Diversity of labour process, household forms, and political practice: a social approach to the inshore fishing communities of Clare, Digby Neck, and the Islands

This study seeks to address the crises facing the inshore fisheries of Atlantic Canada by providing a stronger basis for the integration of a social approach into research and policy considerations. The enlargement of the social approach consists of a full accounting of the diversity and dynamic interactions occurring within fishing communities at the levels of labour process, production units, household forms, cultural understandings, and political practices. These levels of diversity are analyzed in relation to one specific portion of Southwest Nova Scotia; the regions of Clare, Digby Neck, and the Islands. The region of Clare is comprised of francophone Acadian communities while the population of Digby Neck and the Islands is English-speaking and largely of Loyalist descent. Research methods included formal interviews and participant observation. The results of this study reveal an extremely high level of diversity in the labour processes of the inshore fishery and considerable flexibility of response on the part of fishers to variable resource and socioeconomic conditions. Within this context, the inshore fleet consists of several components in which some enterprises clearly exhibit the characteristics of either petty commodity or petty capitalist production while still others contain a mix of features from both forms of production. The analysis of fishing households demonstrates how women, in an attempt to ensure the survival of the family unit, have intensified their work in paid employment, community organizations, household labour, and the fishing enterprises of their husbands. The study also highlights the critical role played by the variable and competing cultural understandings of coastal residents in informing their political practice. The results of this study lead to the conclusion that gender relations and the process of class formation must be understood within the context of the dialectical and multi-layered interactions occurring between material and culture conditions. Such an approach not only accounts more fully for the complexity of the inshore fishery but also reveals, in a more precise fashion, the uneven growth of capitalism and the forces resisting or promoting its full development.