The Politics of Morales

T h i s a rt. ic .:le i n vestigates the complexity of eth n i c.:ity in modern society. It is based on an ethnological liold work at c.:ar i ndustries in Europe and explores tho way ethn ic groups nrc sorted on a growing cultural l abour m arket , representinga va ry i ng set of' p ro li tablo mora los. E a rl ier, anthropologists were mainly interost. erl in t h e gene ral lcatures o f'cthn ic groups, i .e . l(n·mal c.:onstruc.:L ion of'commun i c.:at ion , la nguage , r i tuals a nd religious confessi o n , i nstead o f' thei r i nternal dynam i cs. The general tendency became focus i n g on the deviation from a n ational majority. The i m pac.:L ol' geography was profound i n anthropologists' thinking. This paper suggest oth e r i nterpretations, based on re-estab l i sh i n g o l' the ideas of' classes. A depa rture l'rom cthnicity w i ll make it eas i e r to give a voice to the minorit ies a nd to unveil the technologies of representation.

A 35-day conflict at FIAT in Turin in 1980, involving 114,000 unskilled workers on the fac tory floor, gave rise to several sociological stud ies. The strike was an event that occurred for no ostensible reason in the middle of a process of humanization and socio-technology. In keeping with the special workers' culture at FIAT, 70-85 per cent ofthe workers were members of the Italian Communist Party, PCI. During the strike, however, the party went against its militant members and fo rced them to surren der, in a spirit of agreement with the fo remen and their union organization. Under the sur fa ce one could see a pattern emerging. The fo remen and white-collar workers were out to gain respect as stable Italian citizens and want ed to prevent the social and economic ruin of the factory, a value which the Communist Party also seized on. Conversely, the ethnically mixed workforce on the fa ctory floor was considered a downright danger to society (Bonazzi 1984). This might be noticed as confirming the strength of a non changing structure in the industrial ized countries of Europe -ethnicity as a threat. The situation at FIAT contains elements which have changed dramatically over some few years. Many signs fr om today's work life realities give rise to questions about culture as the primary tool of organizing differences.

Loyalty to the company
In the autumn of 1990 I began to fo rm ideas about a research project on European motor companies which would study expectations about good morale, about the willingness to show loyalty to the company; these expecta tions directed at the employees had become increasingly common in large-scale industry. Later on I have done fieldworks at e.g. Ford in Dagenham, East London, S koda in Miada Bole slav and Vo lvo in Gothenburg.
At this time the effects of the industrial recession began to appear clearly. Both capital and production were exported to fo reign coun tries, which increased the uncertainty.
In that situation a debate flared in the media about the Swedish wage-earners concerning work morales. The wages and social benefits of the growth period during the 1950s and 60s could no longer be justified, especially not in a phase of economic decline. The strong society showed up its weak inhabitants, relying on fu ll employment and fu nctioning social security systems. The debate about sickness absence in the companies concentrated on dishonest claims of sickness benefit and turned into a campaign to get employees to show loyalty. If the country was to survive as an industrial nation, every-one had to st a nd up and be cou n ted, even immigran ts .

Eihnicity
Many years carl ier during tho early l 970s while Eu rope sti ll s u ffered !'rom armament and a balance of' power J ca rri ed out field studies of th o traditio na l buildingcu lturo among the peas ants in northeastern Poland. There was a pro nounced separa tio n of' ethnic groups and closed boundaries between the villages. It was also a multicultural combination of' dillerent lan gu ages and religions, stretching fr om the cath olic church to old-confessional Russians and the Arabic used by Muslims in their wooden mosq uos. The landscape with its ethnic villages worked as an open textbook fo r those who were interested in cultur·a l difl' erentiati on. Many of those villages showed the evidence of a fo lkso ciety concept, coined by Robert Redfield in 1940, they were "small, isolated, non-literate, and homog-eneous, with a strong sense of group solidarity" (Redfield l 940, l 94 7, Hultkrantz 1960: 142). Their technology was simple and with a shared production activity, aiming for economic independence.
Things were very different later when I in vestigated the multicultural body of immigrant labour at Vo lvo Motor Company in Gothenburg. Folksocieties still worked in the shop and struc tured social life, specially when some Greek and Turkish workers reorganized a "village" struc ture for their own satisfaction and defence. Members were ranked according to seniority principles and the informal leadership was com monly held by an "old-man". A shared past was the ruling principle behind their performance of cultural Otherness, which occasionally pro vided them with exaggerated means when there was a threat coming fr om the outside. Their hidden cottages and provisional living rooms behind the assembly lines, decorated with eth nic symbols and signs, were prohibited by the officials, still designed as home territories. They served the goal of preservation and fu nctioned as ethnic domains in the shop.
Origins, and those promised lands invented during breaks, represented a significant demand for historic territories. You were identified by 18 your origin. Sometimes tho decisive steps to the plant put an end to real lifi> . Like a f'rozon film sequence, your personal self in the fa ctory was neither moving nor being updated anymore. Somewhere you were still a fa rmer in northern Finland and the daily talking produced a com pound body of imaginary homes. The lif'o-as-a journey fo rmula served a structure when t rying to operate in a universe of opportunities; the impact of travelling between past and present was highly imaginative. The plant was a wait ing time ior transfer to another destin�:�tion.
Imagined homes might be seen as the cui tur al consequence ofthe labour policies duri n g the post war period. A sudden turning-point in European immigration policy came in ] 97:.1/7 4 when West Germany and France imposed re strictions on immigration (Castles & Kosack l 973). There was already a tradition of political U berfremdung rooted in several Western Euro pean countries. A contributory fa ctor was the oil crisis of 1973-75 and the stagnation period which reduced the demand for labour. Mean while, it was important to find possibilities to get rid of the manpower that was no longer needed, and varying strategies were discussed for exporting unemployment back to the immi grants' home countries. The 70s meant that xenophobia took on a new legitimacy. There were national offensives against minorities as second-class citizens, slum-dwellers, and social outcasts. A common opinion was that the decay of the cities was due to fo reign groups having taken over whole areas; by prohibiting them fr om settling there it would be possible to start reconstructing those areas (Castles 1984). Af ter the UN General Assembly adopted a decla ration "on the rights of persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious or linguistic minor ities" in 1978, there was a balanced political interest of human rights for the ethnic minori ties. The European countries now completed a basic political view which involved using the immigrants as an economic buffer during fluc tuations in the trade cycle, and exporting un employment.
Xenophobia took on a more civilized face during the 80s. In several European motor com panies the job descriptions were redefined. Sev eral unskilled job positions became "qualified" without any technical re;.tson in the sense that only member:-; oft. he national culture could hold them. The socio-technical progra mmes which began at the Volvo plant in Ka lmar in 1974 (Agurcn 1976) had already become an impor tant experience, and now sci !�governing groups andjob rotation were fu ndamental principles in all personnel pol icy. Those ideas of"Lean Pro duction", o riginally compiled from Japanese sources with Toyota in the fr ontline, were im plemented in a spirit of consensus. The union organ izations in Sweden were not as antagon is tic as they had been at l{enault or British Ley land; they collaborated in a corporate-control led humnni zation of produ ction . The new inter est in people encouraged the social design of corporate cul tures, fo llowin g a stereotype view on the Japanese example (Dassbach 1993/94).
A recurrent pattern was the new social pl an ning. It was accompanied by an increasing interest in forms of work which corresponded to people's need for stimulation and creativity. At this time during the 1980s tho eH"ccts of the recession began to appear clearly. They were fo llowed by unrest on the labour market, with reduced investments and higher unemployment.
There was a common return to standards going on in society with attacks on the liberals in the European countries who worked for social rights for minorities. "Ethnic conflicts" boiling all over the Balkans, Central Europe and the fo rmer Soviet Union contributed to a predomi nantly negative view on minority issues in news media: "Indeed, the Yu goslav tragedy provides excellent arguments for anyone seeking to bury the whole issue of minority rights" (Mortimer 1992). The New Rights movement in the USA criticized the radicals for their proposals to teach the literatures of racial and ethnic minorities. Such efforts were undermining the patriotic agenda (Denzin 1991:6). Hard work and fa mily once again became central cultural values. The house wife was defined as the moral centre in most European societies, abortion was a crime against nature. The social security system was attacked, it undermined self-confidence among the working poor people. The duties of the ordi nary man who worked hard to support his fam ily was contrasted to the rising unemployment figures among ethnic groups who did not want to work and make plans lor thei r lives.
An aggravatingcircumo;iance wa:-; uncerta in ty about the place of work in the social construc tion of the fa mily and the home. When o;een in th ai light, it was obvious th at some groups were hit harder than others . They included the im migrants; the conception of immigrants was thai they did not share a n ational work morale, defined by the majority. Since they did not belong to the national myth, no one could praise them lor their concern for the core activitieo;. Natu rally, they became ihe iarget ofoiher polit ical forces, and the xenophobia that lurked under the surface; this was not always visible but it was all the more effective outside the official programmes. There was a desire to expose groups who sponged on welfare.
In the leading industrial nations a variety of conservative movements arose during the 1 980s, all with the common fe ature that they were searching for historical models, which gave rise to ideas in which the very sense of affiliation was a cornerstone. Now it was possible for a top manager to tell the reporter fr om The Financial Times: "I am a German in the ethnic sense". 1 Tn the new situation ethnicity became a moral issue, a problem of showing loyalty to one's origin. Emerging fr om the flavour of "being ethnic" there was a boundary created between the social use of"ethnicity" among the people in charge, mostly industrial leaders, politicians or officials at high levels, and the traditional Oth erness of lower class migrants, reflecting a compound citizenship mystique in society.2 A strong movement of cultural nostalgia developed in the industrialized countries and worked the same way as we earlier understood ethnicity, as a search for cultural authenticity. Ethnicity did not mean the same thing any longer, specially when the "aura" of progress turned into nostalgia in the 1980s. There was a widespread searching for authenticity and roots, representing dreams of being that was opposed to technology and the production of dead mat ters. This is what Jean Baudrillard (1983, 1988: 16, Denzin 1991 suggests when he is look ing for the concept of hyper-reality -reality is that which is already reproduced. Even minor changes contributed to a common pattern of restoration of fu ndamental values, customs, beliefs and the traditiomtl legit imacy that they carr i ed with them. These were th e fc" t u reH of' <.t poHt mode rn cul t ure . '!' h ey were all re p rese n t a t i o ns of the rea l, co m p r i si n g p rofound imag·in"tions of' Hoci ety co m b i n ed w ith a n ostn lgic, co n se rvati ve lo n gi n g for the past co upled w i th an erasu re of' th e bounduries between pust and present; un inten:;c preoccupation with th e real an d its represe n tati on s ; " po rnogru p h y of th e visible; the commod i fi cution of sexuul i ty a nd d es i re; a con s u m er culture which o bj ecti ves a set of'mus cu I i ne culture id eals ; i nte nse e m otional experi ences sh aped by anxiety, alienution, and de tachment fr om others ( Den z i n 1 991).

"Lost Working Days" in the interna tional imagination
Ethnicity -and cultural nationalism-might be conce i v ed as an identity mysti q u e which has become increasingly attractive for modern peo ple. H represents a false historical conscience and ethnic stereotypes, wh ich become an un verifi able experience originating fr om an ima gined history (Niedermiiller 1994). It has ac quired importance in the political discussion about economic flows which dominates today's discourse and which is fr equent in the debate about the European Union. Most company lead ers in Sweden are convinced that Germans are hard-working and that they keep their agree ments. The conception of their national charac ter thus has an economic value. To put it blunt ly, you can rely on them and you can be sure that invested capital will bring returns. We must seriously begin to study the economic fa ctors which have acquired such an enormous signif icance in the shaping of the new Europe and the relations between states. Economic problems have increasingly become objects of cultural judgement, and vice versa. Ethnicity and mul ticulturality have extended to more important issues of fo reign policy fo rmation than only some decades ago. Roland Robertson, Professor of Sociology in Pittsburgh says, that "it is be coming more and more apparent that no matter how much the issue of'naked' self-interest may enter into the interactions of nations there are still crucial issues of basically cultural nature 20 which structu re and shape most reluiions, f'rom ihe hosti l e io ihe f' riendly, betwee n n ation ally organized societies" ( 1984:4).
These issues are empiri cally inte rtw i ned with central themes in modernity and posimoderni ty. li is obvious thai national seJJ�interesis cre ated an atmosphere in which cu ltural differenc es determined ihe ione ofihe dialogue. The tone invoked national moods; modernity exposed it self through religious-like confessions of facts where economy and culture combined, and the aura of maiier-of�factness was inviol able." What we now see emerging are world wide cultural, ethnic, and political patterns based on mapping of"ihe Other". Comprehensive stu tis tics on living conditions which we now have fr om Europe, illustrate the differences rather than the similarities between national iiies. Sta tistics on lost working time because of industri al conflicts in different national settings reveal great differences. The data can of course be used for many different purposes. The most obvious is for long-term indus trial planning in tended to avoid the worst labour. Stoppages and wildcat strikes were much more common in Greece and Spain in the early 1990s, while in Britain they showed a noticeable reduction (EC Rapid Re ports:Population and Social Conditions l 993:2). Statistics on stoppages are a way of organizing differences based on the loyalty to the company which varying nationalities display.

Towards a cultural labour market
Peoples and nations nowadays are increasingly being valued in a cultural investment strategy. Some views suggest that certain groups have a higher work morale than others and that they are better at doing certain jobs because they have a more stable kinship system, a better religion, and more favourable ideas about the value of work. These notions are not particular ly new in our society. In Sweden in the past we had the falling scale fr om Walloons, Germans, and Poles, to Galicians, and similar ideas are still used to evaluate cultural minorities with regard to their capability in working life. What is new is the scope and capacity of the cultural labour market of the 1990s.
A typical out-fit of today's working condi-tions ai I :J rg·e scale incl usirial plunis is ihut employees ure noi pri marily val ued fiJr iheir ability to ca rry out pa rticu lar iasks, but fo r their wi ll ingne::;::; io acce pt a corporate -conirol led ideology. A�:; Weber pre:;umnbly more ihan anyone else emphasized , the I ndusirial revolu tion embod ied and reinforced certa in distinc tive values relating to work. Since the ea rly phases of industrial ism there has been ideas of workers' willingness to sh ow loyalty and the employer::; were implanting an appropriate work ethic and th e acceptance ofih ese v::�lues. Wo rk was given meanings by do m in ant groups in the society which served the interests of the power ful (Brown 1984: 133). Th e new element during 1990s is rather the way these expectation::; concerning work ethics have grown stronger in pace with the deepening oft he industrial crisis. "Showing l oyalty" to one's company and leaders has taken on an increased importance in the motor industry in Europe. This might be the result of the influence of the Japanese -where loyalty to company and fe llow workers is seen as equivalent to loyalty to th e fa mily (Dassbach 1993/94:1 9). We see how the cultural design of loyalty fo llows the nostalgic picture of the res toration of national values, core activities, and post-industrialism. In many versions of post industrial theory there is much greater empha sis placed on the control and expansion oflmowl edge than on the control and expansion of pro duction for an understanding offuture develop ments (Brown 1984: 132). As a consequence, there are reasons to consider more radical fo rms of industrial management based on controlled experiences, and demands for unwavering loy alty on the part of the employees. In this new situation, a spectre fr om Europe an history is being reawakened. Those who are not considered to belong to the industrial tradi tion and who do not share the social rights of the majority population tend to be placed in a spe cial labour market for the most vulnerable and hazardous jobs. There thus arises a social order based on elitism, which means that people are valued differently, not just materially and eco nomically, but also in purely physical terms. If cultural differences of the work fo rce will func tion as the sorting principle behind the recruit ment of workers on a fr ee European labour market in the fu ture, cu ltural stereotype�:; and expected moral qualities will divide the appli cant::; inio new categories. Ln a recently pub li::;hed ::;tudy on uihnic differentiation of labour at Vo lvo, Cnrl-Ul ri k Schieru p says, th a t the on go ing efforts of sorting people into ethnic catego ries i;; a th reat towards harmony in soci ety (1994:1 0). My fi eldwork has gi ven me some insight i n to conceivable fu ture scenarios which point unambiguously towards totalitarian fo rms of industrialism. Jn comparison with the con viction of the social ;;ciences in the 1960s, th::�t the dem ocratization of working life was tho ultimate goal of the massive research eflcJrts, the tasks of today's research ers are more seri ous: it is a matter of defending human dignity.

Cultural melancholia
World cultures today are highly complex. In trinsic order is directed against what is called depravation among the workers. On the other hand a new kind of ethnic style -emerging fr om moden1 symbols and mass culture, interwoven and mediated by media -is often used by labou r groups in order to visualize their Otherness. We may learn fr om the strike at FIAT in 1980 that the ethnic compound of unskilled workers was considered a danger to the nation and implicat ed social instability. The ideology of progress fu sed with ethnicity as a negative premise. Customs, traditions, beliefs which constituted ethnic behaviour challenged the modern, im personal fu nctions of industrial corporate work places.
Ethnicity has been conceived as a reproduc tion of moral communities in exile, related to a dislocation of profound values (Ringer & Law less 1989). The members of such a group fe el themselves, or are thought to be, bound togeth er by common ties of race, or nationality, or culture. Some culturalist interpretations sug gest that ethnicity may be used for a number of purposes, sometimes as an overt political in strument (Cashmore 1984, Guideri & Pellizzi 1988. A common view is that "ethnic bound aries provide a standard for viewing the self as a member of a moral community" (O'Sullivan See & Wilson 1988:227). A profound idea of territorial dislocation made it easier to under-c;;timat c et hnic ident ity at c�ulicr phases of industriali1.ation and ove rloo k the emergence of c ultu r al sclf-awarcncs:;. Anthropologist:;' w ritings al:;o conli rmed Llwt cultural dell exion must be located and mcaRurcd and thai tho impact of ti m e and Rpacc in t heir an alys is generally positio ned these groups to certa i n slum areas in the cii ic;; or the outskiri;; o f t h e in du::;iria lly developed cen tre::; in E urope. A clo:;e look at the idea:; behind will challenge thai view. The rca::;on i::; thai cultural reproduc tion of' the pa::;i hus become one of the most widespread ideas of the l 990s. A depa rt ure fr om the concept will make it easier io lind other modes of interpretation which would give a voice to the "sile nced" minorities and unmask the technologies of representation.
The society of the 1990s contains desires of origins and u n iquen ess thai national majorities share with ethnic minorities, possessed with simi lar cultural extraction s of th e past. Chal lenge and desire are not only deeply rooted in today's world, they arc also fu ndameniing prin ciples behind th e fo rmation of"Ncw Ethnicities" (Hal1 1991), like cultural nationalism. Seeking one's identity through seductive journeys in the imagined landscapes of the past is a challenge one can avoid, or respond to, but desire takes the individuals beyond all contracts, beyond the ideas of cultural harmony and social equality (Baudrillard 1988:58). The connection of lived experiences with cultural texts that organize and represent their lives in them is a common trait -based on the voyeur's dangers and bene fits. Desires are nomadic. They can be fr ozen like a film sequence, territorialized and invest ed in cultural meaning. They can be coded in an infinite number of ways, but in practice they are always coded in some way (McLaren 1992:27).

A departure fr om ethnicity
Ethnicity has more to say about lived experi ences than places. In a guiding study for the understanding of modern ethnic processes, Bea triz Lindqvist claims that it is consequently the individual's understanding of the situation which is essential. There is always a conflict between collective consciousness and individu al experience, cultural change is not only the res ult of outer i nfl u en ces, it also depends on an ongoing process within the cult ure (Li n d qvist 1991:27). This may serve as a re minder of cultural forces in the modern society where the politics of morales arc put lorward in both collective and individual terms, which partly re flects tho classical division between objective and individual ethics made by Emile Durkheim as early as 1894-95 in his courses on Ethics (Alpert 1939:67). The classical approach , how ever, was categorically loaded with historical and geographi cal notes on deviation. Now the most fi·equently used elements could be exam ined in other settings -they have names such as imagined homes and moral communities, dislo cation of feelings, absent fri ends and a compel ling sensation of exile. Even if we let these elements separate because th ey arc not repre sentative for ethnic behaviour only, there will be a core of morales left. Postindustrial society reduced ethnicity to culturally defined team spirits. That might be one of many reasons behind a sudden input at Vo lvo Motor Compa ny. Traditional religiosity had virtually disap peared when the company recently appointed a Lutheran company priest on a trial basis, rep resenting the Church of Sweden.
The information of the postmodern society has shifted fr om print to video, fr om texts to pictures. Communications and information tech nologies participate in a major representation of society and a collapse of spatial distances. The essential postmodern scene can be fo und in the images and meanings that flow fr om media, film and TV where man enters a landscape of dreams. The concept ofDesignedEthnicity might be useful here when attempting to deconstruct Otherness and understand the emergence of singular cultural movements (Arvastson 1992). A designed ethnicity mirrors both challenge and desire, it might be regarded as a form of constructed Otherness which introduces a new genre of discourse, a personal mystery compiled fr om the media-flow of cultural imaginations. For the reason that ethnicities always are con structed in some way, it is possible to use the concept in order to apprehend a common life construct among car workers; the human body passes through inner landscapes of past and fu ture, where the present, the "world of work" (Dassbach 9:3/94 ) has nothing to add more than an accidental stop alonl-{ the road.

Developing cultural studies
Some comments on the objectives fo r fu rther investigations will fi nal i se the discussion; th ere must be something behind the sparkling d iffer ences between people in the street, their face�;, clothes and signs. D uring my fidel work at Ford Motor Compa ny in East Lon don som eth ing essential had chanl-{ed . Tho owner of' Shahi Halal talte away restaurant in Beth nal Green told me he was poor, he would never make the trip to Pakistan any more. In the old days his take away restaurant was running fai rly well.
The relatively stable British working class in Bethnal Green described in the writings of Michael Young and Peter Wi llmott (1959) dur ing the 50s had disappeared. Almost fifty per cent ofthe settlers were non-white inhabitants. Rapidly the borough had changed, fr om a tradi tional working-class area to a multicultural compound of West Indians, Afri cans, Indians, Pakistani, Chinese and Asians. According to 1991 Census Bangladeshi held the majority.4 Class and culture were melting together, the outlook of bodies, playing with origins, compet ed with cultural boredom and melancholy.
Multiculture itself need not imply harmony or absence of repression. The real challenge is to find the invisible connections between now and then -and not to be trapped by limitless com munication of symbols, or the exhibitionism of Otherness. Culture might override the impact of class only because of anthropologists' as sumptions of univalent communication. There are, however, strategies under the surface of "ethnic realities" to be detected, and layers of political resistance embedded. The strategies are bent on class actions, searching for a greater autonomy and control of one's own destiny, rather than the endless communication of Oth erness in an imagined landscape of cultural equivalence. Ethnic strategies are defensive against the repressive fe atures of industrial society, primarily against the fo rces of suppres sion and cultural disfranchisement. In many cases, these strategies are transforming cultur al singularity into political aspirations.
For the moment a nth ropol ogi sts have lost their course. Thoro is a need to tu rn away f'ro m the main streams of communicative interpreta tions ofcu ltural deviation, w hilo developing lan guages fo r new fo rms of representations based on Otherness as a dimension ofhuman thought, as a move for human freedom and dignity.