Exploring an Industrial Structure of Feeling: Creating Industrial Gemeinschaft in a Twentieth-Century Workplace

Abstract

John Eldridge, and the generation of sociologists of which he is a part, are important for the contemporary discipline in many diverse ways. John’s career in particular demonstrates the rich and varied breadth of interests from industrial sociology, through social theory, to cultural and media studies. This scale and scope, this ambition to stretch the sociological imagination, is partly a product of a very different era of academic practice, but is also a function of individual and collective ambition and vision. This vision and ambition is something I think we need to recapture as part of our practice as sociologists. In this chapter I want to explore how this stretching of the sociological imagination might be achieved in my own part of the sociological jungle, that of the study of work. I want to reflect briefly on John’s writing and research in that subfield, but then make the argument that the development of his interests into theoretical and cultural areas has to be understood as an extension rather than break with his earlier work. In the remainder of the chapter I use my research on the Guinness Brewery at Park Royal to show the kinds of ways in which John’s ideas and broader vision have informed my own thinking — one that combines classical approaches and ideas with cultural questions and approaches.