Baza naslova relevantne literature
Allan, Kori. 2019. „Volunteering as hope labour: the potential value of unpaid work experience for the un- and underemployed“. Culture, Theory and Critique 60(1): 66-83.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2018.1548300
This paper examines how voluntary labour is being reconfigured in precarious labour markets. I argue that like an internship, volunteering is increasingly construed as a form of ‘hope labour’, premised on the logic of investment. Hope labour promises that exposure and experience will possibly lead to employment in the future. In workshops for job seekers, experts reproduce a neoliberal logic through which the self is imagined as a portfolio or a bundle of skills that indexes one’s employability. These workshops present simple correlations between investments in one’s portfolio and enhanced employability, which tend to unravel in practice. The un- and under-employed, particularly immigrants, face difficulties accessing volunteer opportunities that develop appropriate skills and networks. They also struggle to present volunteer work as valuable ‘work experience’ in resumes and LinkedIn profiles. These difficulties reveal the ways in which hope labour is structured by and reproduces social inequalities. Although volunteer positions do not necessarily lead to paid work, unpaid work is simultaneously about filling one’s resume and chasing opportunity – prominent forms of neoliberal risk management in contingent and competitive labour markets. This labour creates potential affective and economic value, not only for individuals, but also for non-profit organisations and the state.
Aronowitz, Stanley i Jonathan Cutler. 1998. Post-Work: the Wages of Cybernation. London-New York: Routledge.
In Post-Work, Stanley Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler have collected essays from a variety of scholars to discuss the dreary future of work. The introduction, The Post-Work Manifesto, provides the framework for a radical reappraisal of work and suggests an alternative organization of labor. The provocative essays that follow focus on specific issues that are key to our reconceptualization of the notion and practice of work, with coverage of the fight for shorter hours, the relationship between school and work, and the role of welfare, among others. Armed with an interdisciplinary approach, Post-Work looks beyond the rancorous debates around welfare politics and lays out the real sources of anxiety in the modern workplace. The result is an offering of hope for the future - an alternative path for a cybernation, where the possibility of less work for a better standard of living is possible.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284597857_Post-Work_The_Wages_of_Cybernation
Aronowitz, Stanley i William DiFazio. 2010. The Jobless Future. Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press.
High technology will destroy more jobs than it creates. This grim prediction was first published in the 1994 edition of The Jobless Future, an eerily accurate title that could have been written for today's dismal economic climate. Fully updated and with a new introduction by Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future warns that jobs as we know them-long-term, with benefits-are an endangered species.
Atzeni, Maurizio. 2014. Workers and Labour in a Globalised Capitalism: Contemporary Themes and Theoretical Issues. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
An introduction to work and society for undergraduate and postgraduate students. This new text brings together international experts on work and employment from a range of disciplines to debate key themes and issues related to work in a globalised economy.
Baker, Catherine. 2014. “The Local Workforce in International Intervention in Yugoslav Successor States: Precariat or Projectariat”. International Peacekeeping 21(1): 91-106.
The international organizations involved in peacebuilding, democratization and peacekeeping in the Yugoslav successor states have employed thousands of locally recruited workers as project officers, language intermediaries and support staff. This makes them a distinct employment sector within these post-socialist and in several cases post-conflict economies, most significantly in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. This paper evaluates arguments in favour of regarding this workforce firstly as a group of workers suffering precarity and secondly as a privileged social elite. While there are good grounds for recognizing them as a distinctive social group, this distinctiveness has not led to a widely expressed social identity based on the commonalities of their employment.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13533312.2014.899123
Baldoz, Rick, Charles Koeber i Philip Kraft, ur. 2001. The Critical Study of Work: Labor, Technology, and Global Production. Temple University Press.
Two broad developments reshaped work at the end of the twentieth century. The first was the implosion of the Soviet Union and the worldwide triumph of market capitalism. The second was the increasing use of computer-based production technologies and management command-and-control systems. How do we make sense of these important developments. The editors have assembled a collection of provocative, original essays on work and workplaces throughout the world that challenge the current celebration of globalization and new technologies. Building on labor process analysis, individual case studies venture beyond factory and office to examine "virtual" workplaces, computer-era cottage work, and emotional and household labor. The settings range from Indian and Irish software factories to Brazilian supermarkets, Los Angeles sweatshops, and Taiwanese department stores. Other essays seek to make theoretical sense of increasingly de-centered production chains, fluid work relations, and uncertain employment. Individually and collectively the authors construct a new critical study of work, highlighting the connections between geography, technology, gender, race, and class. They offer an accessible and flexible approach to the study of workplace relations and production organization - and even the notion of work itself.
Bartha, Eszter 2014. "Forgotten Histories: Workers and the New Capitalism in East Germany and Hungary". U EUtROPEs: The Paradox of European Empire. University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 309-334.
By drawing on Kideckel (2002) and Todorova and Gille (2010), this article seeks to (1) explore forms of workers’ new subalternity in the new capitalist regimes in East Germany and Hungary, and (2) argue that nostalgia for the socialist regimes functions as a means and claim of the “little man” to express social criticism. Under state socialism, workers constituted the emblematic class of the regime. After the collapse of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, workers faced the double challenge of the decline of the political weight and significance of the working class and the devaluation of production work in a postindustrial society. Te essay analyzes the postsocialist experience of East German and Hungarian workers in three main dimensions: (1) the experience of post-Fordist development in the factory, (2) the subjective evaluation of the standard of living, and (3) interpersonal relations. Lastly, I examine the social and political attitudes of the workers in the mirror of their postsocialist experience. I argue that Hungarians had a more direct experience of peripheral development than East Germans. While East Germany’s more successful integration into the capitalist world economy was accompanied by a change of mentality and the appearance of post-materialistic values, in Hungary nationalism seemed to be the only alternative to capitalism, which had disappointed and effectively impoverished many people. Tis explains the ambiguous evaluation of the socialist Kádár regime, as the vision of greater social and material equality came to be confused with a longing for a strong state, order, and an autocratic government.
Bauman Zygmunt. 2005. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Berkshire, England: Open University Press.
If "being poor" once derived its meaning from the condition of being unemployed, today it draws its meaning primarily from the plight of a flawed consumer. This distinction truly makes a difference in the way poverty is experienced and in the chances to redeem its misery.
This absorbing book traces this change, and makes an inventory of its social consequences. It also considers ways of fighting back advancing poverty and mitigating its hardships, and tackles the problems of poverty in its present form. The new edition features: up-to-date coverage of the progress made by key thinkers in the field; a discussion of recent work on redundancy, disposability, and exclusion; explorations of new theories of workable solutions to poverty. Students of sociology, politics, and social policy will find this to be an invaluable text on the changing significance and implications of an enduring social problem.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/280582.Work_Consumerism_and_the_New_Poor
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2005. Liquid Life. Polity.
'Liquid life’ is the kind of life commonly lived in our contemporary, liquid-modern society. Liquid life cannot stay on course, as liquid-modern society cannot keep its shape for long. Liquid life is a precarious life, lived under conditions of constant uncertainty. The most acute and stubborn worries that haunt this liquid life are the fears of being caught napping, of failing to catch up with fast moving events, of overlooking the ‘use by’ dates and being saddled with worthless possessions, of missing the moment calling for a change of tack and being left behind. Liquid life is also shot through by a contradiction: it ought to be a (possibly unending) series of new beginnings, yet precisely for that reason it is full of worries about swift and painless endings, without which new beginnings would be unthinkable. Among the arts of liquid-modern living and the skills needed to practice them, getting rid of things takes precedence over their acquisition. This and other challenges of life in a liquid-modern society are traced and unravelled in the successive chapters of this new book by one of the most brilliant and original social thinkers of our time.
Beck, Ulrich. 1986. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. New Delhi: Sage.
Western industrial society is widely seen to be going through a decisive transitional period into a form defined variously as 'post-Enlightenment', 'post-Fordist' or 'postmodern'. Arguing that we are instead facing a different modernity typified by reflexivity, Ulrich Beck goes beyond these descriptions to provide a coherent picture of the direction of global social change. Underpinning the analysis is the notion of the `risk society'. The changing nature of society's relation to production and distribution is related to the environmental impact as a totalizing, globalizing economy based on scientific and technical knowledge becomes more central to social organization and social conflict.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/31995357?selectedversion=NBD8977232
Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books
https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Post-Industrial-Society-Venture-Forecasting/dp/0465097138
In 1976, Daniel Bell's historical work predicted a vastly different society developing—one that will rely on the “economics of information” rather than the “economics of goods.” Bell argued that the new society would not displace the older one but rather overlie some of the previous layers just as the industrial society did not completely eradicate the agrarian sectors of our society. The post-industrial society's dimensions would include the spread of a knowledge class, the change from goods to services and the role of women. All of these would be dependent on the expansion of services in the economic sector and an increasing dependence on science as the means of innovating and organizing technological change. Bell prophetically stated in The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society that we should expect “… new premises and new powers, new constraints and new questions—with the difference that these are now on a scale that had never been previously imagined in world history.”
Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.
With a new afterword by the author, this classic analysis of Western liberal capitalist society contends that capitalism,and the culture it creates,harbors the seeds of its own downfall by creating a need among successful people for personal gratification,a need that corrodes the work ethic that led to their success in the first place. With the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a new world order, this provocative manifesto is more relevant than ever.
https://www.bookdepository.com/Cultural-Contradictions-Capitalism-Daniel-Bell/9780465014996
Berardi, Franco B. 2009. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/soul-work
Capital has managed to overcome the dualism of body and soul by establishing a workforce in which everything we mean by the Soul—language, creativity, affects—is mobilized for its own benefit. Industrial production put to work bodies, muscles, and arms. Now, in the sphere of digital technology and cyberculture, exploitation involves the mind, language, and emotions in order to generate value—while our bodies disappear in front of our computer screens. In this, his newest book, Franco “Bifo” Berardi—key member of the Italian Autonomist movement and a close associate of Félix Guattari—addresses these new forms of estrangement. In the philosophical landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, the Hegelian concept of alienation was used to define the harnessing of subjectivity. The estrangement of workers from their labor, the feeling of alienation they experienced, and their refusal to submit to it became the bases for a human community that remained autonomous from capital. But today a new condition of alienation has taken root in which workers commonly and voluntarily work overtime, the population is tethered to cell phones and Blackberries, debt has become a postmodern form of slavery, and antidepressants are commonly used to meet the unending pressure of production. As a result, the conditions for community have run aground and new philosophical categories are needed. The Soul at Work is a clarion call for a new collective effort to reclaim happiness.
Berlant, Lauren. 2007. “Nearly utopian, nearly normal: Post-Fordist affect in La Promesse and Rosetta’”. Public Culture 19(2): 273-301.
https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2006-036
https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/politicalfeeling/files/2007/10/berlant-la-promesse.pdf
Biti, Ozren i Mislav Žitko. 2017. "Transformacija (ideje) rada: od teorijskih rasprava o novom kapitalizmu do kvalitativnih istraživanja u hrvatskom tranzicijskom kontekstu". Narodna umjetnost 54(2): 149-167.
https://doi.org/10.15176/vol54no208
Prilog nudi pregled teorijskih argumenata o transformaciji rada, oslanjajući se pritom na pojmove fleksibilizacije i prekarizacije, koji su u posljednje vrijeme premrežili akademski i javni diskurs. Ukazuje na zajedničku argumentacijsku jezgru autora poput Becka, Sennetta i Baumana, ali i na interpretacijske nedostatke onoga što se ugrubo, na tragu Dooganove rasprave, može klasificirati kao “postmarksistički diskurs”. U tu svrhu izloženi su i empirijski fundirani uvidi koji dovode u pitanje utemeljenost nekih od važnijih teza iz tog korpusa literature, još uvijek dominantnog u lijevo usmjerenom dijelu akademskog polja. Pokušaj deskripcije transformacije rada u Hrvatskoj u (post)tranzicijskom razdoblju kreće od presjeka domaćih socioloških istraživanja. Kasnije se kroz odabrane etnografske doprinose tom istraživačkom području naznačuje kako bi kvantitativni aspekti transformacije (tržišta) rada mogli biti nadopunjeni širim spektrom kvalitativnih istraživanja. U toj međuigri sociologije i kulturneantropologije/etnologije prepoznaje se mogućnost za meritorniju analizu transformacije rada u hrvatskom posttranzicijskom društvu, onu koja bi svijet rada bolje povezala sa svijetom života.
Biti, Ozren. 2012. “Potraga za odgovorom na nedefinirano pitanje: Zygmunt Bauman i sociologija protočne potrošnje”. Filozofska istraživanja 32(1):109-119
U ovom se radu, krećući od sociološke teorije Zygmunta Baumana, raspravljaju s jedne strane izazovi života u lakoj moderni, a s druge strane izazovi znanstvenog promišljanja različitih aspekata lake moderne. U tu se svrhu Baumanove knjige i članci uspoređuju s djelima drugih velikih imena suvremene sociologije poput Jeana Baudrillarda, Anthonyja Giddensa i Ulricha Becka. Ukrštavanje njihovih teza i ocjena o učincima globalizacije na pojedinačne živote te o novim identitetnim politikama navodi na zaključak da je Baumanov doprinos osebujan i iskoristiv za reviziju okoštalih socioloških pogleda na društvo i uloge sociologije u njegovu analiziranju. Opreke proizvodnja/potrošnja, zajednica/individua i sigurnost/ sloboda kod Baumana se provlače kroz ideju protočnosti, mobilnosti i pokretljivosti društva lake moderne, što sociologiji otežava mogućnost odgovaranja na konkretna pitanja te pred nju stavlja nove i sve kompleksnije dijagnostičke zadatke. Dok individualizirano društvo od svojih pripadnika iziskuje biografske odgovore na sistemske kontradikcije, isto to društvo od sociologa iziskuje potragu za odgovorom na nedefinirano pitanje.
Biti, Ozren. 2018. "Igra nikad ne prestaje". U Domaći teren: sociokulturno istraživanje hrvatskog sporta. Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, 215-242.
Blagaić, Marina i Renata Jambrešić Kirin. 2013. “Ambivalentno nasljeđe socijalističkih radnica: slučaj tvornice Jugoplastika”. Narodna umjetnost 50(1):40-74.
https://doi.org/10.15176/vol50no102
Socijalistički je pravni okvir omogućio poboljšanje pravne, ekonomske i socijalne ravnopravnosti žena što je izmijenilo njihov tradicionalno subordiniran položaj u obitelji i društvu. S druge strane, konflikt revolucionarnih i tradicijskih vrednota generirao je različite antagonizme i kompromise kao i “nizove konfliktnih komplementarnosti” (G. W. Creed) starog i novog sistema, posebice u privatnoj sferi gdje se očuvao patrijarhalni “seksualni ugovor” (C. Pateman) s jasnom podjelom muških i ženskih uloga. Članak se usredotočuje na segment socijalističke modernizacije vezan uz nagli razvoj industrije plastike koja je rasla uglavnom kao rezultat ženskih napora i postignuća, to jest kao simbioza rane socijalističke kulture kompeticije, (samo)discipline i (samo)korekcije ljudskih mana, i patrijarhalne baštine koja je cijenila ženske vrline poput spremnosti na žrtvovanje (za druge) i preuzimanja odgovornosti za obitelj i zajednicu u cjelini. Već od kraja 1950-ih, rivalstvo dva kolektivistička projekta – patrijarhalnog i komunističkog – koji su, svaki na svoj način, disciplinirali, socijalizirali i koristili žensku radnu i reproduktivnu sposobnost, pronašli su zajednički interes u obnavljanju diskursa ženstvenosti i kućevnosti. Prijelaz iz siromaštva u stanje relativnog blagostanja, praćen počecima masovne proizvodnje kućanskih aparata i potrošnih dobara, sintetičkih materijala i plastike, pratila je pasivizacija žena kao političkih subjekata i komodifikacija njihovih slika u masovnim medijima.
Etnografsko istraživanje iskustava žena zaposlenih u Jugoplastici (1954. – 1991.), a posebice radnica iz Jugoplastikinog pogona na Šolti (1959. – 1991.), raspravlja o ambivalentnom nasljeđu socijalističke emancipacije. Za većinu žena, stalni posao u tvornici fundamentalno je promijenio njihove svakodnevne života, rodne odnose u obitelji, razinu životnog standarda i način na koji žene prosuđuju svoje sposobnosti i kompetencije. Njihova kazivanja otkrivaju selektivno viđenje života u socijalizmu; nedostatak kritičke refleksije o vlastitoj ideološkoj poziciji unutar lokalnog i nacionalnog konteksta te nostalgiju za vremenom ekonomskog osnaživanja, vremenom radnih uspjeha i ponosa zbog vještina koje su koristile obavljajući radne zadatke. Ta su iskustva supostavljena onima iz razdoblja tradicijske otočne ekonomije (poljoprivreda, ribolov, proizvodnja vapna), kao i onima recentnog oslanjanja na prirodne izvore i turizam koje reaktiviraju tradicijske (patrijarhalne) obrasce života i ženama ne ostavljaju mnogo prostora za (samo)afirmaciju.Boltanski, Luc i Eve Chiapello. 2005. New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.
In this established classic, sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello get to the heart of contemporary capitalism. Delving deep into the latest management texts informing the thinking of employers, the authors trace the contours of a new spirit of capitalism. They argue that beginning in the mid-1970s, capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist work structure and developed a new network-based form of organization founded on employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace—a putative freedom bought at the cost of material and psychological security. This was a spirit in tune with the libertarian and romantic currents of the period (as epitomized by dressed-down, cool capitalists such as Bill Gates and Ben and Jerry) and, as the authors argue, a more successful, pernicious, and subtle form of exploitation. In this new edition, the authors reflect on the reception of the book and the debates it has stimulated.
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2513-the-new-spirit-of-capitalism
Bonfiglioli, Chiara. 2019. Women and Industry in the Balkans: The Rise and Fall of the Yugoslav Textile Sector. I.B. Tauris.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/women-and-industry-in-the-balkans-9781838600761/
Women's emancipation through productive labour was a key tenet of socialist politics in post-World War II Yugoslavia. Mass industrialisation under Tito led many young women to join traditionally 'feminised' sectors, and as a consequence the textile sector grew rapidly, fast becoming a gendered symbol of industrialisation, consumption and socialist modernity. By the 1980s Yugoslavia was one of the world's leading producers of textiles and garments. The break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, however, resulted in factory closures, bankruptcy and layoffs, forcing thousands of garment industry workers into precarious and often exploitative private-sector jobs. Drawing on more than 60 oral history interviews with former and current garment workers, as well as workplace periodicals and contemporary press material collected across Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia, Women and Industry in the Balkans charts the rise and fall of the Yugoslav textile sector, as well as the implications of this post-socialist transition, for the first time. In the process, the book explores broader questions about memories of socialism, lingering feelings of attachment to the socialist welfare system and the complexity of the post-socialist era. This is important reading for all scholars working on the history and politics of Yugoslavia and the Balkans, oral history, memory studies and gender studies.
Bourdieu Pierre. 2005. The Social Structures of Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Much orthodox economic theory is based on assumptions which are treated as self-evident: supply and demand are regarded as independent entities, the individual is assumed to be a rational agent who knows his interests and how to make decisions corresponding to them, and so on. But one has only to examine an economic transaction closely, as Pierre Bourdieu does here for the buying and selling of houses, to see that these abstract assumptions cannot explain what happens in reality. As Bourdieu shows, the market is constructed by the state, which can decide, for example, whether to promote private housing or collective provision. And the individuals involved in the transaction are immersed in symbolic constructions which constitute, in a strong sense, the value of houses, neighbourhoods and towns.
The abstract and illusory nature of the assumptions of orthodox economic theory has been criticised by some economists, but Bourdieu argues that we must go further. Supply, demand, the market and even the buyer and seller are products of a process of social construction, and so-called ‘economic' processes can be adequately described only by calling on sociological methods. Instead of seeing the two disciplines in antagonistic terms, it is time to recognize that sociology and economics are in fact part of a single discipline, the object of which is the analysis of social facts, of which economic transactions are in the end merely one aspect. This brilliant study by the most original sociologist of post-war France will be essential reading for students and scholars of sociology, economics, anthropology and related disciplines.
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Social+Structures+of+the+Economy-p-9780745625393
Bourdieu, Pierre et al. 1999. The Weight of the World. Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Confined in their governmental ivory towers, their actions largely dictated by public opinion polls, politicians and state officials are all too often oblivious to the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. These persons, who often experience so much hardship in their lives, have few ways to make themselves heard and are obliged either to protest outside official frameworks or remain locked in the silence of their despair.
Under the direction of Pierre Bourdieu, France’s foremost sociologist, a team of 22 researchers spent three years studying and analyzing the new forces of social suffering that characterize contemporary societies―the daily suffering of those denied the means of acquiring a socially dignified existence and of those poorly adjusted to the rapidly changing conditions of their lives. Social workers, teachers, policemen, factory workers, white-collar clerks, farmers, artisans, shopkeepers―no one seems to be immune from the frustrations of today’s life, not to speak of the institutions of the family, work, and education.
The book can be read like a series of short stories, which include: a steel worker who was laid off after 20 years and now struggles to support his family on unemployment benefits and a part-time job; a trade unionist who finds his goals undermined by the changing nature of work; a family from Algeria living in a housing tract on the outskirts of Paris who must cope with pervasive forms of racism; and a schoolteacher confronted with urban violence. Reading these stories enables one to register these people’s lives and the forms of social suffering that infuse them.
The original publication of this book was a major social and political event in France, where it topped the best-seller list and triggered a widespread public debate on inequality, politics, and civic solidarity. It offers not only a distinctive method for analyzing social life, but another way of practicing politics.Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. “Utopia and endless exploitation. The essence on Neoliberalism”.
Bourdieu, Pierre&Wacquant, Loic. 2001. “Nova planetarna vulgata”. Diskrepancija sv. 2. br. 3. (La nouvelle vulgate planetaire, Le Monde Diplomatique, Mai 2000:6-7).
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2000/05/BOURDIEU/13727.html
Bröckling, Ulrich. 2016. The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject. Sage Publishing. Translated by Steven Black.
https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/the-entrepreneurial-self/book242746
Ulrich Bröckling claims that the imperative to act like an entrepreneur has turned ubiquitous. In Western society there is a drive to orient your thinking and behaviour on the objective of market success which dictates the private and professional spheres. Life is now ruled by competition for power, money, fitness, and youth. The self is driven to constantly improve, change and adapt to a society only capable of producing winners and losers. The Entrepreneurial Self explores the series of juxtapositions within the self, created by this call for entrepreneurship. Whereas it can expose unknown potential, it also leads to over-challenging. It may strengthen self-confidence but it also exacerbates the feeling of powerlessness. It may set free creativity but it also generates unbounded anger. Competition is driven by the promise that only the capable will reap success, but no amount of effort can remove the risk of failure. The individual has no choice but to balance out the contradiction between the hope of rising and the fear of decline.
Braverman, Harry. 1998. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.
https://caringlabor.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/8755-labor_and_monopoly_capitalism.pdf
This widely acclaimed book, first published in 1974, was a classic from its first day in print. Written in a direct, inviting way by Harry Braverman, whose years as an industrial worker gave him rich personal insight into work, Labor and Monopoly Capital overturned the reigning ideologies of academic sociology. This new edition features an introduction by John Bellamy Foster that sets the work in historical and theoretical context, as well as two rare articles by Braverman, "The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century" (1975) and "Two Comments" (1976), that add much to our understanding of the book.
https://www.amazon.com/Labor-Monopoly-Capital-Degradation-Twentieth/dp/0853459401
Bridger, Sue, Rebecca Key i Kathryn Pinnick. 1996. No more heroines? Russia, women and the market. London i New York: Routledge.
With the collapse of Soviet rule and the emergence of independent Russia, the image of Russian women in the Western imagination has changed dramatically. The robust tractor drivers and athletes have been replaced by glamorous but vulnerable beauty queens or the dishevelled and downcast women trading goods on the streets.
The authors of this work take a closer look at what lies behind the above images and how Russian women are coping with a very different sort of life. The main focus is on the effect of unemployment on Russian women and how they are coping with it. Based on case studies and personal interviews carried out in the Moscow region in 1993-94, No More Heroines? will provide both specialist and non-specialist alike with access to the thinking of women and their organisations in Russia today.https://books.google.hr/books/about/No_More_Heroines.html?id=Wn5rFaVrfD4C&redir_esc=y
Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos
Neoliberal rationality--ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture--remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice bow to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either. In an original and compelling argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that for democracy to have a future, it must become an object of struggle and rethinking.
Buchowski, Michal. 1997. Reluctant capitalists. Class and culture in a local community in Western Polland. Berlin: Centre Marc Bloch.
Buchowski, Michal. 2001. Rethinking Transformations: an anthropological perspectives on post-socialism. Poznań:Wydawnictwo Fundacji Humaniora.
Buchowski, Michal. 2004. “Hierarchies of Knowledge in Central-Eastern European Anthropology”. The Anthropology of East Europe Review 22(2):5-14.
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/article/view/296/372
Buchowski, Michal. 2006. “The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother”. Anthropological Qarterly 79(3):463-498.
http://webs.ucm.es/info/antrosim/docs/BuchowskiMichal_The_Specter_Orientalism_In_Europe.pdf
Buchowski, Michal. 2012. “Anthropology in Post-socialist Europe”. U A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe. Ullrich Kockel, Máiréad Nic Craith and Jonas Frykman, ur. Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 68-88.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118257203
Burawoy, Michael and Katherine Vardery. 1998. Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the PostSocialist World. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.
The ethnographies collected here offer a surprising and compelling picture of change in Russia and Eastern Europe found in no other book to date. The collection brings together a wideranging group of authors from sociology, anthropology, and political science to reveal the complex relationships that still exist between the former socialist world and the world today.
https://www.amazon.com/Uncertain-Transition-Ethnographies-Change-Postsocialist/dp/0847690431
Burawoy, Michael. 1979. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Since the 1930s, industrial sociologists have tried to answer the question, Why do workers not work harder? Michael Burawoy spent ten months as a machine operator in a Chicago factory trying to answer different but equally important questions: Why do workers work as hard as they do? Why do workers routinely consent to their own exploitation?
Manufacturing Consent, the result of Burawoy's research, combines rich ethnographical description with an original Marxist theory of the capitalist labor process. Manufacturing Consent is unique among studies of this kind because Burawoy has been able to analyze his own experiences in relation to those of Donald Roy, who studied the same factory thirty years earlier. Burawoy traces the technical, political, and ideological changes in factory life to the transformations of the market relations of the plant (it is now part of a multinational corporation) and to broader movements, since World War II, in industrial relations.http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo23899991.html
Burawoy, Michael.1985. The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism. London: Verso.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1949540.The_Politics_of_Production
Carls, Kristin. 2007. „Affective Labour in Milanese Large Scale Retailing: Labour Control and Employees’ Coping Strategies“. ephemera 7(1): 46-59.
Internationalisation and rising competition in large scale retailing have led to a re-discovery of service quality as a relevant field of competition. Consequently, the affective character of frontline retail labour, inherent in the direct interaction between employee and customer, has become a focus of labour control. However, management’s strategies remain contradictory and fragile, not least due to opposing strategies of rationalisation and service orientation. Conflicts could thus be expected to arise, constituting possible starting points for employees’ resistance against labour control and its colonisation of affects. Against this backdrop, this paper explores employees’ strategies to cope with conflicting and unsatisfying working conditions, asking what role affects play in everyday work experiences. It highlights the way coping oscillates between adaptation and appropriation of competences, and how a lack of collective experiences reduces employees’ capacity to act.
Castree, Noel, Neil Coe, Kevin Ward and Michael Samers. 2004. Spaces of Work: Global Capitalism and Geographies of Labour. London: SAGE Publications.
https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/spaces-of-work/book210835
Spaces of Work is an accessible examination of the role of labour in the modern world. The authors critically assess the present condition and future prospects for workers through the geographies of place, space and scale, and in conjunction with other more commonly studied components of the globalisation such as production, trade and finance. Each chapter presents examples of labour practice from around the world, and across multiple sectors of work, not just Western manufacturing. In addition, the book features; further reading section with key questions, glossary of key terms, short summaries of the main theoretical approaches, guide to further learning resources. Spaces of Work is a key book for all social scientists interested in the contemporary state of labour, and the scope for progressive change within the capitalist system. Students of human geography, sociology, international political economy, economics and cultural studies will all find this an invaluable text.
Cepić, Dražen. 2015. “The Crisis of Working Class Sociability in Croatia: Challenges of De-Unionization“. Ethnologica Balkanica 18: 337-353
https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=413806
This article investigates how the working class in contemporary Croatia responded to challenges brought by the post-socialist transition, with special focus on the patterns of sociability. In this ethnographically and historically informed paper, I explore three topics: the shrinking of cross-class sociability which is explained by the emergence of new, non-egalitarian orders of values; the privatization of sociability, often caused by the decline of trade union activities; and finally, the strategies of adapting to the new conditions by persisting on union activism and self-organizing of neighbourhood communities. The paper presents results from 17 in-depth interviews conducted in five research sites: two textile factories and one electric factory, one oil company, and one research institute.
Chamberlain, James A. 2018. Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt1w0dbv8
This revolutionary book presents a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism. In Undoing Work, Rethinking Community, James A. Chamberlain argues that paid work and the civic duty to perform it substantially undermines freedom and justice. Chamberlain believes that to seize back our time and transform our society, we must abandon the deep-seated view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not. Chamberlain focuses on the regimes of flexibility and the unconditional basic income, arguing that while both offer prospects for greater freedom and justice, they also incur the risk of shoring up the work society rather than challenging it. To transform the work society, he shows that we must also reconfigure the place of paid work in our lives and rethink the meaning of community at a deeper level. Throughout, he speaks to a broad readership, and his focus on freedom and social justice will interest scholars and activists alike. Chamberlain offers a range of strategies that will allow us to uncouple our deepest human values from the notion that worth is generated only through labor.
https://www.amazon.com/Undoing-Work-Rethinking-Community-Critique/dp/1501714864
Choonara, Joseph. 2019. Insecurity, Precarious Work and Labour Markets: Challenging the Orthodoxy. Palgrave Macmillan.
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030133290
Precarity is a key theme in political discourse, in media and academic discussions of employment, and within the labour movement. Often, the prevailing idea is of an endless march of precarity, rendering work ever more contingent and workers ever more disposable. However, this detailed study of the UK labour force challenges the picture of rising precarity and widespread use of temporary employment, suggesting instead that employment tenure and the extent of temporary work have proved stubbornly stable over the past four decades. Choonara offers a new approach to labour markets, drawing on the theoretical underpinnings of Marxist political economy to interrogate research data from the UK. This book examines why, despite the deteriorating conditions in work, employment relations have remained stable, and offers insight into the extent of subjective insecurity among workers. Insecurity, Precarious Work and Labour Markets will be of use to students and scholars across the sociology of work, labour economics, industrial relations and political economy.
Crapanzano, Vincent. 2003. “Reflections on Hope as a Category of Social and Pshychological Analysis”. Cultural Anthropology 18(1): 3-32.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/can.2003.18.1.3/full
Ćurković, Stipe. 2011. “Civilnom scenom do restauracije kapitalizma”. Novosti br. 613.
http://www.novossti.com/2011/09/civilnom-scenom-do-restauracije-kapitalizma/
Ćurković, Stipe. 2011a. “Tranzicija i solidarnost”. U Kroz tranziciju. Prilozi teoriji privatizacije. Željko Popović i Zoran Gajić Gajić, ur. Novi Sad: AKO, 223-235.
Ćurković, Stipe. 2012. “Europa, kapital, demokracija: napomene o Europskoj uniji i nacionalnoj državi”. Slobodni filozofski.
http://www.slobodnifilozofski.com/2012/04/stipe-curkovic-europa-kapital.html
De Angelis, Massimo and David Harvie. 2009. “‘Cognitive Capitalism’ and the Rat-Race: How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities”. Historical Materialism 17(3): 3-30.
https://doi.org/10.1163/146544609X12469428108420
One hundred years ago, Frederick Taylor and the pioneers of scientific management went into battle on US factory-floors. Armed with stopwatches and clipboards, they were fighting a war over measure. A century on and capitalist production has spread far beyond the factory walls and the confines of 'national economies'. Although capitalism increasingly seems to rely on 'cognitive' and 'immaterial' forms of labour and social cooperation, the war over measure continues. Armies of economists, statisticians, management-scientists, information-specialists, accountants and others are engaged in a struggle to connect heterogeneous concrete human activities on the basis of equal quantities of human labour in the abstract – that is, to link work and capitalist value. In this paper, we discuss contemporary capital's attempt to (re)impose the 'law of value' through its measuring of immaterial labour. Using the example of higher education in the UK – a 'frontline' of capitalist development – as our case-study, we explain how measuring takes places on various 'self-similar' levels of social organisation. We suggest that such processes are both diachronic and synchronic: socially-necessary labour-times of 'immaterial doings' are emerging and being driven down at the same time as heterogeneous concrete activities are being made commensurable. Alongside more overt attacks on academic freedom, it is in this way that neoliberalism appears on campus.
Deville, Joe. 2015. Lived Economies of Default: Consumer Credit, Debt Collection and the Capture of Affect. London: Routledge.
Consumer credit borrowing – using credit cards, store cards and personal loans – is an important and routine part of many of our lives. But what happens when these everyday forms of borrowing go ‘bad’, when people start to default on their loans and when they cannot, or will not, repay? It is this poorly understood, controversial, but central part of both the consumer credit industry and the lived experiences of an increasing number of people that this book explores. Drawing on research from the interior of the debt collections industry, as well as debtors' own accounts and historical research into technologies of lending and collection, it examines precisely how this ever more sophisticated, globally connected market functions. It focuses on the highly intimate techniques used to try and recoup defaulting debts from borrowers, as well as on the collection industry’s relationship with lenders. Joe Deville follows a journey of default, from debtors’ borrowing practices, to the intrusion of collections technologies into their homes and everyday lives, to the collections organisation, to attempts by debtors to seek outside help. In the process he shows how to understand this particular market, we need to understand the central role played within it by emotion and affect. By opening up for scrutiny an area of the economy which is often hidden from view, this book makes a major contribution both to understanding the relationship between emotion and calculation in markets and the role of consumer credit in our societies and economies. This book will be of interest to students, teachers and researchers in a range of fields, including sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, economics and social psychology.
Doogan, Kevin. 2009. New Capitalism? The Transformation of Work. Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press.
https://www.amazon.com/New-Capitalism-Kevin-Doogan/dp/0745633250
In this highly original work, Kevin Doogan looks at contemporary social change through the lens of the labour market, revealing that the transformation of work and the rise in job insecurity are not unavoidable effects of 'new capitalism'; they are manufactured, a result of government policy and the greater exposure of the economy to market forces.
Dowling, Emma. 2007. “Producing the Dining Experience: Measure, Subjectivity and the Affective Worker”. ephemera 7(1): 117-132.
http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/7-1dowling.pdf
One of the major contributions of the operaista tradition is the concept – and hands-on investigation – of class compostion. A detailed analysis of the real conditions of workers today is necessary to validate any analysis of contemporary capitalism, as well as its potential sites of struggle; only thus can the concepts of immaterial and affective labour be useful politically. This article is a contribution to such an effort. Working as a waitress in a restaurant in a metropolitan city, where both the product of my work and the means by which it was produced were highly ‘affective’, I have been in a privileged position to experience first-hand the material conditions of this type of labour. This article addresses the way in which affective and immaterial labour have been characterised in the literature from the point of view of my experience. How well does the way in which these forms of labour are defined apply to the service work I performed? In particular I will take up the debates around the organisation and (im-)measurability of affective labour, and how this can (or cannot) open up possibilities for resistance in the specific context of my example. I then wish to show what can be generalised from this case study and consider what this means for the further development of the debates around affective and immaterial labour.
Duffield, Mark. 2012. “Challenging Environments: Danger, Resilience and the Aid Industry”. Security Dialogue 43(5): 475–92.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010612457975
Despite the widespread perception of danger, the aid industry continues to expand within challenging political environments. As a way of reducing risk, this expansion has been accompanied by the ‘bunkerization’ of international aid workers. While this development is largely viewed by the industry as an unfortunate response to a decline in external security, a more holistic approach is used here to explain the consequent paradox of liberal interventionism: an expansion that is simultaneously a remoteness of international aid workers from the societies in which they operate. The demise of modernist legal, moral and political constraints, together with a decline in the political patronage that aid agencies enjoy, has been important in shaping the new risk terrain. At the same time, these changes embody a profound change in the way contingency is approached. Earlier modernist forms of protection have been replaced by postmodernist calls for resilience and the acceptance of risk as an opportunity for enterprise and reinvention. Within the aid industry, however, field-security training represents a countervailing attempt to govern aid workers through anxiety. Resilience, in the form of ‘care of the self’ techniques, becomes a therapeutic response to the fears induced in this way. Viewed from this perspective, apart from reducing risk, the bunker has important therapeutic functions in a world that aid workers no longer understand or feel safe in.
Dunn, Elizabeth. 2004. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking the Labour. Ithaca: Cornel University Press.
The transition from socialism in Eastern Europe is not an isolated event, but part of a larger shift in world capitalism: the transition from Fordism to flexible (or neoliberal) capitalism. Using a blend of ethnography and economic geography, Elizabeth C. Dunn shows how management technologies like niche marketing, accounting, audit, and standardization make up flexible capitalism's unique form of labor discipline. This new form of management constitutes some workers as self-auditing, self-regulating actors who are disembedded from a social context while defining others as too entwined in social relations and unable to self-manage.Privatizing Poland examines the effects privatization has on workers' self-concepts; how changes in "personhood" relate to economic and political transitions; and how globalization and foreign capital investment affect Eastern Europe's integration into the world economy. Dunn investigates these topics through a study of workers and changing management techniques at the Alima-Gerber factory in Rzeszów, Poland, formerly a state-owned enterprise, which was privatized by the Gerber Products Company of Fremont, Michigan.
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100938110
Elson, Diane, ur. 2015. Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. London, New York: Verso.
https://www.versobooks.com/books/1967-value
This influential collection of essays focuses on the elusive concept of “value,” and aims to answer the question “Why is Marx’s theory of value so important?” Aboo Aumeeruddy and Ramon Tortajada introduce the key interpretive debates surrounding “value form,” leading to seminal essays by Jairus Banaji and Chris Arthur. The labour theory of value is interrogated by Geoffrey Kay and Athar Hussain, and Diane Elson concludes with an argument for the importance of Marx’s “Value Theory of Labour.” These incisive and erudite texts provide a crucial introduction to Marxist political economy, as well as advancing critical arguments for those already well versed in the field.
Fairclought, Norman. 2001. “Critical Discourse Analysis as a Method in Social Scientific Research”. U Methods in critical discourse analysis. Ruth Wodak i Michael Meyer, ur. London: Sage.
http://sk.sagepub.com/books/methods-of-critical-discourse-analysis
Fantone, Laura. 2007. “Precarious Changes: Gender and Generational Politics in Contemporary Italy”. Feminist Review 87(1): 5-20.
The issue of a generational exchange in Italian feminism has been crucial over the last decade. Current struggles over precariousness have revived issues previously raised by feminists of the 1970s, recalling how old forms of instability and precarious employment are still present in Italy. This essay starts from the assumption that precariousness is a constitutive aspect of many young Italian women's lives. Young Italian feminist scholars have been discussing the effects of such precarity on their generation. This article analyses the literature produced by political groups of young scholars interested in gender and feminism connected to debates on labour and power in contemporary Italy. One of the most successful strategies that younger feminists have used to gain visibility has involved entering current debates on precariousness, thus forcing a connection with the larger Italian labour movement. In doing so, this new wave of feminism has destabilized the universalism assumed by the 1970s generation. By pointing to a necessary generational change, younger feminists have been able to mark their own specificity and point to exploitative power dynamics within feminist groups, as well as in the family and in the workplace without being dismissed. In such a layered context, many young feminists argue that precariousness is a life condition, not just the effect of job market flexibility and not solely negative. The literature produced by young feminists addresses the current strategies engineered to make 'their' precarious life more sustainable. This essay analyses such strategies in the light of contemporary Italian politics. The main conclusion is that younger Italian women's experience requires new strategies and tools for struggle, considering that the visibility of women as political subjects is still quite minimal. Female precariousness can be seen as a fruitful starting point for a dialogue across differences, addressing gender and reproduction, immigration, work and social welfare at the same time.
Fechter, Anne-Meike i Heather Hindman, ur. 2011. Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers: The Challenges and Futures of Aidland. Kumarian Press.
Much and warranted attention is paid to the lives of aid recipients – their household lives, saving habits, gender relations, etc. It’s held that a key to measuring the effectiveness of aid is contained in such details. Rarely, however, is the lens turned on the lives of aid workers themselves. Yet the seemingly impersonal network of agencies and donors that formulate and implement policy are composed of real people with complex motivations and experiences that might also provide important lessons about development’s failures and successes. Hindman and Fechter break new ground by illuminating the social and cultural world of the aid agency, a world that is neglected in most discussions of aid policy. They examine how aid workers’ moral beliefs interlink and conflict with their initial motivations, how they relate to aid beneficiaries, their local NGO counterparts, and other aid workers, their views on race and sexuality, the effect of transient lifestyles and insider language, and the security and family issues that come with choosing such a career. Ultimately, they arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of development processes that acknowledges a rich web of relationships at all levels of the system.
Fechter, Anne-Meike. 2016. “Aid Work as Moral Labour”. Critique of Anthropology 36(3): 228–43.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X16646837
This paper argues that some of the engagements and practices of international aid workers can be productively understood as forms of moral labour. Taking Hardt’s concept of ‘immaterial labour’ (1999) as a point of reference, the paper examines the moral practices that aid workers engage in the course of their work and personal lives. Much of the relevant literature focuses on the humanitarian imperative – that is, the implied moral responsibility of better-off nations and individuals to assist others in need. Less extensively, some development literature has adopted the understanding of aid and development assistance in moral frameworks of the gift, or ‘doing good’. What happens, though, in terms of experienced and practiced moralities in the concrete situations and scenarios generated by such helping imperatives? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among aid workers in Cambodia, the paper examines some of the perhaps inevitable moral entanglements which these workers find themselves in, and have to negotiate. The analytical benefits of framing these efforts as ‘moral labour’ include a broadened understanding of how morality matters in aid beyond the helping imperative, as well as a recognition that the significance of this labour does not rest on products that may result from it, but lies in the performance of the labour itself.
Ferguson, James. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. University of Minnesota Press.
https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Politics-Machine-Development-Depoliticization-Bureaucratic/dp/0816624372
Development, it is generally assumed, is good and necessary, and in its name the West has intervened, implementing all manner of projects in the impoverished regions of the world. When these projects fail, as they do with astonishing regularity, they nonetheless produce a host of regular and unacknowledged effects, including the expansion of bureaucratic state power and the translation of the political realities of poverty and powerlessness into "technical" problems awaiting solution by "development" agencies and experts. It is the political intelligibility of these effects, along with the process that produces them, that this book seeks to illuminate through a detailed case study of the workings of the "development" industry in one country, Lesotho, and in one "development" project. Using an anthropological approach grounded in the work of Foucault, James Ferguson analyzes the institutional framework within which such projects are crafted and the nature of "development discourse," revealing how it is that, despite all the "expertise" that goes into formulating development projects, they nonetheless often demonstrate a startling ignorance of the historical and political realities of the locale they are intended to help. In a close examination of the attempted implementation of the Thaba-Tseka project in Lesotho, Ferguson shows how such a misguided approach plays out, how, in fact, the "development" apparatus in Lesotho acts as an "anti-politics machine," everywhere whisking political realities out of sight and all the while performing, almost unnoticed, its own pre-eminently political operation of strengthening the state presence in the local region. James Ferguson is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine.
Fleming, Peter. 2014. Resisting Work: The Corporatization of Life and its Discontents. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/34933
A job is no longer something we "do," but instead something we "are." As the boundaries between work and non-work have dissolved, we restructure ourselves and our lives using social ingenuity to get things done and be resourceful outside the official workday. In his provocative book, Resisting Work Peter Fleming insists that many jobs in the West are now regulated by a new matrix of power-biopower-where "life itself" is put to work through our ability to self-organize around formal rules. This neoliberal system of employment tries to absorb our life attributes--from our consumer tastes, "downtime," and sexuality--into employment so that questions of human capital and resources replace questions of employee, worker, and labor. Fleming then suggests that the corporation turns to communal life-what he calls "the common"-in order to reproduce itself and reinforce corporate culture. Yet a resistance against this new definition of work is in effect, and Fleming shows how it may already be taking shape.
Fleming, Peter. 2015. The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself. London: Pluto Press.
https://www.plutobooks.com/9781783713004/the-mythology-of-work/
There was once a time when ‘work’ was inextricably linked to survival and self-preservation; where the farmer ploughed the land so their family could eat. But the sun has long since set on this idyllic tableau, and what was once an integral part of life has slowly morphed into a painful and meaningless ritual, colonising almost every part of our lives - endless and inescapable. In The Mythology of Work, Peter Fleming examines how neoliberal society uses the ritual of work (and the threat of its denial) to maintain the late capitalist class order. As our society is transformed into a factory that never sleeps, work becomes a universal reference point for everything else, devoid of any moral or political worth. Blending critical theory with recent accounts of job related suicides, office-induced paranoia, fear of relaxation, managerial sadism and cynical corporate social responsibility campaigns, Fleming paints a bleak picture of neoliberal capitalism in which the economic and emotional dysfunctions of a society of wage slaves greatly outweigh its professed benefits.
Galasińska, Aleksandra i Dariusz Galasiński, ur. 2010. The Post-Communist Condition: Public and private discourses of transformation. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.
his volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on discourses in one national context of post-communist transformation. Proposing a macro-micro approach to discourse analysis and transformation, it examines a spectrum of topics including Polish history, with its ‘interpreters’; changes in political bodies and the media, policies of the Catholic Church and the Institute of National Remembrance; xenophobia and anti-Semitism, with the emergence of unemployment and homelessness; experiences of new gender relations and migrations. In effect, drawing upon unique sets of data, the book shows how post-communist transformation can be understood through analyses of the changing public and private discourses. It shows Polish post-communism as a fragile and uneasy transformation, with people and institutions struggling to make sense of it and of life within it. The volume will be of interest to a broad range of social scientists: discourse analysts, sociologists, modern historians and political scientists, as well as to the informed lay public.
Gill, Rosalind and Andy Pratt. 2008. “In the social factory? Immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work”. Theory, Culture & Society 25(7-8): 1-30.
https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0263276408097794
This article introduces a special section concerned with precariousness and cultural work. Its aim is to bring into dialogue three bodies of ideas — the work of the autonomous Marxist `Italian laboratory'; activist writings about precariousness and precarity; and the emerging empirical scholarship concerned with the distinctive features of cultural work, at a moment when artists, designers and (new) media workers have taken centre stage as a supposed `creative class' of model entrepreneurs. The article is divided into three sections. It starts by introducing the ideas of the autonomous Marxist tradition, highlighting arguments about the autonomy of labour, informational capitalism and the `factory without walls', as well as key concepts such as multitude and immaterial labour. The impact of these ideas and of Operaismo politics more generally on the precarity movement is then considered in the second section, discussing some of the issues that have animated debate both within and outside this movement, which has often treated cultural workers as exemplifying the experiences of a new `precariat'. In the third and final section we turn to the empirical literature about cultural work, pointing to its main features before bringing it into debate with the ideas already discussed. Several points of overlap and critique are elaborated — focusing in particular on issues of affect, temporality, subjectivity and solidarity.
Gorz, Andre. 1980. Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism. London-Sydney: Pluto Press.
André Gorz argues that changes in the role of the work and labour process in the closing decades of the twentieth century have, once and for all, weakened the power of skilled industrial workers. Their place has been taken, says Gorz, by social movements such as the women’s movement and the green movement, and all those who refuse to accept the work ethic so fundamental to early capitalist societies. Provocative and heretical, Farewell to the Working Class is a classic study of labour and unemployment in the post-industrial world.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/486958.Farewell_to_the_Working_Class
Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave.
https://monoskop.org/images/3/36/Graeber_David_Toward_an_Anthropological_Theory_of_Value.pdf
This volume is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber re-examines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of ongoing quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.
Graeber, David. 2006. “Turning Modes of Production Inside Out: Or, Why Capitalism Is a Transformation of Slavery”. Critique of Anthropology 26(1): 61–85.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X06061484
Marxist theory has by now largely abandoned the (seriously flawed) notion of the ‘mode of production’, but doing so has only encouraged a trend to abandon much of what was radical about it and naturalize capitalist categories. This article argues a better conceived notion of a mode of production - one that recognizes the primacy of human production, and hence a more sophisticated notion of materialism - might still have something to show us: notably, that capitalism, or at least industrial capitalism, has far more in common with, and is historically more closely linked with, chattel slavery than most of us had ever imagined.
Graeber, David. 2011. Dug: Prvih 5000 godina. Zagreb: Fraktura.
Treba li se dug vratiti? Premda je civilizacija uvjetovala da na to pitanje čovjek odgovori potvrdno, anarhist i antropolog David Graeber u Dugu tvrdi suprotno. Usprkos uvriježenom stavu da je suvremeni kapitalizam nastao tek u doba velikih revolucija, divovski financijski aparat kreditâ i dugova postoji gotovo od osvita civilizacija te funkcionira tako da izvlači sve više rada iz sviju s kojima dođe u dodir, ustvrđuje Graeber analizirajući pojam i značenje duga od Sumerana do danas. David Graeber, jedan od začetnika pokreta Occupy, u svojemu nagrađivanom djelu Dug – prvih 5000 godina pruža sveobuhvatni uvid u borbu siromašnih i bogatih, povijest novca i pozajmljivanja. Analizirajući tijekove novca – kako virtualnog tako i stvarnog – na primjerima od trampe do američkoga vojnog proračuna, pokazuje kako su svi elementi financijskog aparata koje smatramo obilježjima modernog doba zapravo nastali u dalekoj prošlosti, a dužničko sužanjstvo jedna je od nedvojbenih tekovina ljudske civilizacije, bez obzira na to je li riječ o ljudožderima s egzotičnih otoka ili bankarima s Wall Streeta.
Graeber, David. 2018. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon and Schuster.
https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp/150114331X
Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After a million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer. There are millions of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation.
Gregg, Melissa. 2011. Work’s Intimacy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
https://www.wiley.com/en-hr/Work's+Intimacy-p-9780745650289
This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It moves between the offices and homes of workers in the knew "knowledge" economy to provide intimate insight into the personal, family, and wider social tensions emerging in today’s rapidly changing work environment. Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet computers, have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of this shift, which has seen work move out of the office and into cafés, trains, living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms. This professional "presence bleed" leads to work concerns impinging on the personal lives of employees in new and unforseen ways. This groundbreaking book explores how aspiring and established professionals each try to cope with the unprecedented intimacy of technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in its way.
Hakken, David. 1994. Computing Myths, Class Realities: An Ethnography of Technology and Working People in Sheffield. New York: Routledge.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Computing-Myths-Class-Realities-Ethnography/dp/0813383129
This is a study of the effect of new information technologies on a traditional working-class society in the north of England. Focusing on the complex interplay between technology and society's ideas on work and labour, the authors examine how these impulses are expressed in the computer-related jobs of the service and manufacturing sectors. The people of Sheffield offer an opportunity to understand the processes of modernization and change in the integration of society and technology affecting us all. The book is intended for anthropologists and sociologists, and all scholars interested in the effect of computers on our lives.
Hardt, Michael i Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
When Empire appeared in 2000, it defined the political and economic challenges of the era of globalization and, thrillingly, found in them possibilities for new and more democratic forms of social organization. Now, with Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conclude the trilogy begun with Empire and continued in Multitude, proposing an ethics of freedom for living in our common world and articulating a possible constitution for our common wealth. Drawing on scenarios from around the globe and elucidating the themes that unite them, Hardt and Negri focus on the logic of institutions and the models of governance adequate to our understanding of a global commonwealth. They argue for the idea of the “common” to replace the opposition of private and public and the politics predicated on that opposition. Ultimately, they articulate the theoretical bases for what they call “governing the revolution.” Though this book functions as an extension and a completion of a sustained line of Hardt and Negri’s thought, it also stands alone and is entirely accessible to readers who are not familiar with the previous works. It is certain to appeal to, challenge, and enrich the thinking of anyone interested in questions of politics and globalization.
Hardt, Michael. 1999. “Affective Labor”, boundary 2 26(2):89-100.
Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Its spread has depended upon a reconstitution of state powers such that privatization, finance, and market processes are emphasized. State interventions in the economy are minimized, while the obligations of the state to provide for the welfare of its citizens are diminished. David Harvey, author of 'The New Imperialism' and 'The Condition of Postmodernity', here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. While Thatcher and Reagan are often cited as primary authors of this neoliberal turn, Harvey shows how a complex of forces, from Chile to China and from New York City to Mexico City, have also played their part. In addition he explores the continuities and contrasts between neoliberalism of the Clinton sort and the recent turn towards neoconservative imperialism of George W. Bush. Finally, through critical engagement with this history, Harvey constructs a framework not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.
Haskel, Jonathan and Stian Westlake. 2017. Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy. New Jersey, Woodstock: Princeton University Press.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691175034/capitalism-without-capital
The first comprehensive account of the growing dominance of the intangible economy. Early in the twenty-first century, a quiet revolution occurred. For the first time, the major developed economies began to invest more in intangible assets, like design, branding, R&D, and software, than in tangible assets, like machinery, buildings, and computers. For all sorts of businesses, from tech firms and pharma companies to coffee shops and gyms, the ability to deploy assets that one can neither see nor touch is increasingly the main source of long-term success. But this is not just a familiar story of the so-called new economy. Capitalism without Capital shows that the growing importance of intangible assets has also played a role in some of the big economic changes of the last decade. The rise of intangible investment is, Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake argue, an underappreciated cause of phenomena from economic inequality to stagnating productivity. Haskel and Westlake bring together a decade of research on how to measure intangible investment and its impact on national accounts, showing the amount different countries invest in intangibles, how this has changed over time, and the latest thinking on how to assess this. They explore the unusual economic characteristics of intangible investment, and discuss how these features make an intangible-rich economy fundamentally different from one based on tangibles. Capitalism without Capital concludes by presenting three possible scenarios for what the future of an intangible world might be like, and by outlining how managers, investors, and policymakers can exploit the characteristics of an intangible age to grow their businesses, portfolios, and economies.
High, Steven, Lachlan MacKinnon and Andrew Perchard, ur. 2017. The Deindustrialized World. Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places. Vancouver, Toronto: UBC Press.
https://www.ubcpress.ca/the-deindustrialized-world
Since the 1970s, the closure of mines, mills, and factories has marked a rupture in working-class lives. The Deindustrialized World interrogates the process of industrial ruination, from the first impact of layoffs in metropolitan cities, suburban areas, and single-industry towns to the shock waves that rippled outward, affecting entire regions, countries, and beyond. Seeking to hear the “roar ... on the other side of the silence,” scholars from France, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States share their own stories of ruin and ruination and ask others what it means to be working class in a postindustrial world. In Part 1, they explore the ruination of former workplaces and the damaged health and injured bodies of industrial workers. Part 2 brings to light disparities of experiences between rural resource towns and cities, where hipster revitalization often overshadows industrial loss. Part 3 reveals the ongoing impact of deindustrialization on working people and their place in the new global economy. Together, the chapters open a window on the lived experiences of people living at ground zero of deindustrialization, revealing its layered impacts and examining how workers, environmentalists, activists, and the state have responded to its challenges. This volume will appeal to historians, geographers, and social science scholars as well as anyone interested in the issues surrounding capitalist development, urban revitalization, and poverty, class, and community.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2012. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520272941/the-managed-heart
In private life, we try to induce or suppress love, envy, and anger through deep acting or "emotion work," just as we manage our outer expressions of feeling through surface acting. In trying to bridge a gap between what we feel and what we "ought" to feel, we take guidance from "feeling rules" about what is owing to others in a given situation. Based on our private mutual understandings of feeling rules, we make a "gift exchange" of acts of emotion management. We bow to each other not simply from the waist, but from the heart. But what occurs when emotion work, feeling rules, and the gift of exchange are introduced into the public world of work? In search of the answer, Arlie Russell Hochschild closely examines two groups of public-contact workers: flight attendants and bill collectors. The flight attendant’s job is to deliver a service and create further demand for it, to enhance the status of the customer and be "nicer than natural." The bill collector’s job is to collect on the service, and if necessary, to deflate the status of the customer by being "nastier than natural." Between these extremes, roughly one-third of American men and one-half of American women hold jobs that call for substantial emotional labor. In many of these jobs, they are trained to accept feeling rules and techniques of emotion management that serve the company’s commercial purpose. Just as we have seldom recognized or understood emotional labor, we have not appreciated its cost to those who do it for a living. Like a physical laborer who becomes estranged from what he or she makes, an emotional laborer, such as a flight attendant, can become estranged not only from her own expressions of feeling (her smile is not "her" smile), but also from what she actually feels (her managed friendliness). This estrangement, though a valuable defense against stress, is also an important occupational hazard, because it is through our feelings that we are connected with those around us.
Huws, Ursula. 2014. Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age. New York: Monthly Review Press.
https://monthlyreview.org/product/labor_in_the_global_digital_economy/
For every person who reads this text on the printed page, many more will read it on a computer screen or mobile device. It's a situation that we increasingly take for granted in our digital era, and while it is indicative of the novelty of twenty-first-century capitalism, it is also the key to understanding its driving force: the relentless impulse to commodify our lives in every aspect. Ursula Huws ties together disparate economic, cultural, and political phenomena of the last few decades to form a provocative narrative about the shape of the global capitalist economy at present. She examines the way that advanced information and communications technology has opened up new fields of capital accumulation: in culture and the arts, in the privatization of public services, and in the commodification of human sociality by way of mobile devices and social networking. These trends are in turn accompanied by the dramatic restructuring of work arrangements, opening the way for new contradictions and new forms of labor solidarity and struggle around the planet. Labor in the Global Digital Economy is a forceful critique of our dizzying contemporary moment, one that goes beyond notions of mere connectedness or free-flowing information to illuminate the entrenched mechanisms of exploitation and control at the core of capitalism.
Illouz, Eva. 2007. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Cold+Intimacies%3A+The+Making+of+Emotional+Capitalism-p-9780745639055
It is commonly assumed that capitalism has created an a-emotional world dominated by bureaucratic rationality; that economic behavior conflicts with intimate, authentic relationships; that the public and private spheres are irremediably opposed to each other; and that true love is opposed to calculation and self-interest. Eva Illouz rejects these conventional ideas and argues that the culture of capitalism has fostered an intensely emotional culture in the workplace, in the family, and in our own relationship to ourselves. She argues that economic relations have become deeply emotional, while close, intimate relationships have become increasingly defined by economic and political models of bargaining, exchange, and equity. This dual process by which emotional and economic relationships come to define and shape each other is called emotional capitalism. Illouz finds evidence of this process of emotional capitalism in various social sites: self-help literature, women's magazines, talk shows, support groups, and the Internet dating sites. How did this happen? What are the social consequences of the current preoccupation with emotions? How did the public sphere become saturated with the exposure of private life? Why does suffering occupy a central place in contemporary identity? How has emotional capitalism transformed our romantic choices and experiences? Building on and revising the intellectual legacy of critical theory, this book addresses these questions and offers a new interpretation of the reasons why the public and the private, the economic and the emotional spheres have become inextricably intertwined.
Ivancheva, Mariya, Kathleen Lynch i Kathryn Keating. 2019. “Precarity, Gender and Care in the Neoliberal Academy”. Gender, Work & Organization 26 (4): 448–62.
https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12350
This article examines the rise in precarious academic employment in Ireland as an outcome of the higher education restructuring following OECD (Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development), government initiatives and post‐crisis austerity. Presenting the narratives of academic women at different career stages, we claim that a focus on care sheds new light on the debate on precarity. A more complete understanding of precarity should take account not only of the contractual security but also affective relational security in the lives of employees. The intersectionality of paid work and care work lives was a dominant theme in our interviews among academic women. In a globalized academic market, premised on the care‐free masculinized ideals of competitive performance, 24/7 work and geographical mobility, women who opt out of these norms, suffer labour‐led contractual precarity and are over‐represented in part‐time and fixed‐term positions. Women who comply with these organizational commands need to peripheralize their relational lives and experience care‐led affective precarity.
Jansen, Stef, et. al. 2008. “Reconsidering Post-socialism from the Margins of Europe: Hope, Time and Normality in Post-Yugoslav Societies”. Anthropology News 49(8):10-11.
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/stef.jansen/documents/SJ-AAAnewsletterpYUhope.pdf
Karmel, Jonathan D. 2017. Dying to Work: Death and Injury in the American Workplace. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/books/137/
In Dying to Work, Jonathan Karmel raises our awareness of unsafe working conditions with accounts of workers who were needlessly injured or killed on the job. Based on heart-wrenching interviews Karmel conducted with injured workers and surviving family members across the country, the stories in this book are introduced in a way that helps place them in a historical and political context and represent a wide survey of the American workplace, including, among others, warehouse workers, grocery store clerks, hotel housekeepers, and river dredgers. Karmel’s examples are portraits of the lives and dreams cut short and reports of the workplace incidents that tragically changed the lives of everyone around them. Dying to Work includes incidents from industries and jobs that we do not commonly associate with injuries and fatalities and highlights the risks faced by workers who are hidden in plain view all around us. While exposing the failure of safety laws that leave millions of workers without compensation and employers without any meaningful incentive to protect their workers, Karmel offers the reader some hope in the form of policy suggestions that may make American workers safer and employers more accountable. This is a book for anyone interested in issues of worker health and safety, and it will also serve as the cornerstone for courses in public policy, community health, labor studies, business ethics, regulation and safety, and occupational and environmental health policy.
Kasmir, Sharryn i August Carbonella, ur. 2014. Blood and Fire. Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.
Based on long-term fieldwork, six vivid ethnographies from Colombia, India, Poland, Spain and the southern and northern U.S. address the dwindling importance of labor throughout the world. The contributors to this volume highlight the growing disconnect between labor struggles and the advancement of the greater common good, a phenomenon that has grown since the 1980s. The collection illustrates the defeat and unmaking of particular working classes, and it develops a comparative perspective on the uneven consequences of and reactions to this worldwide project. Blood and Fire charts a course within global anthropology to address the widespread precariousness and the prevalence of insecure and informal labor in the twenty-first century.
Kasmir, Sharryn i August Carbonella. 2008. „Dispossession and the Anthropology of Labor“. Critique of Anthropology 28(1):5-25.
This article develops an approach to the anthropology of labor that seeks to transcend the North/South and working class/poor oppositions that have long framed our understanding of social inequality. Drawing upon David Harvey's understanding of the ways in which capitalism always creates its own Other through dispossession, as well as historical case studies of struggles against dispossession, we emphasize the mutability of class relations in both the global North and South, and point to the complex interconnections of the social movements of waged and unwaged laborers across the globe. This focus on the connections between peoples who are differently marked by processes of dispossession, we argue, simultaneously enriches our understanding of social inequality and furthers the project of decolonizing anthropology.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0308275X07086555
Kirk, John. 2007. Class, Culture and Social Change: On the Trail of the Working Class. New York: Palgrawe Macmillan.
Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, Valentin Volosinov and Mikhail Bakhtin, the book examines key issues for working-class studies including: the idea of the 'death' of class; the importance of working-class writing; the significance of place and space for understanding working-class identity; and the centrality of work in working-class lives.
Kirn, Gal. 2010. „Jugoslavija: od partizanske politike do postfordističke tendencije“. Up&Underground, 206-229.
http://www.up-underground.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/1718_gal_kirn.pdf
Kockel, Ullrich, Máiréad Nic Craith and Jonas Frykman. 2012. A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe offers a survey of contemporary Europeanist anthropology and European ethnology, and a guide to emerging trends in this geographical field of research. Providing a synthesis of the different traditions and contemporary approaches, the book is both thematic and fully cross-European in its approach.
- Provides an authoritative guide for researchers, instructors and students of anthropology and European studies
- Discusses important emerging trends in this broadening field of research
- Includes established names and rising stars who will shape the discipline in years to come
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/A+Companion+to+the+Anthropology+of+Europe-p-9781405190732
Kofti, Dimitra. 2016. “Moral economy of flexible production: Fabricating precarity between the conveyor belt and the household“. Anthropological Theory 16(4): 433-453.
https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1463499616679538
In this article I discuss some of the theoretical implications of adopting moral economy as an approach to analysing new forms of flexible production and work. Despite a growing interest in the anthropology of precarity and work, the linkages between political and moral economies have been relatively neglected. By discussing E.P. Thompson’s approach to moral economy as well as ways moral economy has been discussed in anthropology, the article argues it is a timely and encompassing approach for the study of flexible work and precarity, as well as compliance and resistance to inequality. A nexus of diverse moral frameworks of value converge at the production site and back home, contributing to the reproduction of precarity and capital under flexible forms of accumulation. The article suggests that moral economy may offer an encompassing approach to studying individual ideas and practices and their relation with collective moral frameworks and confinements and to exploring change and change potential. It draws from an ethnography based on long-term fieldwork in a privatized factory in Bulgaria, in the context of radical economic transformations and privatization projects. It scrutinizes solidarities, tensions and inequalities developed around the conveyor belt, with a particular focus on gender and employment status inequalities and their intertwinement with managerial and household practices.
Kostanić, Marko, ur. 2014. Zbornik radova: Dva desetljeća poslije kraja socijalizma. Centar za radničke studije, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe.
Sve države nasljednice bivše Jugoslavije kretale su se u osnovi sličnim putanjama, kako po pitanju socioekonomskog razvoja, tako i po pitanju političkog i ideološkog tumačenja tih procesa u mainstream diskursu. Socioekonomski, restauracija kapitalističkih proizvodnih odnosa, u kombinaciji s progresivnom asimilacijom u (neo)liberalne tržišne režime s Europskom unijom i drugim regijama kapitalističkog centra, dovela je do obuhvatne deindustrijalizacije, socijalne polarizacije i rastuće zaduženosti (kako javne tako i privatne). Ti procesi su institucionalno i ideološki osnaženi upućivanjem na nužnost „modernizacije“ neoliberalnog usmjerenja. Konačni politički cilj „Europske integracije“, koji dijeli većina pripadnika političkih i intelektualnih elita u državama nasljednicama Jugoslavije, pritom igra dvostruku ulogu pogonske snage i zadnje instance legitimacije tih procesa. Istovremeno, socijalne implikacije kapitalističke restauracije i pristajanja na u osnovi neoliberalnu „modernizacijsku“ agendu (ohrabrene i aktivno promicane od strane MMF-ovih programa „strukturne prilagodbe“ i preporuka EU-a u korist produbljivanja tržišnih „rješenja“ za ekonomska i socijalna pitanja), pritom su ostale bez političkog odgovora i adekvatne teorizacije s ljevice. Ideološka inkriminacija marksizma zbog njegovih veza s jugoslavenskim socijalističkim projektom i paralelni – i s tim procesom povezani – dramatični uspon nacionalizma krajem osamdesetih i tokom devedesetih, izbrisali su ili gotovo do nevidljivosti zaklonili klasno pitanje, i to upravo u trenutku njegova historijskog povratka kao neposredne društvene stvarnosti. Intelektualni konformizam i opća klima ideološkog suzbijanja antikapitalističkih ideja i tradicija mišljenja igrali su značajnu ulogu u potiskivanju pitanja vezanih za problematiku klasnih odnosa i socijalne pravde.
Krašovec, Primož. 2011. “Realna supsumpcija u hramu duha: klasna borba u univerzitetskom polju”. U Kroz tranziciju. Prilozi teoriji privatizacije. Željko Popović i Zoran Gajić ur. Novi Sad: AKO, 43-75.
https://jugolink.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/jl_1_1_krasovec.pdf
Kuus, Merje. 2010. “Critical Geopolitics”. U The International Studies Encyclopedia. Robert A. Denemark, ur. Blackwell Publishing. Blackwell Reference Online.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2017. Experimental Politics Work, Welfare, and Creativity in the Neoliberal Age. MIT Press.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/experimental-politics
In Experimental Politics, Maurizio Lazzarato examines the conditions of work, employment, and unemployment in neoliberalism's flexible and precarious labor market. This is the first book of Lazzarato's in English that fully exemplifies the unique synthesis of sociology, activist research, and theoretical innovation that has generated his best-known concepts, such as “immaterial labor.” The book (published in France in 2009) is also groundbreaking in the way it brings Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari to bear on the analysis of concrete political situations and real social struggles, while making a significant theoretical contribution in its own right. Lazzarato draws on the experiences of casual workers in the French entertainment industry during a dispute over the reorganization (“reform”) of their unemployment insurance in 2004 and 2005. He sees this conflict as the first testing ground of a political program of social reconstruction. The payment of unemployment insurance would become the principal instrument for control over the mobility and behavior of the workers. The flexible and precarious workforce of the entertainment industry prefigured what the entire workforce in contemporary societies is in the process of becoming: in Foucault's words, a “floating population” in “security societies.” Lazzarato argues further that parallel to economic impoverishment, neoliberalism has produced an impoverishment of subjectivity—a reduction in existential intensity. A substantial introduction by Jeremy Gilbert situates Lazzarato's analysis in a broader context.
Ledeneva, Alena, Roxana Bratu i Phillipp Koker, ur. 2017. Innovations in Corruption Studies. Modern Humanities Research Association.
https://www.bokus.com/bok/9781781886311/innovations-in-corruption-studies/
Despite great advances in corruption studies over the last three decades, there is still a lot to learn about corruption and anti-corruption policies. The key question currently driving innovations in corruption studies is why anti-corruption reforms do not work. This volume offers a selection of papers from the international seminar series on innovations in corruption studies in Europe and beyond held by the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London between October 2015 and March 2016. The purpose of the series, which brought together researchers of the project 'Anticorruption Policies Revisited: Global Trends and European Responses to the Challenges of Corruption' (ANTICORRP), was to highlight innovations in the field of corruption studies regarding theory, methodology, analysis and policy. The papers here represent a sample of the wider academic debates but focus on integrating expertise relating to Central and Eastern Europe into a comparative framework. The outcome reflects the openness of the authors to work across area and discipline and to ensure cross-fertilization between area studies and the social sciences in general.
Lofgren, Karl, Sebastian Godenhjelm i Stefan Sjöblom. 2013. “Projectified Politics – Temporary Organisations in a Public Context”. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration 17(2):3-12.
http://ojs.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/sjpa/article/viewFile/2453/2201
Malkki, Liisa H. 2015. The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-need-to-help
In The Need to Help Liisa H. Malkki shifts the focus of the study of humanitarian intervention from aid recipients to aid workers themselves. The anthropological commitment to understand the motivations and desires of these professionals and how they imagine themselves in the world "out there," led Malkki to spend more than a decade interviewing members of the international Finnish Red Cross, as well as observing Finns who volunteered from their homes through gifts of handwork. The need to help, she shows, can come from a profound neediness—the need for aid workers and volunteers to be part of the lively world and something greater than themselves, and, in the case of the elderly who knit "trauma teddies" and "aid bunnies" for "needy children," the need to fight loneliness and loss of personhood. In seriously examining aspects of humanitarian aid often dismissed as sentimental, or trivial, Malkki complicates notions of what constitutes real political work. She traces how the international is always entangled in the domestic, whether in the shape of the need to leave home or handmade gifts that are an aid to sociality and to the imagination of the world.
Mason, Paul. 2017. Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
https://www.amazon.com/Postcapitalism-Guide-Future-Paul-Mason/dp/0374536732
Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone profound changes―economic cycles that veer from boom to bust―from which it has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism argues that we are on the brink of a change so big and so profound that this time capitalism itself, the immensely complex system within which entire societies function, will mutate into something wholly new. At the heart of this change is information technology, a revolution that is driven by capitalism but, with its tendency to push the value of much of what we make toward zero, has the potential to destroy an economy based on markets, wages, and private ownership. Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Vast numbers of people are changing how they behave and live, in ways contrary to the current system of state-backed corporate capitalism. And as the terrain changes, new paths open. In this bold and prophetic book, Mason shows how, from the ashes of the crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable economy. Although the dangers ahead are profound, he argues that there is cause for hope. This is the first time in human history in which, equipped with an understanding of what is happening around us, we can predict and shape the future.
Massumi, Brian. 2015. The Power at the End of the Economy. United States: Duke University Press.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-power-at-the-end-of-the-economy
Rational self-interest is often seen as being at the heart of liberal economic theory. In The Power at the End of the Economy Brian Massumi provides an alternative explanation, arguing that neoliberalism is grounded in complex interactions between the rational and the emotional. Offering a new theory of political economy that refuses the liberal prioritization of individual choice, Massumi emphasizes the means through which an individual’s affective tendencies resonate with those of others on infra-individual and transindividual levels. This nonconscious dimension of social and political events plays out in ways that defy the traditional equation between affect and the irrational. Massumi uses the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement as examples to show how transformative action that exceeds self-interest takes place. Drawing from David Hume, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Niklas Luhmann and the field of nonconsciousness studies, Massumi urges a rethinking of the relationship between rational choice and affect, arguing for a reassessment of the role of sympathy in political and economic affairs.
Matković, Teo. 2002. "Restrukturiranje rada? Transformacija strukture zaposlenosti". Revija za socijalnu politiku 10(2):161-184.
http://www.rsp.hr/ojs2/index.php/rsp/article/view/125
U procesu kapitalističkog restrukturiranja, transformacija rada i zaposlenosti zauzima ključan položaj. Novi organizacijski modeli i doktrine, osnaženi upotrebom informacijsko-komunikacijskih tehnologija i deregulatornih političkih odluka, pridonijeli su promjeni oblika i strukture zaposlenosti širom svijeta. Članak proučava strukturu zaposlenosti na makrorazini. Na temelju koncepata postindustrijskog društva razmatraju se teze: (a) da se ekonomska aktivnost pomiče sa proizvodnje robe na pružanje usluga, i (b) da u novoj ekonomiji zanimanja s visokim udjelom znanja i informacija zauzimaju ključan položaj. Kroz pregled strukture zaposlenosti u zemljama prvoga svijeta, tranzicijskim zemljama i Hrvatskoj, razmatraju se strukturalne promjene u njihovu historijskom kontekstu. Glavni je izvor podataka anketa o radnoj snazi, te službena statistika rada za Hrvatsku (period 1970.–1996.). Ekonomske aktivnosti agregirane su u skladu sa Castellsovom adaptacijom Singelmannove klasifikacije sektora djelatnosti. Podaci za zemlje prvoga svijeta, usprkos međudržavnim razlikama, podržavaju izvorne teze. Analiza recentnih promjena u strukturi zaposlenosti u tranzicijskim zemljama prikazuje različite startne pozicije i različite obrasce transformacije. Zajednička im je karakteristika rast udjela proizvođačkih i društvenih usluga, dok su u strukturi zanimanja promjene manje. Hrvatski je slučaj analiziran nešto detaljnije, te su ustanovljene dvije etape razvoja strukture zaposlenosti. U godinama 1970.–1990. zaposlenost je rasla u obimu, ali je struktura djelatnosti bila gotovo zamrznuta zbog specifičnih političkih i institucionalnih uvjeta. Tijekom druge, tzv. ratno-tranzicijske etape (1990.–2001.), broj zaposlenih se drastično smanjio, ali sa različitim učincima u različitim sektorima. Ukupan učinak na strukturu zaposlenosti bio je sličan onome u procesu kapitalističkog restrukturiranja u razvijenim zemljama – rast udjela zaposlenih u proizvođačkim i društvenim uslugama, te pad u transformativnom sektoru. U kasnim devedesetima struktura zaposlenosti se stabilizira, dok je tržište rada postalo dinamičnije.
Matković, Teo. 2004. "Nestajanje rada? Opseg i oblici nezaposlenosti na početku informacijskoga doba". Društvena istraživanja: časopis za opća društvena pitanja 13(1-2):241-265.
Rad je socijalna konstrukcija – aktivnost koja obavlja socijalno identificiranu i normaliziranu funkciju u održavanju društvene cjeline. Usprkos strahu od nestajanja rada zbog informatizacije, na globalnoj razini broj radnih mjesta ubrzano se povećava. Međutim, prekidajući trend industrijskoga doba, na tržištu rada dolazi do ponovnoga rasta kontingentnih oblika rada. Nove oblike zapošljavanja karakterizira doktrina fleksibilnosti. Fleksibilnost se može odnositi na vrijeme, mjesto ili stabilnost posla, pa i na društveni ugovor pod kojim se rad odvija. U novoj društvenoj podjeli rada, unutar privreda gdje se kreativnost, baratanje podatcima i osobne usluge smatraju glavnim izvorom rasta, poslovi koji se temelje na analizi simbola i emocionalnom radu sve više dobivaju na značenju. Provedena je komparativna analiza kretanja opsega i oblika zaposlenosti, većim dijelom utemeljena na Anketi o radnoj snazi. Zemlje Prvoga svijeta povećavaju broj zaposlenih, uz umjeren rast udjela nestandardnih oblika zaposlenosti. U tranzicijskim zemljama, koje prolaze kroz niz kriza i smanjivanja tržišta rada, također raste udio nestandardnih oblika zaposlenosti, ali uz pad broja zaposlenih. Slično je stanje i u Hrvatskoj. Nakon duga razdoblja politički kreditiranoga rasta, od 1990. počinje pad broja zaposlenih i stope aktivnosti te rast stope nezaposlenosti. U ovom razdoblju nestandardni oblici zapošljavanja postaju sve češći. Ovakva transformacija rada može voditi k nestajanju ljudskih prava, isključivanju velikog djela populacije te izdvajanja privrede iz društva. No nove proizvodne snage omogućuju i unaprjeđenje svijeta rada te ostvarivanje koncepta multiaktivnosti.
Matošević, Andrea. 2013. “This is a matter of numbers, not of heart”. Re-signing shock labor in 1970s film. Narodna umjetnost 50(1):12-40.
https://doi.org/10.15176/vol50no101
The 1970s mark a turning point in the representation of “exemplary workers”, shock workers and work heroes, who had for years been part of the enterprise to increase (mainly) industrial production in state socialist countries and beyond. From its very beginnings, shock labor was inseparable from its representation in the mass media, mainly documentaries and propaganda films. In contrast, in the early 1970s, post-war work successes turn into a caput mortuum, a worthless residue of early “official” socialism. Accordingly, the image of the shock labor movement and of shock workers-as-innovators turns out to be interesting material for artists and filmmakers, who resurrect and rediscover this long-forgotten idea, turning it into an instrument of criticism of the system that advocated it, without criticizing the movement’s most prominent actors. Yugoslav, Polish and Italian directors Bahrudin Bata Čengić, Andrzej Wajda and Elio Petri in their films Slike iz života udarnika (Images from the Life of a Shock Worker,1972), Człowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble, 1976) and La classe operaia va in paradiso (Lulù the Tool, 1972) respectively, resign the essence of work heroism. The problem of increasing production quotas, a “good and happy family life” accompanied by indispensable cultural education and the inclusion of workers in political life are some of the prevailing topics these directors use to build their own eclectic, critical as well as apologetic vision of the shock labor past or present.
Matošević, Andrea. 2015. Socijalizam s udarničkim licem. Etnografija radnog pregalaštva. Zagreb: Nova etnografija
Socijalizam s udarničkim licem: etnografija radnog pregalaštva važan je doprinos promišljanju udarništva općenito, i posebno u kontekstu poslijeratne jugoslavenske obnove i izgradnje. Promatranjem i analizom resignacije toga fenomena 1970-ih, u domaćem, ali i poljskom i talijanskom kontekstu, a potom i u kontekstu hrvatske “tranzicije”, autor upozorava na mrežu faktora koji utječu na poziciju i značaj rada u “običnoj svakodnevici”, što ovu monografiju čini štivom koje će doprinijeti i promišljanju aktualnog akutnog stanja rada.
http://www.ief.hr/Izdava%C5%A1tvo/tabid/67/agentType/View/ID/207/Default.aspx
McRobbie, Angela. 2011. “Reflections on Feminism, Immaterial Labour and the Post-Fordist Regime”. New Formations 70: 66-76.
https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF.70.04.2010
In the many articles and books written in recent years on the topics of precarious labour, immaterial and affective labour, all of which are understood within the over-arching frame of post-Fordist regimes of production, there is a failure to foreground gender, or indeed to knit gender and ethnicity into prevailing concerns with class and class struggle. I seek to rectify this by interrogating some of the influential work in this terrain. I draw attention to those accounts which have reflected on gender and on changes in how feminists and sociologists nowadays think about the question of women and employment. I ask the question, how integral is the participation of 'women' to the rise of post-Fordist production, and what kind of role do women, especially young women now play in the urban-based new culture industries? By prioritising gender I am also critiquing its invisibility in this current field of new radical political discourse associated with writers like Hardt and Virno (eds 1996) and Hardt and Negri (2000). I argue for a more historically informed perspective which pays attention to the micro-activities of earlier generations of feminists who were at the forefront of combining forms of job creation with political activity (eg women's book stores and publishing, youth-work or 'mädchenarbeit', child care and kinderladen) under the auspices of what would now be called 'social enterprise'.
Meszmann, Tibor. 2019. „Snakes or Ladders? Job Quality Assessment among Temp Workers from Ukraine in Hungarian Electronics“. Central and Eastern European Migration Review 8(1): 75-93.
http://cejsh.icm.edu.pl/cejsh/element/bwmeta1.element.desklight-9b6d27a1-c465-49b8-8a1e-e56621c64c59
In contrast to the usual integration of migrant workers in the ‘bottom jobs’ on the labour market, the employment of Ukrainian workers in Hungarian electronics plants seems to take place in a more beneficial way. With the active mediation of temporary (temp) agencies, Ukrainian migrant workers are offered regular blue-collar assembly work, together with the same social rights and benefits as their local Hungarian colleagues. Relying, in our analysis, on the literature on industrial sociology, migration research and global value chains, we are developing a critical perspective in which migration and employment are not seen as separate spheres but as mutually reinforcing each other. We combine bottom-up empirical research based on interviews with workers and a sectoral inquiry on industrial and employment relations in the temp agency sector supplying multinational corporations. Our main argument is that complex contracting also means subtle controlling. Such contracting is not the cheapest form but it creates a different, efficient employment regime with dependent, controllable, flexibly available, ‘fluid’ employees. Employee respondents described their position as dependent, ‘out of control’ and a temporary earning opportunity. Devoid of clear mechanisms for controlling their work conditions or growth within the job, all respondents turned to a more instrumental approach, in which they invested in building up social capital through friendships, networks and personal relationships. Obtaining Hungarian citizenship and learning the language were two other main strategies for dealing with insecurity. Their efforts correspond with and reinforce a more globally integrated but ethnically motivated immigration regime, characteristic of post-socialist Hungary.
Miletić, Radmila, Vesna Lukić i Dragana Miljanović. 2011. “Deindustralization and Structural Changes in Commuting Flows in Serbia”. Forum Geographic 10(2):244-254.
The aim of the paper is to point to the mutual linkage between the changes in the extent and directions of the commuting flows and contemporary changes in the economic structure of Serbia. Even though the increase in the number of commuters in total and commuters employed in the industrial sector has been evident on the national level, on the local level the research results indicate a considerable decrease in the number of industrial commuters in the case of large industrial centres (transition losers). Unprepared for rapid transformation, the industrial centres faced economic (mono-functional economic structure, collapse of large systems, undeveloped entrepreneurship, slow privatisation process), structural (high unemployment), social and demographic problems. Consequently, there have been changes in the intensity and structure of the migration flows.
Miller, Daniel. 1997. Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford and New York: Berg.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/capitalism-9781845208752/
This provocative book challenges many of our ingrained assumptions about the direction of contemporary capitalism and offers fresh perspectives that will inform the development of a new and relevant political economy for our times. The complex and often contradictory world within which modern commodities are produced, sold and consumed is set within the larger context of transnational business and economic developments. The importance of factors such as profitability and globalization is highlighted, and a sophisticated analysis of the contradictions and ironies of the world of modern commodities emerges. Trinidad provides an ideal setting for this study, given its recent oil boom and recession and the subsequent experience of both wealth and poverty.
Moe, Karine S. 2003. Women, Family, and Work: Writings in the Economics of Gender. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Women, Family, and Work is a collection of original essays on a wide variety of topics related to the economics of gender and the family. Written by leading thinkers in the field, the essays apply traditional economic theory to unconventional topics, while also developing neoclassical economic thought to provide a better model of economic interactions.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9780470755648
Muehlebach, Andrea. 2011. “On Affective Labor in Post-Fordist Italy”. Cultural Anthropology 26(1): 59-82.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01080.x
This article explores the role that compassion plays in the building of a post‐Fordist laboring public in Italy. By exploring how the state has made compassion productive through new regimes of voluntary labor, this piece shows that compassion operates not as a mitigating force against, but as a vehicle for the production and maintenance of a new exclusionary order precisely because it allows for the emergence of a fantasy of spontaneously available public emotion. Affective labor is a desired form of activity for marginalized members of Italian society because it allows them to approximate the form of social belonging that was centrally institutionalized and cultivated within Fordist societies—that of the capacity to belong to and be publicly recognized by the world through waged work. Fordism thus appears not as an era past, but as an object of desire and mourning that still retains much social force as people attempt to recapture or at least approximate Fordist forms and feelings of stability and belonging.
Muehlebach, Andrea. 2012. The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo13040555.html
Morality is often imagined to be at odds with capitalism and its focus on the bottom line, but in The Moral Neoliberal morality is shown as the opposite: an indispensible tool for capitalist transformation. Set within the shifting landscape of neoliberal welfare reform in the Lombardy region of Italy, Andrea Muehlebach tracks the phenomenal rise of voluntarism in the wake of the state’s withdrawal of social service programs. Using anthropological tools, she shows how socialist volunteers are interpreting their unwaged labor as an expression of social solidarity, with Catholic volunteers thinking of theirs as an expression of charity and love. Such interpretations pave the way for a mass mobilization of an ethical citizenry that is put to work by the state. Visiting several sites across the region, from Milanese high schools to the offices of state social workers to the homes of the needy, Muehlebach mounts a powerful argument that the neoliberal state nurtures selflessness in order to cement some of its most controversial reforms. At the same time, she also shows how the insertion of such an anticapitalist narrative into the heart of neoliberalization can have unintended consequences.
Negri, Antonio i Michael Hardt. 2003. Imperij. Zagreb: Multimedijalni Institut. Preveo Živan Filippi.
https://www.superknjizara.hr/?page=knjiga&id_knjiga=100048725
Politički filozofi Hardt i Negri smatraju da se zajedno s globalnim tržištem i globalnim krugovima proizvodnje pojavio globalni poredak, nova logika i struktura vladavine - ukratko, nov oblik suverenosti koji oni nazivaju Imperij. To je politički subjekt koji djelotvorno uređuje te globalne razmjene i ujedno suverena moć koja upravlja svijetom. "Imperij" je svojevrsni "komunistički manifest 21. stoljeća" te stoga angažirana i polemička knjiga, čiji je najvažniji potencijal artikulirana emancipacijska praksa koja mnoštvu dodjeljuje vrlo pozitivnu ulogu u procesu političke modernizacije.
Negri, Antonio i Michael Hardt. 2009. Mnoštvo. Zagreb: Multimedijalni Institut. Preveli Petar Milat i Tomislav Medak.
https://www.superknjizara.hr/?page=knjiga&id_knjiga=37060
Danas se prvi put ukazuje mogućnost demokracije na globalnoj razini. Ovo je knjiga o toj mogućnosti, o onome što nazivamo projektom mnoštva. Projekt mnoštva ne samo da izražava želju za svijetom jednakosti i slobode, ne samo da traži otvoreno i uključivo demokratsko globalno društvo, već i nudi sredstva da ga se ostvari. Time ćemo našu knjigu zaključiti. Ali, ne možemo tu i započeti. Danas je, izgleda, mogućnost demokracije zastrta i ugrožena stalnim stanjem sukoba diljem svijeta. Naša knjiga mora krenuti od toga ratnog stanja. Demokracija je, doduše, ostala nedovršeni projekt tijekom čitavoga modernog doba u svim svojim nacionalnim i lokalnim oblicima, a procesi globalizacije posljednjih desetljeća donijeli su nove izazove, pa ipak primarna prepreka demokraciji je to globalno ratno stanje. U naše doba oružane globalizacije moderni san o demokraciji mogao bi se učiniti bespovratno izgubljenim. Rat je oduvijek bio nespojiv s demokracijom. Tradicionalno, demokracija bi se suspendirala tijekom ratnog razdoblja, a moć bi se privremeno povjeravala snažnom središnjem autoritetu da riješi krizu. Budući da je trenutno ratno stanje globalno u razmjerima i dugotrajno, bez doglednog cilja, suspenzija demokracije također postaje nedogledna ili čak trajna. Rat poprima opći karakter, gušeći sav društveni život i namećući svoj politički poredak. Demokracija se stoga čini nepovratno izgubljenom, zakopanom duboko ispod oružja i sigurnosnih režima našega stalnog stanja sukoba. Ova knjiga nastavak je naše knjige Imperij, u čijem se fokusu nalazio novi globalni oblik suverenosti. Ta knjiga pokušala je interpretirati tendenciju globalnoga političkog poretka u procesu njegova formiranja, to jest prepoznati kako iz raznovrsnih suvremenih procesa tu nastaje novi oblik globalnog poretka koji nazivamo Imperij. Naše polazište bila je spoznaja da se suvremeni globalni poredak više ne može adekvatno pojmiti pod vidom imperijalizma kakav su provodile moderne sile.
Neilson, Brett and Ned Rossiter. 2008. “Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception”. Theory, Culture & Society 25(7-8): 51-72.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276408097796
In 2003, the concept of precarity emerged as the central organizing platform for a series of social struggles that would spread across the space of Europe. Four years later, almost as suddenly as the precarity movement appeared, so it would enter into crisis. To understand precarity as a political concept it is necessary to go beyond economistic approaches that see social conditions as determined by the mode of production. Such a move requires us to see Fordism as exception and precarity as the norm. The political concept and practice of translation enables us to frame the precarity of creative labour in a broader historical and geographical perspective, shedding light on its contestation and relation to the concept of the common. Our interest is in the potential for novel forms of connection, subjectivization and political organization. Such processes of translation are themselves inherently precarious, transborder undertakings.
Ngai, Pun. 2005. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
https://www.amazon.com/Made-China-Factory-Workers-Workplace/dp/1932643001
As China has evolved into an industrial powerhouse over the past two decades, a new class of workers has developed: the dagongmei, or working girls. The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. Because of state laws dictating that those born in the countryside cannot permanently leave their villages, and familial pressure for young women to marry by their late twenties, the dagongmei are transient labor. They undertake physically exhausting work in urban factories for an average of four or five years before returning home. The young women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to leave home. Made in China is a compelling look at the lives of these women, workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the socialist state, and the patriarchal family. Pun Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen special economic zone where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Pun illuminates the workers’ perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and especially the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistance and transgression in the workplace, positing that the chronic pains—such as backaches and headaches—that many of the women experience are as indicative of resistance to oppressive working conditions as they are of defeat. Pun suggests that a silent social revolution is underway in China and that these young migrant workers are its agents.
Obad, Orlanda i Nataša Bokan. 2018. "Nevidljivi Dubrovnik. Istraživanje razvojnih perspektiva u ruralnoj lokalnoj zajednici". Etnološka tribina 41(48): 213-237.
https://doi.org/10.15378/1848-9540.2018.41.08
Rad se bavi razvojnim perspektivama ruralnog područja Grada Dubrovnika. Cilj je istražiti izazove s kojima se poljoprivrednici susreću u radu i svakodnevnom životu, utvrditi potencijale za razvoj te ponuditi razvojne smjerove ruralne lokalne zajednice u Gradu Dubrovniku. Empirijsko je istraživanje provedeno metodom ankete i polustrukturiranog intervjua među pedeset tri poljoprivrednika/ce u svibnju 2016. godine u selima i drugim naseljima u ruralnom prostoru koja pripadaju Dubrovniku. Utvrđena su tri komplementarna razvojna smjera: diversifikacija ruralnih djelatnosti koja je povezana s konkuriranjem za fondove Europske unije, osnivanje zadruga i razvoj zadružnog načina suradnje te prelazak na ekološku poljoprivrednu proizvodnju. U analizi se kritički sagledavaju razvojne prepreke u svim trima aspektima razvoja te se predlaže kako bi se razvojni potencijali mogli upotrijebiti na dobrobit lokalne zajednice. Slijedeći logiku neoendogenog ruralnog razvoja, autorice u zaključku ocrtavaju konture razvoja ruralnog područja Grada Dubrovnika koji bi, u socioekonomskom pogledu, u većoj mjeri integrirao Grad, ali ističu i prepreke na putu takvog razvojnog smjera u lokalnom kontekstu.
Obad, Orlanda i Tea Škokić. 2019. „Brižno poduzetništvo u ženskim poslovnim praksama. Od reprodukcije do destrukcije patrijarhata“. Etnološka tribina 49(42): 80-101.
https://doi.org/10.15378/1848-9540.2019.42.02
U radu se propituju rodno uvjetovane prepreke za uspješno poslovanje poduzetnica, posebice u segmentu ravnoteže privatnog i poslovnog života (work-life balance), rodno uvjetovane podjele kućanskih poslova unutar šireg problema socijalne reprodukcije u patrijarhalnim društvima te u segmentu stila vođenja poslovanja. Primijenjena je kvalitativna metodologija karakteristična za etnografska istraživanja – pomoću metode polustrukturiranog intervjua provedeni su razgovori s 24 poduzetnice, dok teorijski okvir pripada feminističkoj kritici roda i diskurzivnoj analizi. Istraživanje je provedeno u Bosni i Hercegovini, Hrvatskoj, na Kosovu i u Srbiji. Ključni nalazi pokazuju da specifične politike i mjere za bolje uključivanje žena u svijet poduzetništva nisu dovoljne ako isključuju širu kritiku patrijarhata, a time i prevladavajućeg koncepta poduzetništva, kroz rodno osviještene međusektorske politike. Novost koju ovo istraživanje donosi odnosi se na neformalne prakse koje žene prakticiraju u svojim formalnim i neformalnim poslovima, a koje imaju potencijala postati jednakovrijedni model poduzetničkog ponašanja.
Obad, Orlanda. 2009. “Imperij kao uzvraćanje udarca: predodžbe o kulturi i identitetu u hrvatskih pregovarača s Europskom unijom”. Narodna umjetnost 46(2): 111-127.
Rad propituje proces hrvatskog pristupanja Europskoj uniji kroz prizmu odnosa moći središta i periferije europskog kontinenta, u kojem važnu ulogu imaju percepcija i tumačenje kulture i povijesti. U nizu tzv. polustrukturiranih intervjua hrvatski pregovarači s Europskom unijom su iznosili svoje predodžbe o EU i Zapadu općenito, kao i o regionalnoj pripadnosti Hrvatske. Pregovarači su Srednju Europu isticali kao regiju koja je bliska "zapadnoj kulturi i civilizaciji", a pripadnost Hrvatske toj regiji iskazivali su, među ostalim, i pozivanjem na habsburško nasljeđe. U odnosu prema državama nastalima na prostoru bivše Jugoslavije analizirani je diskurs, pak, nalikovao diskursu koji prati proširenje EU pa se tako naglašavala važnost postupnog napredovanja tih država na zamišljenoj "civilizacijskoj kosini".
Obad, Orlanda. 2013. “Pouke iz predsoblja Europe za balkanističku kritiku (i njezine kritičare)”. Filozofija i društvo 14(1): 458-476.
http://doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0353-5738/2013/0353-57381301458O.pdf
Autorica koristi primjere iz višegodišnjeg istraživanja društvene percepcije Europske unije u Hrvatskoj kako bi postavila niz pitanja o primjeni balkanističke kritike u recentnoj akademskoj produkciji. Kroz intervjue s pripadnicima triju skupina, koje su na različite načine povezane s Unijom, na vidjelo izlaze predodžbe o Europi i o Balkanu koje nisu u skladu s prevladavajućim diskursom devedesetih godina prošlog stoljeća. U radu se naznačuje i opadanje važnosti simboličke geografije u tumačenju predodžbi o EU. Propitujući metateorijsku razinu, autorica predlaže nekoliko novih smjerova za balkanistička i srodna istraživanja: priznavanje važnosti ekonomije, koja je posljednjih dvadesetak godina bila u drugom planu u odnosu na tumačenja kulture i povijesti, te preispitivanje pitanja proizvodnje i slobode protoka znanja. Posvajajući terminologiju Europske unije, autorica u zaključku ispostavlja prijedlog uvođenja „varijabilne kritičnosti“ u odnosu na središte kontinenta. Riječ je o pokušaju uzimanja u obzir i svakog ravnopravnog, nerepresivnog i korisnog susreta središta i periferije.
Ong, Aihva. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception. Mutations in Citizenship and Soverenity. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Neoliberalism is commonly viewed as an economic doctrine that seeks to limit the scope of government. Some consider it a form of predatory capitalism with adverse effects on the Global South. In this groundbreaking work, Aihwa Ong offers an alternative view of neoliberalism as an extraordinarily malleable technology of governing that is taken up in different ways by different regimes, be they authoritarian, democratic, or communist. Ong shows how East and Southeast Asian states are making exceptions to their usual practices of governing in order to position themselves to compete in the global economy. As she demonstrates, a variety of neoliberal strategies of governing are re-engineering political spaces and populations. Ong’s ethnographic case studies illuminate experiments and developments such as China’s creation of special market zones within its socialist economy; pro-capitalist Islam and women’s rights in Malaysia; Singapore’s repositioning as a hub of scientific expertise; and flexible labor and knowledge regimes that span the Pacific.
Ong, Aihwa. 2010. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press.
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/1369
New edition of Aihwa Ong’s classic ethnographic study of Malay women factory workers. In the two decades since its original publication, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline has become an ethnographic classic in the fields of anthropology, labor studies, and gender and globalization studies. Based on anthropological field work in an agricultural district in Selangor, Peninsular Malaysia, Spirits of Resistance captures a moment of profound transformation, illustrated by the disruptions, conflicts, and ambivalences in the lives of Malay women during the rapid industrialization associated with Malaysia’s rise as a tiger economy. Aihwa Ong’s nuanced approach to the Malay women factory workers’ experiences of the contradictions of modern globalized capitalism has inspired subsequent generations of feminist ethnographers in their explorations of key questions of power, resistance, femininities, religious community, and social change. With a new critical introduction by anthropologist Carla Freeman, this new edition of Spirits of Resistance continues to offer an exemplary model of sophisticated analysis of culturally based resistance to the ideology, surveillance, and institutional authority of globalized corporate capitalism.
Orlić, Olga. 2014. “Grupe solidarne razmjene. Počeci ekonomije solidarnosti u Hrvatskoj”. Etnološka tribina 44(37): 72-88.
https://doi.org/10.15378/1848-9540.2014.37.02
Na globalnoj razini sve je jača svijest o tome da postojeći ekonomski modeli i nisu toliko uspješni, odnosno da uspješno generiraju isključivo nejednakost. Istovremeno jača i svijest o tome da ekološki problemi nisu nešto što neće ostaviti nikakve posljedice. Važno je da postajemo svjesniji da nije istina da nas se sve to uopće ne tiče i da ništa ne možemo promijeniti. Pojedini društveni pokreti, poput ekonomije solidarnosti, nastoje aktivno promijeniti postojeće stanje i ponuditi drugačija i bolja rješenja. Iako ideje koje zastupa ekonomija solidarnosti mogu djelovati idealistički i nedostižno, pojedine prakse pokazuju da je promjene moguće ostvariti, za početak na mikro-razini. Grupe solidarne razmjene jedan su od oblika takvih solidarnih praksi koje imaju transformativan potencijal. Iako ih je najjednostavnije opisati kao alternativni oblik nabave hrane (i to prvenstveno organske) izravno od proizvođača, grupe solidarne razmjene puno su više od toga. Ne samo da potiču ekološki način proizvodnje hrane, koji je dobar i za ljude i za okoliš, već potiču ravnopravne partnerske odnose između kupaca i proizvođača, stvaraju solidarnost i jačaju povjerenje među ljudima. U svijetu takve zajednice prakse ne predstavljaju novinu, a u Hrvatskoj su se pojavile tijekom zadnjih pet godina. U ovom radu iznosim neke od rezultata dosadašnjeg istraživanja grupa solidarne razmjene s podru!ja Zagrebačke županije.
Outhwite, William and Ray, Larry. 2005. Social Theory after Communism. Blackwell Publishing.
Social Theory and Postcommunism undertakes a thorough study of the implications of post-communism for sociological theory. Written by two leading social theorists, the book discusses the thesis that the fall of communism has decimated alternative conceptions of social organizations other than capitalism.
- Analyzes the implications of the fall of communism on social theory
- Discusses alternative ideas of social organizations other than capitalism, in the wake of the collapse of communism
- Covers state/civil society, globalization, the future of "modernity," and post-socialism
Pascucci, Elisa. 2019. “The local labor building the international community: Precarious work within humanitarian spaces”. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 51(3): 743–760.
https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0308518X18803366
Recent research has highlighted the relevance of spaces of international aid and development as sites where global politics materializes. However, the position of local aid workers within these spaces remains less explored. Drawing on fieldwork with humanitarian professionals employed in responses to the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan and Lebanon, this paper theorizes the salience of labour and precarity in the geographies of contemporary humanitarian aid. The ethnographically informed argument is built through three main points: (1) unemployment and insecurity among locally recruited humanitarian staff; (2) the forms of care and affective labour that the aid sector mobilizes; and (3) racialized and classed relations within humanitarian spaces. I argue that the differential precarities experienced by aid workers reproduce a porous and contested ‘local vs international’ divide. While challenged by the ‘new inclusions’ brought about by the global expansion of the aid industry, this divide perpetuates entrenched exclusions and hierarchies, raising ethico-political concerns about the presumptions of abstract universality inherent to humanitarianism.
Pavlović, Petar. 2011. “Radnički otpor u Hrvatskoj: iskustva i zadaci”. U Kroz tranziciju. Prilozi teoriji privatizacije. Željko Pppović i Zoran Gajić, ur. Novi Sad: AKO, 235-253.
Potkonjak, Sanja i Tea Škokić. 2013. “In the World of Iron and Steel. On the Ethnography of Work, Unemployment and Hope”. Narodna umjetnost 50(1):74-96.
https://doi.org/10.15176/vol50no103
In this paper the authors discuss three sets of issues. The first relates to the recent economic crisis, as well as the transitional crisis that preceded it, and is illustrated on the example of the devastation of the Sisak Ironworks. The collapse of the Croatian industry is explained primarily as a bankruptcy of political, ideological and economic values from the socialist period and only secondarily as the result of the global economic crisis. The second set of issues is revealed in the interviews with the employees of the Sisak Ironworks who were laid off, whose narratives mostly conceptualize their life without work, who talk about their life while they were still employed, and who consider their future life and work. In all these interviews the word “hope” is repeated as a kind of a leitmotif. The notion of hope is, in fact, the object of the final set of issues. In recent years, within the humanities and social sciences, the concept of “hope” was given considerable importance in research, especially in the analysis of individual and collective traumatic experience, such as losing one’s job. Thus, the authors present some of the more important theoretical articles about hope, and problematize them based on their own field notes.
Potkonjak, Sanja i Tea Škokić. 2016. „Working Class Gone to Heaven: From Working Class to Middle Class and Back“. Narodna umjetnost 1(53):117-132.
https://hrcak.srce.hr/ojs/index.php/nu/article/view/4437
This paper problematizes the relationship between the working and middle classes in socialism, which was characterized by consumer culture and state of welfare. It also tackles the extinct middle class in the post-socialist context of the economic crisis and economically defined but politically void “new” working class. The economic realization of the Yugoslav socialist model – a hybrid of planned and market economies – combined the capitalist idea of the state of welfare with the communist execution of social rights. The socialist consumer culture, “searching for welfare”, established a homogenous middle class as a proof of its own social success, leaving the “working class” to be conveniently invoked only in ideological manifests of the governing nomenclature. The discussion about the capitalist restoration of the post-socialist period gives precedence to the lament over the extinction of the middle class and its high standard of living over the issues of class relations. On the other hand, the majority of the 286,075 unemployed and 15,230 of the employed who did not receive their salaries in the first quarter of 2015 are low-skill or vocational workers, i.e., the working class. This new relationship between the working and middle classes problematizes the socialist inheritance of transformation of the working class into the middle class, the recent phenomenon of economically defined working class without a political meaning, the post-socialist class inequality between the employed and the unemployed, and the emancipation of the worker as “the scorned subject” and his mobilization without being necessarily included in the middle-class political activism for the “general good”.
Pozniak, Romana. 2019. „Pomoć ili biznis? Transformacija humanitarnog rada u slavonskobrodskom kampu za izbjeglice“. Studia ethnologica Croatica 31(1): 49-66.
https://doi.org/10.17234/SEC.31.2
Članak nastoji prikazati polazišta za tumačenje transformacije humanitarnog rada i oprimjeriti prakse koje upućuju na njegovu profesionalizaciju i izgradnju bliskog odnosa s područjem političkog djelovanja. Zasnovan kao filantropijski projekt i imperativ o spašavanju života i/ili reduciranju patnje, u posljednjih nekoliko desetljeća humanitarizam je formalizirao koncept pružanja pomoći i počeo se manifestirati u aspektima tipičnima za poslovnu i korporacijsku kulturu. Prakse profesionalizacije i odnos između dva pojma koji ostavljaju dojam suprotstavljenih varijanti shvaćanja humanitarnog rada – pomoć i posao – problematiziraju se na osnovi etnografije rada i analize intervjua provedenih s humanitarnim radnicima iz izbjegličkog kampa u Slavonskom Brodu.
Prica, Ines. 2001. “‘To be here – to publish there’. Zur Situationen einer kleinen Europäischen Ethnologie”. U Kroatische Volkskunde/Ethnologie in der Neunzigern. Jasna Čapo Žmagač i dr., ur. Wien: Verlag des Instituts für Europäische Ethnologie (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Ethnologie der Universität Wien, Bd. 22), 31–51.
Prica, Ines. 2004. ”Nasljeđe jugoslavenskih etnologija i suvremeno istraživanje postsocijalizma”. Traditiones, Zbornik Instituta za slovensko narodopisje Instituta ZRI SAZU 33(1):19-34.
U izlaganju se razmatraju uvjeti za antropološko istraživanje postsocijalističkih društava s obzirom na znanstveno nasljeđe etnologija u socijalizmu, posebno na primjeru hrvatske etnologije kao nekadašnjeg dijela jugoslavenskog sustava različitih etnoloških znanstvenih tradicija. Praznina etnografije socijalizma ali i elementi znanstvene postkolonijalnosti u istraživanju i interpretaciji istočnoeuropskih društava od strane zapadne antropologije posljednjih desetak godina otčitavaju se u nasljeđu bivših socijalističkih etnologija i njihovih nesvjesnih ili dirigiranih interpretativnih interesa.
Prica, Ines. 2010. “On the possibility of transmitting the fieldwork experience – Presentation of the Meta-methodological Conditions of the Transitional Filedwork”. Glasnik Etnografskog institute SANU 57:17-29.
Without any intention to synthesize the broader theoretical discussions about the problem, I shall herein try to outline the boundaries of “the fieldwork”, as an implied, disputed, but also inevitable ethnologic scientific practice. This will be done in a concise and critical manner, within the contexts implied in various ways by “domestic ethnologies”. Particular attention will be devoted to the points where its unavoidable limitations mutate into strategies of manipulating the knowledge and/or academic power.
Prica, Ines. 2019. "Delivery of ethnographic material. The work of ethnologists in the conditions of 'project disciplinarity'". U Prospects for Anthropological Research in South-East Europe. Marina Martynova i Ivana Bašić, ur. Moscow-Belgrade: N. N. Miklouho-Maklay Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia and Institute of Ethnography, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, Serbia, 15-25.
http://www.transwork.eu/arhiva/Prica-16-26.pdf
The paper problematises the new conditions in which the humanities are operating, with special emphasis on the requirements imposed upon the institutional foundation and perception of disciplinary identity by the tendency of projectification. The analysis is more narrowly focused on the change in the perception and performative aspects of ethnology in the context of “project interdisciplinarity”. While in such a mosaic common field of various disciplinary claims and goals, it is primarily represented by the symbolic capital of its “famous” ethnographic method, the general ethnological insight, in final outcomes, often left deprived of the key disciplinary strongholds, together with the complex, although somewhat idealistic model of humanistic ethnography. Consequently, the trend leads to the reduction of the professional work of ethnologists to the “suppliers of material” for further analytical procedures and the later finalisation of the scientific product.
Procoli, Angela, ur. 2004. Workers and Narratives of Survival in Europe. The Manegement of Precariousness at the End of the Twentieh Century. State University of New York Press.
Workers and Narratives of Survival in Europe explores the growing problem of job uncertainty in Europe at the end of the twentieth century. The management of professional precariousness is reconsidered against the backdrop of far-reaching social, economic, and political changes in Europe in recent decades, including: the instability of the traditional family; the emergence of new forms of parenthood; globalization of the economic sphere; attempts to impose a uniform pattern of culture; and the breakdown of borders with former Communist countries. The contributors utilize extensive field studies in both Western and Central Europe to understand the meaning of professional uncertainty, as perceived by its victims, and the strategies they develop to face it.
Rainnie, Al, Adrian Smith and Adam Swain. 2002. Work, Employment and Transition: Restructuring livelihoods in post-communism. London: Routledge.
Since the late 1980s the experiences of work and employment in the former communist world have been profoundly transformed. Work, Employment and Transition brings together a series of essays by leading international scholars which highlights the varied and complex forms that work and employment restructuring are taking in the post-soviet world, and makes important theoretical contributions to our understanding of these transformations.
https://www.routledge.com/Work-Employment-and-Transition/Rainnie-Smith-Swain/p/book/9780415249423
Rathgeb, Philip. 2018. Strong Governments, Precarious Workers: Labor Market Policy in the Era of Liberalization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt21h4wqd
Why do some European welfare states protect unemployed and inadequately employed workers ("outsiders") from economic uncertainty better than others? Philip Rathgeb’s study of labor market policy change in three somewhat-similar small states—Austria, Denmark, and Sweden—explores this fundamental question. He does so by examining the distribution of power between trade unions and political parties, attempting to bridge these two lines of research—trade unions and party politics—that, with few exceptions, have advanced without a mutual exchange. Inclusive trade unions have high political stakes in the protection of outsiders, because they incorporate workers at risk of unemployment into their representational outlook. Yet, the impact of union preferences has declined over time, with a shift in the balance of class power from labor to capital across the Western world. National governments have accordingly prioritized flexibility for employers over the social protection of outsiders. As a result, organized labor can only protect outsiders when governments are reliant on union consent for successful consensus mobilization. When governments have a united majority of seats, on the other hand, they are strong enough to exclude unions. Strong Governments, Precarious Workers calls into question the electoral responsiveness of national governments—and thus political parties—to the social needs of an increasingly numerous group of precarious workers. In the end, Rathgeb concludes that the weaker the government, the stronger the capacity of organized labor to enhance the social protection of precarious workers.
Rifkin, Jeremy. 1995. The end of work: the decline of the global labor force and the dawn of the post-market era. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
Jeremy Rifkin argues that we are entering a new phase in history - one characterized by the steady and inevitable decline of jobs. The world, says Rifkin, is fast polarizing into two potentially irreconcilable forces: on one side, an information elite that controls and manages the high-tech global economy; and on the other, the growing numbers displaced workers, who have few prospects and little hope for meaningful employment in an increasingly automated world. The end of work could mean the demise of civilization as we have come to know it, or signal the beginning of a great social transformation and a rebirth of the human spirit.
Rifkin, Jeremy. 2013. The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780230341975
The Industrial Revolution, powered by oil and other fossil fuels, is spiraling into a dangerous endgame. The price of gas and food are climbing, unemployment remains high, the housing market has tanked, consumer and government debt is soaring, and the recovery is slowing. Facing the prospect of a second collapse of the global economy, humanity is desperate for a sustainable economic game plan to take us into the future. Here, Jeremy Rifkin explores how Internet technology and renewable energy are merging to create a powerful "Third Industrial Revolution." He asks us to imagine hundreds of millions of people producing their own green energy in their homes, offices, and factories, and sharing it with each other in an "energy internet," just like we now create and share information online. Rifkin describes how the five-pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution will create thousands of businesses, millions of jobs, and usher in a fundamental reordering of human relationships, from hierarchical to lateral power, that will impact the way we conduct commerce, govern society, educate our children, and engage in civic life. Rifkin's vision is already gaining traction in the international community. The European Union Parliament has issued a formal declaration calling for its implementation, and other nations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, are quickly preparing their own initiatives for transitioning into the new economic paradigm. The Third Industrial Revolution is an insider's account of the next great economic era, including a look into the personalities and players — heads of state, global CEOs, social entrepreneurs, and NGOs — who are pioneering its implementation around the world.
Rofel, Lisa i Sylvia J. Yanagisako. 2019. Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion. Duke University Press.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/fabricating-transnational-capitalism
In this innovative collaborative ethnography of Italian-Chinese ventures in the fashion industry, Lisa Rofel and Sylvia J. Yanagisako offer a new methodology for studying transnational capitalism. Drawing on their respective linguistic and regional areas of expertise, Rofel and Yanagisako show how different historical legacies of capital, labor, nation, and kinship are crucial in the formation of global capitalism. Focusing on how Italian fashion is manufactured, distributed, and marketed by Italian-Chinese ventures and how their relationships have been complicated by China's emergence as a market for luxury goods, the authors illuminate the often-overlooked processes that produce transnational capitalism—including privatization, negotiation of labor value, rearrangement of accumulation, reconfiguration of kinship, and outsourcing of inequality. In so doing, Fabricating Transnational Capitalism reveals the crucial role of the state and the shifting power relations between nations in shaping the ideas and practices of the Italian and Chinese partners.
Rojek, Chris. 2005. Leisure Theory: Principles and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan.
Offering readers the most complete and authoritative critical introduction to Leisure Theory and written by one of the major figures in the field, the book provides an exciting and reliable guide to leisure forms, leisure practice and the representation of leisure. It demonstrates how power relations influence leisure choices and introduces students to the primary functions and regulative mechanisms of leisure, providing a thought provoking account of the central problems confronting students of leisure today. Written with the needs of students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in mind, the book will quickly be recognized as the bible for Leisure Theory.
Rose, Nikolas i Peter Miller. 2008. Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press.
https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9780745641010
The literature on governmentality has had a major impact across the social sciences over the past decade, and much of this has drawn upon the pioneering work by Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose. This volume brings together key papers from their work for the first time, including those that set out the basic frameworks, concept and ethos of this approach to the analysis of political power and the state, and others that analyze specific domains of the conduct of the conduct of conduct, from marketing to accountancy, and from the psychological, management of organizations to the government of economic life. Bringing together empirical papers on the government of economic, social and personal life, the volume demonstrates clearly the importance of analyzing these as conjoint phenomena rather than separate domains, and question some cherished boundaries between disciplines and topic areas. Linking programs and strategies for the administration of these different domains with the formation of subjectivities and the transformation of ethics, the papers cast a new light on some of the leading issues in contemporary social science modernity, democracy, reflexivity and individualization. This volume will be indispensable for all those, from whatever discipline in the social sciences, who have an interest in the concepts and methods necessary for critical empirical analysis of power relations in our present.
Ross, Andrew. 2009. Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times. New York: New York University Press.
https://nyupress.org/9780814776919/nice-work-if-you-can-get-it/
Is job insecurity the new norm? With fewer and fewer people working in steady, long-term positions for one employer, has the dream of a secure job with full benefits and a decent salary become just that - a dream? In Nice Work If You Can Get It, Andrew Ross surveys the new topography of the global workplace and finds an emerging pattern of labor instability and uneven development on a massive scale. Combining detailed case studies with lucid analysis and graphic prose, he looks at what the new landscape of contingent employment means for workers across national, class, and racial lines – from the emerging creative class of high-wage professionals to the multitudes of temporary, migrant, or low-wage workers. Developing the idea of precarious livelihoods to describe this new world of work and life, Ross explores what it means in developed nations – comparing the creative industry policies of the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union, as well as developing countries – by examining the quick fire transformation of China's labor market. He also responds to the challenge of sustainability, assessing the promise of green jobs through restorative alliances between labor advocates and environmentalists. Ross argues that regardless of one's views on labor rights, globalization, and quality of life, this new precarious and indefinite life, and the pitfalls and opportunities that accompany it is likely here to stay and must be addressed in a systematic way. A more equitable kind of knowledge society emerges in these pages – less skewed toward flexploitation and the speculative beneficiaries of intellectual property, and more in tune with ideals and practices that are fair, just, and renewable.
Rubić, Tihana. 2013. "Afternoon Moonlighting – it Was a Must. The Dynamics and Paradoxes of the Croatian Socialist and Post-socialist Labor Market". Narodna umjetnost 50(1):121-146.
https://doi.org/10.15176/vol50no105
This paper discusses the elements of socialist and post-socialist (un)employment and informal economy. A growing economic crisis and a reduced participation in the formal labor market in the newly-formed Croatian state in the early 1990s brought about an increase in unemployment and gave rise to informal economy. However, informal economy had been widespread even before, in the late socialist period in the former Yugoslavia, which was the so-called “golden age” of formal employment. Being formally employed generally did not discourage people from additionally engaging in informal economy. This paper offers an analysis of the cultural and social logic behind informal practices, based on a qualitative research that was conducted in an urban settlement in the periphery of Zagreb among former full-time industrial workers, who are officially unemployed today, and who have been active in the underground economy up to the present day.
Rubić, Tihana. 2013a. “Nezaposlenost i neformalna ekonomija u Hrvatskoj”. Studia Ethnologica Croatica 25(1): 61-92.
Kroz kulturnu analizu i analizu diskursa, u radu se prikazuju narativni (diskurzivni) elementi suvremene nezaposlenosti i neformalne ekonomije u Hrvatskoj. Istraživanjem je uočena metaforičnost i višeznačnost uvriježenih elemenata medijskoga i kolokvijalnoga diskursa o nezaposlenima i nezaposlenosti: kako kroz medije, tako i kroz naracije nezaposlenih, perpetuiraju se predodžbe o nezaposlenima kao trpećim pojedincima, dok, s druge strane, prakse i iskustva nezaposlenosti pokazuju heterogeniju sliku. Premda pozicija dugotrajne nezaposlenosti mahom nije utemeljena na samoizbornosti, viktimizacijski diskurs o nezaposlenima i nezaposlenosti također nije uvijek podudaran s praksama i iskustvima nečije (dugotrajne) formalne nezaposlenosti.
Scholz, Trebor, ur. 2013. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge.
The book asks whether life on the internet is mostly work, or play. We tweet, we tag photos, we link, we review books, we comment on blogs, we remix media, and we upload video to create much of the content that makes up the web. And large corporations profit on our online activity by tracking our interests, affiliations, and habits—and then collecting and selling the data. What is the nature of this interactive ‘labor’ and the new forms of digital sociality that it brings into being? This unique collection of essays provides a wide-ranging account of the dark side of the Internet. It claims that the divide between leisure time and work has vanished so that every aspect of life drives the digital economy. The book reveals the anatomy of playbor (play/labor), the lure of exploitation and the potential for empowerment. Ultimately, the 14 thought-provoking chapters in this volume ask how users can politicize their troubled complicity, create public alternatives to the centralized social web, and thrive online.
Sennett, Richard. 2006. The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Hawen and London: Yale University Press.
http://asounder.org/resources/sennett_culture.pdf
The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life—how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls “the specter of uselessness” haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving. In recent years, reformers of both private and public institutions have preached that flexible, global corporations provide a model of freedom for individuals, unlike the experience of fixed and static bureaucracies Max Weber once called an “iron cage.” Sennett argues that, in banishing old ills, the new-economy model has created new social and emotional traumas. Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary institutions: the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience. In a concluding section, Sennett examines a more durable form of self hood, and what practical initiatives could counter the pernicious effects of “reform.”
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300119923/culture-new-capitalism
Sennett, Richard. 2008. The Craftsman. Penguin.
Most of us have to work. But is work just a means to an end? In trying to make a living, have we lost touch with the idea of making things well? Pure competition, Sennett shows, will never produce good work. Instead, the values of the craftsman, whether in a Stradivari violin workshop or a modern laboratory, can enrich our lives and change the way we anchor ourselves in the world around us.The past lives of crafts and craftsmen show us ways of working - using tools, acquiring skills, thinking about materials - which provide rewarding alternative ways for people to utilise their talents. We need to recognize this if motivations are to be understood and lives made as fulfilling as possible.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/55381/the-craftsman/#cIYEHxtmWgLS3Lwh.99
Senjković, Reana. 2008. Izgubljeno u prijenosu: pop-iskustvo soc-kulture. Zagreb: Biblioteka Nova etnografija.
http://www.ief.hr/Portals/0/docs/knjige/Izgubljeno%20u%20prijenosu.pdf
Senjković, Reana. 2016. Svaki dan pobjeda. Kultura omladinskih radnih akcija. Zagreb: Biblioteka Nova etnografija.
Svaki dan pobjeda prva je postjugoslavenska kulturno-antropološka studija o fenomenu radnih akcija u Jugoslaviji čija se iznimna vrijednost ne iscrpljuje samo u pionirskoj ulozi. Štoviše, ni u samom socijalizmu nije napisana ovako opsežna i temeljita monografija u čiju analitičku perspektivu ulaze različiti tipovi kulturnih praksi: od književnosti, filmova, sjećanja, medija, domaćih i stranih, koji su kreirali značenja radnih akcija. Analizirajući obilje raznovrsne građe, poput filma Prekobrojna Branka Bauera, Krležina teksta Izlet na omladinsku prugu Brčko-Banovići, sve do manje poznatih radova kao što je zbornik The Railway: An Adventure in Construction što ga je uredio britanski povjesničar Edward Palmer Thompson, iskreno oduševljen idejom i praksom radnih akcija s kojima se susreo u Jugoslaviji, autorica donosi inovativan i iscrpan pogled na taj fenomen koji je u socijalističkoj Jugoslaviji imao gotovo mitski status. Ukratko, neophodno štivo u “ovom strašnom času” prekarijata i devalvacije vrijednosti rada za opće dobro.
http://www.ief.hr/Izdava%C5%A1tvo/tabid/67/agentType/View/ID/212/Default.aspx
Senjković, Reana. 2017. „'Ovdje se kuju novi ljudi': tijelo, ideologija i utopija u literarizaciji prvih poslijeratnih omladinskih radnih akcija“. U Tijelo u hrvatskome jeziku, književnosti i kulturi, zbornik radova 45. seminara Zagrebačke slavističke škole. Ivana Brković i Tatjana Pišković, ur. Zagreb: Filozofski fakultet, Zagrebačka slavistička škola, 57-173.
U radu se razmatra korpus tekstova hrvatskih književnika posvećenih prvim poslijeratnim omladinskim radnim akcijama, a pozornost se posvećuje opisima tijela, pojedinaca ili kolektiva.
Senjković, Reana. 2017. „Uvod“. U Omladinske radne akcije – dizajn ideologije, katalog izložbe. Sanja Bachrach Krištofić i Mario Krištofić, ur. Zagreb: Umjetnička organizacija Kultura umjetnosti, 5-14.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LgwK4jwQ1929kyolEDmfZZOORyVKwTx3/view
Senjković, Reana. 2018. "Ugljen i šminka. Narativi o jugoslavenskoj radnici na ponudi posttranzicijskom sjećanju". Etnološka tribina 41(48): 174-193.
https://doi.org/10.15378/1848-9540.2018.41.06
Istraživanja u zemljama nekadašnjeg državnog socijalizma, pa i u Hrvatskoj, pokazala su da su stavovi žena prema prošlosti koju su živjele u drugom političkom sustavu pozitivniji od stavova muškaraca, da one, u skladu s time, svoju trenutnu situaciju ocjenjuju lošijom no u "bivšem komunističkom sustavu" te da su sklonije podržati lijevo orijentirane političke stranke. Čitanje triju jugoslavenskih ženskih časopisa iz razdoblja od 1946. do 1975. godine otkriva dijapazon uzornih reprezentacija i kreacija lika zaposlene žene, koje se nude usporedbi sa suvremenim nostalgijskim i/ili kritičkim iskazima.
Senjković, Reana. 2020. "Work as a Cure". U Cultures of Economy in South-Eastern Europe. Spotlights and Perspectives. Jurij Murašov i dr, ur. Bielefeld: Transcript, 97-110.
http://www.transwork.eu/arhiva/Senjkovic-Work-as-a-Cure.pdf
The text discusses examples of efforts in "correcting" delinquents during the so-called youth work actions in SFRY. Examples from the then published scientific papers/books and popular literature are considered in comparison with problems of delinquency in Western countries, which were dealt with in the same way, through voluntary work.
Shore, Cris. 2000. Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration. London, New York: Routledge.
The development of the European Union has been one of the most profound advances in European politics and society this century. Yet the institutions of Europe and the 'Eurocrats' who work in them have constantly attracted negative publicity, culminating in the mass resignation of the European Commissioners in March 1999.
In this revealing study, Cris Shore scrutinises the process of European integration using the techniques of anthropology, and drawing on thought from across the social sciences. Using the findings of numerous interviews with EU employees, he reveals that there is not just a subculture of corruption within the institutions of Europe, but that their problems are largely a result of the way the EU itself is constituted and run. He argues that European integration has largely failed in bringing about anything but an ever-closer integration of the technical, political and financial elites of Europe - at the expense of its ordinary citizens.
This critical anthropology of European integration is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the culture and politics of the EU.https://www.amazon.com/Building-Europe-Cultural-Politics-Integration/dp/0415180155
Siefert, Marsha, ur. 2020. Labor in State-Socialist Europe, 1945–1989, Contributions to a History of Work. Central European University Press.
http://ceupress.com/book/labor-state-socialist-europe-1945-1989
Labor regimes under communism in East-Central Europe were complex, shifting and ambiguous. This collection of sixteen essays offers new conceptual and empirical ways to understand their history from the end of the Second World War to 1989, and to think about how their experiences relate to debates about labor history, both European and global. The authors reconsider the history of state socialism by reexamining the policies and problems of communist regimes and recuperating the voices of the workers who built them. The contributors look at work and workers in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. They explore the often contentious relationship between politics and labor policy, dealing with diverse topics including workers' safety and risks; labor rights, and protests; working women's politics and professions; migrant workers and social welfare; attempts to control workers' behavior and stem unemployment; and cases of incomplete, compromised or even abandoned processes of proletarianization. Workers are presented as active agents in resisting and supporting changes in labor policies, in choosing allegiances, and in defining the very nature of work.
Slavnić, Zoran, Branka Likić-Brborić, Sara Nadin i Colin C. Williams. 2013. “‘From Workers’ Self-management in Socialism to Trade Unions Marginalization in ‘Wild Capitalism’: A Case Study of ArcelorMittal in Bosnia and Herzegovina”. Revija za sociologiju 43(1): 31-55.
https://doi.org/10.5613/rzs.43.1.2
This paper explores the largest steel producer in Bosnia and Herzegovina as it shifted from a state-owned company to a foreign-owned private company. The impact of the transition on industrial relations, effect of new management on employment conditions within the company and the changing role of trade unions is explored. The extent to which the findings can be considered a typical consequence of the inexorable encroachment of capitalism and privatization across Eastern Europe is considered. The paper commences with brief summary of the historical and political context of the transitional economies. This is followed by a brief history of the steel industry in general, and in Yugoslavia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular, detailing the main features of industrial relations. The background to the specific case study is then presented, providing a short history of Mittal Steel and its restructuring challenges in the transitional post-communist period. This provides the foundation for the analysis, which explores the impact of privatization on industrial relations in the company, looking in particular at the effect of new management and its culture, and the concomitant effects on employment contracts, working conditions and the changing role of trade unions. The paper concludes with a discussion of the extent to which the transformations can be explained by the various theories of post-communist capitalism.
Spyridakis, Manos. 2013. The Liminal Worker. An Ethnography of Work, Unemployment and Precariousness in Contemporary Greece. London and New York: Routledge.
The Liminal Worker examines the experience of work, employment, employment insecurity and precariousness in a context of high unemployment and welfare state crisis in modern Greece. A theoretically-informed, anthropological exploration of the notion of work in contemporary western society and its relation to processes of political decision making, this book challenges the mainstream conception of work as an economic or purely productive activity, presenting a comparative analysis of work as a social phenomenon. Drawing on original empirical research, it explores the key themes of the transformation, experience, meaning and narrative of work and its relation to attendant social policies. A unique examination of the complicated experience of work and labour relations within power systems, institutions and organisations, as well as the reactions and survival strategies of ordinary actors facing precariousness in their daily existence, The Liminal Worker elaborates upon the notion of the anthropology of work and investigates the connection between ethnographic data (and its critical analysis) and the formation of policy. As such, it will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, policy makers and geographers concerned with questions of work, labour relations and policy formation.
Srnicek, Nick and Alex Williams. 2016. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso.
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2315-inventing-the-future
Neoliberalism isn’t working. Austerity is forcing millions into poverty and many more into precarious work, while the left remains trapped in stagnant political practices that offer no respite. Inventing the Future is a bold new manifesto for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitalist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms. This new edition includes a new chapter where Srnicek and Williams respond to their various critics.
Standing Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
This book presents the Precariat – an emerging class, comprising the rapidly growing number of people facing lives of insecurity, moving in and out of jobs that give little meaning to their lives. Guy Standing argues that this class is producing instabilities in society. Although it would be wrong to characterise members of the Precariat as victims, many are frustrated and angry. The Precariat is dangerous because it is internally divided, leading to the villainisation of migrants and other vulnerable groups. Lacking agency, its members may be susceptible to the siren calls of political extremism. To prevent a 'politics of inferno', Guy Standing argues for a 'politics of paradise', in which redistribution and income security are reconfi gured in a new kind of Good Society, and in which the fears and aspirations of the Precariat are made central to a progressive strategy.
Stenning, Alison, Adrian Smith, Alena Rochovská i Dariusz Swiątek. 2010. Domesticating Neo-Liberalism: Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post-Socialist Cities. Oford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.
Based on in-depth research in Poland and Slovakia, Domesticating Neo-Liberalism addresses how we understand the processes of neo-liberalization in post-socialist cities.
- Builds upon a vast amount of new research data
- Examines how households try to sustain their livelihoods at particularly dramatic and difficult times of urban transformation
- Provides a major contribution to how we theorize the geographies of neo-liberalism
- Offers a conclusion which informs discussions of social policy within European Union enlargement
Stubbs, Paul. 2001. “New Times? Towards a Political Economy of ›Civil Society‹ in Contemporary Croatia”. Narodna Umjetnost 38(1): 89–103.
This article critiques orthodox approaches to civil society in Croatia adopting a political economy approach which is concerned with struggles over possession of different 'capitals'. The historical continuities and ruptures in the relationship between 'civil society' and 'nationalism', in the context of 'formal politics' and 'everyday life' are addressed. The article suggests that the impact of relationships between local, national and global discourses has been problematic and remains complex and contested.
Škokić, Tea i Sanja Potkonjak. 2015. „Retro-Utopia. On the Idea of Work and Progress in Post-Socialist Croatia“. Ethnologica Balkanica. Journal for Southeast European Anthropology 18:369-384.
http://bib.irb.hr/prikazi-rad?rad=818187
This article aims at exploring narratives on work and progress in post-socialist Croatia in the light of the retro-Utopia. By drawing on archival, socialist labour newspapers, and longitudinal research on unemployment in the post-industrial town of Sisak, Croatia, we will focus on how workers have been narrativizing work, progress, and their well-being over a broad time span of more than 60 years. In addressing these narratives, we will use the concept of retro-Utopia and show its ability to cover nostalgic revalorization of lost times, as well as to offer promissory imaginary directed toward the future. In this article, we argue that Utopian narratives on work, progress and well-being have changed from community-based ideas in socialism to be constructed anew in the last twenty years as retro-Utopian concepts deploying a past-based nostalgic revalorization of socialism and future-based Utopianism connected to the Croatian accession to the EU.
Škokić, Tea. 2019. "O rodnoj i radnoj ideologiji". Glasnik Etnografskog instituta SANU LXVII(2): 247–263.
http://www.transwork.eu/arhiva/O-rodnoj-i-radnoj-ideologiji.pdf
U radu se prikazuju glavne okosnice diskursa o rodnoj ideologiji, njegovi akteri na međunarodnoj, a napose na lokalnoj, hrvatskoj razini te propituju ekonomske reperkusije zahtjeva koje zagovaraju pristaše tzv. antirodnih pokreta. Povezivanje neoliberalne agende s neokonzervativnim zagovaranjem smanjivanja demokratski stečenih ljudskih prava, a posebice reproduktivnih prava žena prokazuje se kao novi oblik starog patrijarhalnog modela kontrole nad ženskim tijelom, ali i ženskim radom.
Tooze, Adam. 2008. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. New York: Penguin Books.
An extraordinary mythology has grown up around the Third Reich that hovers over political and moral debate even today. Adam Tooze's controversial new book challenges the conventional economic interpretations of that period to explore how Hitler's surprisingly prescient vision- ultimately hindered by Germany's limited resources and his own racial ideology-was to create a German super-state to dominate Europe and compete with what he saw as America's overwhelming power in a soon-to- be globalized world. The Wages of Destruction is a chilling work of originality and tremendous scholarship that is already setting off debate in Germany and will fundamentally change the way in which history views the Second World War
Tooze, Adam. 2018. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. United States: Viking.
https://www.amazon.com/Crashed-Decade-Financial-Crises-Changed/dp/0670024937
From a prizewinning economic historian, an eye-opening reinterpretation of the 2008 economic crisis (and its ten-year aftermath) as a global event that directly led to the shockwaves being felt around the world today. In September 2008 President George Bush could still describe the financial crisis as an incident local to Wall Street. In fact it was a dramatic caesura of global significance that spiraled around the world, from the financial markets of the UK and Europe to the factories and dockyards of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, forcing a rearrangement of global governance. In the United States and Europe, it caused a fundamental reconsideration of capitalist democracy, eventually leading to the war in the Ukraine, the chaos of Greece, Brexit, and Trump. It was the greatest crisis to have struck Western societies since the end of the Cold War, but was it inevitable? And is it over? Crashed is a dramatic new narrative resting on original themes: the haphazard nature of economic development and the erratic path of debt around the world; the unseen way individual countries and regions are linked together in deeply unequal relationships through financial interdependence, investment, politics, and force; the ways the financial crisis interacted with the spectacular rise of social media, the crisis of middle-class America, the rise of China, and global struggles over fossil fuels. Finally, Tooze asks, given this history, what now are the prospects for a liberal, stable, and coherent world order?
Verdery, Catherine. 1996. What Was Socialism and What Comes Next. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Among the first anthropologists to work in Eastern Europe, Katherine Verdery had built up a significant base of ethnographic and historical expertise when the major political transformations in the region began to take place. In this collection of essays dealing with the aftermath of Soviet-style socialism and the different forms that may replace it, she explores the nature of socialism in order to understand more fully its consequences. By analyzing her primary data from Romania and Transylvania and synthesizing information from other sources, Verdery lends a distinctive anthropological perspective to a variety of themes common to political and economic studies on the end of socialism: themes such as "civil society," the creation of market economies, privatization, national and ethnic conflict, and changing gender relations. Under Verdery's examination, privatization and civil society appear not only as social processes, for example, but as symbols in political rhetoric. The classic pyramid scheme is not just a means of enrichment but a site for reconceptualizing the meaning of money and an unusual form of post-Marxist millenarianism. Land being redistributed as private property stretches and shrinks, as in the imaginings of the farmers struggling to tame it. Infused by this kind of ethnographic sensibility, the essays reject the assumption of a transition to capitalism in favor of investigating local processes in their own terms.
Virno, Paolo i Michael Hardt. 2006. Radical Thought in Italy. A Potential Politics. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/radical-thought-in-italy
Over the past several decades, Italian revolutionary politics has offered a model for new forms of political thinking. Radical Thought in Italy continues that tradition by providing an original view of the potential for a radical democratic politics today that speaks not only to the Italian situation but also to a broadly international context. First, the essays settle accounts with the culture of cynicism, opportunism, and fear that has come to permeate the Left. They then proceed to analyze the new difficulties and possibilities opened by current economic conditions and the crisis of the welfare state. Finally, the authors propose a series of new concepts that are helpful in rethinking revolution for our times.
Wagner, Ines. 2018. Workers Without Borders: Posted Work and Precarity in the EU. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501729157/workers-without-borders/#bookTabs=1
How the European Union handles posted workers is a growing issue for a region with borders that really are just lines on a map. A 2008 story, dissected in Ines Wagner’s Workers without Borders, about the troubling working conditions of migrant meat and construction workers, exposed a distressing dichotomy: how could a country with such strong employers’ associations and trade unions allow for the establishment and maintenance of such a precarious labor market segment? Wagner introduces an overlooked piece of the puzzle: re-regulatory politics at the workplace level. She interrogates the position of the posted worker in contemporary European labour markets and the implications of and regulations for this position in industrial relations, social policy and justice in Europe. Workers without Borders concentrates on how local actors implement European rules and opportunities to analyze the balance of power induced by the EU around policy issues. Wagner examines the particularities of posted worker dynamics at the workplace level, in German meatpacking facilities and on construction sites, to reveal the problems and promises of European Union governance as regulating social justice. Using a bottom-up approach through in-depth interviews with posted migrant workers and administrators involved in the posting process, Workers without Borders shows that strong labor-market regulation via independent collective bargaining institutions at the workplace level is crucial to effective labor rights in marginal workplaces. Wagner identifies structures of access and denial to labor rights for temporary intra-EU migrant workers and the problems contained within this system for the EU more broadly.
Wallman, Sandra, ur. 1979. Social anthropology of work. London, New York: Academic Press.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/9836504?q&versionId=11421909
This volume contains 14 original papers arising out of the 1979 conference of the Assocaition of Social Anthropologists of Great Britain and the Commonwealth. The conference was convened around the topic work. The ethnographic and theoretical range covered by the conference and so by the volume was and is unusually wide: the collection includes cases from nonindustrial, industrialising, societies; not every paper deals with the same aspects of work, nor does each necessarily define "work" in the same way. Because of this comparative range, the general discussion can broach two simple but crucial questions. The scope of the first-What is work about?-is expanded by short commentaries from practitioners of three other disciplines (economics, psychiatry, and human biology) which confirm the generality and the general recognition of "the problem of work" and signal themes echoed by the people whose views are represented in the papers which follow. Although several of the contributors address themselves to issues in Marxist debate or in industrial management, the volume as a whole underlines the fact that work is not primarily a specialist or academic topic and that its most pressing importance is outside academic domains altogehter. Because work is "about" controlling the environment, it is concerned with solutions to the ordinary problems of livelihood, and in this sense it is everybody's problem. Hence our second question: What does social anthropology have to say about work that has not already been said? The anthropological perspective taken in this book recongnizes that existential, symbolic, or social values may be more fundamental incentives to work than the expectation of material gain; it allows comparisons between the production of yams and the sweeping of streets, the management of farm land and dock work, and the maintenance of bureaucratic services and family obligations because they are presented as analogous systems of work; and it exposes the systematic connections between the many elements which make up the organisation and experience of work of all sorts. The Editor's Introduction (by Sandra Wallman) does not pretend to review the extensive literature on the subject. It should be read as an epilogue to the conference and a commentary on the volume. In it, the dimensions of work systems described or implied in the volume are explored and some indication of where they occur and how they relate to each other in the separate contributions is given. The editor proposes that the variety of meanings attached to work can be encompassed and understood in a framework in which work is defined as the production, management, or conversion of the resources necessary to livelihood and in which the classical list of resources-land, labour, and capital-is enlarged by the addition of time, information, and identity. The practical uses of this approach and the implications for further enquiry are indicated.
Weeks, Kathi. 2007. "Life within and against work: Affective labor, feminist critique, and post-Fordist politics". ephemera 7(1): 233-249.
Feminist theorists have long been interested in immaterial and affective labor, even if the terms themselves are a more recent invention. Contemporary discussions of the concepts of immaterial and affective labor could be enriched by a better understanding of these lineages. Towards that end, this paper focuses on two pioneering feminist projects: the socialist feminist effort to add a critical account of reproductive labor to a Marxist analysis of productive labor and Arlie Hochschild’s addition of the emotional labors of pink collar service workers to the critical analyses of white collar immaterial labor exemplified by the work of C.W. Mills. By focusing on what each of these feminist interventions contributes one can better understand the specificity of labor in the immaterial mode and the difficulties posed by its theorization. The two traditions are instructive for both the achievements and the failures of their analyses. Arguing that both of these critical strategies prove increasingly untenable under the conditions of post-Fordist production, the paper concludes with a brief attempt to imagine the terms of an alternative immanent strategy of critical/political intervention, one that might serve to open another angle of vision on, and frame a different kind of political response to, post-Fordist regimes of work.
Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham i London: Duke University Press.
https://libcom.org/files/the-problem-with-work_-feminism-marxism-kathi-weeks.pdf
In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks boldly challenges the presupposition that work, or waged labor, is inherently a social and political good. While progressive political movements, including the Marxist and feminist movements, have fought for equal pay, better work conditions, and the recognition of unpaid work as a valued form of labor, even they have tended to accept work as a naturalized or inevitable activity. Weeks argues that in taking work as a given, we have “depoliticized” it, or removed it from the realm of political critique. Employment is now largely privatized, and work-based activism in the United States has atrophied. We have accepted waged work as the primary mechanism for income distribution, as an ethical obligation, and as a means of defining ourselves and others as social and political subjects. Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation. Work, she contends, is a legitimate, even crucial, subject for political theory.
Weiss, Thomas G. 2013. Humanitarian Business. Cambridge: Polity Press.
https://www.wiley.com/en-gh/Humanitarian+Business-p-9780745663319
With some 50 million people living under duress and threatened by wars and disasters in 2012, the demand for relief worldwide has reached unprecedented levels. Humanitarianism is now a multi-billion dollar enterprise, and aid agencies are obliged to respond to a range of economic forces in order to 'stay in business'. In his customarily hard-hitting analysis, Thomas G. Weiss offers penetrating insights into the complexities and challenges of the contemporary humanitarian marketplace. In addition to changing political and military conditions that generate demand for aid, private suppliers have changed too. Today’s political economy places aid agencies side-by-side with for-profit businesses, including private military and security companies, in a marketplace that also is linked to global trade networks in illicit arms, natural resources, and drugs. This witch’s brew is simmering in the cauldron of wars that are often protracted and always costly to civilians who are the very targets of violence. While belligerents put a price-tag on access to victims, aid agencies pursue branding in a competition for 'scarce' resources relative to the staggering needs. As marketization encroaches on traditional humanitarianism, it seems everything may have a price, from access and principles, to moral authority and lives.
Wilkinson, Sue. 2006. “Analysing Interaction in Focus Groups”. U Talk and Interaction in Social Research Methods. Paul Drew, Geoffrey Raymond i Darin Weiberg, ur. London: Sage.
This book admirably fulfils its stated objective of describing social research methods in action and exploring, from a range of perspectives, the linguistic shaping of social context. Overall, this is a balanced, well-edited and coherent collection of papers, bringing together high quality work from recognized authorities in the analysis of talk-in-interaction. Talk and Interaction in Social Research Methodologies is a much-needed methods text. Focusing on research methods in action, the volume offers a new way of viewing the realities of social research. By taking language use seriously, the text reveals the details and depths of a wide range of research projects as they have seldom been presented before.The editors Paul Drew, Geoffrey Raymond and Darin Weinberg represent the very best from multiple traditions of researching talk-in-interaction from both sides of the Atlantic. The chapters are written by a sterling collection of researchers a virtual honor roll of conversation analysts and kindred spirits. This book is a must read for social researchers of all disciplines who are interested in social interaction. It should be assigned reading for all graduate students being introduced to qualitative methods.
http://methods.sagepub.com/book/talk-and-interaction-in-social-research-methods/n4.xml
Witzel, Andreas i Herwig Reiter. 2012. The problem-centred Interview. London: Sage.
Interviewing is among the most commonly used methods in qualitative research. It is a pragmatic and reliable tool for collecting information and can be adapted to diverse situations and purposes. The discursive-dialogic reconstruction of relevant issues in the perspective of the interview partner is one of these purposes - it is at the core of the programme of the technique of the problem-centred interview (PCI). Witzel and Reiter present the first English book about this popular and widely recognised method and introduce it to the international research community. The comprehensive and hands-on introduction to methodology, principles and practice of this particular technique is organised along the logical steps of preparing, doing and processing PCIs. The authors use many practical examples from their own problem-centred research to illustrate each stage as well as common interviewing pitfalls and errors. The book also demonstrates how to work with sensitizing prior knowledge in the context of interview research. Novice and experienced interview researchers across the social, educational and health sciences will find this an invaluable guide.
Woodward, Susan L. 1995. Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945-1990. Princeton-New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
In the first political analysis of unemployment in a socialist country, Susan Woodward argues that the bloody conflicts that are destroying Yugoslavia stem not so much from ancient ethnic hatreds as from the political and social divisions created by a failed socialist program to prevent capitalist joblessness. Under Communism the concept of socialist unemployment was considered an oxymoron; when it appeared in postwar Yugoslavia, it was dismissed as illusory or as a transitory consequence of Yugoslavia's unorthodox experiments with worker-managed firms. In Woodward's view, however, it was only a matter of time before countries in the former Soviet bloc caught up with Yugoslavia, confronting the same unintended consequences of economic reforms required to bring socialist states into the world economy. By 1985, Yugoslavia's unemployment rate had risen to 15 percent. How was it that a labor-oriented government managed to tolerate so clear a violation of the socialist commitment to full employment? Proposing a politically based model to explain this paradox, Woodward analyzes the ideology of economic growth, and shows that international constraints, rather than organized political pressures, defined government policy. She argues that unemployment became politically "invisible," owing to its redefinition in terms of guaranteed subsistence and political exclusion, with the result that it corrupted and ultimately dissolved the authority of all political institutions. Forced to balance domestic policies aimed at sustaining minimum standards of living and achieving productivity growth against the conflicting demands of the world economy and national security, the leadership inadvertently recreated the social relations of agrarian communities within a postindustrial society.
Woodword, Susan L. 1995. Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War. Washington: The Brookings Institution.
The collapse of Yugoslavia into nationalist regimes led not only to horrendous cruelty and destruction, but also to a crisis of Western security regimes. Coming at the height of euphoria over the end of the cold war and the promise of a "new world order," the conflict presented Western governments and the international community with an unwelcome and unexpected set of tasks. Their initial assessment that the conflict was of little strategic significance or national interest could not be sustained in light of its consequences. By 1994 the conflict had emerged as the most challenging threat to existing norms and institutions that Western leaders faced. And by the end of 1994, more than three years after the international community explicitly intervened to mediate the conflict, there had been no progress on any of the issues raised by the country's dissolution.
In this book, Susan Woodward explains what happened to Yugoslavia and what can be learned from the response of outsiders to its crisis. She argues that focusing on ancient ethnic hatreds and military aggression was a way to avoid the problem and misunderstood nationalism in post-communist states. The real origin of the Yugoslav conflict, Woodward explains, is the disintegration of governmental authority and the breakdown of a political and civil order, a process that occurred over a prolonged period. The Yugoslav conflict is inseparable from international change and interdependence, and it is not confined to the Balkans but is part of a more widespread phenomenon of political disintegration. Woodward's analysis is based on her first-hand experience before the country's collapse and then during the later stages of the Bosnian war as a member of the UN operation sent to monitor cease-fires and provide humanitarian assistance. She argues that Western action not only failed to prevent the spread of violence or to negotiate peace, but actually exacerbated the conflict. Woodward attempts to explain why these challenges will not cease or the Yugoslav conflicts end until the actual causes of the conflict, the goals of combatants, and the fundamental issues they pose for international order are better understood and addressed.Žitko, Mislav. 2011. “Tranzicija financijskog sektora u Hrvatskoj i Sloveniji”. U Veselinović, Ana et al. Izgubljeno u tranziciji. Beograd: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.
http://slobodnifilozofski.com/2011/07/mislav-zitko-tranzicija-financijskog.html
U svom tekstu, Mislav Žitko analizira tranziciju financijskog sektora i njegovu ulogu u pretvorbi i privatizaciji. Autor naglašava činjenicu da monetarni sustav ima snažnu i dalekosežnu, iako često nevidljivu ulogu u oblikovanju društvene dinamike i klasne stratifikacije. Utoliko su tehnička pitanja ekonomske teorije uvijek pitanja društvenog poretka. Budući da pojam tranzicije ustvari označava restauraciju kapitalizma, bitno je uklopiti promjene kroz koje su prolazile bivše socijalističke republike u kontekst suvremenih ekonomskih kretanja.