We analyse some of the transformations in the experience of exploitation in light of the dematerialisation of the economy. Specifically, we refer to the crisis of work as cultural mediation and the ...individual experience of exploitation. From this perspective, we analyse the erosion of the conditions of possibility in terms of the construction of class identity, and the challenges for verifying our grief in the sociability of the working class and its production spaces.
Analizamos algunas de las transformaciones en la experiencia de la explotación, atendiendo a los procesos de inmaterialización de la economía. En concreto, nos referimos a la crisis del trabajo como mediación cultural y la experiencia individual de la explotación. Desde esta perspectiva, analizamos la erosión de las condiciones de posibilidad en lo que a la conformación de una identidad de clase se refiere; y a la dificultad para verificar nuestro dolor en la sociabilidad de la clase obrera y sus espacios de producción.
Western armies have undergone substantial organizational-cultural transformations since the end of the Cold War. Two main themes have been suggested to describe these transformations: postmodernity ...and post-Fordism. This article analyzes these profound shifts. The author portrays the new Western army as a "market army," distancing itself from the "citizen army," and envisions a continuum between these extreme types. The market army emuhtes market practices in order to adapt to modern strategic, economic, political, and cultural constraints. What typifies the market army is the subjection of military doctrine to the market, a post-Fordist structure, a network-centric hierarchy, market values borrowed by the military profession, the convergence of military and civilian occupations, the commodification of military service, and new contractual forms of bargaining between soldiers and the military. Israel serves as a critical case with which to develop the theory of the market army.
The article studies the difficult process of normalization of the U.S. automobile employment relationship at a time of industrial crisis and unprecedented intervention of the state in 2009, during ...the Great Recession. Changes introduced at contractual “boundaries”, understood in generational terms, undermined the single employment norm: lower wage-scales for entry-level workers and a distinct health-care regime for retirees, through a new actor in industrial relations, the VEBA trust fund. It highlights the mounting influence of financial rationale in this process of recodifying employment norms, both in setting wage standards and through the VEBA, as a market-based provider of social benefits and the trust’s role in the state-mandated bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. The tensions that ensued, from the shop floor to workers’ home lives, challenged the union mandate to represent all workers and marked the new sociopolitical compromise reached in 2015 contracts. This short but crucial period created an “employment grey zone”, a theater of confrontations among stakeholders and indeterminations where workers’ individual and collective strategies proved decisive in how events played out.
This paper presents a critical multimodal analysis (CMDA) of the representation of robots and work in recent commercials. Commercials were selected that represented robots not as tools of industry ...but as workers. Robots are increasingly endowed with the ability to not only take on the work of human workers engaged in productive, material forms of labour but immaterial, affective forms of labour as well. Rather than being represented as dead capital, the robots instead function within the narratives as living labour and therefore capable of producing value. What is most notable in these commercials is how the demands and conditions of 'employment' for the robots echoes neoliberal transformations of work from individuated Fordist forms of production to post-Fordist team-based forms in which workers must increasingly participate in their own management and, therefore by extension, their own subordination.
This article engages critically with Richard Hyman’s work on union identity and European integration. It includes a sympathetic review of Hyman’s contribution to the debate on these topics over the ...past two decades, alongside a critique of Hyman’s approach that highlights certain weaknesses and contradictions resulting from his uncritical use of a range of categories and concepts taken from regulation theory. The authors question Hyman’s argument that developments in European unionism can be conceptualised adequately through an analysis of the development and crisis of ‘political economism’: a dominant union identity that Hyman aligns with the development and crisis of Fordism. An alternative model for understanding the reorientation of European unions is presented based on a critical and dialectical conceptualisation of the relationship between unions and capitalist development. This is used to construct a model of contemporary union reorientation along the dimensions of ‘accommodation’ and ‘opposition’ to neoliberalism and to ‘national’ and ‘international’ modes of organisation and mobilisation.
Medical autonomy in the United Kingdom has declined over the last twenty-five years, whether considered at the micro level (such as control over treatment and work patterns), the meso level (in terms ...of corporatist relations with the state) or the macro level (in terms of the ‘biomedical model’). After a period in the early 1990s when the National Health Service displayed a mix of Fordist and post-Fordist controls, the emphasis has swung sharply towards the former, suggesting the continued explanatory value of theories which focus on the state's need both to contain welfare expenditure and to maximise the political legitimacy derived from it. The analysis of this relatively narrow area of sociology has implications for the study of much broader questions about the capacity and legitimacy of the state in the twenty-first century.
This article deals with the puzzle of the well-known gap between actual and preferred working hours (i.e. over-employment). We propose a new explanation based on selective attention in decision ...making and test it with the Time Competition Survey 2003 which includes information of I I 14 employees in 30 Dutch organizations. We find very limited support for the hypotheses that over-employment is caused by restrictions imposed by the employer (traditional lumpiness). Instead, we find much empirical support for our hypothesis on a new form of lumpiness that is related to selective attention and is created by work characteristics of ‘post-Fordist’ job design. In this work organization, the increased autonomy of workers is leading to an autonomy paradox. We also find evidence of a part-time illusion: under the post-Fordist regime, many part-time employees, who obviously were willing and allowed to reduce their working hours, still end up working more hours than they prefer.
In der Arbeitswissenschaft und in der Fabrikpraxis rückte eine Frage nach 1910 ins Zentrum: Wie kann der Faktor Mensch effektiv in die Produktion eingebracht werden? Zugespitzt: Wie werden aus ...apathischen Arbeitern interessierte Mitarbeiter? Karsten Uhl korrigiert in seiner Geschichte der Fabrik im 20. Jahrhundert unser Bild des Taylorismus und Fordismus, indem er nachweist, dass Unternehmen seit den 1920er Jahren ergänzend zu Disziplinierungsformen die Selbstverantwortung der Arbeiter_innen förderten. Er zeigt, dass die Subjektivität der Arbeitenden beides war: Störgröße und Potenzial. Rationalisierung und Humanisierung wurden bei der Gestaltung des Lebens- und Arbeitsraums Fabrik miteinander verknüpft.
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