Page 403 - The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology

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374 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

who found Caneville – the sugar plantation, sought to look at people and workers, not as
mill and the town that developed around it commodities, the muscle, the fibre, the
(1964: 66), a ‘benevolent dictatorship’ with a brain – they were not only a calculation or a
strict ‘hierarchy of races’ (1964: 73). He price, but a social force and therefore group-
unpacked for us the peculiar colonial man- ings with cultural significance, and individu-
agerialism that marked the industrial heritage als with private, social needs ‘and the
of our region. creative energy to participate fully in cultural
The widespread repression of the early and political life’ (Webster, 1991: 3). Such an
1960s marked also the decline of the ‘Natal emphasis moved from the abstractions, ‘factor
School’. Leo Kuper left for moral and politi- of production’, ‘abstract labour power’, to
cal reasons; his protégés Ben Magubane and view working people’s lives from the perspec-
Fatima Meer went into exile, and spent many tive of the concrete, the qualitative, what I
years banned, respectively; Hilstan Watts have termed, the ‘cultural formation’.
continued measuring poverty, but was left The emerging field was the result of a vari-
unnoticed until the early 1970s when the ety of ‘fusions’ between theoretical work,
Security Police found his insistence that moral critique, commitments to struggles for
there were poor black people, subversive. worker rights, the mixing up of many anti-
At best a ‘pragmatic realism’ developed Apartheid discourses and the challenge of
which began to dialogue with power elites major socio-economic struggles in the area.
about the need for reform. Through large There were also echoes of Christian libera-
social surveys it tried to convince that the tion theology, and the communitarian tradi-
aspirations of the black majority were for- tions of Ethiopian and Zionist churches
eign to Apartheid decrees. At the broader brought to the projects through working class
level, the dignity black people and black intellectuals.
labour were imbued with in the Kuper Our first contribution (Kruger and Sitas,
‘period’ reverted back to the crude cultural- 1995) was to understand a managerialism
ism of management schools: ‘motivating the which was bifocal. There was the world of
Bantu to work’. white managers, artisans and workers (and to
It was only after the Durban strikes in a lesser extent of ‘Indians’ and ‘Coloureds’),
1973, however, and the continuing challenge which was governed by ‘modern’ statutes
of black worker militancy in the 1970s, that a and collective bargaining. There was also the
new sociological school arose, which has world of black workers, and ‘Zulus’ which
been described as the New Labour Studies. over and above the segregationist statute of
Its priorities were to ‘understand ... the subjec- the Apartheid years, was also governed by
tive experience of work’ (Webster, 1991: 3). ‘traditional’ authorities. This style of gover-
As he explains: nance of people at work, we can label as
‘colonial managerialism’. A managerialism
in trying to find answers to why workers were join-
ing the new industrial unions in large numbers, that ruled African workers differentially and
sociologists were drawn beyond the workplace to elicited traditional forms of control to maxi-
an examination of working class cultural forma- mize its modernized benefits. A style similar
tions as well as powerful political traditions that to Chakrabarty’s (1989: 177) description of
shape the attitudes and political behaviour of black
workers. These new directions brought the subjec- Bengali jute-mills in the first part of the
tive experience of work into industrial sociology twentieth century, with its peculiar gover-
generating a number of studies which analyzed nance steeped in an imagined oriental tradi-
culture and working life and the relationship of tion, its displays of power and opulence and
unions to new social movements – what has been control.
called social movement unionism (1991: 3).
What was peculiar about Natal’s industrial-
Particularly in Natal, with its divided work- ization was the coexistence of ‘scientific man-
forces and idiosyncrasies, New Labour Studies agement’ and bureaucratic forms of control