Introduction

How a problem is framed and how questions about it are asked is important. Different kinds of possibilities emerge from different framings of the question. Anyone who can say what matters and what doesn’t matter, and have people listen, is powerful. Putting established modes of thought and ways of describing problems under scrutiny is a way to encourage democratic conversations and different kinds of insight. Well-established modes of thinking provide important insights, and have been especially useful in understanding the effects on workers of how work is organised, both by creating strong political and ethical statements about the ways work is alienating, and by building models of ‘good’ and ‘bad work’ – both of which I discuss here. But the former doesn’t do much towards understanding interconnections of work, or what work does in the world; and the latter offers apparently ‘neutral tools’ for the assessment of work. In the spirit of the assemblage thinking described in Chapter One, I want to open those black boxes using my feminist multi-tool, with its blades for paring out inequality, with care, caution, humility and tentativeness.

When factory work (production) is seen as the starting point, comparison point and emblematic form of work, then research, ethics and political campaigning take a particular form. That generates other omissions. Linear stories about how industrialisation originated in Europe and extended to ‘peripheral’ places are particular and partial, and such story telling makes invisible the historical and contemporary power of colonialism and political dominance. I consider the dominance of the factory for conceptualising work alongside the dominance of European industrialisation for conceptualising economic development because they are interconnected in many ways, including being caught together in intellectual work. That helps to see how other kinds of work exist in relation to industrial production, and to counterbalance the assumed centrality of the west. It might look like I have refused to take my own advice from Chapter One about paying attention to capitalocentric thinking. But my aim is the reverse. This chapter shows what happens when capitalocentric ideas dominate, and shows some of the absences, exclusions and partialities it makes.