ABSTRACT
To refocus on questions of work and its social meanings negotiated through visual representation across an expanded geographical field and diverse domains of practice is not nostalgia for a time when work worked for us in Britain or the West, when workplaces were stable enough and secure enough for unionization to be resistance rather than negotiated management, and when workplaces were significant sources of collective social and personal identities whatever the terms of exploitation involved. Work is or can be, amongst many other things, something that gives meaning to life, marks its rhythms and stages, fulfils ambitions, offers concrete rewards. It can provide a sense of pride in earning one's own way. Work is not what most people want to avoid even if they struggle rightly to improve its terms. Despite the real dangers and stresses of its conditions, and the inequality, in capitalist societies, of its relations, work does offer a potential site of social and personal meaning. In the contemporary world, it is lack of work that constitutes for too many a social tragedy and personal desolation. Without its function as a social passport, the unemployed suffer the anguish of social invisibility. We daily witness the atrocity of declaring citizens of industrial societies redundant, surplus to need, only because the possibilities of a particular kind of productive labour have moved geographically with the process of globalization to recruit ever cheaper armies of temporary, deskilled labour. Thus a paradox emerges. If the spectre of worklessness haunts the countries that first experienced the industrial revolution that socialized and harnessed labour, the radical restructuring of the so-called developing countries draws new populations into the relations of production that shift the traditional functions, meanings and effects of their work in these regions and cultures. Does it follow, therefore, that modernization and a radical transformation of the meanings of work are intimately related? What is work in modem times? How have its processes and meanings been mediated to us by visual imagery from advertising to cinema?
