Table Of ContentTransnational Corporations from the
Standpoint of Workers
This page intentionally left blank
Transnational Corporations
from the Standpoint of
Workers
Nora Räthzel
Department of Sociology, Umeå University
Diana Mulinari
Department for Gender Studies, Lund University
and
Aina Tollefsen
Department of Geography and Economic History, Umeå University
© Nora Räthzel, Diana Mulinari, Aina Tollefsen 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-32304-0
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 2014 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 978-1-349-45866-0 ISBN 978-1-137-32305-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137323057
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.
Contents
Acknowledgements i x
Part I Theories and Histories of Labour
1 In Search of Labour in Labour Studies 3
The disappearance of work? 6
Is there labour in organisational psychology? 10
Searching for workers’ agency in Polanyian labour studies 1 4
Labour in Labour Process Theory – the dominance of
the researcher 1 7
A poststructuralist approach in Labour Process Theory 21
Studies of women factory workers 25
Finding the missing subject in the industrial workplace 28
Elements of a theory of work 32
Subjectivity 38
Critical Psychology: a non-essentialist societal human nature 4 0
2 Production Processes in a Globalising World 42
Theoretical approaches 42
The contested fi elds of development and globalisation 42
World-Systems Theory and the ‘new’ semi-peripheries 43
Theorising space and place – examining new
spatialities of power 4 5
Varieties of fi rm-place relations 48
The case of AB Volvo in the globalising automotive industries 5 0
A short history of the automotive industry 50
AB Volvo: transnational interconnectedness in local places 55
Joint ventures, mergers, and acquisitions in the
1970s and 1980s 5 8
The divestments of the 1990s 60
AB Volvo in The 2000s: growth by acquisitions and
‘global optimising’ 6 0
Transnationalisation of production in AB Volvo 61
3 Qualitative Methods: What We Did and How We Did It 6 4
How we think about our work: research from the
standpoint of workers 6 8
v
vi Contents
How we think about qualitative methods 71
The pitfalls of investigative curiosity 73
Are you from the company? How we were positioned
and how we positioned ourselves 7 7
Negotiating trust and distance in Mexico 77
Being examined and found acceptable in Durban 79
Losing power in India 82
Contradictory familiarity in Umeå 83
Knowledge for whom and for what? 84
Part II Entering the Factory Gates
4 Locating Volvo: Four Plants, Four Places, Four Histories 8 9
The Swedish periphery – firm-place relations of the Umeå plant 8 9
Historical trajectories of investments 89
Umeverken: place and times 92
Management and workers – a team representing its factory 94
Disempowering the local 96
México – the radical contemporaneity of centre and
semi-periphery 1 02
Competitive pressures from the semi-periphery 106
Optimising for the corporation 109
Volvo in South Africa – from the periphery to the
semi-periphery 1 10
Socio-spatial tensions 115
Globalising industrial production – upgrading Durban? 117
Bangalore: locating in the Asian growth market 1 20
The aims from above 121
The story from below 122
5 Regimes of Representation: Trade Unions in Sweden
and Mexico 124
Mexico – A history of co-optation and resistance 124
Unions as mediators of subordination 127
Subordinated inclusion 130
Unionists protecting the order 132
Sweden – unions and the withering away of the welfare state 1 39
The Volvo union in Umeå: community unionism 142
A union defending its members – members in
defence of their union 1 46
Paradise lost – nostalgia or lived experience? 147
Contents vii
Part III Subjectivities at Work
6 Men’s Jobs – Women’s Work: Women as Industrial Workers 1 51
Labour, gender, and women 151
A woman’s day 153
Women cannot do a man’s job 155
Women can do a man’s job better than a man 1 58
Gender inequality at work is global 1 61
7 Three Gender Regimes – Gender Relations at Work 1 63
Mexico – neoliberal ideologies, gender transformations 1 63
Sexuality on the shop fl oor – who defi nes the game? 167
South Africa – gender antagonisms 1 68
Black women in industrial employment: between
privilege and vulnerability. 168
Gender violence and workplace collectivity 173
Images and realities of ‘youth’ 177
Sweden – gender equality as gender segregation 180
Women industrial workers and care work 181
Strategies against exclusion: de-gendering the self,
feminising the other 184
Women industrial workers 189
8 Constructing the Volvo Family: The West and the Rest 1 91
Mexico: the globalising TNC and its southern others 1 94
The South African Volvo family – transcending race,
acting responsibly? 1 96
The Volvo family disintegrates in Sweden 1 98
9 Production Regimes – Producers’ Pride 1 99
Between pride and anxiety 201
On the way to lean production 203
Leaving the line 204
Between individualisation and responsibility 2 07
A different take on job enrichment: predictable and
unpredictable variation 209
The lack of challenges – predictable variation 211
Job rotation: stress and monotony or the enjoyments of
responsibility 2 13
Back to the line – the demise of the Volvo Way 216
The pleasure of learning and the unfulfilled desire to learn 2 25
viii Contents
10 Production Regimes – Women’s Pride as Producers 233
Mexico – pride and prejudice 233
Sweden – defiant women 241
South Africa – from anxiety to pride 2 45
11 Production Regimes – The Wage Labourer’s Discontent 248
The demand for respect 248
India – successful resistance 259
South Africa – a lost battle 261
Producers’ pride in context 271
Epilogue 2 73
The normality of over-exploitation 273
The centrality of (wage) labour 274
The diversity and similarity of workers’ experiences 275
Thrown together, working apart – the need for and
absence of union solidarity 2 76
Writing transnational corporations from the
standpoint of workers 2 77
Notes 2 79
References 2 84
Index 3 01
Acknowledgements
We thank the institutions and individuals who made this research
possible: we are grateful to the Swedish Research Council (VR), which
generously funded our research during the first three years. We started
this project as a group of five and are ending it as a group of three. We
are deeply indebted to Irene Molina and Paula Mählck, who started this
journey with us, but were not able to write the book with us due to other
urgent commitments. They conducted interviews with us in Mexico,
South Africa, and Sweden. They took part in discussing our first results
and in writing our first paper, which focused on Mexico (Räthzel et al.,
2008). We want to thank them for their commitment and ideas. We
could not have written the book without their engagement during the
times that led to it.
In Mexico, South Africa, and India we were aided by colleagues, who
gave us their time: Fabiola Escárzaga and Raquel Gutiérrez in Mexico,
Ari Sitas and Eddie Webster in South Africa, Joyashree Roy and Duke
Ghosh in India. They generously answered our questions and helped us
with contacts and we benefited enormously from reading their work.
They are of course in no way to be held responsible for what we did with
their information. Special thanks go to David Uzzell for reading and
commenting so wisely on some of the chapters.
We thank the managers in Mexico, Durban, and India who gave us
access to their factories and allowed us to speak to the workers in uncon-
trolled spaces. Our greatest debt is to the workers in the four countries,
who readily shared their experiences, contents, and discontents with us.
We want to send our special gratitude to the trade unionists in India,
who in a very short time provided us with the possibility to speak with
30 workers from the three Volvo plants and to these workers for readily
sharing their experiences.
Gunnar Pettersson has been an invaluable source of information,
support, and knowledge. While we have interviewed him several times,
it is impossible to think of him in terms of an interviewee. In classical
anthropology when scholars had theories and people had experiences
he could have been defined as a key informant, the one mediating the
‘culture’ and providing access to the ‘others’. We want to define his
contribution as that of a colleague. He mapped the world of the firm for
ix
