1.5 Offshore fragments of industry: a pro-market standpoint From a pro-market standpoint, global market forces and the competitive pressures that they generate leave businesses with no choice but to take advantage of lower labour costs elsewhere. In the textile business or the toy business, lower wage costs are the key to profitability; if your competitors find a cheaper labour source, you either follow their example or go out of business. It is not, so the argument runs, because managers lack integrity or compassion that there are now more manufactur
1.4 Offshore fragments of industry: the negative standpoint Nike Inc., the US sportswear firm, did in fact take the lead in organising its overseas manufacturing business on a subcontracting basis (Donaghu and Barff, 1990). Early on in the 1970s, it established a web of contractual relationships (or partnerships, as it preferred to call them), with factories in Taiwan and South Korea, to produce its branded footwear. Of these factories, the big-volume producers among them were also contracted to other Western firms to produce a range of footwear. Nike
1.3 Activity 1 Before you read on, I would like you to dwell for just a moment on the significance of this shift from direct investment by Western firms to the establishment of subcontracting ties with overseas partners. Aside from 1.2 Offshore fragments of industry The rise of global factories in the 1970s owed much to the rapid improvement in transport and communications technologies which took place at that time and which made it possible to keep in touch with, and control, production processes in different parts of the world. Just as significant was the fragmentation of industrial production whereby parts of the manufacturing process could be relocated over vast distances. Sewing in garment and footwear production, for instance, was among the 1.1 Introduction Looking back over the 1970s, it is perhaps hard now to appreciate just how dramatic were the changes to the global map of industry taking place at that time. As more and more of the world's industry shifted from the affluent nations to the poorer, less developed countries in search of a cheaper labour force, the global economic map had to be redrawn to take account of the borders crossed and the distances traversed by firms from wealthier countries seeking to generate higher profits by reloca Next steps After completing this unit you may wish to study another OpenLearn Study Unit or find out more about this topic. Here are some suggestions: 6 Further resources Gilleard and Higgs (2000) more fully develop some of the ideas explored by Giddens (1994) in their useful and comprehensive introduction to post-structural readings of older age. Elder's (1977) life history account offers compelling insights into the intersections of class and gender through a socialist lens, and represents an early and interesting example of the life history and biographical method. Chamberlayne et al. (2000) provide comprehensive and thoughtful insights into biographical me 5 Conclusion As we have seen, pensions are both inherently personal and political. Pensions and other social policies are heavily implicated in shaping the way older people experience their personal lives, and the way in which these personal lives have become constructed as ‘other’. Providing a means by which older lives could be ‘divided up’ and divided out of the domain of paid employment, and reconstituted through the arena of public and private welfare, this process is also informed 4.3 Reconstituting older people's personal lives in uncertain times The multiplicity of different ‘work-endings’ at the close of the twentieth century, combined with the increasing mobilisation of older people through pensioner and ‘third age’ movements, effectively destabilised the institution of retirement and the associated orthodoxy that older age began at the age of 60 or 65 years. However, voices from within the pensioner movement were marginalised in the process of reconstitution that ensued. A neo-liberal redrawing of th 4.2 Moving towards greater equality in older age? Old Labour, pension reform and the continuity of a The mid 1970s heralded a period in which the Labour Government introduced a series of reforms in the pension arena that potentially promised a more secure retirement for older, working-class people. Stripping away some of the patriarchal assumptions that had informed the Beveridgean settlement, the 1975 Social Security Pensions Act promised particular benefits for women and other low-paid workers. For example, the dual aspects of many women's lives – involving both unpaid and paid work – 4.1 Introduction The 1970s marked a period in which the cessation of the ‘normal’ period of full-time employment at 60 or 65 years had become the accepted orthodoxy. The personal lives of older people had thus become constituted outside the domain of paid employment and within the arena of public and private welfare. As we illustrated in the preceding section, pensions, organised around fixed ages of retirement based on chronological measurements of age, played a crucial role in this process. Further 3.3 Beveridge and the move towards a ‘species of universalism’ The 1942 Beveridge Report laid the foundations for the 1946 National Insurance Act and the creation of the welfare state. This represented a central plank of the post Second World War reconstruction. State pensions were viewed as offering a basic minimum income to old people, thereby constituting them as part of the nation's social citizenry. However, cultural and economic imperatives privileging the needs of the young over those of the old meant older people's citizenship rights were in real 3.2 The 1908 Pensions Act and the inter-war years: counting age and discounting older workers The 1908 Pensions Act represented the first time welfare interventions in older age were based on chronological age. It set the pension age at 70 years. Prior to this, although chronological age was often noted in Poor Law records, it did not constitute the basis of eligibility. Rather, age, and older age specifically, was constructed in terms of particular forms of embodiment, with older people being defined as those whose bodies were ‘past’ work, ‘worn out’ by work or 3.1 Introduction In this section we look at the way in which the personal lives of older people have been socially constructed through pensions policies over the last century. As we saw above, welfare policies and changes in employment in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century constructed the personal lives of older people as ‘other’ to the emergent normal of relatively younger, ‘independent’ paid workers. Here, we explore the way pensions policies 2.3 Older lives and elder care homes: care and control The de facto constitution of workhouses as ‘older’ spaces can be viewed as representing a precursor to public elder care homes as these developed later in the twentieth century. Indeed, the numbers of older people in such care homes today remains consistent with the 5 per cent of older people inhabiting workhouses at the end of the nineteenth century (Midwinter, 1997). Constituted as sites of care rather than control, these homes have nonetheless been subject to considerable critical 2.2 Older lives and the shadows of the workhouse: mediating ‘welfare’ through the thre For much of the nineteenth century, the experience of public welfare by older working-class people was mediated through the local administrations of the 1834 New Poor Law Act (a separate Act was introduced in Scotland in 1845) and the deterrent of the workhouse that provided its spine. The Act enshrined a particular set of social relations underpinned by the dominant liberal political ideology of laissez-faire. Predicated on a philosophy of non-state intervention, this ideology advocat 2.1 Introduction In this section, we explore how experiences of being an older person in the nineteenth century were constituted through the operation of the 1834 New Poor Law Act and the processes of industrial change that ran parallel to it. We examine the way this constructed the lives of older people as ‘other’ to the emergent ‘normal’ (adult, relatively youthful, male paid worker) and trace its legacy to reveal points of continuity and change. Ori 1 The experience of‘old age’ I don't think I mind being old, I try very hard to accept that I am old, but what makes it harder is that people think that old age is a write-off … The reason it's brought home to you with such a jolt is because you give up work. You have to give up work – suddenly Next steps After completing this unit you may wish to study another OpenLearn Study Unit or find out more about this topic. Here are some suggestions: If you wish to study formally at The Open University, you may wish to explo 7 Conclusion We have explored nations, national self-determination and secession as living political ideas. Perhaps the key points to emerge from the discussion are that: the nation-state is the basic political community in the contemporary world, despite regional and global challenges; subjective approaches to defining nations, prioritising awareness of belonging to a national group, have advantages over efforts to construct objective definitions
Activity 1
Extract 1 Mrs Pullen
