As part of the Sustaining Time project, Alex Buchanan is organising a public event in Liverpool on the 30th of October that looks at Time in the Archives. What archive resources might be available to research historical understandings and approaches to time? There is a fascinating line-up of presentations including:
Originally published on the Sustaining Time blog, part of an AHRC funded project which asks the question: What would be the time of a sustainable economy? A key question for us since we first started thinking about this project, was not only what is the time of sustainable economies, but how we might find it. How on earth do you actually go about researching people's perceptions of time? As anthropologist Kevin Birth writes eloquently in his paper Finding Time: Studying the Concepts of Time Used in Daily Life: Cultural conceptions of time do not lie by the side of the road waiting for an ethnographer to wander by and pick them up. Indeed, the idea of the naïve fieldworker walking up to some beleaguered informant and asking, “What are your cultural ideas of time?” is amusing in its absurdity. There is something about time that makes it seem extremely important to understanding how people live, yet it seems an intangible concept. It seemed to us that the project provided a great chance to address a series of interesting methodological questions. Work that has come out of the AHRC Connected Communities theme, for example, has raised a number of questions about the ability of established research methods to do justice to the dynamic nature of communities (see particularly McLeod & Thomson 2009; Law 2004; Abbott 2001). They suggest that need to understand communities as being in time, (or even as producers of time), just as much as the more usual focus on communities and space, territory, locality etc. We were also intrigued by the development of methods for researching experiences of space as changing and dynamic, which have been coming out of the mobilities research paradigm (Buscher, Urry, Witchger 2011). What methods might researchers use to study the way time itself can also be changing and dynamic, rather than simply assuming that time provides a taken-for-granted background to everyday life? Since the remit of this project was, above all, to be exploratory, we created a variety of opportunities for us to reflect on methods as the project progressed. We asked for advice from our Project Partners and Advisers and I've summarised their suggestions in the slide below: In some ways the approaches we have been using are perhaps on the more conservative side, in that we are focusing primarily on archival research, participant observation and open-ended focus group interviews. Even so we've been finding that attempting to use these methods to research the slippery subject of time has ended up working back on the methods themselves. You can read about Alex's experiences in the archives here and here, for example, and we'll be adding further reflections as we go along.
But given that we were also aware that there are a wide variety of other methods that have been developed, we were excited to be able to include a Methods Festival for Studying Perceptions of Time, which took place on the 26th of June 2013. Organised by Jen Southern, this event explored the potential of arts, design and technology practices for researching shifting temporal paradigms, as well as a number of different ways that social science methods have been put to use in studying time. The talks from this event are now online and can be accessed here. References Abbott, A. (2001). Time Matters: On Theory and Method. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Birth, K. (2004). "Finding Time: Studying the Concepts of Time Used in Daily life." Field Methods 16(1): 70-84. Bryson, V. (2008). "Time-Use Studies: a potentially feminist tool?" International Journal of Feminist Politics 10(2): 135-153. Büscher, M., J. Urry, et al., Eds. (2010). Mobile Methods. Abingdon, Routledge. Law, J. (2009). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. Abingdon, Routledge. McLeod, J. and R. Thomson (2009). Researching Social Change: Qualitative Approaches. London, SAGE. The write up from the recent Festival of Methods for Studying Perceptions of Time is now available on-line. Get an overview of what we got up to, listen to the presentations and have a look at the resources created on the day. Organised by Jen Southern as part of the Sustaining Time project. Speakers include: Rachel Thomson (Sussex), Martin Green (Lancaster), Alex Buchanan (Liverpool), Helen Holmes (Sheffield), Jennifer Whillans (Manchester), Eric Laurier (Edinburgh), James Ash (Northumbria), Jen Southern (Lancaster) and Chris Speed (Edinburgh). Originally published on the Sustaining Time blog, part of an AHRC funded project which asks the question: What would be the time of a sustainable economy? Written by Alex Buchanan (University of LIverpool) The Sustaining Time project is funded under the AHRC's Care for the Future theme. In keeping with its aim of 'thinking forward through the past', one strand of our project is scoping out the potential of archive resources to provide material for understanding how alternative economic models might challenge dominant approaches to time. The team will be visiting four archives over the course of the project. This post by Alex Buchanan is the second in a series that looks at how we've approached the task of finding time in the archives. My most recent archive visit was to the truly inspiring Working Class Movement Library (WCML) in Salford. The WCML was established as a labour of love by Eddie and Ruth Frow, lifelong members of the Communist Party, who dedicated their leisure time to collecting books, archives and memorabilia recording over 200 years of working class history. When the collection outgrew the Frows’ own house, it was moved to the present location, a Victorian former nurses’ home in Salford Crescent. It has received a number of grants, notably from the Heritage Lottery Fund, to ensure that the collections are catalogued and accessible – an ongoing task managed by both a professional staff and an enthusiastic team of volunteers, of which Ruth Frow was a member until her death in 2008. The enthusiasm of the Frows – and their supporters – for working-class history is in itself reflective of an attitude to time which demands the memorialisation of historical events – and the people involved, whether or not their names survive – in order that they may inform and inspire those who follow in their footsteps. Marx’s work, deeply informed by his understanding of history, ensured that his followers have been equally keen to trace the seeds of historical change, which might document the potential for revolution. Thus the collection in itself is a document of a particular temporal awareness, which is also obviously present within its contents. A single example will suffice: a booklet printed as part of the celebration of the Dorsetshire Labourers’ Centenary in 1934. This event, staged in collaboration with the Trades Union Congress, commemorated the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Dorset farmworkers sentenced to transportation to Australia as convicts for joining together as a union in 1834. The centenary involved a number of activities designed to raise awareness of the historical dimensions of trade unionism, including an elaborate series of tableaux telling the story of events in Tolpuddle. In the words of Labour M.P. Arthur Greenword, quoted in an advertisement for the Co-operative Printing Society Ltd (printers of the leaflet): 'What we as workers have lacked, is tradition, and now we are building it.’ Thanks to the useful catalogue and the knowledgeable guidance of former librarian Alain Kahan (for which I am extremely grateful), I identified a number of other useful resources which will repay further study and a number of record types and historical episodes which we can try to explore in the collections of other repositories. In scoping the ‘Sustaining Time’ project, we identified that useful archive material was likely to be generated as a result of industrial disputes – and this proved very much the case at the WCML. Two particular themes emerged: industrial workers’ concerns about new ‘scientific’ management techniques which involved time and motion studies, and ‘white collar’ unions’ concerns about ‘flexi-time’, that is to say working practices involving changes to working hours. In terms of management, business historians have already identified that in the UK, neither the so-called scientific techniques of the famous Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), nor the production-line management of his fellow American, Henry Ford (1863-1947), were as directly influential as the approach of Charles Bedaux (1886-1944), whose management consultancy business had a branch in London. Much research has been devoted to charting the spread of modern management in the UK and numerous firms, including Vickers Instruments, Rover cars and ICI have been shown to have adopted Bedaux methods. Other firms are known to have overhauled their processes without employing efficiency engineers – the new approach soon became an essential tool of modern management. What is particularly fascinating about the WCML’s collections is that they provide a glimpse into the other side of the picture – the reaction of the workers to these new methods of control, which extended to the imposition of particular bodily actions in order to increase efficiency (and reduce fatigue). In the archive is a file of legal papers drawn up as part of a dispute between members of the Wiredrawers’ Union and Richard Johnson and Nephew, of Bradford, Manchester in the 1930s. These provide an insight into the workers’ objections, which focused in particular on their unease at the use of stopwatches to time workers’ actions. This was felt to be an attack on the industrial expertise and autonomy of the employees, who valued their identity as highly skilled craftsmen. Sadly for them, their long strike did not achieve its aims of rejecting Bedaux, nor were the strikers eventually reinstated – however they received much local and national support and much publicity for their cause. My next archival trip will be to the Modern Records Centre at Warwick University, where I expect to find more information about opposition to the Bedaux system and other worker campaigns over attempts to control their temporal autonomy. Originally published on the Sustaining Time blog, part of an AHRC funded project which asks the question: What would be the time of a sustainable economy? London Permaculture (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) Another organisation I’ve visited recently is Lammas, a planned low-impact eco-village in North Pembrokeshire. I attended the recent Low Impact Experience week run by Hoppi Wimbush and also interviewed some of the villagers and volunteers. There are lots of notes and interview transcripts to go through, but I wanted to share some initial observations about possible links between permaculture and developing a more critical relationship to time. As Chris Warburton-Brown from the Permaculture Association has pointed out, “unlike other finite resources that are in short supply in post-industrial society, most of us in the environmental movement have not yet formulated much response to the shortage of time we often experience”. So one of the questions we wanted to look at in this research project is, if permaculture is a design system for working with finite resources in a sustainable way, how might it help us with our widespread feelings of time pressure? One really interesting issue that came up in conversations about time and permaculture while I was at Lammas related to the idea of zoning. In fact this issue arose as part of a discussion about how permaculture was more obviously about space than about time. That is, seeing permaculture as a way of designing space seemed most obvious and intuitive. Zoning, of course, provides a perfect example of this. This is the technique of locating plants, animals and other features based on how often you interact with them. So trees for coppicing would be planted further away than herbs which might be used daily in cooking. On the other hand, you could also argue that zoning is also a way of designing time. It minimises wasted time, for example, by ensuring that you don’t have to walk right to the back of your garden every time you want a sprig of mint. But more than that, zoning seems to involve judgements about which rhythms you need to be most aware of and which you can pay less attention to. I couldn't help thinking it would be really interesting to explore how these kinds of decisions are made. What kinds of conflicts arise in the process? What happens when a rhythm or cycle that you thought you didn’t need to be so aware of (and so placed further away) actually starts becoming more important? Does explicitly considering the differing cycles involved in your work processes (e.g. once a day for compost or once a decade for coppicing) create a more sophisticated and multi-layered sense of time? How might this kind of decision making process be used in daily life to manage the differing rhythms of work, family, volunteering, friends, leisure etc? I think it’s really intriguing to try to think of clocks as devices for zoning time. That is, they bring some rhythms closer to our daily attention while backgrounding others (see my paper on this [PDF]. My favourite example of this is the way that a clock can generally tell me whether I’m late for the bus, but not whether we are too late to mitigate climate change. One might say that in this case the bus seems to be included in Zone 1 (nearest to 'the house'), while the climate is in Zone 5 (in the ‘wilderness’). This is of course a real problem, so how might we zone time differently if we paid closer attention to permaculture ethics and principles when we designed our clocks? Another issue that we discussed was stacking, where a permaculture designer aims for multiple outputs from a single process or space. So rather than planting an area with only one crop, you layer it with useful ground-cover, shrubs and trees. Again, in a way this seems to be about a more complex approach to space, rather than industrial agriculture where one field = one crop. But might this also work as a method of more sustainable time management? I thought initially that this might mean trying to do multiple things at the same time, although this can often lead to the dreaded stress-inducing need to ‘multitask’. So perhaps it can be more about designing your work so that a single process provides multiple benefits at the same time? Here the more general aim of reducing the amount of labour required to grow food through attentive design (e.g. Fukuoka’s Do-Nothing Farming) is also important. Finally, in the organisations I’ve visited so far, the issue of how to negotiate the way time, money and value have been inter-weaved within capitalist systems is coming up as a central issue (see this previous post). Many people are reducing the time they spent in waged jobs in order to use this ‘free’ time to develop businesses based on non-capitalist models. The impact of opportunity costs, particularly loss of monetary income, are weighed up against increased meaningfulness of their work and knowing that they are contributing to developing more sustainable ways of life. Those making these decisions still have to deal with the weight of others’ expectations and sometimes their own conflicting feelings about their choices. It seemed that the permaculture approach to accepting reductions in outputs from a single source in order to have a net increase in benefits might be an interesting way of thinking through this dilemma. For example rather than maximising wheat production over all else as we see in monoculture farming, a permaculture farm might produce smaller amounts so that other useful crops can be enjoyed as well. In the case of those moving away from maximising income, there seems to be an effort to move towards a more diversified understanding of value creation, where time might sometimes ‘produce’ money, but might also be used to grow free local food, to build community, to enhance one’s skills or just to enjoy life more. Thus reducing the production of one 'crop' in order to enjoy others more. So these are just a few thoughts from the work so far. I’m sure some of them have already been explored in permaculture literatures and practises and so I'd be really grateful comments or recommendations. Originally published on the Sustaining Time blog, part of an AHRC funded project which asks the question: What would be the time of a sustainable economy? Repair Cafe Brussels (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) As well as visiting a number of UK archives, we will also be developing a range of case studies. Over the course of the project I will be visiting organisations who are trying to develop alternative economic models. I’ll be exploring whether this then leads to using, or thinking about, time in different ways. I’ll be visiting about 9 or 10 organisations in total and will be sharing what comes up along the way here on the blog. I visited The Restart Project early last month, my first case study for Sustaining Time. Restart was started by Janet Gunter and Ugo Vallauri in 2012. Their mission is to help grow a more widespread culture of repair. They organise Restart Parties in London twice a month, where people can bring along their broken gadgets and work with the Restart repairers (or Restarters) to try and find a fix. These events encourage more people to think about repair as a possible option for their gadgets, to become better skilled and to also save repairable items from ended up as landfill. They are starting small, but Janet and Ugo have big ambitions for their project. The are creating a world map of similar projects and are hoping to scale up their approach to support a global network of Restarters. They also clearly see themselves as contributing to a different kind of economy - laying the groundwork for the future, which they believe will be much more geared towards maintenance and repair than about continuing to buy more new stuff (see here). Like most (if not all) of the organisations I’m visiting, time is not really an explicit issue in their work. However, weaved throughout their website are quite a few examples where they appear to be challenging dominant temporal paradigms around use and value. I'll be exploring these in a series of posts. The first example of is their interest in questioning the life cycle of electronic goods. Rather than a model where we buy, use and discard, they state that they are seeking to promote “positive behaviour change by encouraging and empowering people to use their electronics longer.” Initially I wondered whether this meant they were interested in supporting a shift to a circular economy rather than a linear one. Arguably this kind of economy would draw on a sense of time which connected up the past and the future, by paying more attention to how things were produced prior to use and what would happen to them afterwards. This idea of the circular economy is explicitly contrasted with a linear model by a range of organisations interested in waste reduction (see here and here). However, when I asked Janet and Ugo about whether they saw themselves and moving towards a more circular or cyclical sense of time in relation to gadgets and repair, they expressed strong reservations. The danger of thinking in terms of the cycle, seems to be that this encourages people to think first about recycling, rather than about the ways their gadgets could continue to be useful now and into the future. Part of the reason they chose Restart for their name, rather than something with recycle in the name for instance, was to pick up on the way that for many electronic items the first solution to a problem is to simply to turn it off and then on again. That is, as Ugo said you “restart it and give it a second life, which didn’t necessarily mean that it had to be taken apart”. For the Restart project, recycling should be an absolute last resort and instead the emphasis is on prolonging your relationship to the gadgets you own. Their critical intervention into the short disposable time of current consumerism is thus not to champion a seemingly more ‘natural’ circularity. At least not a small circle that would move straight from use to recycle. Rather a more sustainable time for electronics comes from expanding the length of time we use our gadgets and prolonging our relationships with them. Recognising the way we have come to perceive something as old or obsolete every couple of years, they challenge the temporal boundaries that constrict ‘usefulness’ to such a short period. For example when people ask them what smartphone they should buy, their answer is “The one you already have. Keep it”. For Ugo and Janet, their ethic of time relates well with the New Materialism proposed by Andrew Simms and Ruth Potts. The second statement in their manifesto, for example, is “Wherever practical and possible develop lasting relationships with things by having and making nothing that is designed to last less than 10 years” (2012, 27 [PDF]). What is really interesting about this is that Restart seem to be suggesting that a particular kind of linear time, which is often thought to be the bane of sustainability, might actually be more suitable than a straightforward shift to a cyclical framework. Originally published on the Sustaining Time blog, part of an AHRC funded project which asks the question: What would be the time of a sustainable economy? The Sustaining Time project is funded under the AHRC's Care for the Future theme. In keeping with its aim of 'thinking forward through the past', one strand of our project will scope out the potential of archive resources to provide material for understanding how alternative economic models might challenge dominant approaches to time. The team will be visiting four archives over the course of the project. This post by Alex Buchanan is the first in a series that looks at how we've approached the task of finding time in the archives. Our first archive visit was to the National Co-operative Archive. This was a great place to start our research, in part because of the way the archivists have helped to make their resources accessible. As I'll explain in this post, the level of detail used in the archive descriptions enabled us easily to identify items which might be of interest and to order them from storage before we arrived. This won't be the case at other archives we visit, so I'm going to use this post to explore how archivists' work can support research, whilst recognizing that such efforts aren't always possible. Since the nature of our research is so specific, i.e. finding out how those experimenting with economic systems might be thinking about time, we will have to put in some additional effort to understanding both the domain and the archives we use in order to get the most out of these resources. There are 6 ways of searching the Co-op archive online, including an image search, which we did not use. In line with most users' preferences, the default option is a simple free text search. We used this to identify the majority of the items we used, by using keywords including: time, hour/s, work, working, clock/s, future, nature, change, evolution, progress, history, environment, flood/s, earthquake/s, disaster/s. However, as our list of search terms suggests, the disadvantage of this method is that even changing the word from singular to plural brings a different list of results, because the search engine simply looks for exact matches anywhere in a description. This creates a number of problems when trying to research time in the archives. A good example was our search for 'clocks'. Anyone looking for clocks may also be interested in watches, but because the word has another, more common meaning this can confuse the results. In our case, all the item descriptions that included the word 'watch' were for images involving onlookers. This means that it is possible that the Co-op archives include information about pocket and wrist watches (these were often retirement gifts for long serving employees in many businesses, for example), but unless the archivist has included the word in the item description it will not be accessible via a keyword search. One of the ways archivists try to deal with this and other problems associated with keyword searching is to 'index' archives - that is to say, to associate the description with a number of 'authority terms' which the cataloguer decides have particular relevance for the unit being described. At the Co-op archive there are indexes for names (of people and organizations), subjects and places. Authority terms are created as a separate exercise and can involve considerable research, to ensure that, for example (and, not, as far as I am aware, featuring in the Co-op Archive), Robert Smith, equestrian, son of Harvey Smith, is not confused with Robert Smith, musician, lead singer in The Cure. When used consistently, indexes can often be the most efficient and effective means of searching - but they are labour intensive to create. Of the three types of index, subject indexes are perhaps the most problematic for archives. From the point of view of an archivist, archives are not in the first instance information resources because - unlike books - this is not the purpose for which most records were created. Most records are created as evidence - to provide a persistent representation of a time-delimited event. Minutes from meetings provide a good example of this. As the influential archival writer Sir Hilary Jenkinson (1882-1961) declared, they 'were not drawn up in the interest of, or for the information, of posterity'. The American archival theorist T.R. Schellenberg modified this perspective, by suggesting that archives have two sets of values: primary values for their creators and secondary values for other users, which come into play in particular when records, created for current purposes, cross the 'archival threshold' and then may be used by a wide variety of users for a wide variety of purposes. Archivists want to open the records in their custody to the widest variety of users and uses. Subject indexing is intended to assist with this but archivists cannot predict all the possible topics future researchers may want to investigate. Trying to represent the subject matter of a document from the perspective of its creator/s follows archival theory's traditional emphasis on provenance (discussed further below) and thus appears theoretically straightforward, although it inevitably involves difficult decisions in practice, as anyone who has ever tried to describe a photograph without knowing what the photographer was trying to capture will recognize. Extending this indexing to include possible research topics is fraught with difficulties and is thus rarely attempted: a more common approach is the 'Subject Guide', whereby an archivist gathers together potential resources for a researcher interested in a particular subject area. However, when embarking on this research, we were aware that the elusive nature of time and temporal awareness was one of the difficulties we would have to overcome (which will be explored in our 'Methods Festival' in June) - there are no useful archive guides on temporal research to assist us. Archivists' descriptions try to represent the context of creation of the records - this is what is known as 'provenance'. Whilst archives can be used to support an almost infinite variety of research topics, which will inevitably change over time, it is generally accepted that our understanding of the people and processes that created the records in the first place are likely to remain relatively constant and that this knowledge is vital for interpreting the records' historical meaning. This means that archivists try to maintain the original order of the records, and list them according to their creators. Thus at the Co-operative Archive, all the records of the Crumpsall Biscuit Works are described as a single group. They are, of course, not all the records created - the vast majority have not survived, but enough remained for us to get a sense of the importance the Co-op movement accorded both to worker welfare and to production efficiency in this model factory. In an archive where descriptions are less full than at the Co-op, the only way we may be able to identify records relevant to our research will be by identifying the types of organizations and the historical circumstances which might produce records of potential interest. Again, by starting with an archive with a very detailed catalogue, we have started to build up a picture of what sorts of series of records are likely to be of particular significance to our research. In a later post, I'll explore how 'Time' is represented in other forms of resource discovery, such as library catalogues. Alex Buchanan Originally published on the Sustaining Time blog, part of an AHRC funded project which asks the question: What would be the time of a sustainable economy? This post is written by Chris Warburton-Brown Chris Warburton-Brown is the Research Coordinator at The Permaculture Association and in this post he explains why Permaculture UK got involved in the Sustaining Time project. Wasting time, spending time, giving you my time, running out of time, investing time, in your own time... all of these common phrases suggest that we see time as a finite, own-able resource like any other. And it would be fair to say that most of us feel that resource is often in short supply in our lives as we try to reconcile the demands of work, family and leisure. But unlike other finite resources that are in short supply in post-industrial society, most of us in the environmental movement have not yet formulated much response to the shortage of time we often experience. This is all the more strange when we realise that our relationship to time as a finite resource is intimately linked to our relationship to other finite resources; oil to fuel rapid transport, electricity to power labour saving (i.e. time saving) domestic devices, farmland or forest lost to build road, rail and airport infrastructure. The slow food movement has made these connections and recognised that locally grown and cooked food made using craftsmen skills outside of the industrial food and transport systems will be slow food. They have set an example for us to follow. All of us with an environmental perspective on the world should be thinking hard about our relationship to time and how we might apply the same principles of conservation, use reduction and alternative approaches that we have come to take for granted with other finite resources. I hope the Sustaining Time project will help us with that thought process. Originally published on the Sustaining Time blog, part of an AHRC funded project which asks the question: What would be the time of a sustainable economy? The Grey Gentlemen from Michael Ende's "Momo", as a grafitti on a wall in Trier. (Sebastian Nebel CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) This project tackles not one, but two amazingly complex issues - time and economies - and so as part of setting up the project I’ve had meetings with each of the advisers and project partners to get a better idea of the kinds of issues they think it would be important for the project to address. It’s been fascinating talking to everybody one-on-one and to start unpacking how we might go about researching the question of time and sustainable economies. A range of themes came up in our discussions, but the most prominent was around the relationship between time, money and value. Arguably one of the key moves made by capitalist economies has been to turn the time of our lives into abstract units of time that can then be sold in exchange for money. One effect of this is that time not spent earning money is devalued. A quick look at the nef report 21 Hours: Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century reveals a wide variety of examples of this, including a critique of the failure to value care work (which is often unpaid or low paid) adequately. So in thinking about what kinds of case studies we want to develop, one key area will be exploring how people are unpicking the relationship between time, value and money and reknitting it in different kinds of ways. People practising voluntary simplicity, for example, will probably have lots of insights into this since the emphasis there is on reducing your need for money as part of valuing time more. Craftspeople, artists and those engaged in self-provisioning work (food-growing and preserving for example) also regularly confront the mismatch between the value and quality of their work, their experience of time and the kinds of monetary returns they can expect. What kinds of practices have people developed to decommodify their labour and to experience their time as intrinsically valuable? Another issue that came up turns our original question on its head. So rather than asking what kind of times are the new economics creating, people were also interested in what kind of time is needed to even engage in trying to do economies differently. There can be a tendency to assume that everyone can be involved in this, but the same kinds of opportunities aren’t available to all. Time poverty and low incomes restrict how people can get involved. So we’re also interested in how the ‘opportune moment’ opens up for people to take the leap into doing things differently. When does this happen? At what stage in people’s lives? And with what support systems in place? Importantly how do people negotiate the kinds of compromises they might be required to make in order to open up time for change, or to keep the new project moving along? More specific issues related to an interest in whether the frameworks already in place around the co-operative and permaculture movements might have anything in particular to tell us about sustainable times. Chris Warburton-Brown, for example, suggested that if time is a resource, and permaculture is about designing more sustainable resource-use, then perhaps those practising it will already have important insights that the project can learn from. He also suggested it would be interesting to explore what kinds of time have already been assumed by the philosophical basis of permaculture. Issues to do with the role of the past and the future were also important. How might the seven principles of the original co-operative founders developed in the 1800s address issues that new co-ops are facing today? More generally, an important question arising from our interest in ‘thinking forward through the past’ will be how can we inherit from past experiments with alternative economies without being overly nostalgic or romantic? Alternatively, if capitalism has been widely characterised as blighted with short-time horizons is it the case that alternative enterprises are developing a more extended sense of past and future? Does the idea of being accountable to the next seven generations, for example, resonate with the people we will be visiting and working with? Finally, our discussions also brought up issues of social and environmental change. Time is important here because our understandings of how change happens and what counts as a change are shaped by our conceptions of time. A linear model of time suggests that change happens when an individual decides the result they want and puts in place the incremental steps needed to achieve that result. A more complex model of time questions our ability to predetermine results in this kind of way. Here in particular Debbie Bird Rose and I talked about the contrasts between an ecological time where very slow processes can be combined with feedback loops and sudden shifts between states, and human (often bureaucratic) accounts of change which depend on ideas of stability and predictability. Might a more sustainable understanding of time respond better to the ‘patchiness of change’ which we see in climate data for example? Molly Scott-Cato also raised the issue of how to combine ideas of dynamic change with a need to be fixed within limits. Within capitalism dynamism is linked with growth, but in the arts, for example, creativity and limits can go hand in hand. An important issue here then is challenging the idea that nature provides a timeless and unchanging backdrop to a progressive and inventive human economy. Suggested case studies to explore this topic include working with communities that are experiencing nature as an active and abrupt force in their lives (e.g. through floods, severe weather etc) and what kinds of mechanisms they are using to deal with this, but particularly exploring whether these experiences are challenging people’s understandings of time. Alex and I are off to the Co-op archives next week to see what we find there so stay tuned! Originally published on the Sustaining Time blog, part of an AHRC funded project which asks the question: What would be the time of a sustainable economy? Written by Alex Buchanan (University of Liverpool) In our previous post, we described some of the changes in the baking industry following the deregulation of bread prices in the UK in 1815. In this post we wanted to outline some of the temporal dimensions specific to baking that have been revealed in our preliminary research: Night-working. Long hours worked at night were the main factor that set baking apart from other crafts. Night working was promoted both by the consumer (wanting to purchase fresh bread before work in the morning) and the supplier (the journeyman working on commission, who needed to buy the amount of flour agreed with the miller or corn factor). The introduction of the free market encouraged longer hours and during the nineteenth century, bakers might have only 4-5 hours sleep each day. Yeast - bread-making was a lengthy process, needing to take into account the cycles of rising and kneading. Until the production of dried yeast, it needed to be nurtured as a living product, in the forms of barm or ferment - which remains true of traditional sourdough bread. In 1859 the aerated bread process, which needed no yeast, was patented by Dr John Daulish, founder of The Aerated Bread Company. This reduced the length of time taken in breadmaking from around 10 hours per loaf to around 2 - but the high costs of the machinery limited its take-up. Perishability - this limited bread production to the locality and required consumers to make regular purchases. In a fascinating article on the Halifax (Canada) baking and confectionary industry, we found a quotation from an 1868 petition by the Journeyman Bakers' Friendly Society "To the Master Bakers of Halifax", which puts the workers' hours of labour into a social and moral context designed to resonate with public opinion on respectability. In a moral and intellectual point of view it is nearly as bad, as we have no time for recreation, no moral improvement; no time to spend in the social or family circle. We have no time for the public meeting, lecture, concert or religious duty; the Sun shines in vain for us, the trees and plants may grow, and the flowers may bloom, but not for us. To us the delights of the country are a sealed book; to prepare for our early toil we have to go to bed, (those that have one), while the rest of the world is awake, and work while the rest of the world asleep, thus reversing the laws of nature. No wonder that some of us have recourse to stimulants in order to give a spur to our overworked and failing nature, and for the time to bury in oblivion our degraded position.' Modern breadmaking methods have reduced the need for night working, by cooling dough down to low temperatures - its fermentation is then halted until it is warmed up again. Modern methods, including par-baking and the use of steam ovens, have even enabled bread to be transferred directly from freezer to oven. The use of frozen dough has allowed for the introduction of on-site baking and the continuous supply of fresh bread in supermarkets etc. The return to artisan baking, however, means that some of the time conflicts experiences by bakers in the 1800s are being re-visited today. We’ll explore this in our next post.
References: Burnett, J., 'The Baking Industry in the Nineteenth Century', Business History, 5/2 (1963), pp.98-108 Collins, E.J.T., 'Food adulteration and food safety in Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries', Food Policy, 18/2 (1993), pp.95-109 Decock, P. and S. Cappelle, 'Bread technology and sourdough technology', Trends in Food Science & Technology, 16/1-3 (2005), pp.113-20 Gourvish, T.R., 'A Note on Bread Prices in London and Glasgow, 1788-1815', The Journal of Economic History, 30/4 (1970), pp.854-60 McKay, I., 'Capital and Labour in the Halifax Baking and Confectionary Industry during the last half of the Nineteenth Century', Labour/Le Travail, 3 (1978), pp.63-108 Ross, A.S.C., 'The Assize of Bread', The Economic History Review, 9/2 (1956), pp.332-42 Stern, W.M., 'The Bread Crisis in Britain, 1795-6', Economica, n.s. 31/122 (1964), pp.168-87 University of Durham, Special Collections and Archives, 'Bread through the Ages', available at http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dul0www3/asc/bread/control1.htm Webb, S. and B., 'The Assize of Bread', The Economic Journal, 14 (1904), pp.196-218 |
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