Industry and Work in Contemporary Capitalism by Victoria Goddard Susana Narotzky

Author:Victoria Goddard, Susana Narotzky [Victoria Goddard, Susana Narotzky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138014640
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

Learning from Minas Gerais

What do we learn by looking at the whirlpool of mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures whose outcome converges in the town of Monlevade, in Minas Gerais, Brazil? Albeit starting from a specific locus, we necessarily have to take into account its connections with many other places in the world. The intricacy of these connections and the complexity of the web created by mergers and acquisitions become evident. Steelmaking emerges from this picture as a bundle of complex processes that are structured by and in turn structure globalization. A large steel mill is a global fragmented space, i.e. a part of a broader international network of interconnections and loci. In consequence, its social, economic, political, and cultural characteristics, as well as the different impacts it causes, can only be understood through the consideration of such networks, their interconnections, and their flows.

Such processes often reflect macro-political junctures involving different actions and positions of diverse state elites, such as the following: the Emperor of Brazil’s invitation to a French geologist in 1876 to open a mining school in Ouro Preto, based on a similar French institution; the King of Belgium’s visit to Minas Gerais in 1920; the protectionist policies of the Franco regime (1939–1975) in Spain; the destruction caused by the Spanish Civil War and by World War I and World War II (with the different international alliances and geopolitical changes they entailed); the nationalization of major mills by the French Socialist government in the 1980s; the sales of former state-owned properties in Eastern Europe and in Latin America in the 1990s, i.e. processes of privatization informed by neoliberal ideologies with their impacts on labor relations and on the regulations of international flows of capital; the varying efficacy of different economic dogmas over time; and the role of technological innovation in the definition of business profitability.

In all these mergers and acquisitions, the local realities of different global fragmented spaces are impacted over time. There are cycles of boom and bust with new opportunities appearing with modernization or expansion, and old ones disappearing with downsizing or closure of productive units; there are new migrants (workers, technicians, managers), sometimes creating new ethnic segmentations of labor markets, new cultural exchanges, new interconnections with different parts of the world and their avatars, the introduction of new management models and technologies, and different relations with public policies, politicians, and state elites. Localities (re)constructed by the steel industries are better understood as assemblages “constituted through the mix of networks, platforms, territorial insertions, and the multiple transactions and users in play” (Sassen, 2006: 377).

Mergers and acquisitions are also closely related to companies’ efforts to secure sources of energy (coal, charcoal, water), mineral resources (iron), capital (state or private), and managerial and technological innovations, in view of ever-changing local, regional, national, and international scenarios. These complex processes often get translated into measurable local impacts. Consider, for instance, the substantial environmental impacts these undertakings cause. Mining usually involves moving huge amounts of natural resources in mining (coal and iron,

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