Certain Kinds Of Work Research Articles

Reduced Working Memory is Associated with Heavier Alcohol Consumption History, Role Impairment and Executive Function Difficulties.

Both HIV status and heavy alcohol use have been associated with reduced cognitive function, particularly in the domains of working memory and executive function. It is unclear what aspects of working memory and executive function are associated with HIV status and heavy alcohol use and whether performance on these measures are associated with functional impairment. We examined the relationship between HIV, history of heavy alcohol consumption, and HIV/alcohol interaction on speeded tests of frontal inhibitory abilities, aworking memory task related to mental manipulation of letters and numbers, cognitive flexibility, and measures of functional impairment. Study participants included 284 individuals (151 HIV +) recruited from two different studies focusing on HIV associated brain dysfunction, one specific to the effects of alcohol, the other specific to the effects of aging. HIV status was not independently associated with working memory and executive function measures. Higher level of alcohol consumption was associated with reduced performance on Letter Number Sequencing. Poorer Letter Number Sequencing performance was associated with role impairment (an inability to do certain kinds of work, housework, or schoolwork) and executive function difficulties. Future studies should examine causal associations and interventions targeting working memory abilities.

Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Amelia Bonea

Reviewed by: Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Amelia Bonea et al. Susan Zieger (bio) Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Amelia Bonea, Melissa Dickson, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jennifer Wallis; pp. vii + 336. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019, $50.00. This co-authored volume emerges from the European Research Council-funded project "Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives" directed by Sally Shuttleworth, which ran from 2014 to 2019 at Oxford University. The project ventured that twenty-first-century preoccupations with stress, overwork, insomnia, and related maladies of everyday life first appeared in nineteenth-century discourses of mental strain. Taking Matthew Arnold's overtaxed heads and palsied hearts as its watchwords, the project hosted an array of postdoctoral researchers, generated a wealth of publications, and created an open-access database of over three thousand primary sources. Building the nineteenth-century history of today's quest for wellness, the project drove a variety of public-facing programming, recording a podcast, devising a light show and a card game, and producing a children's book. Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain is the centerpiece of its academic output. It is both uncanny and amusing to read medical and popular writers of the late-nineteenth century anticipating a common critique of today's social media: for example, by complaining about "over-publicity," the insidious framing of private conversations for an audience (217). Today's information overload was first mooted by writers who fretted that one month's worth of thought equaled that of a lifetime just two generations earlier. Then as now, outdoor exercise was recommended to take the edge off knowledge work. And today's platform economy resembles the precarity of proletarian labor throughout the century. Beneath the surprise of such contiguities lies the potential for a deeper critique of the ways that capital forms, deforms, and re-forms subjectivities, from the first generations to experience industrialization to our own neoliberal and globalized lifestyles. Without actually making such a case, the book places all the evidence for it in plain sight. Anxious Times is also less concerned to forge precise genealogies between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century discourses of modern illth than it is to excavate the older discourses. In the introduction, Shuttleworth lays out the book's concerns, beginning with information overload, moving briskly through the problematic central term "modernity," and pointing out the particularly British aspect of the inquiry, the extension to occupational health, which forms the subject of the first chapter (3). The subsequent five chapters deal with the medical engagement with telegraphs and telephones; medical tourism in seaside resorts; the woman drinker; overpressure in schools; and fantasies of adapting the nervous system to the modern world order. Together, they offer an overview [End Page 112] of anxiety—and ways to combat it—that will be familiar to anyone who has encountered current discourses about screen time, gut health, and self-medication. The first and second chapters, written by Amelia Bonea, deal with occupational health and telegraphic and telephonic technologies. She reveals that Victorian occupational health discourse was indebted to Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini's Diseases of Workers (1700), an inquiry into the diseases specific to certain kinds of work, exposures to noxious substances, and mechanical hazards. Victorian scientific and popular writing expanded and transformed Ramazzini's etiologies into diagnoses of new steel pens exacerbating writer's cramp; industrial laborers inhaling construction dust; sedentarism hampering clerks' digestion; and housemaids suffering from inflamed knees. Whereas one might expect a chapter on the telegraph and telephone to rehearse the familiar story of their acceleration of their users' nervous illnesses, Bonea instead demonstrates how they enabled long-distance medical care. In an experiment in "telephonic auscultation," for example, a doctor combined a stethoscope and a telephone to listen to a young lady's heartbeat at a distance (67). Recast as an "audiometer," the telephone could assist those with hearing difficulties; integrated into modernizing medical practices, hospitals, and ambulance services, it accelerated the delivery of medical care and transformed relations between doctors and patients (69). Chapter 3, which tells the story of seaside resorts, shows how the concept of traveling for...

Changing Roles of Women: Examining the Reciprocal Effects of Female Academics’ Job and Family Roles in Public Universities in Ghana

AbstractThe role of women in society seems to be predefined in terms of cultural and physiological lines. Some people think the woman is not capable of taking up some executive positions, because they are weak and too feeble to handle certain kinds of work. However, the last decade has seen huge progress in the employment of women in the formal sector. This study therefore explores the factors that affect the work and family life of female lecturers. Data was generated from the administration of questionnaires on 105 women lecturers, who were conveniently selected from two public universities in the central region of Ghana. Our findings from the study indicated that factors such as teaching large classes, lack of teaching/learning materials, family responsibilities and pressure and demanding Deans and Heads of Departments, affected female lecturers’ job performance. The results also suggest that females academics involved in the study were least bothered about issues on their promotion and personal goals. We recommended that University management would have to come to terms with the requirements of managing tension among women to make the environment potentiating and favourable so as to keep adroit women in higher education.

Building Online Academic Community: Reputation Work on Twitter

Building Online Academic Community: Reputation Work on Twitter

The Emergence of a Low-Skill Migrant Labour Market: Structural Constraints, Discourses of Difference and Blocked Mobility

In this paper, I illustrate how a migrant labour market formed and solidified in the South-West of England immediately after the accession of eight countries (the A8) to the European Union. Furthermore, this was accompanied by a rapid process of differentiation and distinction, labelling particular groups as suited to certain types of work. The research is based on a series of interviews with (often well-educated) A8 migrants working in low-skill roles in the region. Findings indicate that the trajectories that initial migrants follow into work have the effect of producing routes into certain sorts of work for future migrants. However, when such routes lead to low-skill employment (as with the case of the majority of young A8 migrants), this has the effect of halting labour market progression for these workers, whilst simultaneously giving rise to commonly held assumptions that A8 migrants were particularly suited to certain kinds of work in the low-skill sector. I conclude that the co-existence of structural constraints and processes of distinction give rise to a situation in which workers entering the bottom of a migrant labour market can become trapped, regardless of their relative skills or qualifications. Furthermore, such processes rapidly become normalised and established and, without ever becoming formalised or officially grounded, begin to effect and limit the actions of individuals. Whilst such normalised behaviour may be open to contestation and change, it is remarkably resilient.

Jews and the Military: A History by Derek J. Penslar (review)

Reviewed by: Jews and the Military: A History by Derek J. Penslar Jeffrey S. Gurock Jews and the Military: A History. By derek j. penslar. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013. 376 pp. $29.95 (cloth). One of the most common family traditions harbored by American Jews of Russian descent is that the calamity of conscription into the Tsarist army in the nineteenth century drove their frightened ancestors to the freedom of the West. As the story goes, their great-grandfathers would have been subjected to up to twenty-five years of service in a merciless military among the dregs of Christian society under the heels of sadistic officers. And they would have been subject to unrelenting pressure to convert by aggressive Russian Orthodox prelates. This narrative of horrific circumstances also recounts emphatically that to make matters worse, the selections of those who were forced to go were conducted by an oligarchic Jewish community that hired its own bands of kidnappers to impress the powerless. This oft-told tale is one of the several half-truths that Derek Penslar nuances and contextualizes in his far-reaching study of the Jewish encounter with armies in many times and places. Jews and the Military [End Page 191] calmly explains that while Russian Jewish soldiers were surely unfortunates, their difficulties were part of a larger Tsarist policy that was committed to making various groups of problematic subjects more useful through the army experiences. In fact, Penslar avers that while some seventy thousand Jewish males were pressed into the military over a fifty-year period—and many of them were child conscripts—Jewish soldiers were not “coerced to convert” and the vast majority “persever[ed]” in their ancestral faith. Moreover, even under the most repressive tsar, Nicholas I, “the army did allow exemptions from certain kinds of work on Sabbath and holidays” (p. 30). And under the somewhat liberal-minded Alexander II Jewish communities were allowed to donate Torah scrolls to military camps and help build soldiers’ synagogues. Most revealing, when universal conscription was introduced in 1874, so many Jews showed up for induction—they did their duty rather than dodge the draft—that a renowned Torah sage, the Chofetz Chaim (Rabbi Israel Meir ha-Cohen Kagan), published a guidebook for soldiers to assist them in maintaining Jewish tradition while under arms. This same rabbi, twelve years later, would admonish the Jews not to migrate to America since their religion would be lost. Penslar’s take on the military-migration nexus deepens our understanding of the complexity of decision making that Jews contemplated when considering migration out of Russia. With similar comprehensiveness, Penslar enriches our understanding of how in premodern times Jews were ready and able to take up arms to defend their own communities and even defended the lands within which they lived. In his account, “Jews have been soldiers as long as there have been Jews—not only in the land of Israel but also throughout the Diaspora.” To be sure, with the struggle for their emancipation, gaining acceptance within an adopted country’s fighting force became a community-defining situation with Jews anxious to serve shoulder to shoulder with their fellow citizens. So disposed, they might even fire at will at fellow Jews who were wearing another country’s uniform. But clearly they brought to eighteenth- through twentieth-century battlefields prior experience with weapons, an expertise that was used not only to protect their own lives and limbs but also to stand guard on a town’s ramparts “along with everyone else.” Penslar writes, for example, of a “self-confident Jewish community” in sixteenth-century Poland “where synagogues were fortified and occasionally housed cannons on the roofs” (p. 23). Penslar’s thought-provoking study, thus, questions one of the most powerful half-truths of modern Jewish history. He evaluates the regnant Zionist narrative that their state rose against great odds due uniquely to [End Page 192] the homegrown heroes of the Haganah and the Irgun, who reclaimed a “Maccabean” spirit that had been lost for millennia. Penslar argues alternatively that many of these stalwart fighters learned their military arts abroad in Europe during the First World War and the Bolshevik...

Voices of special educators in Sweden: a total-population study

Background: There are two occupational groups in Sweden that are expected to have significant impact on educational work related to children in need of special support. These two groups are special educational needs coordinators (SENCOs) and special education teachers. In this paper, we use the collective name ‘special educators’ to refer to both groups. Special educators are expected to have specific knowledge regarding the identification of, and work with, school difficulties. However, there is noticeably little research concerning these occupational groups. This study was undertaken in order to further our knowledge about special educators’ work.Purpose: The overall purpose of the present paper is to provide a first overview of special educators’ work. The paper investigates these special educators’ perceptions of their occupational role, of their preparedness for the role and of how their role is practised. The paper also illuminates questions about SENCOs’ and special education teachers’ knowledge and values as well as the grounds for the occupational groups to claim special expertise related to the identification of, and work with, school difficulties.Design and method: A questionnaire was sent out in 2012 to all SENCOs and special education teachers in Sweden who received their degree from 2001 onwards and in accordance with the Swedish examination acts of 2001, 2007 and 2008 (N = 4252, 75% response rate).Results: According to the results, special educators state that they are well prepared to work with some tasks, such as counselling, leading development work and teaching children/pupils individually or in groups. Concurrently, there are tasks that the groups are educated for (e.g. school-development work), which they seldom practise in their daily work.Conclusions: Primarily using reasoning concerning jurisdictional control, we discuss SENCOs’ and special education teachers’ authority to claim special expertise in relation to certain kinds of work, clients and knowledge and thus, their chances of gaining full jurisdictional control in the field of special education.

DESIGNING the End

We consider implications for the active, intentional design of the endings of products, services, institutions and other structures and processes pervading our societies. We suggest psychological reluctance to some kinds of endings even in the context of broader social benefit. We propose direction for and encourage attention of this community to certain kinds of work designed to end some things while creating other things. We introduce the notion of “creative idiosyncratic ritualization for renewal” and propose that the EPIC community is uniquely situated to ask “strange” questions in the most “familiar” of ways to increase our collective general welfare.

History of Factory and Mine Hygiene

History of Factory and Mine Hygiene

Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (review)

Reviewed by: Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore Stephen Mihm (bio) Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore. By Seth Rockman. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Pp. xviii, 368. Illustrations. Cloth, $50.00; Paper, $25.00.) In 1819, John Melish wrote a book aimed at anyone contemplating moving to the United States. "In no country in the world," Melish proclaimed, [End Page 539] "is labour so well paid, or labourers so much respected in the United States" (29). Perhaps, but as Seth Rockman persuasively shows in this scrupulously researched and impassioned book, laboring life in the early republic was rarely rewarding. If anything it was brutal and unpleasant, with all of life's energies dedicated to "scraping by." Rockman is not alone in covering this historiographical terrain: In recent years, labor historians have moved beyond an older preoccupation with skilled male artisans, expanding the definition of "worker" to encompass everyone from laundresses to prostitutes to canal diggers. But Rockman is not interested in the travails of a single occupation, much less the particular burdens born by women, African Americans, or any single ethnic or religious group. Rather, his aim is to consider "the full range of workers whose labor was for sale in the early republic city," with a particular emphasis on those "unskilled" workers whose labor underwrote the expansion of economic opportunity for others (11). Baltimore is the backdrop of Rockman's study, and he makes a compelling case for its relevance as the archetypical capitalist boom town of the early republic. But Baltimore affords another intriguing vantage point on labor in the new nation: It was home to numerous free blacks, slaves (many of them "leased" to other employers) and so-called "term slaves" whose enslavement could end after a set number of years. All of these African Americans worked alongside native and foreign-born whites at the difficult, dirty jobs that are the focus of this study. While white workers often petitioned to ban blacks from certain kinds of work, Rockman persuasively shows that employers, however racist and reactionary they might have been, invariably "resisted the opportunity to narrow the range of workers at their disposal," and deliberately sought to cultivate a diverse and deep labor pool (41). Rockman examines a host of workplaces. In one remarkable chapter, he uses the payroll records from a bridge-building project to reconstruct the lives of a mixed-race work force, blending archival research and careful conjecture to capture the realities of the job. An equally compelling chapter uses hundreds of payrolls to detail the Sisyphean labor of workers on the "Mudmachine"—the floating dredging apparatus that kept Baltimore's harbor from filling with silt. "The work was grueling, filthy, and unsuited to the virtuous habits of republican artisans," Rockman wryly observes. "Without it, however, Baltimore's commercial prosperity would have ceased" (76). This is recurrent argument of the book: However dirty, disgusting, and unskilled, the labor performed by the [End Page 540] workers he profiles was not only important but indispensable to the coming of capitalism. Whether it was central to the formation of working-class consciousness is another matter. Rockman recognizes that the low-end workers did not make common cause against their employers, however much time they spent together digging ditches and shoveling mud. But he does make a compelling argument that class consciousness was less about affinity than a common experience of drudgery and deprivation. "For the workers portrayed in this book," he writes, "class experience was waiting every February for the harbor to thaw so that low-end jobs might resume. Class consciousness was knowing the proper pose of deference to get hired. Class struggle was trying to meet the rent and scavenging for firewood to stay warm during winter" (11). Strikes, unions, and sites of conventional class struggle don't play a starring role here. Rather, it is the quotidian struggles of poor people that take center stage. This focus poses tremendous challenges for any historian: It's hard enough to research the lives of skilled workers, but Rockman's toilers are particularly elusive. Fortunately, he found a host of sources, including the rich and otherwise...

Rewards

For much of the 20th century, psychologists and economists operated on the assumption that work is devoid of intrinsic rewards, and the only way to get people to work harder is through the use of rewards and punishments. This so-called carrot-and-stick model of workplace motivation, when applied to medical practice, emphasizes the use of financial incentives and disincentives to manipulate behavior. More recently, however, it has become apparent that, particularly when applied to certain kinds of work, such approaches can be ineffective or even frankly counterproductive. Instead of focusing on extrinsic rewards such as compensation, organizations and their leaders need to devote more attention to the intrinsic rewards of work itself. This article reviews this new understanding of rewards and traces out its practical implications for radiology today.

We were conscious of the sort of people we mixed with: The state, social attitudes and the family in mid twentieth century Ireland

In the Republic of Ireland, the family is both a private entity and a construct of the state, and the relationship between family and state is outlined in the Irish constitution. In the Northern Irish state a similar conviction that the family unit is essential to the welfare of society has been implicit in social policy and legislation, as has the classification of women's place. Access to financial resources has played a significant role in situating the family in society and income and social class were inextricably interwoven. This paper explores how social attitudes have shaped family behaviour and identity in mid twentieth century Ireland, particularly in terms of the part played by women. Class consciousness and definitions of “respectability” are considered, using oral history testimony from a number of women remembering when they were young in the 1930s and 40s. The interviewees accepted the domestic role assigned to them by popular consensus and social policy. Their stories contain frequent references to their reluctance to associate with people whose occupations were judged to be inferior because of the lower status accorded to certain kinds of work. The paper will consider the extent to which legislators and policy makers shared such class awareness and how that might have influenced the shaping of the family unit in Ireland in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work (review)

Reviewed by: Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work Amanda Davis Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work. By Janet Zandy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 240 pp. $21.95 paper. "What are two hands worth?" It is a penetrating question that underpins much of Janet Zandy's reading of the physical body and its connection to working-class literature in her newest contribution to cultural and labor studies. As she reveals in the prologue, hands not only act as maps of history, culture, and memory, they also "mirror hierarchies of power, control and ownership." The stories that hands tell of labor also help form the basis of Zandy's hybrid methodology, one that she situates as bringing different kinds of knowledge together and illuminating the connections between labor and culture. As she states, "We are all sustained because of the labor of hands; what is undervalued, overlooked, and often discarded is how much they have to teach." Recognized for her contributions to working-class literature and working-class studies in her other texts and anthologies, Zandy is particularly attuned to the effects specific class circumstances have on the making and reception of culture, working-class aesthetics, and the importance of reconnecting representation to reality, lived experiences to larger institutions. Always, it seems, Zandy is careful to draw her reader's attention to the links, intersections, and sometimes mutually informing aspects of creative expression and lived bodily experience. The text opens with the section "Loss: Circumstances and Choices," in which she explores processes of loss, dismemberment, and the "discomfort zones" frequently revealed in the lived physicality of labor. She draws our attention to the sometimes painful aspects of work that some readers might initially want to turn away from. Zandy's own autobiographical account of traveling to find the chemical plant her father worked at for nearly twenty years before dying from cancer at age forty-nine is a poignant introduction to the larger questions she asks about the costs the body must bear when exposed to the risks and hazards of certain kinds of work. She moves next to "Articulations: Culture is not Negation" in order to explore the presence rather than absence of working-class cultural expression, as well as the complexities inherent in trying to represent working-class experiences. What many readers might find appealing in Hands is the attention [End Page 97] that Zandy pays not just to classics of working-class literature, but to work by writers, artists, photographers, and documentary film makers whose skillful articulations of working-class life have long been marginalized in both the larger public and in academic study. For example, in her analysis of the "fire poetry" emerging from the 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company that claimed the lives of 146 workers, she convincingly positions writing about the fire as a way to claim working-class subjectivity while still offering compelling examples of how other artists recover cultural history as subjects for their work. Her final section, "Technologies: On Laboring Bodies," extends her discussion of the laboring body by asking how it is positioned within such wider systems as imprisonment and production. In addition to her larger project of (re)envisioning the complex culture of workers and the responses that their labor and literature elicits, Zandy also delineates what she believes makes a text working-class. In doing so, she takes on the complicated task of outlining some of the parameters of what an approach to studying these texts might entail and what some of the forces that influence a working-class text might be. Zandy is able to point successfully to some of the primary characteristics of working-class literature at the same time that she invites increasing dialogue on how a text might receive or resist this designation. If there were a criticism for this book, it might well be that one wishes there were even more to read by the text's conclusion. That, however, is surely a good thing for students, scholars, and critics alike. Zandy's project of recovery, retrieval, and perhaps most important, centering historical experiences with labor will add much to the burgeoning fields of working-class and labor studies...

Whose History are We Writing?: Reading Feminist Texts with a Hermeneutic of Suspicion

In reviewing the books listed above, I was asked to consider several ques tions: How is feminist work in religion being codified and transmitted by fem inists? What is being selected for emphasis and what is being left out? What values are implicit in the process of selection? Are these criteria inclusive or ex clusive? Do the new introductions and anthologies represent the range of fem inist work in religion? Or do they distort feminism and religion by ignoring or dismissing certain kinds of work? Is feminist work in religion of the past thirty years being built upon and expanded, or is it being erased and dismissed?

Old Ideals Crumble: War, Pragmatist Intellectuals, and the Limits of Philosophy

Abstract: This essay explores the resources and limits of pragmatism in a world marked by violence, war, and terrorism. After explicating major strengths of pragmatic social philosophy as developed in the work of John Dewey, I consider two important criticisms of this view as formulated by Randolph Bourne in the face of Dewey's support for American entry into World War I. Bourne first charged that pragmatism is a fair‐weather philosophy ineffective in deliberations among persons who do not already share its principal values of freedom, individuality, education, community, and democracy. I argue that Bourne is correct, but that this does not mark a theoretical weakness or failure of pragmatism: Pragmatism has a real but limited practical value or sphere of effectiveness; it cannot do certain kinds of work in times of war (which it should oppose) and it cannot do certain kinds of work in the face of a certain kind of pluralism (which it should more fully embrace). Bourne's second charge against pragmatists is that too often they miss opportunities and waste time. Here I claim that Bourne is correct, and that his point directs pragmatists to turn away from efforts to make pragmatism better in theory and instead to engage in efforts to make practice more intelligent—something Bourne characterized as a “new Americanism” of “federated ethnic groups and traditions,” a genuine alternative to military coalition, “war in the service of democracy.” I close by outlining four such projects.

Between Labor and Capital: Charlotte Bront�'s Professional Professor

At once outside the market and within it, the nineteenth-century professional juggles a kind of paradox. Most influential rise-of- the-professional narratives explain how the modern professional transcends the market by taking on an aura of disinterest. The professional, one version goes, reworks the aristocrat's noblesse oblige into the professional ideal of service. In another, he aligns himself with the unwaged work of the home so that he can draw on the middle-class angel's stock of self-sacrificing purity. Explaining how the professional enacts his distance from the market, both narratives assume that his proximity to the market requires no interpretation. 1 This essay reverses that assumption. It considers a moment in the emergence of the professional class when it is not the damning presence but the apparent absence of the market that poses the dilemma. In that case, neither the aristocrat nor the middle-class angel has any rhetorical tips to offer. In the 1840s, when Charlotte Brontë writes The Professor (completed in 1846, published in 1857), the relative invisibility of certain kinds of work as value-able labor threatened to shut its producers out of the marketplace. Studying this novel, in which the protagonist wishes to uncover rather than cover over the price of his intellectual labor, will help correct the balance of critical studies of professionalism. In so doing, it allows us to understand these opposing directions (away from, toward the market) not only as the contradiction or the paradox of professionalism but also as its dialectic, its ability simultaneously to enable and critique the economic system in which it ambivalently figures. [End Page 279]

Consumption Intensified: The Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil

Twenty years ago Marshall Berman noted that the experience of the modern in “underdeveloped places was built on the fantasies and dreams of modernity.” Though Berman did not say so explicitly, this formulation implied that under certain circumstances modern lives in such places could become the nightmare of Tantalus from whom the object of his desire was ceaselessly fugitive. This is the experience at the core of anthropologist Maureen O’Dougherty’s Consumption Intensified. The author argues that in the 1990s middle-class Brazilians had to contend with an economic and social crisis, which, by undercutting their ability to consume, threatened their social status and challenged their sense of middle-class identity as emblematic of modernity. She explores the twists and turns of this crisis by weaving together multiple theoretical threads with the words and experiences of about 50 middle-class informants from the city and state of São Paulo.O’Dougherty knows she is up against a formidable problem in defining the “middle class.” Precisely because of its centrality to self-understanding in modern societies, it is the class whose boundaries are inherently flexible and porous and whose composition is often characterized as heterogeneous and unstable. Her task is made more difficult by the fact that the very idea of the middle class in Brazil cannot help but refer to the presumed normativity of middle classes in Europe and the United States. O’Dougherty acknowledges these problems, but wisely pushes beyond them, recognizing that the best approach is to think of the Brazilian middle class in terms of the everyday practices of those who would claim the label, or have it claimed for them.The book sparkles with insights. By focusing on consumption, O’Dougherty sheds light on a still-understudied topic in the Latin American literature. She does an excellent job of showing how middle-class Paulistas lived through the early 1990s—when inflation reached 2,700 percent—by changing their views on acceptable jobs and defending what came to be perceived as an almost inalienable right to consume. She offers an ethnology of inflation, showing how people became mesmerized by the fata morgana that money becomes in such circumstances. (I lived in Rio in 1990–92 and she has the frenzy of daily life dead on.) Her vivisection of the Disney experience among middle-class Brazilians and her burrowing into the media’s role in Collor’s impeachment reveal crucial aspects of the mentalities and world views of her subjects.While O’Dougherty argues persuasively that middle-class people changed their behavior because of the crisis, she does not, to my satisfaction, succeed in demonstrating that her informants “redefined their identities” as members of an “historically constituted” middle class (pp. 3, 6). She does show that middle-class men and women reluctantly took up certain kinds of work—petty entrepreneuralism, commercial retail, and moonlighting generally—that had in earlier years been beneath them and turned to consumption as a hedge against erosion of their social position. She ascertains as well that her informants relied on a rough-and-ready moralism—one expansive enough to condemn corruption for Brazil’s plight, blame dark-skinned Northeasterners for dragging the nation down, and fault other sectors of society for acting out of self-interest rather than for the greater good— in confronting the disorienting complexities of their situation. This moralism, she concludes, isolated (her subjects might say insulated) them from the swirling political currents of the crisis. Although this is the part of the book that leans most heavily on theoretical formulations, I think she is basically right.What’s missing is the deeper sense that most of this was hardly new in the 1990s. Middle-class Brazilians have wrestled with inflation and been enamored of consumerism ever since the 1920s. Their participation in commercial retail and moonlighting dates back to the same period. If during the so-called golden age of the 1970s a segment of the middle class—the “modern middle class”—was able to forget its past, O’Dougherty need not have. Similarly, middle-class moralism has a long history, reflecting a distinct squeamishness regarding politics. Without knowing this history, the reader can only wonder how to account for a middle-class political stance so disempowering and self-defeating. More broadly, O’Dougherty’s depiction of modernity in Brazil might have revealed more of its tantalizing quality had she engaged the deeper historical context more fully. Such an engagement, perhaps through an inquiry into historical memory among her informants, might have led her to see a middle class more equivocal on neoliberalism than she suggests.Still, the book is a welcome one. I know of no other study that offers as sharp an image of middle-class life under inflation. With luck others will be inspired by O’Dougherty’s brave decision to trespass on a terrain that has largely been left to the economists. More important, it treats a neglected and much-derided group with sensitivity and human empathy, a feat in itself.

Explaining differences in the political meaning of unemployment across time and space

This article is a first attempt at theorizing the differences in the political meaning of unemployment and how governments create these differences. It first reviews existing explanations about why unemployment is an especially pressing political threat to those in power. In lieu of a an existing literature on the sources of variation in this threat, the next section puts forward four alternative explanations based on related arguments about politics and the economy. These are the approaches of power resources, protest mobilization, deprivation, and ideology. Guided by the promises and pitfalls of these respective theories, the subsequent section argues for an alternative institutional-constructivist approach. Starting with the historical observation that the category of unemployment was invented alongside particular social institutions and employment practices, this approach seeks to explain how variation in these institutionalized practices is responsible for differences in the political salience of unemployment. The section that follows discusses how government policies can reconstruct the meaning of unemployment by reconfiguring the available set of institutional choices in the labor market and by designating what kinds of choices constitute involuntary joblessness. It is argued that “unemployment” is defined against institutionalized norms of what kinds of work constitute “employment.” Changes in the boundaries of the concept of unemployment come about through changes in the ways that governments hold certain kinds of work as exemplary while granting other forms of work lesser recognition. The final section considers how this reciprocal relationship between the construction of unemployment and employment both imposes political constraints for governments and creates opportunities. Governments face numerous conflicting incentives whether to expand or restrict the institutionalized definition of unemployment. While they must retain semblance with inherited conceptions of unemployment; they can redefine the problem of unemployment through the institutionalization of new solutions.

To Garden, to Market: Gendered meanings of work on an African urban periphery

This article traces the historical origins of a localized gender division of labor found in two villages on the edge of the city of Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. Through social-historical analysis, this article demonstrates that gender divisions of labor are not simply constructed in particular places; they are constructs located near or far from other places, and thus influenced by multidimensional interactions between those places. Specifically, this article shows how the villages' location on the periphery of an important regional city has shaped their experience of European colonialism, religious change and market expansion in ways that have given particular meanings to certain kinds of work in commercial gardening. More generally, this article shows how a focus on the historical meanings of work can provide insights into local variations in gender divisions of labor.

The Extraprofessional Life: Leisure, Retirement and Unemployment

Many professionals seek to experience in their extraprofessional lives in leisure, retirement and unemployment the equivalent of the `spirit of professional work'. This maxim denotes the distinctive set of shared values, attitudes and expectations that form around a type of professional work, where the work itself is seen by its practitioners as socially important, highly challenging, intensely absorbing, and for these reasons and others, immensely appealing. It is argued that professionals who feel this spirit find it so powerful that they search for its equivalent in their extraprofessional lives. This remarkable, albeit relatively rare, orientation is found only in certain kinds of work and its equivalent is found only in certain kinds of leisure. These professionals, compared with most other workers, are generally inclined to spend much less time in leisure activities. But when they do engage in leisure, it too is distinctive. Professionals tend to find there another central life interest or two, which is also motivated by the experience of flow and undertaken in the company of other participants whose orientation to the interest resembles that of the spirit of professional work. The research reviewed in this article generally supports this proposition. The spirit, however, is more strongly felt in the spheres of leisure and retirement than in the sphere of unemployment. Still, even if some fail to find this spirit, every professional of both sexes and of all ages has access to it, in the sense that it inheres in the work itself.