The Trajectories of Industrial Change: Disrupting, Managing and Assembling Futures in Teesside

Abstract

In 2010 the steelworks in Teesside were ‘mothballed’ meaning that the works were shut down yet kept in a state that they could potentially be restarted in the foreseeable future. This had a number of implications for a variety of different orientations towards the future across Teesside. For the steelworkers of Teesside this mothballing rendered many futures of a pension entitlement and continued employment uncertain. The management of the steelworks sought to hold a future of continued steelmaking in Teesside together through retaining skills and the steelmaking workforce. Furthermore, in the wake of the mothballing, local economic governance sought to enact a new orientation towards the future for the local economy of Teesside which was less reliant upon heavy industry. Futures are therefore a key aspect of how industrial change comes to be enacted and lived. Yet, whilst there have been numerous engagements with industrial change, living through such change and an emerging academic engagement with futures, there remains little in the way of attention towards how orientations towards the future can be theorised and researched. This is the goal of this thesis; to develop and establish a conceptual framework for engaging with orientations towards the future within research that can attend to the multiplicity, complexity, inherent change and mobile boundaries of these orientations. To do this the thesis has developed the concept of ‘trajectories.’ A trajectory is means of conceptualising an orientation towards the future as a homeomorphic assemblage, whereby change is inherent to the assemblage but must remain within certain mobile boundaries or ‘thresholds’ otherwise the assemblage loses its homeomorphism and undergoes a ‘transition’ to a different object. This thesis uses this conceptual framework to explore the trajectories enacted through the mothballing of the steelworks in Teesside as a means to explore the futures of industrial change.