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Working for the company : work and control in the Whyalla shipyard

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Working for the company : work and control in the Whyalla shipyard

by Roy J. Kriegler

Roy J. Kriegler.

Accession 9780195505757 ISBN 9780195505757 Publisher Oxford University Press

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on_shelf: True
position_updated_at: 2026-05-05 17:12
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binding_type: Hard Back
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spine_text: Working for the Company Kriegler Oxford

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Working for the company : work and control in the Whyalla shipyard

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Topics and Themes

1. **Workplace Control & Labour Process**
Kriegler's core concern is how management exercises control over workers on the shop floor — the mechanisms, routines, and power structures through which labour is directed and disciplined in a heavy industrial setting. Drawing on his own time as a labourer in the shipyard, his analysis probes the daily lived experience of being managed.

Connect to books about: labour process theory, Taylorism and scientific management, workplace power, managerial authority.

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2. **Worker Alienation & Disengagement**
Kriegler identified what he saw as an entrenched dynamic of alienation among those who worked for BHP — a deep malaise of low commitment that pervaded the workforce. The book examines how structural conditions of industrial work produce psychological and social estrangement from labour itself.

Connect to books about: alienation theory (Marx, Blauner), job satisfaction, industrial psychology, meaning of work.

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3. **Company Towns & Corporate Power**
Whyalla was a city planned and heavily directed by BHP, and Kriegler explores what it means for a single corporation to dominate not just a workplace but an entire community's economy, housing, and social fabric. The book interrogates the blurred boundary between employer and town.

Connect to books about: company towns, corporate paternalism, urban planning, resource-industry communities.

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4. **Australian Industrial Relations & Labour Politics**
Published in 1980, the book is rooted in Australia's post-war industrial relations landscape — union culture, wage bargaining, and the politics of organised labour in a major BHP enterprise. It documents the tensions and shifts in union culture within a flagship Australian heavy industry.

Connect to books about: Australian labour history, trade unionism, industrial conflict, BHP corporate history.

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5. **Deindustrialisation & Community Decline**
Kriegler wrote in the wake of the Whyalla shipyard's closure and predicted a trajectory from "Company Town to Ghost Town." The book anticipates the social and economic unravelling that follows when a single dominant industry disappears from a dependent community.

Connect to books about: deindustrialisation, regional economic decline, post-industrial communities, manufacturing collapse.

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6. **Migration, Ethnicity & the Working Class**
Whyalla's workforce was drawn from extraordinarily diverse ethnic origins, and the book touches on the experience of migrant workers within the industrial hierarchy — including ethnic slights and the social stratification of a multicultural blue-collar workforce.

Connect to books about: migrant labour, ethnicity and work, multiculturalism in Australia, immigrant working-class experience.

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7. **Industrial Sociology & Ethnographic Method**
Kriegler conducted his research partly as a participant observer — working as a labourer in the shipyard himself — making the book a significant example of sociological fieldwork inside a heavy industrial workplace. It belongs to a tradition of immersive, bottom-up industrial sociology.

Connect to books about: workplace ethnography, participant observation, sociology of work, qualitative research methods.

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8. **Shipbuilding & Heavy Industry History**
The Whyalla shipyard was the site of 64 vessels built across two decades, and the book is grounded in the specificities of shipbuilding as an industrial process — its craft traditions, skill hierarchies, and physical rhythms. It is a primary source for the history of Australian heavy manufacturing.

Connect to books about: shipbuilding history, heavy manufacturing, Australian industrial history, decline of traditional industries.

Working for the company : work and control in the Whyalla shipyard

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