New Forms Of Labor Research Articles

Normes d'emploi, hybridation et zone grise chez les pilotes d'hélicoptère au Brésil

Ce texte discute la nature des transformations du travail dans un monde en cours de globalisation. Le concept d’hybridation permet de dégager la spécificité de la zone grise, entendue comme résultant du brouillage des normes d’emploi et de l’émergence de formes nouvelles de travail, prenant la forme d’entorses faites à la loi ou de pratiques qui s’infiltrent dans ses interstices. La profession de pilote d’hélicoptère au Brésil a été retenue, car elle s’inscrit à la fois dans un cadre de normes rigides dictées par les institutions internationales et dans des pratiques qui tentent localement de les contourner et qui révèlent les enjeux de l’accélération des mutations dues à la globalisation.

Brand value: how affective labour helps create brands

One way brands create value is by engaging the capacity of cultural labourers to animate affective connections with consumers. Brands assemble social spaces that harness the communicative capacities of cultural actors. A mode of branding that works by managing an open-ended social process depends on affective labour. Affective labour involves not only the capacity of individuals to produce specific meanings and feelings, but also the open-endedly social capacity to stimulate and channel attention and recognition. This affective labour does not always depend on making particular “authentic” representations, but on facilitating a general circulation of meaning. By investing in social spaces and relations corporate brands engage popular musicians in new forms of labour. This article examines the participation of popular musicians in branding programmes run in Australia by corporate brands between 2005 and 2010. I examine the accounts of musicians and managers who participate in these programmes to consider how they make their participation in social relations that create brand value meaningful. They employ a variety of practices: identifying with brands, endorsing brands' claims of socially responsible investment in culture, and distancing themselves from their own participation in branded space.

Emancipation, Slave-Ownership and the Remaking of The British Imperial World, University College London, 29-31 March 2012

This conference came out of the ESRC-funded Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project (LBS) at University College London. Since April 2009 the LBS group has been investigating the legacies of British slavery, and in particular, the afterlife of the £20 million paid to slave-owners in compensation for the loss of their ‘property’ on the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. Nick Draper has been exploring the financial and economic legacies of the £20 million, including its reinvestment in the railways and the financial City of London. Catherine Hall has been tracing the cultural memory of slave-ownership and the rewriting of histories of Britain’s involvement in slavery over the course of the nineteenth century, particularly in the writings of the descendants of slave-owners. Keith McClelland has been tracing the political legacies of the slave-owners, including the enduring power of those who had received compensation money in the British Parliament, their representation of themselves as victims of abolition, the rewriting of their history to align themselves with anti-slavery and their search for new forms of labour and work discipline. With Rachel Lang and Ben Mechan the group have also constructed an online public database of slave-owners at the point of abolition; held six public-engagement workshops across Britain to bring together academic, community and family historians of slavery; and curated an exhibition on the ‘Slave-owners of Bloomsbury’. Katie Donnington’s forthcoming PhD on the Hibbert Family is also a valuable part of this project as is the Encyclopaedia of British Slave-ownership, based on the group’s findings, which will be published shortly. The conference was thoughtfully constructed to share, discuss and extend some of the core questions raised by the LBS research group – What was the character of the British imperial state? What happened to the planters and slave economy after slavery had been abolished? What free forms of labour were established? And how can historians connect with the public, museums and artists to explore these issues?

Perspectives on Sentiment Analysis

One of the consequences of the widespread use of social media is the equally widespread availability of all sorts of once intimate and private stuff: textual, visual, and affective. From this, a new form of labor arises: the mining of social media data. One type of social media data mining is sentiment analysis, the application of a range of technologies to determine sentiments expressed within social media about particular topics. This article maps out a range of emerging perspectives on sentiment analysis and argues that these sometimes-competing views need to be brought together, so that analyses of new socio-technical phenomena like sentiment analysis can be rich and rounded.

Win the Lottery or Organize: Traditional and Non-Traditional Labor Organizing in Silicon Valley

The growth and change in high -tech industries in Silicon Valley over the last 20 years has produced a highly bifurcated society, with little social mobility between low and high stratums of the society. The highly unequal occupational structure of high-tech industries, combined with the rise in out-sourcing of rela ted service occupa tions, h a s contributed t o the growing inequality in the region. In this environment, traditional models of labor organizing in the electronics sectors have been ineffective in improving wages and working conditions for low-wage workers. Other, more inn o va tive organizing efforts, ho we ver, have had more success. These newer efforts link organizing in the community with organizing in the workplace, build links between en vironmental justice concerns and work­ place safety and health issues, help break down divisions between the public and private sphere, and bring greater public o versight of private sector employment practices. While these efforts have yet to have a major impact in improving emplo yment prospects for low-wage workers in high-tech industries, they do provide some important insights into potential new forms of labor organizing.

Freeze-dried flexibility: a new morphology of labour, casualisation and value

In recent decades, capitalist society has witnessed profound changes, including in the sphere of labour. Neoliberalism, the restructuring of production and economic expansion shaped through instantly-available, ‘freeze-dried’ flexibility have led to far-reaching transformations in the world of work. As a result of this composite and heterogeneous set of transformations, there has been widespread speculation that we may be witnessing the end of the working class, or at least that labour has lost its central position in society. Recent history has been ruthless in relation to such (mis)constructions: the appearance of finitude has actually been part of a process whereby labour has been redesigned, leading to new modalities of labour and the emergence of a new morphology: a new way of being for labour, that coexists with and combines with its past (and still existing) arrangements. It seems that the more labour appears to dwindle, the broader and more diversified are the forms in which it can rise again (in this context it is irrelevant whether these new forms are more or less precarious or more or less provided with rights than those they replace). This article aims to pursue two of the key polysemic trends that are present in this framework: the casualisation of labour and the development of new forms of labour. It also addresses the implications of these interrelated connections for the law of value.

‘Democratic entertainment’ commodity and unpaid labor of reality TV: a preliminary analysis of China's Supergirl

China's Supergirl, a popular reality talent show, is fairly similar to American Idol in the sense that it created new forms of media commodities as well as new forms of labor. Because of this, the entertainment industry has been able to generate profits in China's growing broadcasting and, up to now underdeveloped, music markets. By analyzing both the production and consumption of Supergirl, this paper describes the economic development of reality TV in China. We also analyze how this talent show produced a flexible and localized commodity. This paper suggests that a different perspective is needed in order to understand the ways in which the organizers steer and manipulate the audience participation. Volunteer and unpaid labor is created by promoting the ‘TV Cinderella myth’. Fans and participants are symbolically paid in a form of ‘dream‐fulfillment’. People, otherwise accustomed to a Communist regime, are now charmed by a certain amount of apparent democracy that is displayed during the singing contests. This paper coins the above mentioned process as being a specific commodity of ‘democratic entertainment’ in China.

Doi Moi and Its Discontents: Gender, Liberalisation, and Decollectivisation in Rural Viet Nam

This article explores the ways in which liberalisation processes and the decollectivisation of agriculture have impacted on gender relations in Viet Nam. In Viet Nam, decollectivisation entailed a highly egalitarian land redistribution and so presents a nearly unique case study. I discuss two sets of theories: market transition theory and feminist theories analysing the household and household production processes. While market transition theories offer some insights into the differential effects of liberalisation, they do not address aspects of women's work outside the formal economy. In contrast, feminist theories are able to comprehend the complex and interlocking nature of households, lineages, and the wider economy for women's lives and work.I argue that collectivisation of agriculture presented some advantages for women, in that some work was socialised, and earning work points made their work more visible than it had been within peasant households. Decollectivisation and capitalist market relations have offered opportunities for some: for instance, Vietnamese women's role as market traders has been restored. Agricultural productivity has risen, and this has benefited women as well as men. However, this process also restores much more control to male household heads. New property laws give wives the right to have their names on title deeds, along with husbands; however, this is rarely enforced. The majority of peasant women face a loss of services, increased economic instability, and increased risk. New forms of labour organising may be needed to assist rural women in realising land and other rights.

John, a 20-year-old Boston native with a great sense of humour: on the spectacularization of the self and the incorporation of identity in the age of reality television

Reality television programming simultaneously narrates the conditions of the social factory and produces new forms of labour in and through them. This essay explores the nature of the labour performed by the shows' participants and argues that it involves the self-conscious development and management of public persona based on templates of the self supplied by corporate media culture. This labour of self-presentation operates simultaneously as work for the television industry and as a form of image-entrepreneurship for the individual participants. Insofar as this form of labour involves the alienation of embodied subjectivity into image commodities with recognizable market value, it constitutes a form of self-spectacularization. Reality television programming also provides templates for these spectacular selves within a distinct corporate culture, which aims to contain and control individuals' virtuosity, thus incorporating identity. The Apprentice and Joe Schmo are explored as examples of reality shows that dramatize and embody the collapse of any meaningful distinction between notions of the self and capitalist processes of production. This process of both narrating and producing a branded self enacted by the reality television might be seen as part of a broader multi-level marketing campaign we could call the corporate colonization of the real.

Globalisation and Learning

The human family has acquired a new awareness of its unity, integration and global interdependence. Globalisation is the defining characteristic of our time ( Khor, 2000 ). Time and space are shrinking and many borders are disappearing, giving rise to an increasing interdependence between climates, environments, ecosystems, lives, economies, well-being (freedom from disease), cultures, religions and people.This ‘New World Order', which emerged fully after 1989 with the collapse of European communism, is a dynamic and dialectic process whose characteristics have not been identified completely but one which has brought with it a belief in: ecological emergency; lower trade barriers; an end to exchange controls; a freer movement of investment capital, goods and people; new forms of labour; and the displacement of public sector capital by the private sector. This latest historical stage has created new possibilities and opportunities, and raised new hopes for the world, especially for developing countries. In fact, technological innovations (especially information technology, telematics, the global satellite network and the Internet), the new forms of labour, expanding trade and increased direct foreign investment offer enormous potential for the elimination of poverty, hunger, disease and illiteracy during the millennium that has just started ( UNDP, 1999 ).Nevertheless, many of these potential benefits have not been realised so far for everyone and for the common good. Globalisation has been driven by the expansion of markets and financial systems not necessarily linked to production, leading to increasing levels of inequality in labour, income, resources, opportunities and especially in education. According to the latest ‘Human Development Report', ( UNDP, 2003 ) globalisation in this phase has benefited only one fifth of the world's population while marginalising the rest. Therefore, we cannot but agree with what the United Nations Millennium Declaration says: We believe that the central challenge we face today is to ensure that globalisation becomes a positive force for the entire world's people. This is all the more evident after the atrocious terrorist act of 11 September 2001 and its direct consequences.

Sweatshops in Sunset Park: A Variation of the Late 20th Century Chinese Garment Shops in New York City

The analysis in this study is primarily based on the author's research of the Chinese garment industry in New York over the last ten years, her visits to a number of shops in Sunset Park, and her interviews with several dozen workers in the area. By representing a complex picture of the industry, it argues that while labor organizing and law enforcement remain important ways to address labor abuse in the industry, it is imperative for the law enforcement agencies, organized labor and all concerned individuals to understand the complexity embedded in the highly competitive structure of the garment industry, the multi-dimensional impact of labor legislation and law enforcement, and the need to develop new forms of labor organizing informed and responsive to the challenge of the time. Without such an understanding, any effort to curb the sweating phenomenon is likely to be sporadic and have no lasting effect on the industry.

Migration, Material Culture, and Identity in William Attaway's "Blood on the Forge" and Harriette Arnow's "The Dollmaker"

lthough at first glance they might seem like strange companion texts, William Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941) and Harriette Amow's The Dollmaker (1954) share key thematic elements pertaining to the experiences of migrants from rural Appalachia to multiethnic industrial centers of the urban north during the first half of the twentieth century. To be sure, there are substantial differences between the two texts. Blood on the Forge follows the lives of three male African American protagonists, brothers Melody, Chinatown, and Big Mat Moss, from a life of sharecropping in Kentucky to a steel-mill town resembling World War I-era Homestead, Pennsylvania. Recruited along with other black migrants as strikebreakers to a community whose largest block of laborers are Slavic immigrants, the Moss brothers soon find themselves pitted against their unionized white fellow workers. In addition to the double bind of marginalization from white labor unions and exploitation by industrial capitalists, the Moss brothers simultaneously must deal with pressing issues of familial and cultural dislocation. As I elaborate in this essay, Attaway marks these dislocations primarily through his accounts of the Moss brothers' encounters with radically new forms of labor and labor technology. Like many social realist novelists of his day, Attaway offers readers no idealized resolution to the Moss brothers' rather bleak dilemma. Rather, the novel's tragic conclusion finds Big Mat slain while work-

The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction.

The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature juxtaposes representations of labour in fictional texts and non-fictional texts in order to trace the intersections between aesthetic and economic discourse in nineteenth-century America. Both allegory and the new forms of labour produced a version of personhood that seemed frighteningly flat, a flatness that attacked the substance of the work ethic and, indeed, the very foundations of American individualism. Using this contextualized model of allegory, Weinstein argues that texts by Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and Adams are best understood both as allegories of labour (that is, the allegorical representations of the nature and cost of being a labouring being) and labours of allegory (that is, the visibility of the author's work of representation). Weinstein revolutionizes the notion of allegorical narrative, which is exposed as a literary medium of greater depth and consequence than has previously been implied - a working authorial vehicle for engaged and at times socially turbulent thought.