hello and welcome to this week's edition of CHI the Contemporary History Intervention it's bring
your bike to the video recording week well no not actually but you can understand a good deal of
this week's topic the post industrial society just by looking at my wonderful bike it's a
Brompton bike a folding bike built according to specifications in Britain all Brompton
bikes come from a factory in London it's a bit of an expensive bike but that's the entire idea
industrial production can still survive and thrive in this country if it focuses on high
quality and clever design and if you think that's maybe a bit too much of salesmanship for a history
lecture well wait until I tell you about this week's session our topic was the post-industrial
society we talked about the transformation of the British economy and in other and western
economies in the last third of the 20th century the move to a society where industry has lost
its form of pre-eminence and where service jobs grow and well this bike is a good illustration
of this transformation not least because it puts convenient cliches about British
de-industrialization into perspective no factories didn't just disappear they look different
they focus on high-end products they focus on quality rather than mass production if you look
at the statistics the total value of manufactured products in the uk actually increased between 1970
and 2000 if only slightly the real decline in that period was about jobs Britain lost millions
of industrial jobs over the last third of the 20th century and factories like the Brompton factory
won't bring them back because well this factory for Brompton bikes founded conveniently in 1975
it has some 300 jobs and no that will not make up for the loss of millions of jobs even if we had
dozens of bike factories like Brompton which we don't so my lecture talked about the decline
of industrial jobs the loss of industries former eminence about the loss of charisma the demise of
industrial workers as a political force and my battle plan for the lecture and the session was
that well this lecture maybe sets the stage for a positive counter narrative maybe we shouldn't be
too nostalgic about industry because well services are more attractive in many respects they are less
physically demanding they're better for your health they have lower risk of life-threatening
injuries they don't have the built-in preference for burly males should be nostalgic about jobs
that had silicosis as part of the life risks and where you were basically brought out and ready for
early retirement before your 50th birthday well we read a chapter from Daniel bell's the coming
of post-industrial society of 1975 and that book really has the promise of post-industrial society
written all over it it's optimistic it's about a world new world that is emerging a world of
planning of foresight of knowledge where experts allow for smarter decisions by politicians and
business men well turns out my students were unimpressed by this vision for them service
society means zero hour contracts it means lack of job security means opaque career paths they when
they think about work in the service society they think about ending up with miserably paid desk
jobs that nobody understands including themselves so I tried my best to work against this cliche and
talked about the dirt and the noise on the factory floor I talked about the gender imbalance here I
talked about the possibility of individual agency which you really don't have on the assembly line
I even invoke JK Rowling and football players an example of how the service society allows
some people to rise from modest circumstances to millionaire status and yeah I guess when you
our history tutoring when you start involving JK Rowling and football players yes that means that
you're desperate well my students know that for every best-selling author there are hundreds if
not thousands who don't make it yes some people can make a killing with youtube videos but then
there are others who get stuck with something like 400 viewings yeah that I guess that would be
me too so what was going on here well maybe part of it was the understandable nervousness
of students in their third year these people are now looking at the job market
and that brings the obvious sentiments with it but maybe there was more here maybe there is the
overwhelming mythology of industrial Britain the illusion of social cohesion on the shop
floor the pride in something that you can actually show one student talked about how she struggles to
explain to her parents and grandparents that what she does in history is actually a real
love in spite of the fact she that she does not produce anything that you can actually touch so
the shadow of industrial society is large and well maybe that shadow isn't even about the past
it's about the present too if you look at my bike here that's the one part the mythology of industry
in the land that gave the world the industrial revolution but maybe it's also about the inherent
fuzziness of the post-industrial society it has on the one hand these creative jobs with a great d
degree of independence where you get paid to do things are actually fun and then there are other
miserable jobs and there is a lot in between it lacks the kind of intellectual clarity that the
industrial past had the predefined career paths the jobs that everybody recognizes as I learned
later in the day when I met my project assistant Jennifer and we talked about
the session and it turned out that my project assistant doesn't really understand what my wife
was doing simply for the fact that when I explained what my wife does who works in the
real world well you need more than one sentence to explain it it's not like coal miner or textiles
the traditional jobs so any charm that the service sector may have is tempered by awareness that well
you do not really know where you end up what kind of job you get here and tempered by where
awareness of professional malpractice here again we are working in the shadow of the multiple
financial crisis the financial sector is a classic example for my students for what it means to be
in a service society you can get a high paid job and have zero accountability the finance
industry has brought us to the brink now several times and it's still around and there we can't go
anywhere else when we want to save for retirement that's the service society for them professionals
who are not accountable and make a killing from their money so that's where we are so often in
this module the mess we're in we talk about a past that may be and a future that isn't
all bad but we lack the narratives the clarity the clear vision we realized that a lot of the things
that we have are really complicated and hard to make sense of and well took a long story short I
decided to do something about this my next lecture will offer a vision for the future a vision of how
knowledge use of knowledge use of services use of cutting edge technology no it's not about my back
but about really sophisticated things open a path for students that gives them not just well-paying
job but also a sense of purpose you could argue well maybe that's not your job as a story and
your job as historian is to look at the past and look at the mess and explain why everybody should
have seen this coming but here I think I need to do something for my students you need to give them
a vision for the future that is based on an understanding of where we are and what
we can pull out and if you want to hear that vision well welcome to next week's lecture