Flexible Accumulation Research Articles

Três movimentos para problematizar o trabalho no Contemporâne

Este artigo aborda as transformações contemporâneas associadas à reestruturação produtiva que marcou a passagem do modelo de acumulação taylorista-fordista para o de acumulação flexível de capital, bem como algumas ferramentas conceituais visando à análise dos modos como os sujeitos vivenciam e dão sentido às experiências de trabalho. Por fim, aborda os desafios colocados à criação de estratégias clínico-políticas, de modo a promover tanto a transformação das situações laborais quanto uma análise de como estamos fazendo a experiência de nós mesmos em meio ao trabalho no contemporâneo.

Employment Insecurity and the Frayed American Dream

AbstractThis paper reviews literature on employment insecurity and situates objective and subjective employment insecurity in the context of the contemporary economy. I draw on the argument about shifting social contracts to explain both real and perceived pervasive employment insecurity and the frayed American Dream. Employment insecurity derives from the macro‐economic changes that produced the social structure of accumulation identified as flexible accumulation that requires employment insecurity as both a form of labor discipline and profit‐enhancing strategy. This paper argues that contemporary employment insecurity is both objective and subjective and affects how individuals understand their world and their selves. To this latter point, I look at research on generational differences in the experience of employment insecurity.

Boycunts and Bonus Holes: Trans Men’s Bodies, Neoliberalism, and the Sexual Productivity of Genitals

Recent theorizations of trans embodiment have brought attention to the ways neoliberalism limits the productivity of nonnormatively gendered bodies. This article deals with the discursive framing of embodiment and sexual desirability among trans men and other transmasculine persons negotiating Internet-mediated homoerotic spaces. Micro-level analysis of discourse structure and macro-level analysis of socio-political context together show how trans men navigate homonormative sexual economies by linguistically recuperating their bodies’ sexually productivity. Instead of undermining claims of embodied masculinity and homoerotic value, potential sites of exclusion—i.e., trans genitals—become sites of flexible accumulation that enhance rather than detract from their bearers’ desirability.

Políticas de Trabalho e Emprego (1995-2010): Repensando o Estado Brasileiro a partir do Modelo de Acumulação Flexível

This study aimed to analyze the employment policies between the years 1995-2010, respectively, in governments of the Presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The theoretical framework used was the model of flexible accumulation, understood by briefly flexibility in work processes, markets, products and patterns of consumption. In general, it was noticed that the implemented employment policies are used as a tool to minimize the impact of general changes. They do not eliminate the contradictory nature of the social relations of capitalist production, but accentuate the logic of accumulation. Keywords : Labor and Employement Policies, Flexible Accumulation, Lula Government, Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC) Government.

Neoliberal restructuring, neoregulation, and the Mexican poultry industry

The US poultry industry based on flexible accumulation has been advanced as the model of agro-industrial development for agrifood globalization. Similarly, Mexico has been presented as a noteworthy example of the negative effects of neoliberal restructuring associated with the globalization project. In this paper we use both of these assertions as points of departure to guide an investigation of the case of the restructuring of the Mexican poultry industry. Informed by a commodity systems analysis, archival data and key informant interviews are used to generate an overview of the history of the poultry industry in Mexico. A sociology of agrifood theoretical framework informed by regimes theory is employed to analyze the events of the case. We conclude that neoregulation related to the IMF and NAFTA restructuring in Mexico facilitated the diffusion of the US model of poultry production.

Transformações nas relações de trabalho nos bancos: uma trajetória de precarização (1980-2010)

This text analyzes the process of restructuring of banking work in Brazil, between the years of 1980 and 2010. This process speeds up with the advent of the Plano Real (1994), and is characterized by the elimination of large number of jobs, and to this end it is essential the participation of the so-called new technologies, understood as both the processes of change of management as the physical transformations that have occurred in the banks – bank automation -, both integrated into the production process as an instrument to consolidate the model of ‘flexible accumulation’. Whereas these new technologies are in disguise of greater integration of the worker in the productive process, marking its corporatist character, an intensification of the process of exploitation of labour, highlighting that this flexibility features a stage of spoliation of the workforce in capitalism. It is concluded that the banks’ strategy combines both the extreme exploitation of workers who provide services to third party companies and corresponding as the intensification of work of bank worker.

Deadwood and paternalism: rationalizing casual labour in an Indian company town

This article is based upon ethnographic research in the Indian company town of Jamshedpur, in the Tata Motors and Telcon companies. I relate the local shift towards casual labour since the 1990s to managerial discourses that rationalize this development. I argue that whilst flexible accumulation may represent a global transformation of employment regimes, the local implementation of this process relies upon a discursive continuity with the past. Referencing a historical language of cultural poverty, predominantly Bengali managers in Jamshedpur continue to claim paternal authority over their mainly Bihari employees, despite no longer fulfilling their traditional ‘parental’ roles vis‐à‐vis the provision of permanent employment. In the latter sections of the article, I discuss the managerial spectre of inefficient permanent workers; ‘deadwood’ whom it is perceived that casualization can prune from the workforce. I argue that whilst permanent employees may exhibit less commitment to the work process than their casual counterparts, their presence on the shop‐floor suggests continuity with the company town ideal and forestalls resistance among casual workers. Far from disembedding labour from social relations, neoliberal employment regimes in Jamshedpur exploit company town paternalism and cultural prejudices.

Public Mobility as the Defining Feature of the French Post-industrial City

During the last four decades, the general shift towards flexible accumulation of capital has led to a growing requirement for an increased mobility of labour which greatly affects the restructuring of post-industrial cities today. Using a historical perspective to enlighten the contrast with the period of industrialization when urban planning was, on the contrary, aimed at fixing a large workforce within the city, I argue that the current transformations of urban landscapes one can observe within French cities signal a consequent shift in the regulation of mobilities in the French post-industrial cities. The tactics aiming at regulating the mobilities at a narrow scale have disappeared in favour of a strategy aiming at adapting the city to the requirements of time and space compression through a simultaneous acceleration and rescaling (from the urban and the labour pool to the city-region and the transnational) of the daily mobilities. This shift in the regulation of urban mobilities reflects the recent evolution of the nature of urban power of the French post-industrial cities.

Horizons of Business Anthropology in a World of Flexible Accumulation

Classically, anthropology supplied a cultural critique, by contrasting the Noble Savage to contemporary institutions and exposing the effects of structures of authority. This understanding of humanity was expanded a hundred years ago by Boas’s embrace of cultural and linguistic variety within a common humanity. Similarly, the classical role for business anthropology and other forms of applied anthropology has been to identify areas in contemporary enterprises and institutions where improvements could be made. Today anthropologists’ engagement with the contemporary world of business in a régime of flexible accumulation is expanding our understanding of the human project, interrogating the régimes of value and extension whose scale is global and whose scope penetrates to the deepest levels of consciousness. Using contemporary ethnographic insights from the authors and other anthropologists, this article suggests an enlarged understanding of and direction for business anthropology at the frontier of anthropology that uses classic anthropological approaches to investigate the sites where new human possibilities are being assembled and created.

Rethinking flexible welfare strategy in Hong Kong: a new direction for the East Asian welfare model?

Many East Asian countries or cities have experienced rapid economic growth since the 1990s, and at the same time have had to face increasingly worse economic situations such as that brought about by the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s and the global financial tsunami in 2008/2009. This creates a rising demand for social welfare and an increase in grievances among the citizens. Some Asian states tend to resort to ad hoc ‘flexible welfare strategies’, such as handing out short-term and piecemeal cash subsidies to their citizens, reducing salary tax and waiving property rates and taxes. This article points out that such flexible welfare strategies are not new innovations, but an extension of the ‘flexible accumulation’ strategy (as described by David Harvey) in the post-Fordist society. A flexible welfare strategy is unlikely to meet the long-term needs of the citizens. At best, it acts only as a painkiller that temporarily pacifies the grievances of these citizens. Meanwhile, it wastes resources and is expensive and unsustainable and has no long-term effect. This article calls for a thorough evaluation of this ‘flexible welfare strategy’ and development of more appropriate welfare strategies for facing the age of uncertainty.

Dying Routes: Charles Wright’s Remembered Roadscapes of the US South in Transit

DANIEL CROSS TURNER Coastal Carolina University Dying Routes: Charles Wright’s Remembered Roadscapes of the US South in Transit DEMONSTRATING THAT POETRY CAN REGISTER AND CRITIQUE HISTORICAL pressures as vitally as other genres, my analysis counters what Helen Vendler has called the “disembodied ethereality” (7) of Pulitzer Prizewinning writer Charles Wright’s poetic landscapes. My argument moves beyond the by-now standard interpretations of his work as expressing an ahistorical ethos of nontranscendence. By contrast, I investigate the cultural underpinnings of Wright’s poetics of abstraction by focusing on his aesthetic remappings of Southern roadways, which reflect larger philosophicaltransitions(theturntowardaspace-conscioushistoricism) as well as socioeconomic transformations (the increasing borderlessness and transregionality of the contemporary South). In the first instance, Wright’s poems reveal a strong cartographic impulse as his texts remap highway routes that the poet himself drove and redrove during his youth growing up in east Tennessee. These poems offer abstract models of the natural and built contours that marked this subregion of the South. The workings of cartographic imagination in his verse coincide with contemporary scholarly considerations of how spatial arrangements embody historical significance. In using the landscape as an image for memory in his poetic retracings of older Southern roadways, Wright foregrounds the spatial dimension of remembrance, personal and collective, paralleling the recent theoretical argument that space is as significant as time in shaping history.CulturalcriticsincludingMichelFoucaultandEdwardSojahave emphasized the significance of “the spatiality of social life, a practical theoretical consciousness that sees the lifeworld of being creatively located not only in the making of history but also in the construction of human geographies, the social production of space and the restless formationandreformationofgeographicallandscapes”(Soja11).Because Wright’s poetic cartographies are always set in the past, retracing bygone highways, they reveal “a passionate sensitivity to the presence and absence of memories inscribed in space,” reflecting how “memory too 122 Daniel Cross Turner has become spatialised” (Jarvis 190). Instead of representing past events by rooting their continuing presence in the land, such contemporary cartographies point to the way that a “landscape surfaces over [its] histories” (Jarvis 37). Wright’s poetic cartographies similarly unveil a sense of memory as pure process: rather than mimetically representing the past in a Platonic sense or creatively imitating it in an Aristotelian manner, they simulate lost times in a mise en abîme of abstract and repetitive glimpses of past places. The thinning out of memory, individual but also cultural, in Wright’s textual remappings of lost highways is consonant with Pierra Nora’s assertion that, in the throes of the postindustrial information age, there is “An increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good, a general perception that anything and everything may disappear” (7), as the contemporary subject is no longer certain what moments to value, what events to commit to memory: “We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left” (7). However, this very act of surfacing over the histories latent in mapped landscapes causes cultural memory to slip through the cartographic net and therefore calls us to unbury the social formations concealed in ostensibly ahistorical landscapes. Such abstract cartographies still carry the seeds of contemporaneous material conditions. Economist David Harvey defines post-World War II capitalism—known variously as late capitalism, consumer culture, or flexible accumulation—as the integration of the Fordist model of mass production and industrial infrastructure with the “postFordist” emphasis on the service industry, on conditioning consumer habits through advertising and product placement, and on more flexible sites and forms of production and distribution. These economic transitions can elide the markers of regional culture through standardized market practices. The impetusunderlyingWright’srememberedroadscapescorrespondstothe implications of contemporary time-space compression and the “spatial fix”: late capitalism’s concern with undoing and remarking spatial boundaries that are most advantageous for creating market disequilibria since, as Harvey suggests, “the inner contradictions of capitalism are expressed through the restless formation and re-formation of geographical landscapes” (150). Seen in this light, Wright’s cartographic South is an almost infinitely malleable space of unfixed value and values, a region that no longer reflects its mythology, if it ever did. 123 Dying Routes Mark Jarman provides...

IMPACTOS DA REESTRUTURAÇÃO PRODUTIVA E ESPACIAL NA ATIVIDADE AGRÍCOLA DO BAIXO JAGUARIBE-CE

This article present is an analysis of the dimensions of the current phase of global expansion of capitalism, which is: the production restructuring and consequently spatial at progress. The dynamics of capitalist development is generating to changes- in the economy, in the social relations, in the politics, in the culture, and in the world of work also is operating quantitative and qualitative changes. We seek to provide a clear understanding of the conceptual-logical tool that supports this analysis. Because it is a multidisciplinary analysis, the approach of the thematic demanded the resources to a theoretical framework that provides the understanding of reality, with reference to authors not only geography, but also maintained dialogue with economists and sociologists. Seek so to evidence the specificities of the ongoing process that more closely affect the productive process, the relations and work organization, especially in rural areas, performing a general analysis about the Paradigm of Flexible Accumulation, in order to situate the particularities in whole in inside which is defined your presence, as a case study disjointed of the all of is able to cloud the understanding of the actual process.

The Concatenate Poetics of Slavery and the Articulate Material of Dave the Potter

The Concatenate Poetics of Slavery and the Articulate Material of Dave the Potter Michael A. Chaney (bio) “traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.” —Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” (1936) As the foundation for an economic order based on flexible accumulation and agrarian capitalism, the antebellum slave occupied a pivotal if dichotomous role. Politically mute but commercially hypervisible, even the slave artisan whom W. E. B. Du Bois called the “quasi-slave” remains voiceless in the archive (177–79).1 Yet to discern an exception comes as no surprise. Dave the Potter, an antebellum exemplar of African American exceptionalism, nearly approximates the utopian disconnect from chattel status that Du Bois imagined the skilled, wage-earning quasi-slave to enjoy over field hands. But it is not disconnection that Dave the Potter’s astonishing expressivity seeks. Rather, in its fusion of literacy and materiality, the work of Dave the Potter aspires to a solidity of author and text that always disappears. Some folklorists refer to David Drake (ca. 1800–1874) as Dave of the Hive, since he worked for the newspaper The Hive, where Abner Landrum presumably taught him literacy before he was sold to Lewis Miles, a pottery works owner in the Edgefield district of South Carolina.2 Beyond these apocryphal points of biography, three salient facts anchor Dave the Potter’s exceptionality: first, his writing was a public affair, vaunted by the same slave-owning class that so vehemently prohibited slave literacy; second, he became such a skillful turner of clay that his vessels are among the largest recorded of the era; and third, he signed and dated his ceramics (Fig. 1), even incising anecdotal writing onto their walls. Characterized by phonetic spelling and irregular capitalization, many of these inscriptions are dedicational (“this Jar is to Mr Segler . . .” of 1858 or “for Mr. John monday” of 1857); others are self-reflexive, announcing the vessel’s purpose for storing meats (“Great & Noble Jar/hold Sheep goat or bear” from 1859). A few moralize about feeling “the need of—Grace” (1858) in keeping with the evangelizing rhetoric of most inscribed craftworks of the period from quilts to plateware. Others combine materialist braggadocio and the proverb to muster such unexpected pronouncements as “Cash Wanted” (1852) and “I made this Jar = for cash—/though its called = lucre Trash //” (1857, with equal signs, dash, and double back slashes in the original inscription). Many of these messages are signed (“Dave”) beneath the inscription, indicating the writing to be worthy of acknowledgement, and most are clearly formulated as heroic couplets. Few scholars of American or African American literature, however, address them as literature.3 In the following analysis, I will explore the ways in which Dave the Potter’s hybrid assemblages of material and literary expression complicate our understanding of slave authorship. Central to this investigation is the interplay of the signature and the inscriptive practices that help to call forth and call away the subject that the signature endeavors to name. My own designation of that subject throughout this essay—Dave the Potter rather than David Drake—registers respect for the manner in which the texts explored here were originally signed, as well as skepticism for the hegemonic effects of ascribing an exceptional singularity to that figure.4 Whatever we call the author, we must likewise be cautious when naming the text, lest the poetry overshadow the pottery or vice versa. Both clay and its embellishing marks work together, and [End Page 607] sometimes against each other, to produce a combinatory articulation in which words, names, dates, bases, apertures, walls, necks, handles, surfaces, and markings come together to reject the separation of one part from the other. The term that Dave the Potter seems to have preferred for this trope of convergence is “catination” or “concatination,” two of his earliest inscriptions. In its arresting vocality and refusal of anatomization, Dave the Potter’s aesthetic exemplifies a tactic of transatlantic, nineteenth-century theatricality that Daphne Brooks refers to as “spectacular opacity”: “opaque performances of marginalized cultural figures [that] call attention to the skill of the performer who, through gestures and speech as well as...

Quantifying citizens: neoliberal restructuring and immigrant selection in Canada and Australia

This article analyzes the ways in which Canadian and Australian immigration policies represent causes and consequences of neoliberal restructuring. Interrogating neoliberalism as a series of political-economic and moral changes derived from the marketization of societal and governmental arrangements, it illustrates how numerically-based ‘points systems’ have been employed as mechanisms for: gauging human capital; establishing indices of risk and undesirability; and promoting the ‘responsibilization’ of incoming migrants. In doing so the points systems' historical trajectory is traced through a variety of administrative reforms characteristic of neoliberal government and flexible accumulation. Ultimately, this article contends that as rational, technical and economically guided systems of enumeration and assessment, both governments' policies mirror, enhance and extend neoliberal arrangements and sensibilities. In providing ostensibly objective techniques of evaluation the points systems have assisted in injecting the ideal neoliberal citizens- who are, above all, flexible, cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial and autonomous- from abroad. Overall this paper contributes to studies of state restructuring by providing new insights into the links between the neglected domain of immigration control and emergent techniques of societal regulation and citizen-making.

PATRONAGE AND CLASS IN URBAN PAKISTAN

Of the rich academic literature that has emerged on the growth and dynamism of the “informal economy” in South Asia in recent years very little work has focused on the Pakistani context. This article builds upon the growing body of work on “informal employment” by identifying and explaining modes of labor control in the housing construction industry in metropolitan Pakistan. The crucial role of the subcontractor and his exploitative relationship with workers is discussed in a Gramscian framework. Workers are ensconced in a hegemonic relationship with contractors due to oppressive structural conditions as well as a culture of dependency that contractors have nurtured. Against the backdrop of the shift from Fordist to flexible accumulation regimes, the author argues that the present conjuncture is marked by the prevalence of extra-economic forms of control such that workers conceive of contractors as patrons. The instrumentalization of cultural norms of reciprocity by contractors does not mean that the labor–capital relationship is unchanging and rooted in “culture.” In fact, personalized patronage networks coexist with impersonal market ethics dynamically so as to produce and sustain the hegemony of capital.

Postmodernism and consumer culture: Image-production via residential architecture in post-1980s Turkey

Housing production in Turkey is mostly completed by merchant builders, with little or no involvement of architects. Those architects who do function in the housing industry try to satisfy state authorities, private enterprises and the customer, behaving according to these clients’ intentions. This, in turn, succeeds because of the current era of flexible accumulation where a consumer society is ready to digest whatever is offered. That is, buildings that have some resemblance to historical examples or look different to what people would normally prefer are chosen by consumers. As a result, different social classes of society commodify historical, traditional and cultural values in the name of creating an identity. In this context, this essay focuses on the image of the house itself and its interpretations within the post-1980s Turkish residential housing industry. It shows that architectural styles, typologies, names and terminology are freely used according to the market desires throughout the two case studies. The housing development called Kemer Country is a clear example of the reconstruction of a traditional Turkish neighborhood (mahalle) but there is no substance behind their facades, it is only an illusion. While Kemer Country creates a fake traditional mahalle outside of the city center of Istanbul, the developers of the Bosphorus City housing development claim to have re-built a significant part of Istanbul’s topography, as well as its unique architecture, outside of the city. This paper reveals that the architecture of the residential developments in post-1980s Turkey is lead by market forces and consumption-oriented construction rather than artistic, cultural or historical assets. Key words: Postmodernism, consumer culture, image production, residential architecture.

Relações de Produção e Qualificação Profissional: Problematizações Acerca da “Sociedade do Conhecimento”

In the last four decades, the capitalist mode of production has undergone a restructuring process of its production base, which some authors refer to as the model of flexible accumulation. In contrast to the Taylorist-Fordist work organization, this new moment, due to its flexibility, requires skilled and competitive professionals that constantly seek new skills. For that reason, but also for the need to use Information and Communication Technologies in this process, discourses on the society have become common. Given these considerations, the present theoretical work aims at posing some questions, however temporary, regarding the existing relations between the demands of the flexible model of capital accumulation and the nature of knowledge required from professionals. The advocated hypothesis is that, like other historical moments, the ongoing rationalization of production processes now tends to be accompanied by the growing limitation of a socio-political and economic knowledge – built in the production relations – previously in possession of employees. Therefore, this article points to the fact that the basis for the society is unveiled as potentially ideological and misleading.

A corpora-based detection of stylistic inconsistencies of text in the targeted subgenre

Any text, be it written by humans or generated by computers, must choose a specific style and be consistent. Textual style is based on the genre to which the text should belong. Each genre has its unique characteristics based on the style of narration, the topic, the target audience, and the author’s intentions. Thus, in order to write or produce better passages, a finer-grained style checker sensitive to differences among genres is to be developed. We propose a foundational method for this purpose: the flexible accumulation of data of the style features of atomic expressions based on any kind of contrastive sets of texts representing the good and bad examples for the targeted genre, an analysis of a given text using the style features, and a visualization to effectively help the author detect anomalies for the targeted genre. Any type of genre-sensitive style checker will implement our method or similar ones.

Make a copy, pass it on: The Ring Two and the Ghost of Verbinski

As a Hollywood production helmed by Japanese director Hideo Nakata, The Ring Two upsets categories like remake and sequel. Running below the sinuous narrative and generic entanglements of adaptation, translation, and sequelization is a pattern of shifting authorship. By analyzing the discourse of authorship in industrial texts such as trade journals, newspaper articles, press kits, and DVD featurettes, this article argues that the logic of shifting authorship reflects Hollywood's flexible accumulation of international content and labor. The fetish of the original, discussed and reinterpreted continuously in each subsequent installment of the Ringu/Ring franchise, becomes the basis for self-mythologizing and justification for Hollywood's new international division of cultural labor. Under these circumstances, Nakata's auteur status serves as (multi)cultural capital, while his labor serves to ventriloquize Hollywood horror conventions and the style of director Gore Verbinski, whose presence continues to haunt the franchise as it is further passed along.

A Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall? From Primitive to Flexible Accumulation in Sweden 1800-2005

Using Swedish historical national accounts, this paper shows that, up to the 1970s, there has been a secular rise in the national capital/output ratio and a secular fall in the rate of exploitation, which tended to depress the profit rate. In Sweden, the nominal capital/output ratio increased fastest during the transition from primitive to accelerated accumulation in the 19th century. Since the 1970s, these secular trends have been reversed, which is connected to flexible accumulation that slims down the inventory stock to a minimum and destroys old consensus between capital and labor. JEL classification:B51, E11, N13, N14