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Abstract: For the employees of an Indian scrap-metal yard, work is a process of disassembling things that other people no longer want. Despite the difficult conditions of the labour and the social stigma attached to it, employees express satisfaction in the work process itself.

This observation raises questions for theories of labour, which see artisanal satisfaction as arising from work that is creative, skilled and task-based. Based on research in the Indian industrial city of Jamshedpur, this talk based on the paper 'Transformation and the satisfaction of work' suggests a conceptual framework for understanding why some types of work are experienced in more satisfying ways than others.

The paper argues that transformation should be used as the primary analytic for explaining work satisfaction. Theories of creativity, skill, and task should be regarded as secondary analytics, which describe subsets of transformative action.

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About the speaker

Andrew Sanchez (University of Cambridge) teaches social anthropology. He is a specialist in the anthropology of class, labour and corruption, and has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in urban India among industrial workers, trade unionists and entrepreneurs.

He is the author of ‘Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India’ (Routledge 2016), which considers how experiences of dispossession relate to criminality in corporations and political institutions.

Event details

1.03 (South)
Bush House
Strand campus, 30 Aldwych, London, WC2B 4BG