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Before I started this project I had never worked in a factory. Like most people, I suppose, I understood that factory work was mundane, repetitive, hard work. I thought I knew what to expect when I entered the plant and in a way I did. But it was more mundane, more repetitive, and harder than I had expected, more soul-destroying to work on a line in a dreary factory for hour after hour, day after day, than I can really articulate. You have to be there. And that is the experience of millions of people, year after year. My time with the workers of Valleyco and Nippon CTV was an education in the true sense and when I left them my admiration and respect for those people and my despair at the systematic wasting of their talents was complete.
This book is about the working lives and experiences of those people and their social relations on the shop-floor in the changing world of manufacturing. The data that are presented here were gathered during two periods of participant observation working on the shop-floor at the plants. This research approach allows an ‘up close and personal’ account of these workplace relations. The objective at the start of this project was to understand more about the complexities and dynamics of a particular social situation, namely the shop-floor experience under ‘new manufacturing techniques’. It is my intention that in writing this book the true nature of this shop-floor situation will be understood more widely. In particular, this book addresses debates over the role of workers in modern manufacturing, the nature of new management techniques, and the influence of Japanese management on the ‘new’ workplace.
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