Book reviews

Specialism WORK AND POLITICS

by C.F. Sabel

through struggle

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, f 17.50

Subtitled The Division of Labour in Society, this thought-provoking and pertinent essay is about the reasons industrialists create different kinds of factory jobs; why workers put up with these jobs when they do; and what they want when they do not. The central proposition is that workers’ ideas of self-interest, born of the principles of honour and dignity of labour, can be transformed by workplace struggles; these struggles, colliding or combining with conflicts in the larger society and between nations, can reshape tech-

nologies, markets, and factory hierarchies.

Sahel, in reviewing our impressive range of social science literature, notes that if the ‘events’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Italy, France, the UK and FR Germany put paid to earlier debate on the theory of the

embourgoisement of the working class, they hardly proved any of the variants of the counterclaim that the progress of industrial society was creating a new revolutionary transformation of the state. Sabel’s own position emphasizes the primacy of politics and action: he disagrees with determinist, essentialist and reductionist theories on almost all the points on which they are in agree- ment; he frequently agrees with at least one of them on points of analysis where they contradict one another.

Division of labour

He recognizes the persistence and diversity in the division of labour, the divergence betwen thought and the world. No ‘end of ideology’ here. Politics is a constant struggle to impose moral order on the economy. Out- comes are not determined. Teleology is out. In its place, struggle and possibility.

The essentials of the argument are that diverse investment strategies, which reflected differences between

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stable and highly differentiated demand in markets, led to the creation of radic- ally different kind of jobs. The distri- bution of power and wealth rather than an inexorable logic of technological advance produced the current system. It is not the natural order of things. There can be ‘progress’ in the division of labour; certainly change and development. With Alvin Toffler and other excellent popularizers, he envisages the possibility that mass production and the assembly line may become ‘an historical stage’ in a process which ‘alters the mix of jobs in subtle ways, at one and the &me time creating unskilled work, blurring the lines between craft and semi-skilled jobs, and creating demand for various new skills’.

If these are the demands the econ- omy makes on workers, then the shared expectations of groups of workers with regard to work represents the demands workers make on jobs. Making effective use of concepts of socialization and world view, Sabel suggests the overlap of certain crucial expectations permits at least a tenuous collaboration between capital and labour. If capitalists have played on existing divisions in the workforce,

reflecting differences in world view and expectations to match workers to jobs in different labour markets, there has also been a tenuous collaboration, different from work group to work group. There is nothing very new in this analysis except the suggestion that politicization through conflict may indirectly transform consciousness and in turn transform the division of labour itself. Examples are drawn from the New Deal in the USA, May 1968 in France, and the autunno caldo of 1969 in Italy.

These perceptions and glimpses of values in conflict, shifting allegiances and workplace struggles, which, according to the author, may contribute to an eventual retreat from mass production and to the spread of forms of industrial organization which may resemble those that preceded steam engine sheds and factory towns, are the most original, controversial and inter-

esting parts of an essay that could in truth have been shorter and written for people outside the groves of academe. There are 40 pages of notes, an extens- ive bibliography and excellent index.

There are new things happening out there. Factory work is being revol- utionized. International competition and overlapping domestic conflicts require new products made in new ways. The Kingdom of God may not be at hand, but the end of Fordism may be in sight. The discussion is avowedly speculative; its purpose is to define possibilities, not to predict results. Productive association is the name of the game; collaboration between designers and skilled producers making a variety of goods with general purpose machines. Toffler calls the process customization. Examples are cited which suggest that a high-wage mass production economy, itself the fruit of Fordism, spawns a generation of consumers just yearning for slightly more expensive products made by artisanal techniques.

Risks

The promotion of innovation by modifying products and production processes, the concentration on the manufacture of specialized products that imitators find impossible or unprofitable. to copy, may strengthen these products’ overall market position. But there are risks. At the very least, a reinterpretation of Fordist ideas about the nature of markets and the organiz- ation of production is required. Costly mistakes could be incurred by a change in technology. A simple failure would bankrupt a weak company. Interest- ingly, Japanese production and exports of special&y steels increased fourfold between 1965 and 1967, twice the increase in the production of export of standard products. Firms in the core countries have begun to invest in specialty products that are difficult to imitate at short notice. They have high utility for customers with special needs. Specialties are the thing for the chemical industry.

In the final chapter there is an informative discussion of the way even greater flexibility can be achieved by breaking with neo-Fordism and its

CITIES August 1983

attempts to introduce flexibility into the assembly line, and by decentralizing production, to create high-technology cottage industry.

In the small towns near Bologna, along the Adriatic coast near Ancona and Venice, the number of officially registered factories or artisans’ work- shops almost equals the numbers of inhabitants. Sabel writes, not without a trace of trans-Atlantic nostalgia:

If you had thought so long about Rousseau’s artisan clockmakers at Neuchatel or Marx’s idea of labour as joyful, self-creative associ- ation that you had begun to doubt their possibility, then you might, watching these craftsmen at work, forgive yourself the sudden conviction that something more utopian than the present factory system is practical after all.

He suggests that this ‘system’ of high- technology cottage industry does in a decentralized way what large inno- vative companies do within huge organizations: ‘create new demand by filling needs that potential customers may have only begun to suspect were there’.

Of course, Sabel is right. The pre- conditions for the emergence and perpetuation of the innovative small firms will underscore the relation between Italian developments and his overarching theme: the role of ideas about the world, political conceptions in the broadest sense, in shaping economic activity. After all, the small firm is stifled by the large in FR Germany and the USA. The corpor- ations can diversify, adapt, adopt neo- Fordism or simply buy out the oppo- sition There are often threats to the expansion of high-tech cottage industry relating to both the transmission of inter-generationa ski& and the fact that success reduces the entrepreneur’s appetite for innovation.

I remain sceptical about the extent to which the particular may become

general, however. The world is not the oyster of the educated artisans of the Italian Adriatic. It is not made up of idealists, ex-communists, innovators, designers and craftsmen extraordinary.

Nevertheless, there are lessons for public policy: the need for regional or jndust~-wide apprentices~p pro- grammes to spread the costs of train- ing; the construction of industrial parks

CITIES August 1983

in which tens or even hundreds of artisans can rent space, a practice which not only recalls 19th century Sheffield and Birmingham but more up-to-date initiatives in both these cities.

Sabel suggests that economic structure is fixed by pohtical choices. His preference for approaches he has described in Italy are clear enough. But his main message is that they suggest the shape of things to come.

By the end of the 1980’s it is likely that comparable stories, different in substance but with equally uncertain ends, will be told for each of the advanced industrial countries.

If his overarching aim was to explore the relation between our barely articu-

Book reviews

fated ideas of honour and justice - politics in the broadest sense- and their quietly revolutionary effect on social order, Professor Sabel has largely succeeded. There are important impli- cations for the future social and physical city. We already know some- thing of the urban-rural shift taking place in manufacturing in the UK and other countries. These ideas deserve close study and further elaboration by those with a vested interest in possible futures of industrial societies.

Edgar Rose Levin Professor of Urban Affairs and

public Service Cleveland State University

Cleveiand, OH, USA

Putting cities in context GEOGRAPHY AND THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT Volume 5

edited by D.T. Herbert and R.J. Johnston

John Wiley ~biches~r, UK, 1982, f34.50

In this the most recent volume in Herbert and Johnston’s annual series on research progress and application in urban geography the editors present a somewhat more coherent and inte- grated set of essays than in any of the previous volumes by including a core of four chapters on environmental hazards. The remaining six chapters include: an essay on language and metaphor in geography; a paper on policy analysis and the role of social scientists; two methodological papers on political geography; a chapter on the geography of crime; and a final paper on inner city revitalization. In keeping with the original intent of the series, this volume includes several research and review pieces which characterize the direction and progress of specific areas of urban geographical inquiry.

Volume 5, like the previous four, includes several thought-provoking

and well-researched papers, and it is recommended, though not without criticism. Despite the book’s overall quality, Chapter 1 on language in geography is somewhat confusing and of little practical use to professionals in urban pfanning. In addition, the core biock of chapters on en~onmental hazards deserves more critical remarks as to the ‘steady-state’ of the art of that particular research topic.

Chapter 1, although certainly a scholarly piece, would seem to be of littte use to planners with pressing real- Iife problems to attend to. The authors, Harrison and Livingstone, in arguing the importance of language and metaphor in the labelling of urban problems, make a weak case for its real influence in the setting of social policy.

Chapter 2, on public policy and the role of academics in the political decision making process, is a particu- larly timely and relevant essay. As academics are becoming increasingly involved with practical policy-oriented research it is critically important for them to have a realistic view of the public policy implementation process. Clark’s essay, which includes prop- ositions on the appropriate function of policy analysis, is an important and clear portrayal of the social-scientist- cum-political-actor.

Chapter 3 is an attempt to define a

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