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Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork in a Spanish steel plant to explore shifting perceptions of risk and uncertainty associated with temporalities of industrial work.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses perceptions of risk and uncertainty among workers and stakeholders in a Spanish integrated steel plant. The radical changes in ownership, capital distribution and economic policy that ensued industry restructurings in the context of Spain's democratic transition generated critical transformations that deeply reshaped Spanish steel production, altering the expectations of stability and progress associated with industrial livelihoods during industrial expansion.

Taking a historical perspective and focusing on specific responses to the current crisis, I argue that workers and stakeholders responses to this critical junction entail a significant shift in temporal sensibilities, resulting in an inversion of what Jane Guyer called 'punctuated time', a time structured around qualitatively different dates suspended between the promised effects of long-term economic policy and the series of past transformations that shaped steel production in the old industrial economies. Rather, a presentist logic appears to situate action in emergent, multiple temporal frameworks where risk and value are reconfigured in and for the present. Through these multiple intensive temporalities, I explore ideas of permanence, political dissent and sociotechnical progress associated with actors' perceptions of the uncertain future of industrial work.