New genres and obsolete expertise in the new textiles economy

Caitrin Lynch, Adam Coppola, Andrew Holmes and Margaret Rosner

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2022, vol. 15, issue 6, 815-833

Abstract: This paper examines the role of distinctions between genres in conflicts over expertise in an American textile mill. Riverway is a struggling 150-year-old New England textile mill where members of a diverse workforce focus on producing high quality fabric in a context that demands daily adaptive expertise. Based on fieldwork from 2015–19, we examine how Riverway workers interacted with documentation systems at the mill. They engaged with managers and coworkers around new forms of technology and shifting valuations about skill and expertise, and, in the process, made sense of their roles as workers in a declining industry where their skills and forms of expertise were nearly obsolete. Through analysis of conflicts in the mill, we examine how members of the mill's community of practice made sense of a changing genre ecology of tools for communicating, recording information, communicating asynchronously, and asserting expertise. We show how technologies for making fabric and communicating about fabric production became symbols of valuations tangentially linked to production. These technologies became lightning rods for debates about expertise, skill, and knowledge, and for everyday distinctions that workers and managers made about the value of their work during a time of economic change marked by mill closures.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17530350.2022.2087719 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jculte:v:15:y:2022:i:6:p:815-833

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJCE20

DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2022.2087719

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Cultural Economy is currently edited by Michael Pryke, Joe Deville, Tony Bennett, Liz McFall and Melinda Cooper

More articles in Journal of Cultural Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().