Page 262 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

250 LOOKING BACK AT NEW TIMES AND ITS CRITICS

decide the ‘economies of scope’ rather than scale and who develop an
‘anthropology of consumption’ as they attempt to get to the heart of what
people seem to want.
To writers like Pollert and Clarke such workers would be seen as either
so small in number to be insignificant or else to be mere instruments of the
big multinational companies who employ them to fend off competition by
providing ‘added value’ in the form of design or unnecessary packaging of
their commodities. In this respect they are mistaken. Any analysis of work
which does not attempt to come to grips with the dramatic
transformations which have created huge numbers of self-employed units
or small businesses across the spectrum of class, gender and ethnicity, is
simply not alert to the realities of working life in Britain today. To ignore
these fields of economic activity (for example, the production of culture
and the image industries) is to see only a void or a vacuum in that space
opened up by the decline of heavy industry. This is not the place to engage
in a debate about the sustainability of self-employment or semi-employment
in Majorist (and post-Thatcherist) Britain but it is important to signal that
these are patterns which are establishing themselves among young and not
so young workers with astonishing rapidity. John Urry in the New Times
reader says ‘There have been a number of inter-related changes in Britain;
sizeable increases in the number of self-employed people; the growth in the
size of the secondary labour force so that one third of the labour force now
consists of part-time temporary and home workers…’. As shown in my
own work on British fashion designers, to have one’s ‘own label’ is
simultaneously an overwhelming desire on the part of the many fashion
graduates leaving art school each year and also a realistic response to the
alternative of unemployment (McRobbie, forthcoming). It is also a dream
made possible by the Enterprise Allowance Scheme which provides £40 a
week to help young ‘entrepreneurs’ to move from unemployment into self-
employment. However, there is much more to enterprise culture than
simply numbers of young people on the EAS. This ‘choice’ rarely coincides
with an approval for Mrs Thatcher’s idea of enterprise; it is an altogether
more complex and even a more radical response. These young workers
come closer to what Sean Nixon, talking about the people who launched
The Face magazine in the early 1980s, describes as ‘committed
entrepreneurs’ (Nixon, 1993). So, just as there is more to the market than
the manipulation of needs, so also is there more to new work than the
intensification of labour. It is in both these spaces that lived culture, social
agents, and the category of experience and desire come into play. All of
these remain, however, resolutely outwith the vocabulary of the Capital
and Class journal. Without theorizing what they mean by it, to these
writers this is all ‘ideology’.