbeil-Essonnes, 77 in Evry, 77 in Germany, 14, 23 impact of, 19 processes of, 9 in Spain, 16 urban, 84 Retail in France, 67–8 in Spain, 97–99, 111–2 Revitalization projects, 148 Rhineland capitalism, 26 Ris-Orangis, 74 River Seine, 59 RJB Mining, 191 Rotherham, 192, 194 Ruda Slaska, 17, 148 Ruhr Basin, 133 Rybicki, Pawel, 135 Rybnik-Jastrzebie, 131, 148

Rainbow, The, 205 RECHAR programmes, 208

Sagem, 78 Saltley coke works, 189

industrialization of, 125, 126 mining culture in, 7 national identity of, 142 political democracy in, 129 political developments in, 124–7 political transitions in, 17, 126 population statistics of, 131 poverty rates in, 127, 145–6 regional distinctiveness in, 6–7 social conflicts in, 126 socialism in, 129 social mobility in, 126 state socialism in, 125–6 trade unions in, 17 unemployment in, 127, 143 urbanization in, 126 values in, importance of, 129–30 working-class family in, 227–8 Population identities of Corbeil-Essonnes, 61, 75–6 of Evry, 62, 75–6, 84 of Nuremberg, 34, 36 Poverty rates in Corbeil-Essonnes, 84 in Evry, 84 in Germany, 31–2 in Nuremberg, 50 in Poland, 127, 145–6 in Silesian Voivodship, 145–6 Practical consciousness, 11 Pragmatism, 71 Préfecture, 62 Prescott, John, 195 Presence, bounded, 9–10 Printing, 15, 60, 64–5, 72, 86 Private property, 191 Privatisation, 17, 126, 170 Privy Purse, Turkey, 162, 164 Professional workers, 69 Protestant work ethic, 46 Psychiatric illnesses, 44, 228 Pyramide neighbourhood, 62, 62–3, 75, 84–5

246 Subject Index ‘Save Textile Industry, Save Alcoy’ (Hernández), 109 Scargill, Arthur, 189, 191 Schicksalsgemeinschaft, 25 Schuckert Company, 34 Second Republic, 96 Second World War, 5, 17, 19, 26, 59, 124, 133, 136, 167, 184 Secularization, 126 Seima, 65 Seine-et-Oise, 60 SEL, 40 Service sectors, 18, 32 Sheffield, 18, 194 Shoe industry, 8, 16, 94, 96–7, 111–12 Shopping malls, 14, 67 Siemens, 32, 36, 38, 77, 221 Silesia, 125, 141–2 Silesian Scientific Institute, 136 Silesian Voivodship, 17, 124, 128 administrative reforms in, 131 communism in, collapse of, 142–3 cultural formation of, 135–6 cultural identity in, 138–8 economic changes in, 137–8, 143, 219–20 education in, 134, 145–6 environmental pollution in, 147–8 ethno-cultural identity in, 140 factory housing in, 136–7 fertility rates in, 147 industrial goods sold in, 145 industrial history of, 131–3 industrialization in, 134 migrant workers in, 133 mining sector employment in, 133, 137 political transition in, 137–8 population statistics of, 131 poverty rates in, 145–6 regeneration of, 148 revitalization projects in, 148 social formation of, 135–6 sub regions of, 131 systemic changes in, 143, 219–20 urbanization in, 131 worker identities in, 135 Silkstone area, 192

Snecma, (National Company for the Study and Construction of Aircraft Engines), 15, 66–7, 74, 76–7 Social capital, 69, 149, 161, 177 class, 68–9, 166 conflicts, 126 Democratic Party (SPD), 25, 36 groups, 69 house building, 83–4 identities, 8, 46–7, 58 inequality, 26 landscapes, 15 mobility, 126 reform, 96 security system, 28, 67, 75 space, 69 structure, 61, 91 Socialism, 26, 125–6, 129 Socialist labour movements, 25 Socialist Party (PSOE), 15, 75, 83, 98 Sociéte d’Heraclée (Eregli Sirket-i Osmaniyesi), 163 Sociological Commission, 136 Sociological research, 136 Solidarity Election Action (AWS), 144 Solidarity, 25, 94, 112, 118, 135, 178, 191 complex, 9, 161, 197 in Elda, 112 in France, 15, 75 limited, 40, 110 networks, 76, 85 traditional values of, 42, 159, 198–9, 202 workplace, 176 Solidarity trade union, 144 Sosnowiec, 17 South Wales, 196 South Yorkshire, 18–19 coal mining in, 184–5, 192–3 collective identities in, 17 collieries in, ownership of, 194, 200 economic reconstruction in, 13, 19 EU initiatives in, 208 full employment economy of, 186 Labour Government in, 185, 195 mechanization in, 188–9

Subject Index mining industry in, 17, 19 occupational identities in, 13 political and economic conflict of 1984–85 in, 12 postwar economic policy in, 188 technological developments in, 193–4 trade unions in, 17 Soziale Stadt, 49 Spaces, 8–11 social, 69 transformations of, 218–19 Spain American delocalizations in, 97–9 collective identity in, 91, 109, 113 collective work-based identities in, 102 contractual irregularities in, 102 cost-reduction strategies in, 115 cultural transformations in, 5 democracy in, transformation of, 99 economic crises in, 115 economic reform in, 96 economic transformations in, 5 employment rates in, 101 European Union, membership into, 100–1 gender inequalities in, 102 globalization in, 101 historical evolution of, 103 identity transitions in, 16 industrial-based identity in, 112 industrial cultures in, 91 industrial development in, 108 informal production in, 101 political reform in, 96 purchasing power in, 97 regional labour movements in, 16 Republican period in, 95, 96–7 restructuring process in, 16 Second Republic in, declaration of, 96 shoe industry in, 8, 94, 96–7, 111–12 social reform in, 96 social structure in, 91 socioeconomic development in, 103 Taylorist managerial culture in, 107–8

247

technological systems in, development of, 106–7 textile industries in, 8, 103, 106, 108–9, 111–12 trade-based industrial culture in, 110–11 work-based identification in, 113 workers’ movements in, 111 working conditions in, decline in, 100, 102 Spanish Civil War, 106, 110 Spanish Government, 116 Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE), 95, 103 Spatial division of labour, 157 Spatial landscapes, 15 Spatial organization, 64 SPHERE research, 131 Stabilization Plan, 96, 97 Starsem, 78 Stars Look Down, The, 206 State Agency for Deep Coal, 144 State Plan of Industrial Restructuring, 100 State socialism, 125–6 Steel-making industry, 16–18 Steinbühl, 36, 40, 49 Structural changes, 5, 29–31, 38, 59 Structures of feeling, 8, 10, 11–12, 180, 204, 212, 218–9 Südstadt, 23, 40, 49–51, 221 Südstern, 50–1 Surface workers, 7 SUSE, 38 Swider, Józef, 143 Swietochlowice, 148 Symbolic capital, 69, 140, 161 Systemic changes, 143, 219–20 Tailoring industry, 16 Tarterêts neighbourhood, 84 Tawney, R. H., 187 Taylor, F. W., 27, 74, 107–8 Telenorma, 40 Telos, 42 Temporary workers, 17 Tertiarisation, 28–9 Testut, 65

248 Subject Index Textile industries in Alcoy, 106 in Corbeil-Essonnes, 15 in Spain, 8, 103, 106, 108–9, 111–12 in Zonguldak, 18 Thatcher, Margaret, 29, 190, 191, 207 Third World, 217–18 Toppan Photomasks, 77 Tourism, 18, 115–16, 222–3 Trade unions anti-, 4, 30, 191 female, 12 in Alcoy, 105 in Corbeil-Essonnes, 15 in Germany, 14, 24, 26–7, 40 in Nuremberg, 40–1 in Poland, 17 Solidarity, 144 in South Yorkshire, 17 in Zonguldak, 168 miners, 7 Traditions concept of, 10 cultural, 7, 17 hegemonic process for establishing, 14 importance of, 12 institutional, 19 institutional process for establishing, 14 invented, 140 place of, 12, 211 reinventing, 10 reshaping, 10 selective, 14, 211 in South Yorkshire, 19 working class, 3 Transformations affective, 231 cultural, 5 economic, 2, 3, 5, 64, 140–1 historical, 12 industrial, 15, 60 political, 16 socioeconomic, 40–1, 43 Transitions in action, 19 economic, 10, 126 identity, 16

occupational, 10 political, 17, 126 regional, 3 of United Kingdom, 4 Triumph-Adler, 36, 40 Turkey, 107 coal mining in, decline in, 228–9 de-industrialisation in, 5 economic reforms in, 5 identity formation in, 228–9 import substitution industrialization (ISI) in, 156 laissez-faire policy in, 4 national economic policy in, 4 neo-liberal economic model in, 5 Ottoman Empire and, link between, 154–5 regional distinctiveness in, 6–7 Turkish Republic, 154, 155 Türkiye Taskömürü Isletmeleri (Turkish Coal Company – TTK), 170 Turner, Royce, 202–3 Unemployment in Corbeil-Essonnes, 78 in Evry, 78 in Nuremberg, 39–40, 50 in Poland, 127, 143 Unemployment insurance, 31 UNESCO World Heritage, 116 United Shoe Machinery Company (USMC), 95 United States, 26, 97 University of Evry-Val d’Essonne, 78 University of Silesia, 136 Upper Silesia changes in, cultural consequences of, 124 coal-mining in, 16–17 Communism and, fall of, 17 cultural identity in, 138–41 economic reconstruction in, 13 economic transformations of, 140–1 ethnicity in, 140 folklore elements of, 141 heavy industries in, 17, 135 industrialism in, 141 manual work in, 17 miners’ unions in, 7

Subject Index music movements in, 141–2 occupational identities in, 13 political transformation in, 16 raw material in, 17 sociological research on, 136 steel industries in, 16–17 workers identities of, 135 working class culture of, 137–8 Upper Silesian Fund, 144 URBACT, 148 URBAN, 148 Urbanisation in Evry, 85 in Poland, 126 in Silesian Voivodship, 131 of Zonguldak, 174–5 Urban restructuring, 84 Uses of Literacy, The, 197 Valencia, 97, 103, 109–10, 113 Valencian Autonomous Community, 94 Valencia Polytechnic University, 112 Vall d’Albaida, 16, 103 Valls, Manuel, 83 Values, 129–30, 191 Vinalopó, 16, 109 Vincennes, 66 Voivodship, 139 Volksgemeinschaft, 25 von Ketteler, Bishop, 25 Wage differentials in Germany, 31 Waged work, 71 Wallonia, 133 Warmia-Masuria, 125 War of Independence, 165 Weimar Republic, 26 Welfare state interventions, 27 Werderau, 34, 42 Western Pomerania, 125 West Riding of Yorkshire, 194 White-collar workers, 3, 68, 69–70 Wilkinson, Ellen, 206 Wöhrd, 34 Workers beetroot, 71 manual industrial, 48–9 manual manufacturing, 7, 49

249

migrant, 28, 37–8, 46, 111, 133, 171 professional, 69 qualified, 46 surface, 7 technical, 69 temporary, 17 underground, 7 white-collar, 68, 69–70 Workers identities, 49, 135 Workers’ movements in Alcoy, 105 in Corbeil-Essonnes, 75 in Spain, 111 Workers’ sports clubs, 36 Workerst’ Act, 98 Work first policy, 31 Workforce employment, 39 Work identity, 8 Working class, 48, 68, 78, 81–2, 204–5 action, 71, 82–3, 168 and ethnicity, 177 community, 74–6, 159–161, 178, 180, 196 culture, 15, 137–8, 141–3, 195–203, 225 districts, 37, 61, 72, 41–2, 136, 141, 161, 226, 229 family, 137, 146–8, 227–8 habitus, 161–2, 174, 176–7, 180 identity, 15, 24–5, 45–6, 48, 72, 140, 178, 223–6 in Germany, 24–6, 45–9 in Zonguldak, 18, 178 movement, 81, 156 novelists, 206–7 Work-related cultures, 44–5 Yorkshire miners, 189 Zaglebie Dabrowskie, 133 cultural identity of, 139–40, 141 economic changes in, 137–8 folklore elements of, 141 migrant workers in, 133 political transitions in, 137–8 regional identity in, 141 worker identities in, 135 working class culture of, 137–8

250 Subject Index Zonguldak, 154, 218 class identity in, 178–9 coal mining identities in, 18 coal mining industry in, 17–18 coal workers in, statistics of, 169–70 community formation in, 156 community identity in, 178–9 cultural life in, 18 de-industrialisation, 18, 156 economic reconstruction in, 13 economic structure of, 178 employment statistics in, 170–1 ethnic identities in, 177 geographical isolation, of, 220–1 gross domestic product (GDP) of, 171 identity formation in, 18, 156 income compensation in, 177 industrial history of, 154–6 liberalisation in, 18 liberal policies in, 170 local community identity in, 178 local identities in, 18 migrant workers in, 171

mining industry in, decline in, 168–70 nationalisation in, 155–6, 167–8, 224 neo-liberal policies in, 156 occupational identities in, 13 old cultures in, 18 Ottoman period of, 17 population statistics of, 17–18 privatization in, 170 regeneration strategy in, 172–3 Republican period in, 17 rotational work in, 176–8 social life in, 18 surface workers in, 7 temporary workers in, 17 textile industry in, 18 tourism in, 18 trade unions in, formation of, 168 underground workers in, 7 urbanisation of, 174–5 working-class activism in, 168 working class in, 18 working class movement in, 156