REPRESENTATIONS OF RESTRUCTURING IN THE MEAT-PACKING INDUSTRY OF VICTORIA

Disappointment with narrowly cast industrial - political agendas and a n irreconcilable gap between theory and everyday life has brought unde r scrutiny post-Fordist-derived accounts of industrial restructuring a nd capitalist social change. In this paper, it is suggested that this inadequacy can be traced to the commitment of post-Fordist writers to periodizing capitalist development as a way of defining the philosophy of capitalism. Both these tasks are pursued with, at best, a limited awareness of postmodern critiques of the modernist project. After a cr itique of post-Fordist methodologies, an alternative for understanding industrial restructuring is outlined by means of a case study. Recent ly, in Victoria, a southern state of Australia, a bitter industrial di spute has ensued concerning various attempts at restructuring. It is a rgued that the role of language is crucial in defining communities of interest and in defining social norms. The economic circumstances of t his case indicate that they arc not an automatic determinant of indust rial restructuring.