Leaving post-industrial urban studies behind? A commentary

Luger and Schwarze's (2024) forum paper provides a welcome invitation to reassess the ongoing value of the post-industrial concept for urban studies. The paper's opening quotation taken from the BBC television crime drama series, Sherwood, holds direct relevance for my own research since it is set in the same former coalfield and textile region I have researched and where I call home. Reading this quote immediately prompted me to reflect on how I have utilised ‘post-industrial’ in my own ethnographic research and whether any of the participants involved would interpret the post-industrial label as anachronizing in a similar way to the quote attributed to the fictional character, Julie Jackson. Luger and Schwarze (2024: 193) state that post-industrial ‘was developed … as a concept to make sense of a historical process of economic readjustment and change’ but that it ‘fails as a conceptual-analytical framework today’ since these changes took place largely in the twentieth century. I have asked myself similar questions on the appropriateness of labelling a locality as post-industrial – or by related terms, such as a ‘former colliery town’ (Pattison, 2022a) – when this characterises them more so according to forms of employment and social organisation rooted in the past, rather than those in the present. But these social and economic changes are enduring processes that can carry effects into the present moment. Traces of the industrial past certainly continued to hold significance for many of my participants in Shirebrook, Derbyshire (Pattison, 2022a, 2022b, 2023) – less than 10 miles from the Nottinghamshire pit village where Sherwood was set. Therefore, I will suggest that there is still a role for careful conceptualisation which recognises the ongoing significance of industrial change in particular urban contexts. In relation to the lasting utility of post-industrialism this leads me to two arguments: 1. The need for a careful conceptualisation of post-industrial and the distinctions between related concepts if they are to be of use; and 2. What we take to be our objects of study bears significance. In other words, where we look and which voices we listen to matters, in particular, if we are to attend to the critiques of post-industrialism in relation to gender and race, and other broader structuring forces.

Luger and Schwarze draw primarily on Bell's (1973) pioneering work on post-industrial society and other key works that follow. However, there are key arguments that we could take from deindustrialisation studies that could offer some further conceptual refinement. In their review article on the sociology of deindustrialisation, Strangleman and Rhodes (2014) point to the definitional difficulties created by the often-interchangeable use of post-industrial and deindustrialisation in academic literature – a charge I am also guilty of. While post-industrial marks a discrete event associated with a changing labour market structure primarily in the US and Europe, moving broadly from heavy industrial Fordist occupations to a service economy; deindustrialisation points more towards these changes as an ongoing process that stretches well into the twenty-first century. A number of theoretical ideas have emerged from deindustrialisation studies to make sense of the way industrial legacies continue to shape social life in the present. For example, Alice Mah's (2012) idea of ‘industrial ruination’ and Sherry Lee Linkon's (2018) ‘half-life of deindustrialisation’ both describe how the effects of industrial change can be marked in the urban environment, internalised and transmitted into subsequent generations. This conceptual distinction between post-industrial and deindustrialisation is illustrated in Luger and Schwarze's paper. For example, the arguments that ‘residents continue to strongly identify with, and feel pride for, their communities despite industrial and economic decline’, and that ‘local identities continue to be formed around nostalgia with deindustrialised communities’ (2024: 10). This does problematise the idea of being post-industrial without necessarily dismissing the idea completely since there is a recognition of the structuring presence of industrial legacies. It is important that this ongoing process is adequately conceptualised, in which case it would perhaps be more appropriate to ask if deindustrialisation is still taking place rather than ‘did de-industrialisation really ever take place’ in the first instance (2024: 189).

The term post-industrial can still serve a purpose in marking the impact of a changed labour market structure and signifying the presence of industrial legacies within particular urban contexts without necessarily analysing these processes directly. This was the purpose with which I have, imperfectly, deployed the term ‘post-industrial’ in my own research. The intention was to signal contextual information that the research site I studied was still contending with the fallout of industrial change, and that the industrial legacies were meaningful to many residents, but without directly studying deindustrialisation as a process. Additionally, the intention was that the use of ‘post-industrial’ would indicate some of the labour market characteristics associated with post-industrialism that are overlooked in Bell's (1973) conceptualisation. Principally, this is not just about a shift from manufacturing to a service economy, but also includes the relationship between industrial decline and the growth of low-skilled, low-autonomy and insecure forms of labour.

This relationship was identified in sociology long ago (see for example, Pahl, 1984), and has continued into more recent work, such as Guy Standing's (2011) Precariat. Standing illustrates how the restructuring of the labour market is also connected to the loss of the ‘labour-related security … that social democrats, labour parties and trade unions pursued as their “industrial citizenship” agenda’ which formed part of the post-war social settlement developed in the US and widely across Europe (2011: 16–17). These forms of security include full employment, secure contracts, income security through wages, social security and redistribution, and trade union representation. This indicates that the post-industrial does not just signal a shift from manufacturing to servicing, but also says something about the security and quality of the work available. However, this requires caution. What Standing does not account for is that the industrial citizenship agenda is a racialised contract between white labour and capital that relied upon imperial relations and the exploitation of racialised Others. The rolling back of the welfare settlement represents not just a loss of economic, political and symbolic security, but also the loss the ‘wages of whiteness’ and the racial advantage the welfare settlement once afforded (Du Bois, 1935). It is in this context that we must understand contemporary anxieties about ‘left behind’ white working-class men and their weaponisation in the interest of nationalist-populist politics. Any analysis of post-industrialism and its spatial manifestations must recognise that deindustrialisation, like industrialisation, is entangled with imperial relations and so must be understood through the lens of race, as well as class.

Nevertheless, the point remains that the post-industrial concept does not just signal a shift from manufacturing to servicing, but also says something about the security and quality of the work available. This is why I would argue that the ubiquitous Amazon-fulfilment warehouses (p. 8), renowned for their precarious working conditions (Delfanti, 2021) – or in the case of my research, the main distribution warehouse of sportswear retailer Sports Direct – are distinctly post-industrial rather than a new form of industrial production. Similarly, the dramatic growth in the number of primarily self-employed tradespeople, such as plumbers, electricians, and joiners (p. 14) coincide with the shift to flexible regimes of accumulation since the 1970s (Hamnet, 2024) and so are more representative of post-industrial labour markets than traditional industrial occupations. So, while I agree with the statement that ‘urban industrialisation is … planetary (and therefore, always-ongoing’ and that industries are more likely to move elsewhere than to end, rendering the idea of a broadly post-industrial society as problematic (Luger and Schwarze, 2024: 190), these global processes manifest in specific ways in specific urban contexts. For example, the growth in low-waged insecure work in former industrial areas of the UK, illustrated in my own work (Pattison, 2022b). Therefore, I think it is still possible to talk about an urban locale as being characteristically post-industrial.

This brings me to my second main point on what we take for our empirical cases. My previous research focused on a small deindustrialising coal mining town; a distinct socio-spatial formation. While recognising the heterogeneity of coalfields, they are often mono-industrial, developed around the colliery which reconciles strong forms of social solidarity mediated by its institutions, such as the trade union and welfare institute, and away from larger urban centres typically associated with industrialisation. The hollowing out of this type of industry and associated social organisation so embedded in the community, and its replacement with an archetypal model of precarious work through which capital flows without adding value to the local economy let alone its social institutions, is distinctly post-industrial. However, as we move spatial scale and focus on larger urban conurbations and cities with more diverse economies and different patterns of development and recovery, such as Newcastle, Glasgow and Detroit mentioned by Luger and Schwarze, then the post-industrial label does arguably have dwindling explanatory power.

One of the most troubling problems with the post-industrial picked up by Luger and Scwarze, and already touched upon, is its role in signifying ‘left behind’ white working-class men, and the weaponisation of this in nationalist-populist politics. In the UK, the imagined spatial manifestation of the ‘left behind’ is its peripheral deindustrialising towns, predominantly in the English North and Midlands. The problem here does not necessarily stem from the post-industrial concept but whose accounts are prioritised in relation to it. The study of deindustrialisation has arguably contributed to the whitening of the working-class by focusing largely on white male workers. However, Matera et al., (2023) demonstrate that by looking beyond the typical ‘left behind’ towns and towards the inner-city reveals different accounts of deindustrialisation impacting women and racialised minorities at least as much as white men. Additionally, if, as I have argued, precarity is part and parcel of post-industrialism, then this is a condition shared by racialised minorities and migrants, and not solely experienced by a working-class racialised as white. For example, workers at the distribution warehouse my research centred on were predominantly Eastern European migrants, with migrants in general disproportionately engaged in this type of work. Not only that, if we consider post-industrialism in relation to the reduction in the ‘wages of whiteness’, then ‘left behind’ working-class men are actually being exposed to the same precarious conditions that racialised people have always faced. My point being that the shortcoming here is not necessarily with the post-industrial concept itself, but how it is applied.