Sunday, September 1, 2019

Service Work - Chaplin's Modern Times

One of the most important film texts about work is Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece ‘Modern Times’ (1936). Many recognize the iconic image of Chaplin, caught in the cogs of the machines of the factory, which symbolizes a central message of his film; organic human life as processed and crushed by technological progress. Fewer people realize, however, that Chaplin included in his film an inspired critique on service work, as well as factory work, which still resonates today.



Modern Times is often interpreted as being an allegorical statement about the effect of automation on the individual. The film is a political critique of industrialism but it is also a personal allegorical statement regarding Chaplin’s situation vis-à-vis developments in the film industry. At the time of the distribution of Modern Times, ‘the talkies’ – movies with soundtracks – had been in production for ten years. Chaplin’s most successful invention, the character of the Little Tramp as a silent film figure and so could not survive the era of sound. Looking at the image above, of The Little Tramp being ground through the wheels of the factory, is to see Charlie Chaplin himself being ground through the cogs of a film projector.

I have written a couple of papers on Charlie Chaplin now as I have been fascinated by him as a silent comedian; a comedian who communicates without words, and so has universal appeal that transcends cultural and international boundaries. He was also a man with deeply held political beliefs. One paper is in a book on service work. Read the book! but if you can't then a previous version delivered at a conference is available here

An encyclopedia entry I wrote about Chaplin is here (Chapter 272) which is in the Encyclopedia of Creativity. 



References

Bolton, S. C., & Boyd, C. (2003). Trolley dolly or skilled emotion manager? Moving on from Hochschild's Managed Heart. Work, Employment and Society, 17(2), 289-308.

Chaplin, C. (1964). My auto-biography. London: The Bodley Head.

Collinson, D. L. (2002). Managing humor. Journal of Management Studies, 39(3), 269 — 288.

Fineman, S. (Ed.). (2000). Emotion in organizations. London: Sage.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. London: Penguin.

Hochschild, A. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Keat, R., Whiteley, N., & Abercrombie, A. (Eds.). (1994). The authority of the consumer. London: Routledge.


Sewell, G., & Wilkinson, B. (1992). ‘Someone to watch over me’: Surveillance, discipline, and the Just-in-Time labour process. Sociology, 26(2), 271 — 289.

Van Maanen, J. (1991). The smile factory: Work at Disneyland. In P. J. Frost, L. Moore, C. C. Lundberg & J. Martin (Eds.), Reframing organizational culture (pp. 58—76). London: Sage.

Witz, A., Warhurst, C., & Nickson, D. (2003). The labour of aesthetics and the aesthetics of organization. Organization, 10(1), 33—54.

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