Capitalism in the countryside: work, migration, and moral economy in the agro-industrial hinterland of the South Lincolnshire fens

Abstract

There are increasing calls for us to move beyond the rural-urban divide to better understand historical processes key to contemporary social life. In this thesis I tell new stories about capitalism in the countryside, through an investigation of work, migration, and agro-industrial economic life in the South Lincolnshire Fens. Through the pursuit of an ‘agrarian question of circulation’, I draw into relation the stories of migrant and citizen workers across the agri-food supply chain. I investigate how a shifting agrarian political economy not only reconfigured relations of production and distribution, but the social relations that comprised the system. Through in-depth interviewing and relational ethnography, I enter the ‘lifeworld of work’ to examine how change and continuity is lived and felt across the divergent livelihoods of this agro-industrial formation. Firstly, I examine the moral and cultural sentiments associated with histories of ‘council farm’ smallholders. I argue that ‘supermarket-isation’ was lived and felt as the disruption of a ‘moral economy’, grounded in the mutual obligations of kinship, as well as ideas of scale, graft, and freedom. While some vestigial smallholders persist, many others have entered the wider agri-industry. For the generation that grew up living and working in a world of small traders, I argue that a residual ‘structure of feeling’ from the historical form continues to animate their present. Secondly, I explore the ways in which supermarket circulation has remade forms of seasonal work, as historic gangmaster relationships have been reconfigured as ‘temporary labour agencies’ in factories and warehouses. I characterise the experience of temporariness as a state of indeterminacy. Finally, I analyse the relationship between labour process and personhood on the assembly line of the ‘just-in-time’ food factory and the ‘rhythm of the road’ with HGV drivers. In each case, I demonstrate how people’s historical trajectories and the sociohistorical circumstances by which people enter labour relations come to matter. I find a smallholder ‘generation’ drawing upon a residual structure of feeling through everyday metaphors of scale, temporality, and freedom. This thesis contributes to broader debates on the relationship between economy and culture. I develop the analytic concept of moral economy as way of bringing together structural properties and moral dispositions. Moreover, agro-industrial formations such as South Lincolnshire complicate our sociological understandings of both rural and post-industrial economic life and livelihoods. I move us beyond characterisations of the rural as ‘timeless and static’ or ‘overrun by migrants’. By bringing seemingly divergent stories into relation with one another, I argue we can build a fuller picture of the radical interdependence of life under contemporary capitalism in the countryside.