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2006, The Breathing Factory (Edition Braus/Belfast Exposed/Gallery of Photography)
The South of Ireland never experienced the full impact of the Industrial Revolution but in 2005 was defined as the ‘most globalised economy in the world’ (IDA Ireland). Global companies, primarily North American, outsourced operations to the Republic, attracted by a skilled and flexible workforce where direct cost of employment is among the lowest in Europe and, what continues to be, the lowest rate of corporation tax in Europe. The title of the project is inspired by a widely utilised flexible economic management system responsive to the needs and demands of the global market which is intended to be implemented not only at the level of the factory floor but critically, to extend to the nation state itself. The Breathing Factory (2002-2006) addresses the role and representation of labour and global labour practices in this newly industrialised landscape. Global industrial practices are characterised by fleeting alliances, transient spaces as capital moves when and as required. In such an ephemeral, precarious and globalised context, the project focused specifically upon the Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing and Technology Campus, part of a cluster formation of multinational complexes, in Leixlip in the east of Ireland. Having begun onsite in 2003, following nine months of negotiation regarding access due to the sensitive nature of this highly secure environment and completed over a 20 month period, each visit was pre-scheduled and pre-cleared, being accompanied at all times and thus, the policing of the project is a central concern. The outcome of a practice-led doctoral research project framed by ethnographic understandings in its undertaking, the full installation includes photographs, text-based work, digital video and sound archival material as critical re-representation. The Breathing Factory (ISBN No. 3-89904-216-6) is a hardback edition with 180 pages & 69 colour photographs/interview excerpts/artefacts. Essays have been commissioned by Sean O Riain, Chair of the Sociology Department, National University of Ireland, Maynooth and author of The Politics of High Tech Growth: Developmental States in the Global Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Martin McCabe, lecturer and Programme Chair of the BA Photography, School of Media and researcher within the centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice in the Dublin Institute of Technology.
Journal of Media Practice
The Breathing Factory (2002-2006): Locating the global labouring body Mark Curran Journal of Media Practice Volume 9 Number 2 (2008)2008 •
In 2005, the Republic of Ireland was defined as the ‘most globalised economy in the world’ (IDA Ireland). The significance of this position is amplified by the fact that the South of Ireland never experienced an Industrial Revolution compared to other western European countries (O’Brien 1999). In the absence of significant audio and visual representation of labour, global labour practices and globalised industrial space in the context of this accelerated economic development, this study, both in its methodological design and implementation, stakes out new terrain through the combined use of photography, digital video and ethnographic methods, further engaging with the oral testimony of workers in the multinational location/fieldsite of Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing and Technology Campus, Leixlip, County Kildare. This article addresses the rationale for the multivocal framework in which this prac- tice-led research project has been methodologically undertaken and its role in the for- mation of the installation, The Breathing Factory (2006).
Engaging Science, Technology, and Society
Breathing Late Industrialism2020 •
Breakdown, trespass, seepage, degradation: this is late industrialism. Over the past decade, the term has become synonymous with collapse, describing everything from crumbling infrastructure to outmoded paradigms. But the "late" in "late industrial" carries radical potential, too. It points toward the possibility of another world taking shape within the wreckage as people retrofit broken systems, build flexible coalitions, and work creatively with time. In this collection, we train our eyes on these refashionings, asking how late industrial systems might be put to life-affirming work. Specifically, we track cases where breath, air, and atmosphere help inaugurate a "phase shift" (Choy and Zee 2015) from breakdown toward worlds otherwise. Breath has sentinel qualities: it can warn of trouble in the air. But it is also an animating force. Taking conceptual cues from this duality, contributors attend to late industrialism as it is sensed and transformed into something vital.
Based on recent historical, anthropological, and sociological work on factories, this blog series explores new methodological perspectives on factories in the past and present. In particular, we seek to open a conversation on the question of space and scale. We look at the ways in which the shifting political-economic regimes and macro-political developments at the national and global scales interact with shop floor dynamics. On the national level, factories were key sites for entanglements of state-building, class formation, and modernisation. For a good part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the large factory laid a claim to define the most significant aspects of life associated with modernity, and became a site of the construction of ideologies, imaginaries, and structures of feelings. The factory has also been a hub for collaborative projects between global and national actors and institutions. The balance of power within these networks was shaped in part by the shifting contours of the geopolitical and global economic order. Yet, local dynamics at the shop floor level also played a role in shaping the transnational flows of ideologies, expertise, and knowledge.
International Review of Social History
A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World2019 •
It is an interesting time to write about factories. The once very popular industrial workplace has lost its charm for labour historians with the geographical and thematic broadening of the field. As theoretical interventions encompassing transnational dimensions brought forms of non-wage and non-industrial labour to the fore, labour historians have moved away from the industrial workplace. Just as the large Fordist factory ceased to be the political and cultural reference point for policymakers, employers, and organized labour, writing about factories has largely gone dormant.
Despite many calls to bring anthropology and history closer to each other in the past, interdisciplinary research symposia happen rarely. This workshop on “re-articulating the factory as an object of study” has addressed this paucity of interdisciplinary conversation, in the idea setting of re:work, which hosts scholars from different discipline. The workshop resulted in a productive, rare encounter between labour history and industrial anthropology, two fields that share similar objects of analysis, but are quite apart as for the methodologies and theoretical approaches they deploy. The workshop aimed at gathering state-of-the-art research focus on the factories, to discern the similarities and differences between the two disciplines in terms of research questions, conceptual vocabulary and methodological tools, and to evaluate the potential for collaborative research in the future.
American Ethnologist
Made in Sheffield: An Ethnography of Industrial Work and Politics by Massimiliano Mollona2011 •
TRAFO -Blog for Transregional Research
Factory Reloaded: Transregional Perspectives on the Industrial Workplace2021 •
Based on recent historical, anthropological, and sociological work on factories, this blog series explores new methodological perspectives on factories in the past and present. In particular, we seek to open a conversation on the question of space and scale. We look at the ways in which the shifting political-economic regimes and macro-political developments at the national and global scales interact with shop floor dynamics. On the national level, factories were key sites for entanglements of state-building, class formation, and modernisation. For a good part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the large factory laid a claim to define the most significant aspects of life associated with modernity, and became a site of the construction of ideologies, imaginaries, and structures of feelings. The factory has also been a hub for collaborative projects between global and national actors and institutions. The balance of power within these networks was shaped in part by the shifting contours of the geopolitical and global economic order. Yet, local dynamics at the shop floor level also played a role in shaping the transnational flows of ideologies, expertise, and knowledge.
This dissertation focuses on the evaluation of the obstacles on the way towards a militant and democratic, grassroots trade unionism. Therefore, it is an ethnography of trade union organising. At a general level this study deals with the relationship between labour and capital in the Irish mushroom industry in the context of global capitalism and the Irish national institutional framework. This is reflected at a theoretical level in the opposition between the political economies of labour and capital. At a more concrete level, this dissertation centres on workers’ resistance to exploitation and the struggle of capital to overcome it. While the first part of the thesis deals with that struggle on mushroom farms, the second part tells about the efforts of organised labour in Ireland to ‘clean up’ the worst aspects of exploitation in the mushroom industry. In the second part of the dissertation, a second contradiction arises, that between the interests and dynamics of labour institutions, such as trade unions and workers’ based Non-Governmental Organisations, and workers’ collective interests. This second contradiction, which I consider a reflection of the main contradiction between capital and labour, motivates the title of this dissertation, ‘Workers against Institutions’. This does not imply that I make a case against organised labour; it merely means that workers have also to fight against the influence of the hegemonic political economy of capital within their own organisations, which is reflected in tendencies such as ‘reformism’, ‘partnership trade unionism’, and bureaucratic tendencies as opposed to rank-and-file unionism, and ‘popular power’.
Rethinking the New International Division of Labour: Global Transformations and Uneven National Development, Greig Charnock and Guido Starosta (eds.), Palgrave Macmillan Publishers ( 2016), XV/252 pps., ISBN: 978-1-137-53871-0.
The New International Division of Labour in ‘High-Tech Production’: The Genesis of Ireland’s Boom in the 1990sMichael Pierse, editor, A History of Irish Working-Class Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)
Representing Labour: Notes towards a Political and Cultural Economy of Irish Working-Class ExperienceRepresenting labour Class is about the representation, linguistically, of a socio-economic phenomenon. In the Anglophone world the exact relationship between these terms vexed analysis of class in the last third of the twentieth century. Class, as the prefatory quotes above make clear, is also, however, about the politics of representation. This capacity of linguistic representation is, therefore, about cultural, political economy and, according to Scott, the ‘power to define reality itself’. In the following chapter I explicate some elements of the historical process by which knowledge was produced about class in Ireland. I contend that labour, the political and cultural expression(s) of the ‘subaltern classes’, has been represented in both urban and rural forms during the past 400 years. The first section charts some aspects of the emergence of the representation of labour in Ireland, 1603-1824, which is, in a broad sense, the age of manufacture, as Marx described it, or ‘proto-industrialisation’. The second section presents some evidence for the self-representation of labour in Ireland, 1824-1998: the age of machinery. The final section of the chapter turns to the methodology underpinning the previous sections.
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Mark Curran