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  • Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization
  • Phillip Payne (bio)
Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization. Edited by Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi+372. $49.95/24.95.

Deindustrialization has been a reality in American life for at least a generation, to the point where it now seems commonplace. The announcement that a company was cutting thousands of jobs was once greeted with shock. Today such announcements are a regular event. It has been more than twenty-three years since Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison's seminal [End Page 444] work, The Deindustrialization of America, called attention to this issue. Whether it is termed downsizing, deindustrialization, or creative destruction, the loss of manufacturing jobs has become a part of our national fabric. After a generation of this reality, the essays in Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott's Beyond the Ruins attempt to move the discussion of deindustrialization forward

The closing of plants and the decline of working-class earning power have been mainstays of scholarly and popular discussions of deindustrialization. With the advent of the "new economy" of the 1990s, smokestack industries looked increasingly obsolete. The gutted images of Flint, Youngstown, Buffalo, and other northern cities stand as testimony to an irrecoverable golden age of American industrial might. But these images are outdated, according to Cowie and Heathcott, who write that "the time is right to widen the scope of the discussion beyond plant shutdowns, the immediate politics of employment policy, the tales of victimization, or the swell of industrial nostalgia." The goal of Beyond the Ruins "is to rethink the chronology, memory, spatial relations, culture, and politics of what we have come to call 'deindustrialization.'" (p. 2). Collectively, the essays show that there is not just one single story of deindustrialization and community reaction.

The editors and authors are to be congratulated on an impressive volume. Overall, it paints a picture of deindustrialization as an important change in the nature of capitalism and the relationship between employee and employer that transcends the typical chronological and spatial treatment. Even so, there is more to do. Most of the essays focus on the urban north, yet deindustrialization has affected small towns throughout the country. One is struck by the role of technology in facilitating the movement of capital and industry but also by its role in those communities that succeeded in moving "beyond the ruins." As Barry Bluestone notes, the revival of productivity in the second half of the 1990s was a consequence of the information revolution. Indeed, the shift to a service economy (often tourism) is in large part a technological shift.

Almost absent from Beyond the Ruins is a discussion of unions, even though the decline in unionization is linked to loss of wages and benefits. Unions appear only as they made demands or, more likely, concessions when faced with job loss. There is no serious examination of how unions have dealt with technological innovation during the past thirty years. Because the economic renaissance in manufacturing was based primarily on increased productivity through improved technology, this meant that fewer workers could accomplish the same output. Several contributors comment on the antiestablishment attitudes of workers who believed that business and government failed to protect their jobs. This raises the question of whether the failure of technology to generate new jobs of equal quality could have contributed to the antimodernism that seems to be part of contemporary populism. In Beyond the Ruins there are hints about the [End Page 445] political implications of technological change, but no sustained pursuit of this issue.

These criticisms aside, Beyond the Ruins contributes to a rethinking of deindustrialization and to our understanding of the complexity of the economic and social changes it has entailed.

Phillip Payne

Dr. Payne is associate professor in the Department of History at St. Bonaventure University.

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