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Research Series: “Plant With a Future”: The ‘Spatial fix’ that helped Caterpillar, Inc. emerge from the cocoon
Friday, November 10, 2023 , 12:00 pm – 1:15 pm CST
The Sociology and Anthropology Department will be hosting its final research series talk this semester. For this event, Dr. Utkarsh Kumar, Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow and visiting scholar at ISU, will be giving a research talk titled, “Plant With a Future”: The ‘Spatial fix’ that helped Caterpillar, Inc. emerge from the cocoon.
Caterpillar, Inc. is a quintessential North American manufacturer of colossal earthmoving, mining, and construction equipment. Its ubiquitously deployed rugged yellow “Cat” machines symbolize the muscular dependency of the worldwide mining industry on the Global North. Our research project investigates how this corporation came to define, dictate, and shape the context of mining throughout the world. This presentation focuses on Caterpillar’s ambitious company-wide $2.8 billion “Plant With a Future” (PWAF or “pee-waf”) program of “reorganization,” factory “modernization,” and an interlinked Employee Satisfaction Process (ESP) initiative orchestrated by senior management (beginning 1983 to 1994).
Presenting a critical analysis of these programmatic interventions, we argue how through self-organizing around new organizational principles and fundamentally reimagining the spatial layout and design of its North American factories, Caterpillar arrived at a cost-efficient, customer-driven business model for its unwavering geographical expansion. We further argue, the architecture and design of the so-called modernized automated factories were achieved through deceitful expropriation of blue-collar workers’ informal technical expertise and cooperation what we refer to here as extraction of labor rents. Moreover, this transformation of factory design and organizational principles ramified into expansion of the heavy equipment industry across the globe. We situate our argument in Schumpeter’s framework of rents and Harvey’s metaphor of the “spatial fix.”
This lecture is open to the public.
This lecture will also be accessible via Zoom meeting ID 997 5970 9254, Passcode: cocoon. An ISU account is not necessary.
(309) 438-8668
SociologyAnthropology@IllinoisState.edu
