Hot Metal: Material Culture and Tangible Labour

摘要

Jesse Adams Stein's Hot Metal: Material Culture and Tangible Labour successfully places work, and all of its tangled and intricate associations, at the centre of her study of the Government Printing Office (GPO) in Australia. As Stein explains in her introduction, 'Work is inextricably bound up with a world of things, with and through which the social and gendered processes of workplace life are enacted and experienced' (p. 4). While exploring and explicating the material culture of work. Stein uses myriad sources, including interviews with workers, objects found in the GPO, photographs of the GPO's spaces and larger theories and histories related to the changing nature of land values and the rise of neo-liberalism, which ultimately transformed the GPO during the three decades (the 1960s-1980s) she considers.