3 Machine-Rolling Kretek: Gamification and Individualization
Marina Welker · 2024
Machine-Rolling Kretek Gamification and IndividualizationWhat cultural ideals and social relations prevail in the mechanized factories that are the source of over three quarters of the clove cigarettes produced today?Yusuf, a production technician, claimed that culture was absent from rule-governed mechanized factories, lamenting, "What was great about Sampoerna in the past was Dji Sam Soe.Now it's practically disappeared. . . .If we're talking about culture, what built Sampoerna's culture, it came from SKT [hand-rolled kretek].In SKM [machine-rolled kretek] there's just tight regulations." Yusuf 's view of Sampoerna's mechanized kretek factories as cultural voids was understandable.Humans are strikingly sparse in these cavernous buildings without natural light, dominated by imported machines that dwarf workers and drown out regular speech.Imported managerial techniques accompany imported machinery.Governing values and technocratic regulations are referred to in English, underscoring their foreign status: standard operating procedures (SOPs), safety, quality, volume, continuous improvement, best practices, lean manufacturing, key performance indicators (KPIs).Managerial orthodoxies often clash with practical realities; Sampoerna promotes "work-life balance" while imposing grueling shift schedules, for example, and emphasizes "safety" procedures while making a commodity that kills its consumers.There is little sense of the indigenous cultural and artisanal value that provokes kretek nationalist rhapsodizing in the hand-rolled context.From an anthropological perspective, however, imported managerial ideologies-as well as managerial techniques rooted in Indonesia's domestic history-are also cultural artifacts, and understanding their attraction and uptake requires explanation, as do the social bonds and divisions among workers, managers, and machines.Among Sampoerna's methods of securing worker consent to difficult and deleterious working conditions, foremost on employees' minds are the relatively