Page 257 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ANGELA MCROBBIE 245

If he sees Murray as assuming these to be primary processes, the question
which Nixon does not address is whether we can indeed talk about economic
processes at all in this broad way without succumbing to a kind of post-
Fordist fundamentalism. The value of thinking through these shifts, in the
space opened up by New Times, in conjunction with those of retail,
shopping, and popular culture, seems to me to outstrip the dangers
of crude reductionism. Post-Fordism is not here a deus ex machina, more a
set of emergent social and economic and cultural relationships. It is not so
determinist in New Times as it is for writers like Touraine and Gorz, nor
does it promise a utopia of craft and creativity which some of the
Regulation School writers go so far as suggesting. So perhaps the question
is one of specifying both the degree of determination and that of
containment, so that the range of contingent and historically specific social
processes is held together for the purposes of the particular analysis. Thus
even if the economic is pre-written in a script drafted by cultural
practitioners, as Nixon would argue, can we not still see it actively shaping
some of the social practices of work and leisure which we all participate in?
The New Times writers also play the more modest role of intermediary.
They are translating from a wide range of writing and condensing this to
short pieces for New Times readers. They draw attention to the Japanese
team-based work practices and to the more participative role which
workers find themselves playing in the new factories organized to combat
worker alienation, and increase productivity through making better use of
the mental as well as the manual capacities of the entire workforce. These
‘core’ producers can in turn expect some privileges and a greater degree of
job security than those existing in the periphery, where post-Fordism
subcontracts its less directly profitable work. This is carried out at lower
human or technological cost to the main manufacturers, by workers on the
fringes of the economy, in workshops, or indeed in homework or outwork.
Robin Murray points to the Benetton model where, in a company with
hundreds of global outlets, the core workers number no more than 1500.
Instead there is a vast international network of franchises in the retail
operation, a whole chain of subcontractors serving the Italian centre of
operations, where there is also an industrial core using the most advanced
dye technology, and a team of highly qualified creative professionals
including designers, publicists and photographers (particularly Oliver
Toscani, who recently produced the deliberately controversial billboard
campaign which resulted in immense publicity and in many cases outright
bans). The role of these cultural intermediaries in styling, designing and
promoting the product is as vital to its production as the actual process of
manufacture.
The New Times writers maintain some degree of distance from these
developments, neither welcoming them, nor dismissing them as marking
simply an escalation in class conflict through the deployment of new