CASS Seminar #2 - M.E.Dincer, "Re-Industrialization in the US"

Please join us for the second Critical Approaches in Social Sciences seminar of the Spring semester

on

March 16, Thursday

2-4 pm

at

FEAS 345

for

"Re-Industrialization in the U.S.: An Ethnography of the Auto Industry in Buffalo"

a paper by

Mehmet Evren Dinçer

Assistant Professor of Sociology, Uludağ University

Paper abstract

The 2008 economic crisis (Great Recession) marks a major turning point for manufacturing in the U.S. This talk, based on two-years of ethnographic research in an auto engine assembly plant outside of Buffalo, New York, focuses on the auto industry to reveal its emergent characteristics. The choosing of the auto industry is intentional because it was not only deeply affected by the recession, which ultimately required a federal bailout by the U.S. and Canadian governments. It has also undergone a major and sudden transformation following the bailout. This transformation manifested itself on the shop floor in two key ways: i) deepening the divide among workers, and ii) entailing massive technological reorganization upon the plants. Deepening splits on the shop floor was accomplished through creation of a “two-tier system” as it is commonly known in the industry which divided unionized workplaces into lower and higher tiers along generational lines. Technological reorganization, which was a more nuanced process, was maintained through implementation of a simultaneous and seemingly contradictory processes of automation and manualization. These conditions facilitated by the bailout in the immediate aftermath of the crisis along with the responses to them on the shop floor and in the formerly de-industrialized regions of the U.S. (the Rust Belt) are of critical importance to understand the dynamics of this novel process, which I call the re-industrialization of the U.S.