Post-industrial Work Research Articles

Value theories in motion: Circular labour migration, unfinished land dispossession and reproductive struggles across the urban–rural divide

This analysis theorises the central role of the urban–rural divide in the making of value relations and exploitation in contemporary labour regimes. Inspired by insights contained in Diane Elson’s ‘value theory of labour’ and informed by evidence on labour circulation in India’s ‘Sweatshop Regime’, the article combines Early Social Reproduction Analyses (ESRA) and debates on ‘forms of exploitation’ to illustrate the integrated nature of the circuits incorporating production and reproduction, use and exchange value across the urban–rural divide. It represents these circuits as a concrete instantiation of ‘value in motion’. In this schema, the countryside emerges as central to the regeneration of the urban labour regime; as key provider of labouring bodies; and as absorber of reproductive costs, also performing the function of ‘global housework’ for contemporary capitalism. The narrative is particularly attentive to post-industrial work trajectories, which further explain how partial land dispossession and informal work interplay to sustain the dynamic nature of value relations as well as workers’ livelihoods beyond factory labour. The conclusions stress the political implications of reproductive readings of value for labour struggles and pro-labour policy.

Navigating Work Career through Locus of Control and Job Satisfaction: The Mediation Role of Work Values Ethic

This study examines navigating work careers through self-concept (locus of control and work values ethic) and job satisfaction within the postindustrial work environment of the 21st century. Career construction theory conceptualizes one’s career as a process of responding to a changing environment through self-concepts to more actively construct their careers. The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic further highlights the importance of individuals’ self-leading their work journeys. The study indicates that work values ethic is an important variable in further explaining the relationship between locus of control and job satisfaction in our sample. When the effect of work values ethic is removed, the association between locus of control and job satisfaction is insignificant. We expect this research to spur further efforts by individuals to improve their understanding of the intricacies among their intrapersonal traits, needs, and abilities to better navigate their work careers with application to newly defined workplaces as a result of COVID-19. Our results also inform the practice of career education and counseling.

Cardiff and the contentious landscapes of postindustrial, urban, and transnational memory work

Since Cardiff became the Welsh capital in 1955 and the subsequent referendum placed the new Welsh Assembly Government in Cardiff Bay, the city’s grasp on a Welsh national narrative has only intensified. This paper approaches the various agents of memory work around the city through a landscape analysis to better understand the processes of Welsh memory at work in Cardiff. Furthermore, it focuses on Butetown, the historically multicultural docklands community of Cardiff, and its relationship with the old urban and civic core of the city and the new developments of Cardiff Bay. Butetown fuelled the coal industry which propelled Cardiff towards the wealthy capital and colonial enclave it is today yet continues to be excluded from Welsh national narratives. Redevelopment and gentrification further squeeze Butetown into an ever-smaller core of what it once was. This research indicates that while this resilient cosmopolitan culture continues in many forms, the context of (the) capital continues to complicate Cardiff and its shifting relationship with the history and culture of Welsh identity. By employing a flexible landscape analysis towards historical and ongoing urban development, the memory at work in cultural and political urban landscapes emerges amongst broader considerations of national identity.

Post-industrial capitalism and trade union decline in affluent democracies

This study examines trade union decline in light of concurrent changes in the demographic and sectoral composition of labor markets. Drawing on classical sociology and contemporary scholarship on work and employment, the author theorizes that the emergence of post-industrial work settings coupled with more socially diverse workforces make labor organizing more difficult than prior research recognizes. Operating through various mechanisms, these factors are thought to hinder the development of solidarity among workers and direct employment growth toward previously unorganized parts of the economy. Using panel data on 18 countries from 1960 to 2015, these ideas are tested with regression models that capture labor market changes indicative of post-industrial capitalism—measured by changes in deindustrialization, foreign-born population, and female share of employment. The results support the theoretical argument, with counterfactual estimates suggesting that labor market changes occurring between 1960 and 2015 reduced union density by 9 to 13 points for the whole sample.

The Working Class in the Service Sector: Outlining the Issue and Reviewing Current Sociological Discourse

This study focuses on reviewing and analyzing the current sociological discourse devoted to the problems of routine service labor. The article reveals such aspects as the specifics of interactive service work, methods for assessing the size and composition of the service portion of the working class, how the updated properties of labor relations influence the traditional methods used by researchers to conceptualize them, the specific qualities of class consciousness inherent to the service sphere. It has been established that in foreign discourse of sociology of labor, research in the service sphere is currently at the forefront. The focus is on such problems as the structure of the new post-industrial working class, the inclusion of the client into the traditional worker/employer dyad as a third element that reconfigures the stable structures of labor relations, the increased importance of “emotional labor”, physicality and the so-called “soft qualities” of workers, the ideology of consumer sovereignty and the problems that it generates, the precarization of labor that leads to the deprivation of interactive service workers, the class consciousness and resistance practices of routine services employees. In domestic science, this issue is considered mainly from the standpoint of economics and management. In Russian sociology, service research has not been fully updated, there is no theoretical foundation, and the concept of service workers as part of the working class has not yet taken form. The majority of Russian authors rely on the structural and functional paradigm in the study of the service sphere, which does not correlate with the problems relevant to international sociology and the methods of their analysis.

Working hours - tracking the current and future trends.

It is important to track the trends of future working hours, since working hours have strong associations to everyday life and work-life interaction, but also to health. In this paper we aim to track the current and future trends in working hours. We discuss the trends through the key dimensions of working hours: the length, timing, tempo and autonomy. We also consider the role of current trends of spatial changes of work. Changes in working time patterns are fostered by several driving factors: globalization and business restructuring challenging the current work organizations, new information technologies, demographic and climate change and the current and future pandemics. The past and current tremendous changes in working hours indicate that changes in working hours will continue. The contemporary trends in future working hours pose risks for personal, family and social life, material well-being and health. At its best, however, the new post-industrial working time regime may provide more autonomy and time for recovery to employees as new technologies and changes in business structures release opportunities for greater individual autonomy over how, where, and for how long paid work is performed.

The present is a foreign country: Brexit and the performance of victimhood

This article examines the campaign of the Brexit Party via the conceptual frameworks of cultural performance and the politics of victimhood. The Brexit Party depicts the post-industrial working class communities as forgotten and betrayed and attacks the Labour Party for its stance on Brexit. While current research on national populism focuses on demographic and cultural changes and highlights a prevailing distrust of the political establishment there is little as to how victimhood is performed by the agents of national populism. By deploying Jeffrey Alexander’s conceptualisation of cultural performance, the article identifies the current status of victimhood and its political communication in the Brexit debate. As a result, the post-industrial working class becomes the victim of failed policies and the authentic voice of a country unable to assert its dominance in the world. The social actors in the Brexit Party’s campaign are being motivated by and towards concerns, the meanings of which are defined by signifiers of inequality and nostalgia. The article makes two arguments: the cultural performance of victimhood is a precondition for articulations of nationalism and belonging; the cultural performance of victimhood is integral for the communication of loss, democratic deficit and for presenting the working class as a racialised minority.

The psychosocial significance of social character, habitus and structures of feeling in research on neoliberal post-industrial work

This article highlights the psychosocial relevance of Erich Fromm’s concepts of ‘social character’ and ‘social change’ to broaden our understanding of the intergenerational traumatic legacy of neoliberalism. As part of this, it also reflects on the psychosocial significance of other related concepts – namely Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ and Raymond Williams’ ‘structures of feeling’ – as ways to also acknowledge their significance when related to each other in emerging research on the neoliberal effects of changes in work and identities. This includes secondary analysis of my own earlier research on the psychosocial ramifications of the loss of stable work, changing worker-gendered identities, disrupted affect, community engagement and historical memory within a global context of insecure labour. This is all understood within a theoretical frame that stresses the emerging neoliberal forms of social character in the aftermath of the massive redundancies and unemployment experienced recently in post-industrial working-class communities in the UK.

Making it work in free agent work: The coping practices of Swedish freelance journalists

Studies of post-industrial work have shown how workers are increasingly shouldering the risk of and the responsibility for social protection, work shortages, professional training, and securing a stream of continuous incoming work. This study of Swedish freelance journalists examines how these free agents cope with a situation whereby the need exists to actively bear the full responsibility for attracting and contracting, producing, and billing their work as journalists. The empirical material shows how freelancers engage in various coping practices to secure both sufficient amounts of work and the accompanying economic compensation. Freelancers who “make it work” are often those managing to embed themselves in long-standing relationships with clients and colleagues, thus ensuring a long-term work horizon and a steady income. Even so, the inherent “responsibilization” of contemporary work is amplified and intensified by the freelance work mode. This study makes two contributions: Firstly, it provides knowledge of free agent work in a Swedish context, a national setting that is often presumed to be a “role model” for good working conditions. Secondly, it highlights the specifics of managing work that entails a continuous stream of sequential and parallel assignments of limited duration and the ongoing “employment management work” this entails as regards making sure assignments keep “coming in”.

Capitalism with a Transhuman Face

The most salient feature of the far-right movement, which became known as the alt-right, is its relation with IT rather than with the diminished expectations of the post-industrial working class. The ethos of the tech industry transmogrified in recent years, shifting from the market-besotted optimism championed by Bill Gates to the digital feudalism represented by Bay Area neoreactionaries and cybermonarchists. The article argues that this points to a new configuration of fascist ideology taking shape under the aegis of, and working in tandem with, neoliberal governance. If every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution (a thought attributed to Walter Benjamin but as an elision of his arguments), the rise of cryptofascist tendencies within the tech industry bears witness to the failures of the ‘digital revolution’ whose promises of a post-scarcity economy and socialised capital never came to pass. From this perspective, it is proposed, the online cultural wars are a proxy for a greater battle around de-Westernisation, imperialism and white hegemony.

Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work: Speed and Embodiment in Joshua Ferris' The Unnamed and Michael Faber's Under the Skin

This article analyzes a contemporary posthuman culture of work through a critical disability optic and, in particular, examines the disability aesthetics employed by Ferris and Faber in their novels. It opens with an outline of how contemporary post-industrial work cultures fixate on notions of speed and efficiency, and then reads the ideas of 'humanity', embodiment and power that result from this, before situating the difference of disability as a critique of such focus on immediacy and productivity. Ferris' and Faber's novels are read in terms of their analysis of disability and work, exploring how each creates complex ideas of embodiment, time and subjectivity from their very different contexts (the corporate world of the Manhattan legal profession in The Unnamed and an isolated alien/posthuman work environment of food production in Under the Skin). While offering a critique of the posthuman as it is figured in neo-liberal conceptions of work, the article concludes by suggesting the productive possibilities of aligning a critical posthumanist anti-humanism with contemporary disability theory in further understanding representations of work and disability.

Narratives of Social Mobility in the Post-Industrial Working Class and the Use of Credit in Chilean Households

This paper examines how the frequent and extended use of credit as a social asset in lower-income families and how the interpretation of financialisation practices has led to a particular discourse on social mobility. Specifically, it addresses the process of credit expansion by department stores and how it relates to lower-income families, i.e. the post-industrial working class, who tend to both offer and consume credit products; the lower-middle class; and low-skilled entrepreneurs. Credit has transcended the boundaries of economics. It has become a valuable asset for achieving the goal of providing a « decent life » and is at the core of the lower-income groups’ purchasing and budgeting practices. I will argue that this empirical method shows how the financialisation of household economies is more than a unidirectional process and that household arrangements, particularly moral ones, influence the use of credit and everyday economic behaviour. Lower-income groups are constructing a narrative of social mobility. This narrative convinces them that they are part of a « new middle class », defined fundamentally as people who mobilise credit as an asset for achieving social goals instead of relying on State welfare or constructing identity through educational achievement or occupational mobility.

Is Digital Different? How Information Creation, Capture, Preservation and Discovery Are Being Transformed ed. by Michael Moss, Barbara Endicott-Popovsky

Reviewed by: Is Digital Different? How Information Creation, Capture, Preservation and Discovery Are Being Transformed ed. by Michael Moss, Barbara Endicott-Popovsky Evans Ochola Is Digital Different? How Information Creation, Capture, Preservation and Discovery Are Being Transformed, ed. Michael Moss and Barbara Endicott-Popovsky, with Marc J. Dupuis. London: Facet Publishing, 2015. 217pages. $95.00 (ISBN 978-1-85604-854-5) Is Digital Different? How Information Creation, Capture, Preservation and Discovery Are Being Transformed is a well-written, insightful overview of the role of information professionals in the transition from an analog to a digital environment. The volume is edited by Michael Moss, professor of archival science at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom; Barbara Endicott-Popovsky, director of the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity at the University of Washington in Tacoma; and Marc Dupuis, assistant professor of cybersecurity at the University of Washington. The 13 contributors to Is Digital Different? explore the impact of advanced and emerging technologies on the information sciences in such areas as access, publication, and ownership. The volume addresses the challenges of research libraries in managing a shifting world of published, self-published, and unpublished materials, in both analog and digital formats. One weakness of Is Digital Different? may be its assumption that the digital environment will break down barriers between the academy and the general public. [End Page 651] Each chapter reports on how particular institutions are grappling with a rapidly changing and unpredictable information environment, offering practical ideas for reconceptualizing and reorganizing libraries. Libraries, archives, and museums hoping to develop or improve discovery services will appreciate the descriptions of evolving technologies for the capture, preservation, and crowdsourcing of data. Michael Moss accurately observes, “The speed of the digital depends in part on the ease with which content can be rendered on the screen, but critically on the tractability of the World Wide Web and associated communication systems.” (p. 2) As social practices are shaped and reshaped by ever more sophisticated digital systems, librarians are repeatedly presented with new opportunities and challenges, which may cause tension between the old and the new. Moss contends that practices developed over centuries are being lost and opposition is opening up between the technologists, open source advocates, and the curatorial professions. Crowdsourcing, which relies on volunteers to populate and build out information sources, is one illustration of this phenomenon and is emerging as a viable approach in a number of areas. The best-known current example is Wikipedia, which deserves the careful attention of information professionals. Likewise, new literacy studies teach us that when literacy, digital environments, and pedagogical knowledge come together in the form of Wikipedia, this new creation cannot be interpreted solely in operational terms. The information produced is fluid and empowers individuals in culturally and context-sensitive ways. David Nicholas and David Clark offer a wealth of evidence that challenges the common assumption that “digital natives” are the most Web-literate. They describe a focus group in which PhD students “could not understand why they had to do all the work in getting something from the library and publishers’ websites,” which suggests that retrieval is just as important as content in today’s information services. (p. 32) Norman Gray posits that the Semantic Web, a group of standards that promote common data formats and exchange protocols on the Web, is a notably simple structure sitting atop the Internet, distributed so that there is no center to the Web. Continually evolving, digital technologies developed for one purpose find surprising new applications in other areas. An example is portable digital technologies, which have become a defining feature of postindustrial work. Understanding the diffusion and utilization of networked information management is necessary to avoid interpreting technological systems as social systems. Scott David and Barbara Endicott-Popovsky suggest that the networked information management challenges of security, privacy, and liability are symptoms of a single condition. (p. 95) Making these systems inherently more resilient and reliable will require more than technology. While Is Digital Different? emphasizes that all of us have changed the way we seek information, it also reminds us that the pervasive presence of digital technologies has not necessarily resulted in improved information seeking, retrieval, and evaluation...

“Nothing Is to Be Preferred to the Work of God”: Cultivating Monastic Detachment for a Postindustrial Work Ethic

Traditional terms for theology of work, including co-creation and vocation, tend to overvalue work, abetting the alienating conditions of postindustrial labor. To develop a theology that can help workers make sense of work’s expansion, abstractness, and precarity, this essay proposes a postindustrial ethic of selective detachment from work. The Benedictine tradition offers a model. According to the Benedictine Rule, monastic work is important as a penitential practice but is strictly circumscribed, with prescriptions to forestall overinvestment in work. By detaching themselves from work, monastics cannot place labor ahead of prayer. In the medieval economy, monastic labor demonstrated work’s role in sanctification. Today, the Benedictine Rule demonstrates the need for worldly ascetical practices that will limit work so it does not inhibit someone seeking holiness.

Rethinking deindustrialisation and male career crisis

The decline in manufacturing and growth of service-based jobs has prompted many social theorists to argue that the ability of working-class men to construct meaningful and rewarding careers is becoming ever more limited. Despite using the universal label ‘working class’, the experience of skilled working-class men has been largely ignored. This article explores 26 work history interviews collected from 14 former Royal Dockyard tradesmen in South-East England and 12 of these men's sons and grandsons. Findings from this research challenge the idea that most men were/and are passive victims of industrial change. By contrast, the majority of men in this study managed to carefully adapt to and navigate the transition from industrial to post-industrial work whilst still retaining a ‘linear life narrative’ to give meaning to their evolving careers and lives.

Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity1

In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter-century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu’s concept of “bureaucratic field” to revise Piven and Cloward’s classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, and contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault’s vision of the “disciplinary society,” David Garland’s account of the “culture of control,” and David Harvey’s characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state, and the cultural trope of “individual responsibility.” This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship.

Applying Workplace Models of Learning in Social Science Computer Labs

Sociologists have made great strides in integrating information and communication technologies (ICTs) into their teaching but have paid less attention to the physical and social settings in which ICTs are often embedded. An increasingly important setting in many social science departments is the computer lab. I present four workplace-based models of learning as a scheme to optimize the learning that can occur in labs. Each of these models is built on a conception of post-industrial work as intensely social and interactive and of learning as “situated, distributed, and activity-based.” The models and the metaphors that these conceptions elicit are formal worker training (the lab as classroom), on-the-job training (the lab as shopfloor), apprenticeship (the lab as guild), and project-based learning (the lab as project setting). I argue for the application of these models in lab settings as a way to prepare students for the changing nature of post-industrial work.

The integration of paid work and the rest of life. Is post‐industrial work the new leisure?

Two current contradictory trends in Britain are (a) increased interest in the integration of work and personal life, including leisure – often termed work‐life balance and (b) blurred work non‐work boundaries. This paper explores a number of explanations for the apparent dominance of paid work in many people's lives and considers whether postindustrial work is becoming indistinguishable from leisure, as an activity of choice and source of enjoyment. Long working hours among workers with most autonomy are often explained in terms of personal choice, but it is argued here that this neglects the gendered, societal and organisational constraints on choice, identity and perceived obligations. The paper concludes that post industrial work cannot simply be considered ‘the new leisure’, but that the relative blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure do pose some important questions for the future. The issues are illustrated by qualitative data from a study of working patterns among Chartered Accountants.

Enacting New Ways of Organizing: Exploring the Activities and Consequences of Post-industrial Work

Our empirical study of an interactive marketing company explores how post-industrial work is constituted through the ongoing daily activities of organizational actors drawing on diverse backgrounds to accomplish project-based work. These actors engage in four types of work practices: negotiating agreements, concurrent designing and building, coordinating across boundaries within the organization, and collaborating with clients. As individuals interact across their occupational differences, new ways of working are both enabled and constrained, resulting in intended and unintended consequences for both individuals and organizations.

Skill saturation: Rationalization and post-industrial work

The last few decades in the United States have witnessed an exponential rise of information technologies in production and work. Advanced information systems have not only been adopted by all sectors of the economy in terms of usage and investment;1 they have also triggered a qualitative shift in skill requirements and work experience. This study focuses on the changing structures of work skills, seeking to develop a normative hinge for a better understanding and evaluation of skills. The term "information technologies" may refer to a number of developments such as telephones, computers, microprocessor-based products, integrated telecommunications, and even to genetic engineering.2 As my intent in this article is to explore work skills, I limit its usage to imply technologies that require the worker to interact chiefly with electronic text and graphics, whether to control heavy machines or compose a business document.