post-Fordist Labour Research Articles

Maria Eichhorn’s 5 Weeks, 25 Days, 175 Hours (2016): Subjectivity and Time in Post-Fordist Labor

In this essay, Maria Eichhorn’s 2016 intervention at Chisenhale Gallery 5 weeks, 25 days, 175 hours serves as a foundation to examine the figure of the artistic worker in the Post-Fordist context. Departing from an art-historical analysis of Eichhorn’s gesture of closing the gallery and giving the staff free time, I explore the new subjectivity of the worker from a bio-political perspective, dwelling on the notion of self-precarization. An analysis of Eichhorn’s work shows how the neoliberal worker has been revealed as a subject who takes responsibility for her job insecurity and allows work to penetrate her private life. I argue that Eichhorn’s gesture acts as a reminder of how, as a consequence of the development of the new model of labor, every aspect of life is occupied by the imperative of productivity, complicating traditional ways of resistance.

Working-Through Wellness: Critical Perspectives on the Contemporary Wellness Dispositif

In this paper, we examine the institutionalised demands and imperatives that govern the contemporary working subject. Our starting point is the thesis advanced by both Alain Ehrenberg and Eva Illouz that since the 1960s institutions are no longer characterised by a strict culture of prohibition and discipline. Instead, institutions seem to be increasingly animated by the norms and practices of a "culture of self-care", enriched by therapeutisation (Ehrenberg) and emotionalisation (Illouz). However, this does not mean that the disciplinary regimes that Foucault focuses on are simply disappearing. They persist, albeit in a different form, and we demonstrate this by looking at three central aspects of contemporary wellness: (a) specific spatial arrangements, (b) the performance of bodily practices and techniques and (c) ritualised interactions. We argue that in wellness facilities disciplinary regimes become effective through interpellations that are inscribed in rigid temporal-spatial orders and demand the body's docility. Insofar as this process relies on those norms that Ehrenberg and Illouz reserve for post-Fordist labour, the wellness space can ultimately be understood as a labour space. For what is at stake is the productivity of the subject.

Hospitality work and the sociality of affective labour

This article explores how the social relationships of precarious workers contribute to employment and labour practices in the hospitality industry. In so doing, it contributes to theoretical discussions about the nature of post-Fordist labour, and to studies of the social relations of precarity as they are enacted in workers’ intimate lives. Empirically, the article describes a distinctive mode of interpersonal negotiation and sociality practised by workers that is connected to the requirement that workers be ‘fun’ at work to facilitate consumption and to support the labour of co-workers. This sociality also shapes access to employment. However, the way that this takes place sheds light on divisions within the service labour force, in which employment opportunities are distributed through a social ‘scene’ that excludes migrant and ethnic minority workers. Involvement in this scene places the relationship between the public and the private in workers’ social lives into a constant tension, but exclusion increases vulnerability to poor working conditions and exploitation. The article concludes by arguing that the relationship between the public and the private in the practice of affective labour is not dissolved so much as posed as a problem that workers must negotiate within the disciplinary requirements of labour in specific industries and the modes of embodied inequality shaping the service labour force.

Back to Media Work in a Data-Driven Market: Re-Thinking the Labor of Advertising Practitioners

Industry advocates argue that the focus of advertising production has shifted from the creativity of practitioners to consumer analytics and the potential advantages of big data. Although a little empirical research offers valuable insights about the changing role of advertising practitioners, it lacks a critical perspective to situate it in a broader social context. On the other hand, digital labor and branding literature over-concentrate on user labor and neglect the role of practitioners in advertising production. By deploying the concept of immaterial labor, this article reevaluates the findings of mainstream marketing-advertising literature within the context of post-Fordist labor. This article aims to create a resonance between theories of immaterial labor and advertising literature and to call for further empirical research from a labor perspective. It argues that advertising practitioners put more strategical, relational and communicative powers into work to manage a data-oriented market.

Better Problems

Better Problems

Обоснование формирования новой трудовой этики через призму философии постопераизма и концепции «проектного града»

The article attempts to analyze the formation of a new work ethic in modern society through the prism of the post-operaist concept and the theory of "projective city". It is demonstrated that labor has undergone significant changes in comparison with the labor of the Fordist stage, as a consequence of which a new justification of justice and individual good was required, which would promote involvement in project labor. Drawing on the concept of post-Fordist labor, the emergence of such a rationale is examined. The article reveals the key points of post-Fordist theory that deal with the transformation of labor. conditions of postFordism. It is shown that, on the one hand, labor becomes immaterial, biopolitical, affective, on the other hand, such features contribute to the formation of new practices of ethical justification of labor. It is demonstrated that the organization of "immaterial labor" or biopolitical labor is formed as a network. At the same time, it is the project that becomes the value model that allows the formation of a new work ethic. Thus, the destruction of hierarchical structures leads to the formation of a network mode of labor organization, which does not allow an answer to the question of the fair distribution of material and symbolic goods. Then project work imposes a certain framework that allows us to restore the procedure of fair evaluation. Through the concept of "projective city" by L. Boltanski and E. Chiapello the logic of development of justification of individual benefits for a person included in hired labor is comprehended. It is revealed that justification is built through increasing the opportunities for selfrealization and the expansion of personal freedom. The article shows that the reliance on the concept of "projective city" allows to consider the contradictions associated with the formation of new ethical justifications and value structures. When the apparatus of argumentation of labor involvement in the "projective city" works with the principle of justice and individual good, the worker is offered the opportunity for self-realization and development of his own potential through practices of self-control. The conclusion is that the value changes described above are indicative of the emergence of a new ethic of labor relations.

Postfordist Labor Market Reform and Family Policy: Focused on the UK and Germany

Postfordist Labor Market Reform and Family Policy: Focused on the UK and Germany

Postfordist Labor Market Reform and Family Policy: Focused on the UK and Germany

Postfordist Labor Market Reform and Family Policy: Focused on the UK and Germany

Performances for upward mobility: How Dutch workfare programmes function as temporal spaces of imagination

ABSTRACTThe gradual retreat of many governments from actively supporting secure labour relations and social security through welfare arrangements, and the related normalisation of precarious conditions, goes hand-in-hand with a promise of the attainability of ‘the good life’ through work. Workfare programmes are at the centre of this, as they are aimed at ‘improving’ welfare clients and their position in society through performing precarious work. Based on an ethnographic study of group workshops in three Dutch workfare programmes, this article shows how welfare clients are taught the promise of upward mobility through waged labour and are required to give ‘the right’ performances that might (in principle if, often, not in practice) potentially enable them to be successful on the post-Fordist labour market. I argue that these workshops function as temporal spaces of imagination in which adherence to the promise of upward mobility through paid work can best be understood as a form of post-Fordist affect, one that enacts, albeit temporarily, a resolution that is frequently lacking in real life.

Clean Slates, Marked Bodies: Dollhouse, the [Re-]Programming of the Mind, and the Gendered Labor of a Cyborg

The idea of mind-upload, which equates a human being to consciousness and treats the body as a separate—and separable—appendage, has long been critiqued by feminist scholars. Joss Whedon's short-lived TV series Dollhouse (2009-2010) remains a rare representation of a science fiction text that focuses on the laboring bodies left behind instead of the uploaded minds. This essay uses a Marxist-feminist approach to media studies and science and technology studies to analyze how Dollhouse represents cyborgs as gendered and racialized workers in a techno-capitalist, neoliberal system, expected to perform primarily immaterial and reproductive labor. By closely examining the show's protagonists, the essay considers how the markers of difference, such as race, gender, and ability, affect the expectations put on the working bodies under neoliberal capitalism. Moreover, it considers Dollhouse's representation of a cyborg within the broader cultural context, comparing it to such influential science fiction works as Rossum's Universal Robots and The Stepford Wives, as well as within the Marxist and feminist scholarship on science and technology, such as Donna Haraway's cyborg and Mark Fisher's post-Fordist labor. The essay argues that Dollhouse allows for a feminist reading due to its overarching narrative in which feminized, disenfranchised laborers fight for control over their bodies and minds and for collective liberation.

The digital gamification of labour: a new form of labour process regulation

Digital gamification (DG) is generally defined as the application of game elements or even whole game mechanics to non-gaming contexts via software. In a labour process context its promoters advocate DG as a win-win-technology that supposedly increases productivity and quality of work simultaneously. Critiques, on the other hand, denounce it as part of libertarian ideology or as an empty, deceitful promise. For the sociology of work these normative discrepancies raise theoretical and empirical questions. This paper attempts to confront the sociological challenge of understanding how DG is transforming work by arguing that in order to precisely analyse labour process regulation by DG it is necessary to consider the pseudo-social characteristics of computers and their impact on labour process organisation. It presents four perspectives that aim at answering the key question: how does DG fit into the post-Fordist labour regulation regime?

The new discomforts of precarious workers: Wardrobe matter, insecurity and the temporality of calibration in dress work

This article provides a study of precarisation through the lens of dress work: the mundane practice of dressing the body for work. Based on intimate in-depth wardrobe interviews and analyses of workers’ narratives about their dressing practices, we develop a perspective on what insecure work feels like for workers in the interactive services and creative industries. We understand dress work as a materially mediated practice in which workers often aim to achieve a level of comfort: a state in which they are allowed to become less reflexive about their bodies. One of the ways in which precarisation makes itself known, we contend, is through the temporal logic of the interruption. The temporality of zero-hours contracts and short-term, insecure labour interrupts the achievement of comfort as workers are not allowed the time to experience their work, colleagues and spaces. The discomfort and sometimes pain of insecurity of post-Fordist labour is thus felt on the body.

Snapchat’s Dialectics of Socialization: Revisiting the Theory of the Spectacle for a Critical Political Economy of Social Media

AbstractIn this paper, I use the online app Snapchat as a prism through which I illustrate a “spectacular” power of current informational/communicative capitalism: the ability to subsume and integrate a broad range of practices into a holistic socialization process that operates both at the level of media platform structures and at the level of subjectivization mechanisms. I advance this argument by historicizing Guy Debord’s notion of the Spectacle via Autonomist Marxism and Voloshinov’s materialist semiotics. Shedding light on the tensions inhabiting the post-Fordist labor process its users are involved in—such as autonomy/heteronomy, sociability/alienation, and display/concealment—I show how Snapchat points to a Spectacle that consistently operates through a dialectic of socialization, which enables and compels, consorts and estranges, and deceives and exhibits.

Who can wear flip-flops to work? Ethnographic vignettes on aesthetic labour in precarity

A central aspect of post-Fordist labour, many claim, is that the personal and the professional are increasingly intertwined. Especially in precarious urban sectors such as the interactive services, the aesthetic presentation of self is part of the product or service offered. Indeed, the separation between consumption and production, between private and work is no longer so strict for many, especially, in terms of aesthetics. Steering clear from sweeping statements about post-Fordism, however, this article offers an empirical examination based on ethnographic vignettes of one particular object that, perhaps surprisingly, appears in self-presentations for labour: the Adidas flip-flop. The Adidas flip-flop became salient in two studies in the Netherlands, in particular, one on the implementation of the Participation Act, which organizes welfare since 2015 and stipulates that it is forbidden for welfare recipients to ‘obstruct employment by dress or personal hygiene’. Case managers in Dutch welfare offices, it turned out, often cited the Adidas flip-flop as the ultimate example of an object that would obstruct employment and by consequence is cause for a welfare penalty. At the same time, the Adidas flip-flop is the preferred footwear of tech entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, a surprising fashion item on runways and the highly valued item of Mario, a respondent in one of the ethnographic vignettes. Across several locations, therefore, we ask what aesthetic and moral interpretations of the Adidas flip-flop are offered, by whom and in what context. This allows for (1) an innovative view of aesthetics for labour, (2) an assessment of what that tells us about post-Fordist labour markets and (3) an understanding of how post-Fordist aesthetic norms can be especially opaque though important for those in precarious positions.

The formation of young workers: The cultivation of the self as a subject of value to the contemporary labour force

This article explores the practices through which young people cultivate themselves as subjects of value to the post-Fordist labour force. In this, the article goes beyond an existing emphasis on young people’s ‘transitions’ through employment, to a focus on the practices through which young people are formed as labouring subjects, and therefore on the relationship between youth subjectivities and post-Fordist labour force formation. Theoretically, the article builds upon increasingly influential suggestions in studies of post-Fordism that the formation of post-Fordist workers now takes place through the conversion of the whole of a subject’s life into the capacity for labour, including affective styles, modes of relationality, and characteristics usually not considered as productive dimensions of the self. In this context, the article shows that whilst young people form themselves as workers through practices that are not specific to institutionalised definitions of education and labour, these practices – and the modes of selfhood they aim to cultivate – vary in ways that contribute to classed divisions within post-Fordist societies. In this, the study of the formation of young workers offers a critical insight into the way that the formation of subjectivities intertwines with the disciplinary requirements of post-Fordist labour in their classed manifestations.

Artesanía Teatral. Evolución y consecuencias de la política cultural en el caso del teatro en Madrid desde los años 80

A lo largo del texto se analizan las políticas culturales y los modelos de producción, distribución y financiación del sector teatral en la Comunidad de Madrid en las últimas décadas y el efecto que han tenido sobre trabajadores y trabajadoras del sector. Tras introducir los principales rasgos del contexto laboral posfordista en el que vivimos, se expone el modo en el que las Industrias Culturales y Creativas se han adaptado a este modelo. Centrándose en el caso del teatro he implementado una aproximación metodológica cualitativa basada principalmente en entrevistas en profundidad que permite analizar el efecto del contexto económico y político sobre las compañías. Concretamente, se define un modelo de producción que hemos descrito como “artesanía teatral” que se está extendiendo como única salida laboral para muchos y muchas profesionales del sector.

The Aesthetics of Work-Readiness: Aesthetic Judgements and Pedagogies for Conditional Welfare and Post-Fordist Labour Markets

Recent legislation in the Netherlands takes conditional welfare to a new level. Local welfare offices can now give benefit sanctions to welfare clients that ‘obstruct employment’ by their appearance. Through a qualitative and ethnographic study of aesthetic evaluation practices in Dutch welfare offices it is argued that: (1) an everyday aesthetic labour is pivotal in post-Fordist labour markets; (2) in times of precarization, this is so for unemployed as well as formally employed populations; (3) welfare clients are expected to give an aesthetic performance of work-readiness and adaptability; and (4) case managers use aesthetics as a pedagogy to achieve this readiness and adaptability. Aesthetic labour, it is then argued, is best conceptualized as a continuous, everyday, backstage labour for labour: a daily calibration for work contexts in flux.

Narrar es luchar. Mitopoiesis y pol�tica en la obra de Wu Ming

The current essay aims to point out the connection between Wu Ming´s political and narrative bet and the Italian postoperaist philosophy. To that end, we will do an historical contextualization to the birth of the collective, an analysis to his concept of mitopoiesis regarding virnians studies about postfordist labour and a study about the link between Toni Negri´s letters devoted to the art matter and the way in which Wu Ming self-understand their work and the figure of the artist par excellence: the narrator. All this without ignoring the political background of these reflections.

Fordist Absences: Madrid's Right to Housing Movement as Labor Struggle

AbstractThroughout the literature on contemporary populism in Europe, scholars point to increasing precarity brought about by post-Fordist labor relations as a central component in outrage on both the Left and the Right. Focusing on the case of Madrid and its right to housing movement, I instead argue that current mobilizations need to be understood as the product of the long absence of Fordist urban economic arrangements. I demonstrate how the working class was only able to attain full membership in the city during the recent economic boom. With the property crash, that membership appeared fleeting, triggering both inequality and outrage. Ultimately, I insist on the role of housing in the production of class formation and subjectivities.

Young subjectivities and affective labour in the service economy

ABSTRACTPost-Fordist employment is characterised by the demand for new forms of labour in which workers are expected to make personal investments in their work and to mobilise their embodied subjectivities in the practice of labour. Whilst employment insecurity is well documented in the sociology of youth, theoretical development in this area has yet to contend with the role of changes in the nature of labour itself in the production of youth. This paper draws on theories of labour under post-Fordism to explore the practice of ‘affective labour’ amongst young people performing ‘front of house’ bar work in a large metropolitan service economy. The paper theorises the role of youth subjectivities – including capacities for relationality and leisure, gendered embodiment, and tastes – in the practice of contemporary labour. The paper describes how young people doing bar work contribute to the production of affective atmospheres, or sensations of ease, pleasure and enjoyment that are offered to clientele of boutique bars. In this, we suggest that affective labour mobilises young subjectivities at work in ways that are currently unrecognised within youth studies. The paper concludes by suggesting a new research agenda that goes beyond the existing focus on youth transitions through employment to explore how youth is produced as part of the social dynamics of post-Fordist labour.