ABSTRACT
I have not lived in my hometown, Moss, for twenty-five years, but I visit my family there frequently. It has undergone substantial change in a few decades. One could hardly fail to notice the dwindling number of workers leaving the factory gates at the end of the day. It became increasingly clear that no more tankers would leave the shipyard, and then the glass factory and the concrete factory were shut down. The paper mill, which is the source of the town’s distinctive smell, is still there, but apart from that there is little industry left in what used to be an industrial town. This probably sounds like the beginning of a sad story of mass unemployment in a small industrial town without industry. In fact, there is little unemployment in Moss, and it has been that way for most of the time since the factories were shut down. New jobs were created, and they more than replaced the old ones. These days Moss looks more or less like one big shopping mall, and even if I can be nostalgic about the old industry – as the factories always had a certain aesthetic appeal to me – the transition from the industrial to the post-industrial society seems to have been fairly painless.
