Micron engagements, macro histories

Machines and the agency of labor in a worker-owned company

Bibliographic Data

ID18974017
AuthorsOgnjen Kojanic (0000-0001-5878-0730, University of Cologne, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume35
Issue4
Pages827-847
Publication date2024-08-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory and Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0275-7206 • E-ISSN: 1477-2612
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/02757206.2023.2172721
OpenAlexW4319297748
LanguageEN
References cited28

Focusing on ITAS, a Croatian metalworking company with a turbulent past characterized by various property arrangements and varying degrees of success in the market for machine tools, I sketch out a shop-floor history of the ways in which the materiality of production continues to matter in contemporary capitalism. Control over machines allowed ITAS workers to negotiate their precarious position in the market. I show how collective and individual decisions of workers as economic agents contribute to shaping the geographical unevenness of capitalism. Industrial machines can serve as an ethnographic object that connects analytical scales, allowing scholars to provide a relational and historically situated understanding of how workers are incorporated into political economic systems as well as the degree to which they can influence those systems

Aesthetics · Business · Capitalism · Negotiation · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Situated · Sketch · Social science · Sociology · Computer Science · Crafts, Textile, and Design · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

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