Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on February 13, 2009
Enterprise and Society 2009 10(3):498-528; doi:10.1093/es/khp004
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The Workplace and Economic Crisis: Canadian Textile Firms, 1929–1935
ROBERT LEWIS is professor of geography at the University of Toronto
Contact information: Geography Department, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3G3, Canada. E-mail: lewis{at}geog.utoronto.ca.
The devastating conditions of the Great Depression forced manufacturers to rethink their approach to workplace control, economic policy, and production practices. Although we know a great deal about how industries responded to the depression, we know very little about the changes implemented by firms. This is unfortunate as firms in the same industry face quite different problems, possess dissimilar work cultures, construct an array of production formats, and have access to a range of financial resources. Based on a literature that documents the variety of strategies devised by industries and firms, this paper shows how four Canadian textile firms—two cotton and two hosiery and knitting—reacted to the economic crisis of the Great Depression. In the face of a different array of conditions, each firm devised different restructuring strategies. The large cotton corporations responded by combining mechanization, product line change, and a new division of labor. The smaller, more competitive hosiery and knitting firms, on the other hand, imposed either a harsh regime of scientific management or conservative, piecemeal changes. In the midst of restructuring the workplace, manufacturers reasserted their prerogatives of managerial authority, selectively took advantage of the opportunities opened up by economic crisis, and created a new regime of industrial-state regulations.
He is the author of "Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis" (2008) and is currently working on the impact of World War II manufacturing investment on postwar Chicago. I would like to thank Richard Harris for comments on an earlier draft and the journal reviewers for their constructive criticism.