Precarious everyday agency Jokinen, Eeva
European journal of cultural studies,
02/2016, Volume:
19, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The concept of agency has been used to bridge the gap between micro- and macro-level analyses in social and feminist studies. Giddens proposed the pair of structure and agency; Bourdieu coined the ...concept of habitus as an interlocutor between the two. Feminist theorisation developed the concepts of social agency as always embodied, of power as subtly inculcated through the body, and of social action as generative. Agency as a productive tool has also been contested: as a tendency to reduce agency to individual sovereignty, as being androcentric, as losing the sight of everyday life events, and as reducing action to human action. This article contributes to the theoretical debates on agency by developing a notion of precarious everyday agency as a subjective interface in contemporary capitalism. It engages with theories of precarisation and modifies them to incorporate fragile, everyday life agency. The modification is achieved by analysing the role and logic of habits in precarisation. The article draws on empirical data comprising a series of group discussions with women who identify themselves as living in a precarious situation. The article shows that the logic of habit is complex and that a habit of habit-breaking can be identified as a crucial aspect of precarious everyday agency.
This article focuses on the central and ambivalent role that cities play in the context of platform capitalism. While on the one hand, urban spaces have become an advanced ground for the operations ...of capital, on the other they have also become the main stage for resistance movements. The city is thus emerging as a decisive political and socio-economic dimension for understanding the impact of digital platforms on workers and on society. By presenting two Italian case studies from the city of Bologna, we aim to shed light on how cities not only provide the necessary resources and infrastructures for platforms to rise and operate, but also give rise to movements to organise and resist these developments.
This article presents an analysis of life-political themes in online discussions about the hikikomori phenomenon, acute social withdrawal. In a Finnish online image-board, socially withdrawn ...individuals anonymously take part in conversations concerning, for example, welfare and the difficulties of working life. The aim of this study is to bring new perspectives to the discussion about anonymous online communication, and especially its relationship with social exclusion and anti-social behaviour. In the article, I examine how ‘the anti-social’ is produced and understood in this anonymously used forum. Through a thematically constructed textual analysis of online discussions, the following questions are answered: What kinds of life-political themes are found in the discussion concerning social withdrawal? How is the feeling of being an outsider in one’s own society voiced in this online community? What kind of space for public discussion does this specific forum provide? In the online space, an intimate public is formed around shared narratives and the conversations seem to offer at least a space of expressive politics and social criticism for the participants in a situation that is labelled by precariousness.
Introducing this issue, this paper reflects on the role of peer-reviewed research in documenting and analysing the restructuring of labour under rapidly changing global conditions. It summarises the ...contents of the issue, placing it in the context not only of the 2020-2021 global COVID-19 pandemic, but also in relation to past theoretical debates in the pages of this journal about the dynamics of platform capitalism.
The literature on gender and science shows that scientific careers continue to be characterised – albeit with important differences among countries – by strong gender discriminations, especially in ...more prestigious positions. Much less investigated is the issue of which stage in the career such differences begin to show up. Gender and Precarious Research Careers aims to advance the debate on the process of precarisation in higher education and its gendered effects, and springs from a three-year research project across institutions in seven European countries: Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Iceland, Switzerland, Slovenia and Austria. Examining gender asymmetries in academic and research organisations, this insightful volume focuses particularly on early careers. It centres both on STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and SSH (Social Science and Humanities) fields. Offering recommendations to design innovative organisational policies and self-tailored ‘Gender Equality Plans’ to be implemented in universities and research centres, this volume will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Gender Studies, Sociology of Work and Industry, Sociology of Knowledge, Business Studies and Higher Education.
The accumulation crisis of capitalism from the eighties allowed its restructuring through new modes of accumulation characterized as flexible in order to face the rigidities of the Fordist model. ...Flexibility redirected the organization of production, work and, ultimately, labor rights as a conditioned of the insertion-adaptation processes of the new consumer and labor markets, the ultimate goal of which is to obtain greater productivity for being more competitive. The development of information and communication technologies extended the dynamics of outsourcing and relocation of production worldwide. Flexible specialization and the expansion of the service sector facilitate new productive activities, one of which is Call Centers. This research, based on both a Call Center ethnography in Quito and on the analysis of some distinctive features of work, reflects the control mechanisms and intensification of the extraction of plus-value from the labor force. The main result is the renewal of business management discourses such as technological innovation that ensures the permanence and greater commitment of workers towards the production process, configuring a labour´s new morphology. http://id.caicyt.gov.ar/ark:/s25912755/45f5lismj
La crisis de acumulación del capitalismo a partir de los años ochenta permitió su reestructuración a través de nuevos modos de acumulación caracterizados como flexibles, para enfrentar las rigideces del modelo fordista. La flexibilidad redirigió la organización de la producción, del trabajo y, en último término, de los derechos laborales como condición de los procesos de inserción-adaptación de los nuevos mercados de consumo y de trabajo, cuyo fin último es la obtención de mayor productividad para ser más competitivos. El desarrollo de las tecnologías de la comunicación e información extendieron las dinámicas de externalización y deslocalización de la producción a nivel mundial. La especialización flexible y la expansión del sector servicios dieron paso a nuevas actividades productivas, una de ellas son los call centers. La presente investigación, basada en una etnografía en un call center en la ciudad de Quito y a partir del análisis de algunos rasgos distintivos del trabajo, reflexiona en torno a los mecanismos de control e intensificación de la extracción de plus valor de la fuerza de trabajo. Como resultado principal se señala la renovación de los discursos de gestión empresarial como la innovación tecnológica que asegura la permanencia y el mayor compromiso de las y los trabajadores hacia el proceso productivo, configurando una nueva morfología del trabajo. http://id.caicyt.gov.ar/ark:/s25912755/45f5lismj
The present study highlighted the labour process of the dental surgeon (DS) in the private healthcare sector from the healthcare professional's perspective based on intervention bioethics. An ...observational, cross-sectional survey study was performed within the Federal District (Distrito Federal) region. Data were collected from 108 questionnaires completed by DSs affiliated with two types of private health insurers, self-insurance and group insurance, to assess job perception and the degree of job satisfaction in the dentistry market. The main source of dissatisfaction for healthcare professionals was related to the pay for dental procedures by insurers. For self-insurer 1, 38.1% healthcare professionals replied that the pay was satisfactory, whereas in self-insurance 2 and in the group insurance, 100% of healthcare professionals were dissatisfied. Another finding was that the group insurer considerably restricted elective treatments. In conclusion, loss of professional autonomy, depreciation of insurance claims and precarisation of dentistry occurs in the private healthcare sector, thus demonstrating the ethical conflicts in this relationship.
This study aims to explore work precarity in the platform economy from the perspective of food delivery workers. It also tries to contextualise work precarity in COVID-19 times. With the digital ...boom, food-based platform aggregators have emerged as a new workspace for food delivery workers in India. Food delivery workers working for platform aggregators are termed ‘independent contractors’ and ‘delivery partners’ to avoid legal issues of employer-employee relations; this enables a substantial reduction in transaction costs. Despite the huge number of food delivery workers, they are unable to organise into collectives. The platform economy is emerging as a sector offering new work opportunities, but at the same time it is plagued by low wages (and benefit), absence (or lack) of welfare measures, and digital controls contributing to the process of precarisation. The COVID-19 pandemic and resultant lockdown have aggravated the precarity of work for food delivery workers. It has led to the loss of jobs and incomes, and increased health risks, stigmas and occupation distress. Further, autonomy and flexibility should not come at the cost of the most basic social security and protection. This precarious situation calls for affirmative action from policymakers and platform aggregators.
Recibido: 30-abril-2019 Aceptado: 29-octubre-2019 ABSTRACT In the last decade the European Union has implemented a wide range of policies aimed to foster entrepreneurship and self-employment among ...its young people in order to counteract the disturbing effects of the Global Financial Crisis on youth employment. ...the article identifies a core tension between the governmental discourse around entrepreneurship and the interviewees' experiences as well as gives evidences of the articulation between entrepreneurship and precarity. ...the deconstruction of this discourse gives support both to the notion of the 'self-as-enterprise' (Kelly, 2013) and to the thesis that it conforms a contingent engineering project of subjectivities (Crespo, & Serrano, 2013, p. 1117; Rivera-Aguilera, 2018; Serrano, et al., 2012). The main precarity factors that characterize the Spanish labour market are: high rates of unemployment; a high rate of temporary employment; an increasing labour segmentation which manifests itself in problems regarding access to and retention of employment; unequal employment conditions for workers and; an overall loss of labour rights intertwined with an increase in the workloads.
Since the neoliberal turn in Latin America the rural economy and society has experienced a great transformation. Corporate capital and transnational agro-industries have taken hold of agriculture ...radically transforming the economic and social relations of production leading to the precarization and feminisation of rural labour as well as the intensification of work. Peasant farmers were further squeezed having to increasingly find off-farm incomes, largely through precarious wage labour activities, so as to make a living thereby furthering the process of proletarianization. The 'new rurality' and 'territorial' approaches tried to take account of these transformations but they are found wanting. Instead, a political economy view to the agrarian question is found more promising. A counter-movement to neoliberalism has emerged spearheaded by indigenous peoples and the rural poor, sometimes linked to the transnational peasant movement 'Via Campesina'. Their main aim is to construct an alternative agrarian system based on 'food sovereignty' which is promising but also controversial. Desde el giro neoliberal en América Latina la economía y sociedad rural han experimentado una gran transformación. El capital corporativo y las agroindustrias transnacionales se han apoderado de la agricultura transformando radicalmente las relaciones económicas y sociales de producción que llevan a la precarización y feminización de la mano de obra rural, así como a la intensificación del trabajo. Los campesinos enfrentan condiciones cada vez más difíciles teniendo que buscar con mayor frecuencia ingresos fuera de la finca, principalmente a través de actividades salariales precarias, con el fin de ganarse la vida impulsando con ello el proceso de proletarización. Los enfoques de la 'nueva ruralidad' y 'territoriales' trataron de explicar estas transformaciones pero tienen limitaciones. En cambio, una visión desde la economía política sobre la cuestión agraria se estima más prometedora. Movimientos contestatarios del neoliberalismo han surgido encabezado por los pueblos indígenas y la población rural pobre, a veces vinculado al movimiento campesino transnacional 'Vía Campesina'. Su principal objetivo es la construcción de un sistema agrario alternativo basado en la 'soberanía alimentaria', que es prometedor, pero también polémico.
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