Scrapping the Workshop of the World: Civic Infrastructuring and the Politics of Late Industrial Governance

To understand harm in breathing spaces requires analysis of the ways in which structural violence is built into technologies of environmental governance; a script that cannot recognize the dynamic relationships between bodies, atmospheres, and the industrial practices that condition both. In this paper, I show how community members in a small, Philadelphia neighborhood came to understand that toxic air is made permissible through late industrial political techniques. One of these techniques is a civic engagement platform, designed to more efficiently and transparently connect the public with municipal agencies, and recommended to community members as a means to address atmospheric hazards. Despite initial public optimism, the City’s civic engagement platform failed to address environmental hazards. Rather than abandon the platform, however, community members appropriated the City’s digital infrastructure to run an environmental reporting project. Drawing on the work of STS scholars, I describe the community’s work as civic infrastructuring, a sociotechnical process that utilized public infrastructure to better understand government failure and build community capacity to engage the administration, even if on late industrial terms.

Participatory Paternalism

Chapter 3 describes the institutional foundations of the Chinese work unit system and the practices of worker participation in the early 1960s, after the system was fully established and before the onset of the Cultural Revolution. Participatory institutions included self-managing teams on the shop floor, technical innovation groups, factory elections, representative congresses, and other mechanisms designed to solicit suggestions from below, learn about and defuse employees’ grievances and concerns, and mobilize workers to monitor and criticize factory leaders. Despite high levels of participation, predicated on lifetime job tenure and relatively egalitarian distribution, industrial governance was democratic only in a very limited sense. The party insisted on maintaining a political monopoly and harshly suppressed any hint of independent political activity. Not only was the scope of workers’ influence restricted largely to the shop floor, but they also had little autonomy. Although participation was extensive, the system was more paternalistic than democratic.

The Entrepreneurial Role of Organized Labour in the British Columbia Motion Picture Industry

Research into an industrial sector reflecting principles of the emergent "network" model of production indicates that organized labour can play a positive role in post-Fordist Systems of industrial governance. Within the dynamic motion picture industry of British Columbia (B. C), organized labour was the key organizational factor in the birth and rapid expansion of the agglomeration ofsmall, specialized film production firms which has become a competitor for the coveted title of second largest film centre, after Los Angeles, in North America. In this process, B.C. film unions have become the dominant "actors " in forging collaborative relations between local production companies, between the sector and the state, and between the district and other film centers, so critical to the success of the network model.