Case Study Research of Industrial Working-Class Sites

Marginalization of working class in post-soviet urban space: the case of Bilshovyk plant and shopping centre
Natalia Onyshchenko and Anastasia Ryabchuk
Introduction
In May 2009 a group of BA and MA students in Sociology at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine received a task to conduct research on the place of the working class in a postsoviet city, taking one of the biggest, oldest and most well-known plant in Kyiv ("Bilshovyk") as a case study. BA students were engaged in this project while taking a course on In-depth interviewing and their task was to interview either a current or a former worker at the plant or a member of their family. Primarily concerned with securing access to respondents, students' first question was: "Where exactly is this plant located?" MA students worked on this project while taking a course on Social marginality and their immediate question was: "Why are workers a marginal group?" We believe that these two questions are interrelated and we will show in this paper that social marginalization of the working class during transition to capitalism goes in line with spatial marginalization of industrial sites in East-European cities. The plant that we took as a case study is located in the central part of Kyiv, not more than a hundred meters away from the metro station and in a large industrial building that is difficult not to notice. Yet, despite the plant's central location and physical visibility, students (and we suspect that many other passers-by as well) had difficulties in locating it, as if the plant did not constitute part of the urban landscape and had nothing to do with their everyday experiences in the city. The "invisibility" of the plant is in sharp contrast with the excessive visibility of the "Bilshovyk" shopping centre, constructed in one of the former plant buildings. One is confronted with bright banner of the shopping centre immediately as one exits the metro station, and advertising inside the metro trains also informs city residents that it is "the biggest shopping mall in Kyiv". Although many of the students involved in the research project have visited "Bilshovyk" shopping centre, they admitted that they did not notice the workers entering the "Bilshovyk" plant just twenty or thirty meters away. Moreover, despite having the same name as the plant ("Bilshovyk") and exploiting Soviet symbolism (a bolshevik carrying a shopping bag with a red star) this space of consumption promotes capitalist economic practices and only appropriates elements of Soviet past for commercial purposes. In our research we explore how symbolic invisibility of sites of production and promotion of sites of consumption affected the position of working class in post-soviet urban space and contributed to their marginalization.
Research methodology
The problem of our research was the interrelation between the spatial and social dimensions of working-class marginalization in an East-European city. Considering the nature of the research project (conducted by students in the framework of two trimester-long courses in May 2009), time and resource constraints (one month to collect and analyze data and no financial support), case study seemed to be the most viable option. Seven BA and three MA students were involved in the project under the supervision of a lecturer from the Department of Sociology at NaUKMA. A second plant ("Arsenal") was added to the study since some students had difficulties securing access to the workers of "Bilshovyk" (at the time of our research the plant was working only three days a week and the students who did not manage to conduct interviews by Wednesday would have had to wait until the following Monday) and students' collective research paper includes both plants. A total of twelve interviews of varying length and quality were conducted, from which four were selected for analysis in this paper: with a current worker of "Bilshovyk" (Victor), with a former worker who left the plant for a better-paying service sector job at the "Bilshovyk" shopping centre (Nina), with a former worker who left for a better-paying manual job in a firm producing window frames (Yuri), and with the wife of a former worker of "Bilshovyk" who was fired and had to take up insecure casual jobs in construction industry (Olga). These four interviews were of a superior quality compared to others and also offer a diversity of "trajectories" taken up by workers during transition - from staying at the plant, to achieving upward mobility by moving to the private service sector or to manual labour in the private sector, to suffering from downward mobility from loss of stable employment (as well as other material and symbolic benefits related to working at a large state-owned plant). In this paper we have also decided to keep only "Bilshovyk" plant as a case study (as was the original intention of our research), first of all - to keep better focus of our case study, and secondly - because all four interviews we took for analysis were with "Bilshovyk" workers. However, for reasons of comparison we will occasionally turn to the findings from "Arsenal" plant that were presented in student's research paper.

We consider case study approach as the most appropriate for our research. As we explore how social processes are reflected in space, it is logical to take a specific place as a case and analyze it closely. Case study is a wholistic approach, it gives possibility for a deep and comprehensive examination of the phenomenon. It is important to emphasize that it is not a single method but rather an approach where one can use various research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative (in our own research students supplemented interviews with observation during visits to the plant, collecting visual data, material from Soviet guidebooks and other publications, and statistical data on the working class in contemporary Ukraine).
As R. Yin (2003) suggests, case study should be used if the real-life context of a phenomenon under consideration is especially important and the boundary between the phenomenon and its context is not clear (as it happens in real-life situations). In our case such context is the socio-economic situation in post-soviet space. We can also add a historical dimension tracing temporal changes of the place under consideration in the framework of case study. And of course we find out how people connected to this place perceive and define these changes and the current state of affairs.
Case study approach is often criticized for generalization problems. One may question how representative are our four interviews and how far we can generalize our findings. First, we agree with R. Yin that considering case study we should talk not about statistical generalization, but about analytical one. We shouldn't regard "Bilshovyk" as a sample case. Our research is based on Marxist theories of production of urban space and culture of working class and our case study is designed to provide insights and interpretations for these theories. The same is applicable to our respondents who should not be considered as a sample generalizable to all "Bilshovyk" population. Our aim was not to find such a sample but to find respondents diverse enough to help us understand the research problem. Our findings can also be to some extent transferable to other cases if there are enough similarities observed and especially if these cases are in the same context of post-soviet transformation.

Case study research of industrial working-class sites

Case study remains one of the most widely used approaches to analyzing the experiences of working-class communities both in Western and in post-communist societies. It also has an advantage of allowing us to bring the spatial dimension to class analysis. Mike Savage et al.(2004: 95) note that for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the study of class was tied up with understanding space and place, and that studies of working-class communities were undertaken by many critical social scientists to illuminate the nature of power relations and structural inequalities. They highlight that "the 'classification' of population involved the moralization of space, with classes being zoned into specific locations and spatial boundaries acting as social markers" (ibid.)
Let us now list a few examples of case study approach in working-class research, as they are useful for our own analysis. In some cases a specific plant/factory is taken, while in others - a whole working-class town or geographical community are taken as levels of analysis. Case study approach has been prevalent within the British cultural studies tradition. Savage et al. (2004: 101) list among the "pioneering studies of working class" works of E.P.Thompson, Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and Paul Willis, all of whom "were sympathetic to understanding class in local contexts" and saw working class culture as deeply related to "forms of local identification and interaction". More recent studies carried out in the same tradition include Simon Charlesworth 's "Phenomenology of working class experience" where he examines personal consequences of poverty and class by focusing on his native Rotherham in South Yorkshire (Charlesworth, 2004). In France, case studies of working-class communities were undertaken by Olivier Schwarz who had been living for 5 years in a miners' town in Northern France (Schwarz, 1990); Stephan Beaud and Michel Pialoux who describe a case of "Peugeot" plant (Beaud, Pialoux, 1990). Such research is important as a response to the questioning of the mere existence of the working class and even of the adequacy of class analysis in contemporary society (following Margaret Thatcher's famous phrase that "class is a zombie category"). We can also compare processes of socio-economic and symbolic marginalization of workers in post-soviet and Western context.
How is spatial dimension, crucial in our case, dealt with by aforementioned authors? Charlesworth seems to offer significantly more attention to the question of space than other authors, but his framework and goals are different from ours due to different kind of space under consideration). While we are concerned primarily with the changing place of work, he describes unalterable place of living trying to grasp "understanding of the extent to which social structures come to inhabit individuals through the mediation of a particular place" (Charlesworth, 2004:130), to understand how habitus is inherited through comportment within specific, socially located sites. Nevertheless, his claim about the importance of relying on people's experience, not confining to observation, is relevant for us: "the discomfort comes not from the aesthetics of terraced houses and rubbished greenery, but from a knowledge of what it all means in terms of human experience" (Charlesworth, 2004:117).
Savage et al. (2004) provide another example of research of working class habitus, taking into consideration spatial dimension. But again it is residential space that is in the focus of their study. "There are reasons for thinking that residential space plays a particularly prominent role in the spatial and social structures of contemporary capitalism", - postulate they (Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst, 2004: 101). But we share their committment to local studies and aggree that "there is no way in which working-class culture can be understood transparently. Rather, we need to think about strategic sites in which research can not only develop new findings but also pose new questions" (Savage et al. 2004: 100).

We can as well present cases which are closer to our context and settings. In 2000-2002, a large-scale research of Nowa Huta (Poland) was conducted by a group of British social scientists (Stenning 2005). Nowa Huta is a town, built "by workers for workers". Now these workers are marginalized both in socio-economic and symbolic aspects and this marginalization has got a spatial reflection. Interviewees living there report that nowadays they experience "insecurity (both within and beyond work), fear of job loss, increasing pressure to work overtime and commit more and more of their lives to work, and erosion of domestic and social lives". But work still dominates their lives, occupying most of their time and being a basis for identity shaping. Consumption fails to become a basis for new identities. Other tendencies include individualization of experience and community disintegration, insecurity, declining mobility and uncertainty (as contrasted to commonality, stability and wide opportunities of the past times).
Actually, all these tendencies of marginalization are not specifically post-soviet; they have been described in writings of many theorists of postmodernity and globalization. Distinctiveness, important for our research, is the specific position of workers in the soviet past which made aforementioned shifts especially sharp for the workers' communities. The case of Nowa Huta is similar to ours not only in the aspect of workers' marginalization but also as an attempt to commercialize soviet heritage through transforming the whole industrial site into museum. As Ryabchuk qnd Zlobina (2009) point, Nowa Huta is being positioned as an alien and imposed unit that can be used as a tourist attraction but doe not constitute a part of the city space.

The case of Tiko Garment Factory in Komsomolsk, Ukraine is an example of another level of analysis. It shows the same patterns of marginalization (Hormel, 2005): after reorganization of a garment factory (shift from large-scale centralized production to production in smaller firms and homework) only a small part of workers became small business entrepreneurs while others have experienced a decline in wages and job security (although main findings of a research concern gender aspects of labour market which is beyond our scope of interest). Other case studies in post-soviet space include Sarah Ashwin's (1999) study of the experiences of workers in a Russian coal mine or Michael Burawoy's (1992) research of working-class communities in post-soviet Hungary. Social activists and journalists have also tended to focus on local cases - like the strike of "Ford" workers in Russia or of workers at the Kherson machine-building plant in Ukraine. However, none of these studies have dealt specifically with the interconnection between spatial and social marginalization of industrial working class in large post-soviet cities. This aspect is our main focus in our paper.

Part I: Experiences of marginalization of "Bilshovyk" workers
”Yes, this is the end… the plant is doomed”
Let us now turn to our own case study and present experiences of economic and symbolic marginalization of workers of "Bilshovyk" plant as they are reflected in urban space. The first and most significant cause of marginalization was related to the loss of markets in the USSR and decline of production in the 1990s. For example, in 1993 supply of machinery to Russia from "Bilshovyk" plant has decreased by 14,5 times and has virtually stopped. Between 1993-95 production at the plant was reaching a zero level and some improvements began only in 1996-97.

I think at the plant the situation is getting worse and worse every day... Our department is not working. One section produces... maybe one hundredth of what used to be produced before. There are just walls and almost no people. [...] Yes, this is the end, the plant is doomed. (Victor)
Many people were asking me: "Bilshovyk" plant? Does it still work? There were many people who thought that because it is in the city centre, next to the metro, it would not be working anymore (Nina)

The plant was sold off and almost nothing is left, only some cooperatives. If one looks at the map of Bilshovyk, the plant is no longer there, just the shopping cenre (Yuri)

Respondents mention that the plant "was standing" until the late 1990s or that there are "just walls and no people". Thus the plant could be described as a "hybernating" element of urban space where nothing happens, equipment is being sold off and workers are only formally registered as working, but there is no work for them and consequently - no salaries. This static position of the plant is in stark contrast to the pre-soviet and Soviet periods, when it was one of the major employers and played a vital role in the sity space ("Bilshovyk" plant was built in 1881 as a machine-construction plant for the heavy industry and was the second biggest employer of Kyiv. In Soviet days it was one of five largest machine-building plants for chemical industry in all of USSR). In Soviet times, industrial sites were even presented in guidebooks as major sightseeing destinations, and economic growth - as the major achievement of Soviet cities. An English language guide for foreign tourists provides statistics on how rapidly the industrial output of Kyiv has been increasing after World War II, and that this also means important changes in the structure of the city industry and the very urban fabric.

This advancement rests on a qualitatively new foundation: old workshops are being reconstructed and technically reequipped, new powerful production capacities are being introduced. Take, for example, the "Bilshovik" Plant, one of the oldest in Ukraine. [...] The plant has changed beyond recognition during Soviet times. The latest of up-to-date aggregates for chemical engeneering industry are tested here to be sent to other regions of the Soviet union, as well as abroad. Present-day "Bilshovik" Plant supplies equipment to entire industrial enterprises, the largest construction sites of the current Five-Year Plan. Striving to advance the technological progress, "Bilshovik" production specialists continuously strengthen their contact with science. Today's "Bilshovik" plant is a scientific-production amalgamation that comprises the "Ukrndiplastmash" scientific-research and designing institute" (Kiev. Concise Guide. Kiev: Politvydav, p. 68-70).