The Oral History Of A Guinness Brewery

Imagine a workplace where workers enjoyed a well-paid job for life, one where they could start their day with a pint of stout and a smoke, and enjoy free meals in silver service canteens and restaurants. During their breaks they could explore acres of parkland planted with hundreds of trees and thousands of shrubs. Imagine after work a place where employees could play more than thirty sports, or join one of the theater groups or dozens of other clubs. Imagine a place where at the end of a working life you could enjoy a company pension from a scheme to which you had never contributed a penny. Imagine working in buildings designed by an internationally renowned architect whose brief was to create a building that "would last a century or two." This is no fantasy or utopian vision of work but a description of the working conditions enjoyed by employees at the Guinness brewery established at Park Royal in West London in the mid-1930s. In this book, Tim Strangleman tells the story of the Guinness brewery at Park Royal, showing how the history of one plant tells us a much wider story about changing attitudes and understandings about work and the organization in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on extensive oral history interviews with staff and management as well as a wealth of archival and photographic sources, the book shows how progressive ideas of workplace citizenship came into conflict with the pressure to adapt to new expectations about work and its organization. Strangleman illustrates how these changes were experienced by those on the shop floor from the 1960s through to the final closure of the plant in 2005. This book asks striking and important questions about employment and the attachment workers have to their jobs, using the story of one of the UK and Ireland's most beloved brands, Guinness.

Introduction: the imagined garden -- The machine in the garden -- Creating industrial citizens -- The garden in the machine -- Remembering the work of the long boom -- Change at work -- The ghost in the machine -- The ruined garden -- Conclusion: reimagining work

Imagine a workplace where workers enjoyed a well-paid job for life, one where they could start their day with a pint of stout and a smoke, and enjoy free meals in silver service canteens and restaurants. During their breaks they could explore acres of parkland planted with hundreds of trees and thousands of shrubs. Imagine after work a place where employees could play more than thirty sports, or join one of the theater groups or dozens of other clubs. Imagine a place where at the end of a working life you could enjoy a company pension from a scheme to which you had never contributed a penny. Imagine working in buildings designed by an internationally renowned architect whose brief was to create a building that "would last a century or two." This is no fantasy or utopian vision of work but a description of the working conditions enjoyed by employees at the Guinness brewery established at Park Royal in West London in the mid-1930s. In this book, Tim Strangleman tells the story of the Guinness brewery at Park Royal, showing how the history of one plant tells us a much wider story about changing attitudes and understandings about work and the organization in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on extensive oral history interviews with staff and management as well as a wealth of archival and photographic sources, the book shows how progressive ideas of workplace citizenship came into conflict with the pressure to adapt to new expectations about work and its organization. Strangleman illustrates how these changes were experienced by those on the shop floor from the 1960s through to the final closure of the plant in 2005. This book asks striking and important questions about employment and the attachment workers have to their jobs, using the story of one of the UK and Ireland's most beloved brands, Guinness.

Dublin is renowned for its amazing profusion of pubs and for its exuberant pub culture. In Dublin Pub Life and Lore, Professor Kevin Kearns examines the history of this phenomenon by speaking to old publicans, barmen and regular customers, relating the story of Dublin pubs and their patrons in an engaging and entertaining fashion. Traditionally in Ireland, the public house or 'pub' was the centre of a community's social life and a social institution ranking second in importance only to the parish church. Pubs ranged from dusky watering holes frequented by labourers, dockers and shawlies to elegant Victorian gin palaces where the gentry and literati gathered. Along the Dublin quays there were dives filled with scoundrels, prostitutes and misfits of every sort. Following the success of his bestselling classic Dublin Tenement Life, Kevin Kearns has researched and created a wonderful oral historical chronicle of Dublin's pub life. Based on conversations with old publicans, pub 'regulars' and long-serving barmen, Dublin Pub Life and Lore captures the folklore, customs, characters and wit of the traditional Dublin public house. Dublin Pub Life and Lore: Table of Contents Introduction - History and Evolution of Dublin Public Houses Origins and Uses of Alcohol A City of Taverns and Alehouses Dublin's Colourful Public Houses Drinking Customs of the Social Classes Disreputable Drinking Dens Proud and Prosperous Publicans Dublin Temperance Movement Government Inquiry into Intemperance and the Role of Public Houses Oral History and Pub Lore - Dublin Pub Culture and Social Life The Pub as a Living Social Institution The Publican's Role and Status Pub Regulars and Their Local Porters, Apprentices and Barmen Pubs as IRA Meeting Places Women on the "Holy Ground" The Pintman and His Pint Pub Customs and Traditions Pub Entertainment Singing Pubs Literary Pubs Notable Pub Characters Eccentric Publicans and Notorious Pubs Underworld of Shebeens, Kips and Speakeasies Famous Barmen's Strikes Transformation and Desecration of Venerable Pubs - Oral Testimony of Publicans and Barmen - Oral Testimony of Pub Regulars and Observers

Indigenous peoples have our own ways of defining oral history. For many, oral sources are shaped and disseminated in multiple forms that are more culturally textured than just standard interview recordings. For others, indigenous oral histories are not merely fanciful or puerile myths or traditions, but are viable and valid historical accounts that are crucial to native identities and the relationships between individual and collective narratives. This book challenges popular definitions of oral history that have displaced and confined indigenous oral accounts as merely oral tradition. It stands alongside other marginalized community voices that highlight the importance of feminist, Black, and gay oral history perspectives, and is the first text dedicated to a specific indigenous articulation of the field. Drawing on a Maori indigenous case study set in Aotearoa New Zealand, this book advocates a rethinking of the discipline, encouraging a broader conception of the way we do oral history, how we might define its form, and how its politics might move beyond a subsuming democratization to include nuanced decolonial possibilities.

"For many indigenous peoples, oral history is a living intergenerational phenomenon that is crucial to the transmission of our languages, cultural knowledge, politics, and identities. Indigenous oral histories are not merely traditions, myths, chants or superstitions, but are valid historical accounts passed on vocally in various forms, forums, and practices. Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective provides a specific native and tribal account of the meaning, form, politics and practice of oral history. It is a rethinking and critique of the popular and powerful ideas that now populate and define the fields of oral history and tradition, which have in the process displaced indigenous perspectives. This book, drawing on indigenous voices, explores the overlaps and differences between the studies of oral history and oral tradition, and urges scholars in both disciplines to revisit the way their fields think about orality, oral history methods, transmission, narrative, power, ethics, oral history theories and politics. Indigenous knowledge and experience holds important contributions that have the potential to expand and develop robust academic thinking in the study of both oral history and tradition.--

"As uncontrolled development forces crises in the natural world, deep and long-standing human connections with the earth are changing. Understanding these shifting relationships is essential to framing our responses to issues of industrial development, population growth, and climate change. The use of oral history methodology in environmental research acknowledges and subjectively defines these human connections to the natural world enriching our understanding of both what the earth means to us as well as what the earth needs from us to find balance once again. Oral History and the Environment: Global Perspectives on Climate, Connection, and Catastrophe is the first book to provide a global perspective on the use of oral history in environmental research. It presents excerpts from interviews with environmental activists, victims of environmental catastrophe, and those whose life experience gives them special insights into the natural world; combined with commentary by oral historians who have been exploring how these commentaries can be used to better understand our relationship with the natural world. In this anthology, oral histories with farmers, wildlife rescue volunteers, activists, environmental disaster survivors, elders, water system managers, indigenous voices, tribal trustees, wilderness rangers, reindeer herders, fishers, and foresters, help readers understand a wide range of issues related to our relationship with the environment. These stories and expert analysis touch on a wide range of topics including drought, chemical leaks, oil spills, nuclear disaster, indigenous control of resources, natural resource management, wilderness, and environmental protest"--

The Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies is a timely volume that provides an overview of this interdisciplinary field that emerged in the 1990s in the context of deindustrialization, the rise of the service economy, and economic and cultural globalization. The Handbook brings together scholars, teachers, activists, and organizers from across three continents to focus on the study of working-class peoples, cultures, and politics in all their complexity and diversity. The Handbook maps the current state of the field and presents a visionary agenda for future research by mingling the voices and perspectives of founding and emerging scholars. In addition to a framing Introduction and Conclusion written by the co-editors, the volume is divided into six sections: Methods and principles of research in working-class studies; Class and education; Work and community; Working-class cultures; Representations; and Activism and collective action. Each of the six sections opens with an overview that synthesizes research in the area and briefly summarizes each of the chapters in the section. Throughout the volume, contributors from various disciplines explore the ways in which experiences and understandings of class have shifted rapidly as a result of economic and cultural globalization, social and political changes, and global financial crises of the past two decades. Written in a clear and accessible style, the Handbook is a comprehensive interdisciplinary anthology for this young but maturing field, foregrounding transnational and intersectional perspectives on working-class people and issues and focusing on teaching and activism in addition to scholarly research. It is a valuable resource for activists, as well as working-class studies researchers and teachers across the social sciences, arts, and humanities, and it can also be used as a textbook for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses.