February 2006
The film Kinky Boots is released on DVD this month.
Like The Full Monty (1997), it has all the makings of a popular resource for 16-21 geography teaching.
The film tells the story of a UK footwear firm’s unique efforts to deal with the threat of deindustrialisation brought about by globalisation.
The DVD also includes the ubiquitous but in this case useful, ‘Making Of’ featurette - The Real Kinky Boots Factory - an in-depth look at the making of the film and what inspired it. It speaks to the real life factory owner, Steve Pateman and looks at the actual factory and the real-life people depicted in Kinky Boots, as well as hearing from the filmmakers and stars of the film.
Another snippet on the DVD useful for teachers is ‘The Journey of a Brogue’. This piece documents just how the old fixed assembly line shoes are made in sharply edited fashion.
In the dramatised version of events, it is a chance encounter with a London Drag Queen called Lola and a fight with one of his newly-redundant workers that inspires factory owner Charlie Price to end the old range of shoes that Price & Sons have been making for generations. Charlie realises that diversification is the key to Price & Co's future and begins the manufacture of Northamptonshire's own exotic footwear. He bravely develops products for a new niche market that could make or break the firm. Kinky Boots is the second film from Harbour Pictures, which made Calendar Girls (2003). The film is directed by Julian Jarrold and stars Joel Edgerton (as Charlie) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (as Lola). Many of the real-life shoe factory workers also became extras in the film.
Have you seen the film yet? Did you recognise the geographical themes in it? Was it any good?
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The true story of Kinky Boots - what's the real-life background to the film?
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Kinky Boots - the true story - changing times; changing designs?
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What is the geographical theory behind Kinky Boots?
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How important is technology to post-Fordism?
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The Minimum Wage - another nail in the coffin for UK firms?
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A-level essays and assignments
Six years ago, Steve Pateman inherited a struggling family business. Located in Earls Barton (Northamptonshire), W. J. Brookes Ltd. had produced men’s shoes for 110 years. However, their hard-wearing leather footwear had become increasingly difficult to sell in the years preceding Steve’s takeover. The firm’s traditionally-styled brogues and boots had been very successful in the past, with impressive overseas sales in Germany. Yet by 1999, profits had been falling for sometime, while manufacturing costs had risen considerably. In common with other European textile and shoe manufacturers, W. J. Brookes was facing a number of challenges:
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Cheap imports from overseas Competition from NICs and eastern Europe – with their much cheaper labour costs – makes the mass production of most manufactured goods uneconomical in the UK, resulting in massive closures, especially in the clothing and footwear sector.
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Changing dress codes Formal shoes have been replaced by casual fashion shoes and trainers in many social contexts. Notably, casual footwear has become far more acceptable both in school and at the workplace, leading to shrinking sales with each generation.
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Saturation of markets Market demand for a product can fall once most people have bought the item. Quality shoe makers are particularly vulnerable to this, and can become a “victim of their own success”: once everyone owns a pair of these durable and long-lasting items, it will be many years before they need to buy a replacement (modern shoe makers need not worry about this, as fashions change more rapidly in the past, prompting people to buy replacement items sooner).
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Fixed assembly lines Even if manufacturers wanted to change their designs to meet changing demand (as new fashions emerge), some assembly lines cannot easily be adapted to allow the manufacture of changed designs.
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Strong currency During the mid-1990s, the Conservatives raised the value of the pound. After 1997, Labour followed this monetary policy with further increases. As a result, UK companies found that their products suddenly cost a huge amount more when sold abroad. Worse still, the strong pound meant that English retailers could import even more products from low-cost regions such as Eastern Europe and China.
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Rising labour, land and fuel costs Property and land values have escalated since the late 1990s. The introduction of a national minimum wage in 1999 increased the cost of labour for manufacturers. Looking further back, the dramatic increase in oil price that occurred in 1973 (after the Arab-Israeli war) marked the beginning of the end for many UK firms. Rising haulage costs in recent years – as oil reaches new record prices - are beginning to threaten some of the firms that survived the 1970s oil crisis.
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Enlargement of the EU In April 2004, ten new nations joined the EU. Countries such as Poland have much lower labour costs, encouraging some UK firms (e.g. Terry’s of York) to move their factories there.
Western capitalism has experienced a crisis of profitability in its traditional industries. Since the 1960s (and since the 1930s in some cases) an absolute loss in employment has been experienced in traditional UK manufacturing industries. Over the last three decades, rationalisation has become necessary, in response to rising costs and falling profits. Firms have often responded in one of the following four ways:
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Liquidation Many firms have faced bankruptcy and outright closure, typified by the virtual disappearance of the British car industry (the film The Full Monty documents the aftermath of the collapse of the steel industry in Sheffield).
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Decentralisation Firms have sought a new geographical location, looking for cheaper land and labour costs, either within the UK or else internationally. Dyson’s recent move to Malaysia is an often-quoted example of this.
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Mechanisation Greater use of robots and machinery can reduce labour costs. In the UK’s few remaining steel mills, productivity per worker is now 623 tonnes, compared with 35 tonnes per worker fifty years ago. This is a considerable increase and is largely attributable to mechanisation of most of the production process.
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Diversification into new markets (employing post-Fordist logic and methods). This is the course taken by W. J. Brookes Ltd. that is described in the new film Kinky Boots.
Shortly after taking over, new factory owner Steve Pateman received a telephone call from the firm Laces in Folkestone. They had heard of W. J. Brookes through the Footwear Federation. They asked if Steve could supply a rather unusual product: women’s high-heeled boots, but in men’s sizes. This was when Steve first discovered that there is a small but healthy footwear market in the UK for men who like to “cross-dress” by wearing women’s clothing and shoes -especially particularly “feminine” items like stiletto heels!
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At first, Steve imagined that the market for exotic footwear was probably too tiny for his company to make sufficient sales to make it worthwhile manufacturing this sort of item. However, like any good businessman, he researched the market and discovered that the Europe-wide market was in fact large enough to make manufacturing cost-effective. With membership of the European Union allowing UK firms to sell products on the continent without having to pay import duties, there would be plenty of potential sales to keep the firm alive. Steve’s plan involved:
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researching the market by contacting exotic clothing shops and asking them if they needed a new supplier
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changing the company name to “Divine” before starting to market exotic footwear at the factory
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re-training staff to assemble new designs and introducing much greater flexibility into the design and production process
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improving existing designs in order to create stiletto boots that can actually support a man’s weight
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attending “niche market” trade fairs such as the Dusseldorf footwear show and the Erotica Exhibition in London
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establishing a web site to make international sales even easier, in addition to the production of a printed Divine catalogue
Steve also allowed a BBC film crew to follow him on this bold new venture as part of a documentary series called Trouble At the Top. This brave use of the media (if the venture failed, then it would have been a very public failure!) brought his company to the attention of millions of viewers, increasing sales and ultimately leading to the new feature film being made. The documentary sympathetically showed that here was a real business fighting for its survival. The programme (titled “The Kinky Boot Factory”) received over 3.2 million viewers.
Did the “Kinky Boots” story have a happy ending?
Although the company survived with Steve Pateman as its owner, not all the staff that originally worked on the assembly line at W. J. Brookes Ltd. have been able to keep their jobs. The company had originally employed more than seventy people. When the BBC documentary was recorded there were only fifty five left and by the following year were down to twenty one. The Divine product line saved the company - but only just in the knick of time, and with a greatly-reduced workforce.
Post-Fordism: the geographical theory behind Kinky Boots
Q. What is post-Fordism? How does it differ from Fordism?
In the opening decades of the Twentieth Century, western capitalism had developed an efficient system of mass production and mass consumption known as Fordism. The term is named after Henry Ford, because of his pioneering assembly-line innovations that led to the mass production of affordable products. His assembly-line workers were paid relatively high wages for the time, which allowed them to buy the products they helped manufacture, thereby boosting sales. Under Fordism, mass production and mass consumption mutually re-enforced one another, operating within a modern democratic society. Western factories produced the goods for an emerging international mass market of mass-produced products (all under the hegemonic umbrella of American financial and economic power).
Recently, geographers and economists have observed changes in the strategies of firms and markets that have drifted away from the Fordist model. The newer concept of post-Fordism (or neo-Fordism) originally developed out of empirical studies of MEDC industrial regions including North-eastern Italy, Silicon Valley, Toulouse, Grenoble and the Oxford-Reading-Bristol triangle. During the 1980s, dominant trends in these regions suggested that a shift was occurring towards a new phase of manufacturing history. Patterns of production increasingly exhibited a dynamic new characteristic that became known as flexible production (or flexible specialisation).
In general terms, this means that firms were re-equipping themselves to produce a more varied range of goods, often only in short-lived small batches. For instance, instead of mass-producing a single household item (such as the plain brown leather shoes shown on a conveyer belt at the start of the Kinky Boots story), firms began to shift their focus towards the production of more exclusive and expensive items (the shift was mirrored in the European primary sector, with struggling farmers increasingly moving towards lower-volume production of more expensive speciality cheeses or meats). Firms were widely observed to be replacing high-volume manufacture of mass-produced items with lower-volume sales of niche-marketed high-order goods.
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Fordism (fixed assembly line)
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Post-Fordism (flexible)
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Mass production of a single product
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Small batch production
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Product design rarely changes
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Frequent changes to design (eg mobiles)
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Large stocks and ware housing
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“Just-in-time” (JIT) deliveries of parts and finished goods
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Single task performed by worker
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Workers can multi-task
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“Jobs for life” protected by trade unions
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Limited job security for workers
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Source: adapted from Knox, Agnew and McCarthy (2003)
Q. What went wrong with the Fordist model?
Fordist workers were paid relatively higher wages than previous generations, which gave them the purchasing power to buy the very goods they helped make. In this sense, economic growth should have been circular and self-sustaining, as more workers meant more consumers – which, in turn, would have stimulated higher demand and an even greater need for workers! However, a crisis of profitability led to the failure of the Fordist system (or “regime of accumulation”) to survive beyond the immediate post-war decades. The obvious inability of Fordism to sustain growth was evident on several counts:
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Falling sales The rigidity of long-term fixed capital investment wrongly presumed stable growth in home markets in Western Europe and the Americas. By the 1960s, Western European and Japanese markets were saturated (once the majority of people have purchased a common household item, such as a fridge or cooker, then sales begin to fall). This meant that a drive for export markets was essential if further expansion was to be ensured. Alternatively, firms needed to introduce new products if fresh demand and sales were to be stimulated (even just changing the colour of TV sets can sometimes encourage consumers to buy a replacement). However, many firms had a fixed production line that made it difficult to introduce new design innovations.
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Trade Union power Once the assumption of stable growth had been recognised as an error, attempts were made to overcome rigidity in the production line. Many firms recognised that the introduction of computers and robots would introduce greater flexibility into the manufacturing process. However, any attempt to modernise met with opposition from deeply-entrenched working-class power, represented in Europe and America by powerful Trade Unions.
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Inflation Declining productivity in key sectors, allied with rigid state commitments to entitlement programs (such as unemployment benefits) left printing money as the only solution to the economic problems of many Western states. Inflation was therefore inevitable, with financial institutions further burdened by the recycling problems associated with surplus OPEC oil dollars after 1973.
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Looking back now, Fordism was a system that failed to fully exploit the desires of consumers by offering greater choice. The shopping habits of consumers suggest that people like to differentiate themselves from others through their choices of purchase. Personal ring-tones, while helping the user find their own mobile phone, also tell us a great deal about the apparent psychological need of modern consumers to assert their own uniqueness. Post-Fordist manufacturers appeal to this desire by producing small batches of customised items and by quickly changing their designs (by rapidly introducing new fashions and models they can also prompt existing owners to throw away their old items and buy replacements before it is really necessary to do so). In particular, they seek to nurture niche markets for up-market designer goods (including so-called “kinky boots”).
Q. Has Fordism ended?
Post-Fordism has not replaced Fordism. The two systems now co-exist, although manufacturing in MEDCs tends to be mostly carried out along post-Fordist lines, either using hi-tech computer design and manufacture or by returning to a more old-fashioned mode of hand-made construction. In contrast, everyday mass-produced household items, such as basic plates and cutlery, are likely to be manufactured in LEDC factories that are run along Fordist lines using low-paid assembly-line labour. These are then exported to Europe and America. Of course, a new mass market (and one that is far from saturated) is also now growing throughout the world for these mass-produced items, as the spending power of consumers in countries such as China and India grows.
The application of computers in manufacturing is often vital to the success of a post-Fordist firm. Advances in the two primary elements of factory computerisation - computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) - are central to this ‘new industrial revolution’. CAD functions can be grouped into four categories: design and geometric modelling, engineering analysis, kinematics and drafting. CAM has five main functions: tool design, machine control, process and material planning, robotics and factory management. These new systems allow flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) to flourish with the capacity to manufacture goods cheaply in small volumes.
This is the antithesis of Fordist-style ‘hard’ automation, as machines do not need to be completely rebuilt or replaced at times of product change. One of the earlier success stories was General Electric who by as early as 1983 were using flexible automation to make 2000 different versions of their basic electric meter in New Hampshire (Bylinsky and Moore, 1985). Firms such as Bennetton use CAD/CAM to gain a mere ten-day delay between changed customer demand and the introduction of new lines. This is a significant departure from Fordism with its fixed and inflexible assembly line.
Is there more to post-Fordism than “Kinky Boots”?
Geographers working at an undergraduate level may be asked to study post-Fordism (or neo-Fordism) in greater detail. Possible directions for research could include the social dimensions of post-Fordism. For instance:
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Lash and Urry (1994) claim that flexible specialisation is symptomatic of a new phase of ‘disorganised’ capitalism, and the fragmentation of mass production is coincident with the fragmentation of the industrial working class. Other writers have also focused on the labour process and the modes of accumulation, regulation and societalization associated with post-Fordism (McDowell, 1991; Cloke and Goodwin, 1992).
- The political implications of post-Fordism have been most notably pursued by the New Times writers (Hall and Jacques, 1989) who have argued that post-Fordist changes have benefited the political Right more than the Left. According to this viewpoint, a flexible and de-regulated climate of wealth creation arrived hand-in-hand with a diminished sense of responsibility for those marginalised groups in society who were largely unable to take advantage of the ‘new times’.
Cloke, P. and Goodwin, M. (1992) ‘Conceptualizing countryside change’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16(4), 400-419
Hall, S. and Jacques, M. (eds.) (1989) New times: the changing face of politics in the 1990s Lawrence and Wishart, London
Harvey, D. (1989) The condition of postmodernity Blackwell, Oxford
Jameson, F. (1984) ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’ New Left Review 146, 53-92
Knox, P., Agnew, J. and McCarthy, L. (2003) The geography of the world economy Arnold, London
Kumar, K. (1995) From post-industrial society to post-modern society Blackwell, Oxford
Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1994) Economies of signs and space Sage, London
McDowell, L. (1991) ‘Life without father and Ford’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16(4), 400-419
As of October 2005, the UK Minimum Wage now stands at £5.35 per hour for 22-year-olds and above (except those within the first six months of their job and receiving accredited training). A lower rate of £4.45 is paid to 18-to-21-year-olds and those within the first six months of their job and receiving accredited training. Under-18s who have finished compulsory education must legally be paid at least £3.00. There is no limit set for those who have not yet finished compulsory education (the age when a UK citizen finishes compulsory education is either 15 or 16, depending on where their birthday falls in the school year).
A national minimum wage was introduced for the first time in 1998 by Tony Blair’s Labour government (the earlier Trade Boards Act of 1918 had made a large number of trades subject to minimum wages but these rules were repealed during the 1980s by the Thatcher government). Critics claim that it is just another rise in costs for UK industry, making British products even more uncompetitive in a global market place. However, supporters of the policy argue that it is a basic human right to be paid a decent living wage. Moreover, if the wages of low-paid workers are increased then they become more active consumers. As a result, firms should find that they are selling more products throughout the UK, off-setting the increased cost of paying their workers more money.
At one time or another, most A-level Specifications ask their candidates to answer the following essay-style question:
Account for the general decline in secondary (manufacturing) employment in MEDCs in recent decades.
(20 marks)
Examiner’s notebook
Most students taking the A-level exam will know the standard “globalisation” idea – that manufacturing jobs have “run away” to India and Asia due to the low wages there. Most will be able to provide a few good examples of this (the Dyson factory is very popular!). So how do we distinguish between all of these accounts and work out who to award an A-grade to? With the example shown here, we will be waiting to see who has paid attention to the word “general” in the essay title. The deliberate inclusion of this word is a clue to students that it is not always true to say that all manufacturing has declined. It is a general rule that manufacturing employment has fallen but there are also plenty of anomalies and exceptions. The firm featured in the Kinky Boots film is an excellent example of this – and of the unusual strategies some firms have had to adopt to stay open! An A-grade essay will appreciate that the statement is a complete over-generalisation and that Europe, America and Japan are still home to a great many post-Fordist manufacturing firms (although many of them are now struggling to stay afloat in a globalised world of imports and exports).
Always look carefully at the wording of an essay question. Often the words that it is easiest to ignore are the ones that your examiner is hoping you will pass comment on! This is equally true of physical geography too: the question “account for the general increase in river velocity that occurs downstream”. While it is true to say that river velocity rises as distance downstream increases (due to the addition of more water from tributaries), it is not a perfect relationship. Again, use of the word “general” is inviting you to flag up occasions when velocity might slacken off as we follow the river downstream (perhaps during a braided section of river or in a plunge pool).