Book Review: M. Glucksmann, Cottons and Casuals

Miriam Glucksmann
Cottons and Casuals: The Gendered Organization of Labour In Time and Space
Durham: British Sociological Association, 2000, 188 pp.
15 British Pounds paper (1-903457-00-9)

I asked to review this book because Glucksmann’s 1982 Women on the Line, and Women Assemble that appeared nearly a decade later, gave me such pleasure. When I first started to read the book, however, I was disappointed. Research exploring the connections between paid employment and wage labour, informed by a theory that promised to avoid the dichotomy between theory and research or other dualisms, seemed to offer little that is new. But I quickly learned otherwise.

Cottons and Casuals is a surprising book in our times. It is a sociologist’s book, written for and by a sociologist who is not trying to reach a text mass market or be other than a sociologist. Indeed, Glucksmann seeks to “revitalize a sociology still somewhat limping after the critiques of post-modernism and post-structuralism” (p.156). Acknowledging the importance of multiplicity, difference, particularity, locality and temporality, she nevertheless maintains that it is possible to develop a systematic analysis useful for all levels of abstraction. Critiques of sociology clearly indicate the need for new and more adequate frameworks for analysis. They need not mean the end of explanatory efforts that go beyond the immediate or specific, or the end of sociology.

She carries out her project through a “relational analysis, which helps to elucidate the configurations and patterning of social relations and to throw light on the interlocking or intersectionality connecting together different social processes” (p.156). Revisiting the notion of “total social organization” that she introduced in her earlier work as a unifying analytical framework, she extends it to include informal economic activity and exchange, inter-generational and intra-generational change, temporality and spaciality. This is, however, absolutely not just another book about another theory. The framework is developed in the process of data collection and analysis, very much in keeping with E.P. Thompson’s claim that all research is a dialogue between theory and evidence. As Glucksmann says in the conclusion, the main focus of the research is the “intersecting divisions of labour of husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, cottons and casuals; connections between local employment structures and local cultures; networks of linkages between production and consumption, or between paid employment and domestic labour; configurations of home and work for different individuals and occupational groups; patterns that change over the life course” (p.163). The focus in not theory abstracted from experience but “both and..” (p.15).

What is particularly useful is the way she makes visible the process of doing research that informs and is informed by theory. She does not use her interviews with women who worked in the Lancashire textile industry between 1930 and 1970, and with the women who did various kinds of casual employment during the same period in a similar locale, to illustrate or prove her theory. Rather, she considers the ways her conceptual tools are refined and developed within the process of gathering and analyzing data. She pays attention to what she calls the “in between stages of research”, the “relations of knowledge” (p.21). Drawing on multiple sources such as census data, academic or policy publications, books on local history and television programs, she talks about the inconsistencies in sources as both problems and solutions for researchers aware of the relations involved in knowledge production. She is comfortable in questioning herself and her sources, avoiding fixed categories yet willing to move beyond the specificities of her research. In spite of all these differing views on the same period, she does believe there “was an actually existing reality in 1930s Lancashire and all these different sources apprehend some aspect of it, however partial and however affected by their particular ‘method’‘ (p.49). At the same time, she sees all new analysis of multiple sources as necessarily partial.

Glucksmann spends considerable time writing about how she is “slicing” the research. As she explains, her interview material could be organized or sliced in any number of ways. In taking several approaches to the slicing, she reveals the gendered influences of space and of time, the varied perspectives of women who are at the same time mothers and daughters and the ways of being women in the same locales. This allows her, for instance, to explore not only the quite different identities of women employed full-time as weavers and those who had more casual employment but also the different ways they experience time and public, as distinguished from private, space.

It is this explicit concern with methods and analysis that make the book valuable for anyone interested in doing research. You do not have to agree with her method or analytical framework to learn a great deal from her work. And you do not have to care about the gendered nature of relations in Lancashire or the nature of casual labour and textile work to benefit from her slicing. On the other hand, if you do want to know more about cottons and casuals, this book offers a rich and eloquent investigation. It also is provides a fine example of how sociology can work.

Pat Armstrong
Professor, Sociology and Women’s Studies
York University
patarmst@yorku.ca



		Canadian Journal of Sociology Online January - February 2001 Miriam Glucksmann Cottons and Casuals: The Gendered Organization of Labour In Time and Space Durham: British Sociological Association, 2000, 188 pp. 15 British Pounds paper (1-903457-00-9) I asked to review this book because Glucksmann’s 1982 Women on the Line, and Women Assemble that appeared nearly a decade later, gave me such pleasure. When I first started to read the book, however, I was disappointed. Research exploring the connections between paid employment and wage labour, informed by a theory that promised to avoid the dichotomy between theory and research or other dualisms, seemed to offer little that is new. But I quickly learned otherwise. Cottons and Casuals is a surprising book in our times. It is a sociologist’s book, written for and by a sociologist who is not trying to reach a text mass market or be other than a sociologist. Indeed, Glucksmann seeks to “revitalize a sociology still somewhat limping after the critiques of post-modernism and post-structuralism” (p.156). Acknowledging the importance of multiplicity, difference, particularity, locality and temporality, she nevertheless maintains that it is possible to develop a systematic analysis useful for all levels of abstraction. Critiques of sociology clearly indicate the need for new and more adequate frameworks for analysis. They need not mean the end of explanatory efforts that go beyond the immediate or specific, or the end of sociology. She carries out her project through a “relational analysis, which helps to elucidate the configurations and patterning of social relations and to throw light on the interlocking or intersectionality connecting together different social processes” (p.156). Revisiting the notion of “total social organization” that she introduced in her earlier work as a unifying analytical framework, she extends it to include informal economic activity and exchange, inter-generational and intra-generational change, temporality and spaciality. This is, however, absolutely not just another book about another theory. The framework is developed in the process of data collection and analysis, very much in keeping with E.P. Thompson’s claim that all research is a dialogue between theory and evidence. As Glucksmann says in the conclusion, the main focus of the research is the “intersecting divisions of labour of husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, cottons and casuals; connections between local employment structures and local cultures; networks of linkages between production and consumption, or between paid employment and domestic labour; configurations of home and work for different individuals and occupational groups; patterns that change over the life course” (p.163). The focus in not theory abstracted from experience but “both and..” (p.15). What is particularly useful is the way she makes visible the process of doing research that informs and is informed by theory. She does not use her interviews with women who worked in the Lancashire textile industry between 1930 and 1970, and with the women who did various kinds of casual employment during the same period in a similar locale, to illustrate or prove her theory. Rather, she considers the ways her conceptual tools are refined and developed within the process of gathering and analyzing data. She pays attention to what she calls the “in between stages of research”, the “relations of knowledge” (p.21). Drawing on multiple sources such as census data, academic or policy publications, books on local history and television programs, she talks about the inconsistencies in sources as both problems and solutions for researchers aware of the relations involved in knowledge production. She is comfortable in questioning herself and her sources, avoiding fixed categories yet willing to move beyond the specificities of her research. In spite of all these differing views on the same period, she does believe there “was an actually existing reality in 1930s Lancashire and all these different sources apprehend some aspect of it, however partial and however affected by their particular ‘method’‘ (p.49). At the same time, she sees all new analysis of multiple sources as necessarily partial. Glucksmann spends considerable time writing about how she is “slicing” the research. As she explains, her interview material could be organized or sliced in any number of ways. In taking several approaches to the slicing, she reveals the gendered influences of space and of time, the varied perspectives of women who are at the same time mothers and daughters and the ways of being women in the same locales. This allows her, for instance, to explore not only the quite different identities of women employed full-time as weavers and those who had more casual employment but also the different ways they experience time and public, as distinguished from private, space. It is this explicit concern with methods and analysis that make the book valuable for anyone interested in doing research. You do not have to agree with her method or analytical framework to learn a great deal from her work. And you do not have to care about the gendered nature of relations in Lancashire or the nature of casual labour and textile work to benefit from her slicing. On the other hand, if you do want to know more about cottons and casuals, this book offers a rich and eloquent investigation. It also is provides a fine example of how sociology can work. Pat Armstrong Professor, Sociology and Women’s Studies York University patarmst@yorku.ca http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/cjscopy/reviews/cottons.html February 2001 © CJS Online