In this introductory essay we review key themes in the scholarly literature on deindustrialization over the last twenty-five to thirty years. While the term deindustrialization has been in use since the early 1980s, more careful attention needs to be brought to bear on the cultural significance of industrial change over time, including on how individuals and communities reinterpret deindustrialization through the lens of memory. This essay highlights contributions that reflect multiple disciplines and approaches, including interdisciplinary work. We also argue that cultural representations such as photography, literature, the media, and personal narratives offer especially useful insights into the continuing significance of deindustrialization, giving us access to the ways people are drawing on and constructing their memories of industrial work and of the process of deindustrialization itself. This essay and the wider special issue suggest that taking a long view—from the perspective of more than two decades after major shutdowns—and examining documentary, personal, and creative representations provides important insights into the meanings and consequences of the experience of deindustrialization for individuals, communities, and nations.

This article explores some of the visual imagery that has emerged from the process of deindustrialization. It seeks to understand the similarities and differences between post-industrial photography collected in book format in both North America and Europe and the critics of this genre. It makes sense of the value and meaning of this publishing trend and what it says about its market. While it would be easy to dismiss this material as “simply nostalgic,” representing another manifestation of “smokestack nostalgia,” this article suggests that we need a more nuanced account which asks questions about the continuing desire to reflect back and find value in the industrial past. In so doing it makes a contribution to a wider critical account of the role of cultural approaches to interpreting industrial change and working-class history.

A growing body of contemporary American literature, “deindustrialization literature,” most of it by writers who grew up after major plant closings, is set in former industrial areas, such as Detroit and Youngstown. These texts focus on the lives and perspectives of those who have inherited the physical, economic, and cultural landscapes of the rust belt. For these writers and their characters, the past is always an important part of the present. The deindustrialized landscape provides not only the setting but also significant plot elements, themes, and symbols through which these writers narrate stories about young adults wrestling with their identities, affiliations, and opportunities during a period of economic decline and social change. These narratives complicate the relationship between past and present through characters' observations of and interactions in the deindustrialized landscape. With a complex, ambivalent perspective, they suggest the possibility of revival for both communities and individuals. A novel and works of creative non-fiction by Youngstown's Christopher Barzak and the short stories of Detroit's Michael Zadoorian illustrate how representations of abandoned mills and decaying commercial and residential sites can reveal the complex and persistent significance of deindustrialization, decades after closings began, while also pointing toward a future that uses the past as a resource.

This article considers the highly contested and contradictory uses of the industrial past that continue to animate questions of place-based identity in the wake of large-scale deindustrialization. Drawing on media accounts as well as qualitative interviews with city residents, the representations surrounding Youngstown, Ohio's former middleweight boxing champion, Kelly Pavlik, and his asserted relationships to the city are considered. It is argued that through the various depictions of Pavlik, we see how deindustrialization has led to a more complex interaction of space and time—rather than marking a material and symbolic break from the era in which heavy industry dominated the city and its sense of identity—as aspects of the past are alternately disavowed, recovered, rearticulated, and reconstructed in relation to shifting economic, social, and cultural contexts.

This article explores the legacy of the demise of the deep coal mining industry in Scotland. It places particular emphasis on the cultural scars of this process as witnessed through miners' and managers' memories, positioning these within the context of occupational socialization, conflict, and alienation. The piece explores the enduring importance of these cultural scars in shaping broader collective narratives of decline in Scotland, and how responses were manifest in shifting political outlooks and the emergence (at both a local and national level) of a resurgent nationalism from the early 1960s onward. Drawing on the notion of the “cultural circuit,” the article examines how and why personal experience of the loss of the coal industry informed and conformed to the politics of the miners' union in Scotland, the National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area (NUMSA). As the article makes clear, the program of closures in the industry has left profound psychological scars in coalfield communities—ones that, like the closure of other major industrial sites, shape a powerful national narrative.

The long-running deindustrialization in the Scottish coalfields, the consequence of political decisions, took place in three distinct periods analyzed here: “restructuring,” 1958–1967, when, in response to union activism, a large number of closures was offset by government and industry initiatives to provide or stimulate alternative employment; “stabilization,” 1968–1977, when closures were minimized as the broader industrial economy slowed; and then “accelerated contraction,” 1978–1987, within the larger program of economic restructuring engineered by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative UK governments. Moral economy arguments shaped the debate about deindustrialization in the first two phases: closures were legitimate only where agreed to by the workforce, who would in turn receive guaranteed economic security. These factors did not apply in the final phase, when closures were enforced and redundant miners had limited employment alternatives.

This article investigates the memories and lived experiences of those who dwell in the deindustrial landscape of Chernobyl in north Ukraine. Taking a visual approach to an invisible issue, the article explores the use of photography as a research tool to examine the ‘hidden spaces of everyday life’ in the shadow of Chernobyl.1 The article finds that many people have suffered a ‘double exposure’: once from radiation and then again from the failures of the Ukrainian state. While these communities are exposed as “bare life”2 to the risk of nuclear pollution, they also contest official conceptions of radiation through local knowledge, shared memory, and informal activity. The article interrogates the complex ways people perceive, negotiate, and come to terms with the ever-present but unseen menace of radiation. Through these memories, images, and lived experiences of the marginalized, we can begin to make the invisible threat of radiation appear more tangible. Finally, the article provides a short discussion about the use of participant photography in researching the invisible.

This special issue on “Crumbling Cultures,” the first to appear on deindustrialization in a labor history journal, confirms the historiographical trend away from displaced industrial workers themselves and the cultural meaning of job loss, to a wider reflection on the cultural consequences and representations of deindustrialization. The subject, here, is the cultural agency or resilience of working-class communities broadly defined. This shifting focus reflects the evolving baseline, as the political heat of the 1980s and 1990s cools and rates of unionization plummet. For the most part, the sense of cultural continuity, or working class persistence, so evident in this issue, is found in places where not much has filled the economic and cultural vacuum. As a result, nobody in this issue speaks to the deindustrialization of large metropolitan cities. There, the actions of the state, and middle-class gentrifiers, are weighed and measured as old mills and factories are demolished or converted into condominiums or art spaces. In effect, deindustrialization and the subsequent postindustrial transformation deliver a one-two punch against working-class neighbourhoods and the old culture of industrialism. The resulting break with the industrial past may therefore be greatest where the outward signs of industrial ruination are least visible. The rise of middle-class ruin-gazing within popular culture and the academy, and the global circulation and commodification of these images and experiences, nonetheless raises important questions about its underlying politics. As historian Jackie Clarke has noted elsewhere, what is rendered visible and invisible in a post-industrial era is highly significant.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Iran has experienced numerous dramatic events and has undergone radical transformations. The country participated in three major wars (1914–1918, 1941–1945, 1980–1988) that caused enormous human suffering and economic damage; two coup détats (1921, 1953) that altered power relations within the military and political elite; and two revolutions (1905–1909, 1978–1982) that led to fundamental changes in social, political, and cultural relations in Iran and beyond. But the event that, perhaps, has had the most significant impact on the history of twentieth-century Iran was the discovery of oil in 1908.

The extraction of oil in 1908 and the ensuing construction of an oil refinery, shipping docks and company towns in southwest Persia/Iran opened a new chapter in the nation's labor history. Enjoying absolute monopoly over the extraction, production and marketing of the oil, the Anglo-Persian/Iranian Oil Company (APOC, AIOC, now British Petroleum—BP) embarked on a massive labor recruitment campaign, drawing its recruits primarily from tribal and village-based laboring poor throughout a region. But, in a region where human needs were few and cheap, it was no easy task to persuade young men to leave their traditional mode of life in exchange for industrial milieu with radically different work patterns. Those who did join the oil industry's work force were then subjected to labor discipline of an advanced industrial economy, which eventually contributed to the formation of the early clusters of modern Iran's working class.

This article reviews the labor historiography of Iran for the period between the 1953 coup and the early revolutionary activism of late the 1970s, an interlude marked by a lack of histories of labor activism. Based on a qualitative analysis of the types of collective actions that oil workers engaged in during the period, this article argues that contextualizing the struggles of workers and the types of collective actions they engaged in will tell us more about the social and political changes that they experienced and participated in than the search for an ideal type of labor activism. It is argued that the social and political climate of Iran during the 1960s, characterized by political repression and an extensive centralized reform program, added new tactics to workers’ repertoires of action as they made use of the discourse of the regime for their own ends. This study is based on archival research at the International Institute of Social History archives in Amsterdam, the BP archives at Coventry, the National Archives of UK in London, and the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC.

Oil workers played a pivotal role during the Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979. Involving tens of thousands of workers, oil strikes paralyzed the state and paved the way for the Shah's downfall. Various accounts of these strikes, however, ignore the subjectivity and agency of the oil workers by focusing exclusively on the role of political agitation. Addressing this deficit, this article explores the oil workers' experiences in and out of the workplace in the 1970s in order to contextualize their participation in the revolution. After analyzing the oil strikes and their goals, the article makes two arguments: First, oil workers were conscious of the considerable power they had to disrupt the economic and political routine of the country. Second, the demands of the oil strikes reflected grievances that, while reflecting sentiments in the wider society, were embedded in their own specific conditions and experiences.

My essay “The Promise and Challenges of Global Labor History” in issue 82 (Fall 2012) received commentaries from five colleagues. In this reply I focus on seven central issues: the ambiguities of commodification; the contested notion of “capitalism”; the concept of class; household labor; the need for comparative approaches; the newness of Global Labor History; and its prospects in the coming years.

When the postwar economic boom came to a crashing halt in early 1970s West Germany, foreign “guest workers,” often the first to be laid off, bore the brunt of high inflation, rising prices, declining growth rates, widespread unemployment, and social discontent. Following the economic downturn and the ensuing crisis of stagflation, workers' uprisings became increasingly common in West Germany. The summer of 1973 saw a sharp increase in workers' activism broadly, including a wave of “women's strikes.” However, historical attention to the role of foreign workers, especially of foreign female workers, within these strikes has been limited. This article presents a case study of wildcat strikes spearheaded by foreign, female workers in the early 1970s, focusing specifically on the strikes at the Pierburg Autoparts Factory in Neuss, West Germany. For these foreign women, activism in the early 1970s had a larger significance than just securing better working conditions. Indeed, striking foreign workers were no longer negotiating temporary problems; they were signaling that they were there to stay. Foreign workers' sustained and successful activism challenged the imposed category of “guest worker,” switching the emphasis from guest to worker. Ultimately, the Pierburg strikes' outcomes benefited all workers—foreign and German, male and female—and had grave implications for wage discrimination across West Germany as well.

When, beginning on June 22, 1941, German forces sliced through Soviet defenses, Soviet citizens severed their ties with the Stalinist state. In the Western Borderlands, annexed in 1939–1940 as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact, locals welcomed the invaders with bread and salt as liberators from the Bolshevik yoke. Red Army men hailing from these regions left their posts and went home. Soldiers from the pre-1939 Soviet territories stationed in Ukraine deserted, too, reasoning that the Bolsheviks had “sucked our blood for twenty-five years, enough already!” A group of two hundred soldiers, including an outspoken Siberian, “decided to force our way back, at all cost, toward the Germans.” When army commissars tried to stop them, “[w]e killed them and moved on.” Further East, collective farmers in the pre-1939 territories greeted the German “liberators” in some localities, while displaying a “wait-and-see” attitude in others. One day after the start of the war an inhabitant of Leningrad region reacted to the news of his mobilization by threatening the official bearing the news with a revolver, exclaiming “I will not fight for Soviet Power, I will fight for Hitler!” Urban dwellers rejoiced at the arrival of the long-awaited apocalypse, believing that “the fascists kill Jews and Communists, but don't touch Russians.” As Moscow descended into panic in October 1941, crowds stopped functionaries leaving the city, pulled them out of their cars, assaulted them, and scattered the contents of their luggage on the ground. “Beat the Jews,” yelled the crowd, and protesting their non-Jewishness did not help the victims; to the mob, “Jew” and “functionary” were one and the same. On October 19, workers struck in Ivanovo, an industrial center with a long tradition of militancy. Excited by the spectacle of the advancing Germans and the apparent inability of the Stalinist leadership to stop them, rioters destroyed administrative and Party buildings and beat up state and Party activists, including the first secretary of the region. They demanded “Soviets without communists,” while discussing seriously whether life would be better under Hitler or Stalin. Meanwhile, back at the frontline, where news of the “massive beating up of Jews” in Moscow quickly spread, the state's enforcement agencies arrested soldiers voicing their discontent. They also ensured that both the confused and the hostile would fight. By October 10, People's Commissariat Internal Affairs (NKVD) forces had detained 657,364 soldiers separated from their units. The majority were returned to the front and thrown back into battle; 25,878 were arrested, 10,201 of them shot.

This piece reports the Second International “Mundos do Trabalho” Conference that took place from November 27–30, 2012, in Rio de Janeiro. The meeting was the largest labor history conference ever held in Brazil and clearly demonstrates the vitality of this field in the country.

This Tale from the Field focuses on the interpretation by workers of the precarious nature of blue-collar formal employment in Russia. In an ethnographic sketch based on over two years in the field, I follow an individual, Sergei, as he relies more and more on informal and other sources of income instead of waged labour in the increasing number of multi-national enterprises which have come to Russia to set up factories. Why does Sergei, and many like him, still young or without memory of Soviet labour practices, ‘choose’ exit from the formal economy at the very moment when wages and conditions are finally increasing? Why is the informal economy as a ‘choice’ so important to blue-collar workers despite the hunger for labour in traditional production industry?