Book•
The New Spirit of Capitalism
01 Jan 2005-
TL;DR: A century after the publication of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism, a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.
Abstract: A century after the publication of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism, a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.
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Dissertation•
01 Jan 2013TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that there was a strongly normative image of work constructed around an orientation I term "consumption of work", where constant acquisition, development and selling of skills were necessary to maintain a position in the labour market.
Abstract: Unemployment and precarity have become key features of 21st century work. Employability is presented as a solution to these issues. Individuals are exhorted to manage their employability, in order to be able to exercise choice in the labour market. While employability is individualsʼ responsibility, governments, employers and educational bodies simply provide opportunities for its development.
Higher education is a key site for this process, as employability rhetoric increasingly informs policy and practice. It is founded on rhetoric that emphasises flexibility, skills and marketability, shaping students in certain ways with the risk of being deemed unemployable as the consequence of disengagement.
At the same time, there has been a rise in employer presence on university campuses. Recruitment is no longer its key feature. Traditional ʻmilkroundʼ recruitment has been replaced by year round marketing campaigns. As a result, students are continually exposed to a selection of employers promoting a specific image of work and work orientations.
The theoretical framework of this study is informed by works of Antonio Gramsci and Mikhail Bakhtin. Gramsciʼs notion of ʻcommon senseʼ is central to analysing the rhetoric on work and employability present on campus. I also give voice to students by recounting how they as ʻdialogical selvesʼ engage with such ʻcommon senseʼ. These issues are explored through an analysis of data gathered during seventeen months of fieldwork. This includes longitudinal interviews with students, participant observation, documents, interviews with careers advisors and non-participant observation of career consultations. From this, I argue that there was a strongly normative image of work constructed around an orientation I term ʻconsumption of workʼ. This image was closely associated with consumption opportunities, marketed to students through corporate presence on campus. ʻConsumption of workʼ was central to shaping studentsʼ work orientations and only few of them resisted the ʻcommon senseʼ. Those who made ʻalternativeʼ choices articulated doubt about these, with the challenge to employability as a key reason for it. Employability was presented to students as a lifelong project of the self, where constant acquisition, development and selling of skills were necessary to maintain a position in the labour market. Many students embraced the rhetoric of skill ʻpossessionʼ, but were ʻplaying the gameʼ when ʻdemonstratingʼ skills. Conforming to what the employers were willing them to ʻdemonstrateʼ and understanding how to do this became the primary condition for achieving employability.
21 citations
Cites background from "The New Spirit of Capitalism"
...The same holds for managerial literature, which did not offer any mechanisms to estimate employability or see whether it was increasing or diminishing (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005/1999)....
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...…and social exclusion have been highlighted for different social groups, e.g. age (Nielsen, 1999), social 48 background (Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Morley, 2001), gender (Morley, 2001; Nielsen, 1999; Smetherham, 2006), disability (Chapman, 2009; Morley, 2001) and…...
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...It can hardly be measured whether employability has risen or fallen (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005)....
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...As a result, skills become the ʻinstrumentationʼ of employability (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005: 386)....
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...The notion of skills was presented as the ʻinstrumentationʼ of employability, with each new skill acquired or developed contributing to oneʼs employability (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005: 386)....
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Journal Article•
21 citations
TL;DR: Azais et al. as mentioned in this paper discuss the effects of Activation Measures on Disadvantaged Jobseekers' Rights and Obligations in Denmark, Finland and Sweden, and propose a merging Labour Policy Agenda.
Abstract: Contents: Christian Azais: Introduction. Labour and Employment in a Globalising World - Liana Carleial: The Brazilian Labour Market. Structural Features, "New" Flexibilisation and Recent Performance - Paul Van Aerschot: The Effects of Activation Measures on Disadvantaged Jobseekers' Rights and Obligations in Denmark, Finland and Sweden - Olivier Giraud: Implementing the New Swiss Employment Policies in the Context of Globalisation - Paola Cappellin: Entrepreneur Associations and Trade Unions. Towards a Merging Labour Policy Agenda? - Jacques Perrat: Territorialised Industrial Policies and New Spatial Divisions of Labour. What is at Stake for Socio-economic Actors? - Patrick Dieuaide: Autonomy, General Working Capacity and Collective Action - Cinara L. Rosenfield: Informational Worker Autonomy. Freedom or Control? - Christian Azais: Subordination or Autonomy? The Hybridisation of the Labour Market. The Italian case - Laima Seksnyte-Sappington: New Organisational Realities. Individualisation and Atomisation in the Organisation of 'Second Modernity' - Christoph Henning: Limits of Fulfilment in an Age of Flexibility. Changes in Management Semantics and the Critique of Capitalism - Georgina Murray/David Peetz: Ideology Down Under and the Shifting Sands of Individualism - Kerstin Wustner: Public Sectors Becoming a Flexible Labour World. Consequences for the Employees - Donna Kesselman: Postface.
21 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors introduce a new concept, democracy-driven governance, to refer to efforts by social movements to invent new, and reclaim and transform existing, spaces of participatory governance and shape them to respond to citizens' demands.
Abstract: Scholars of participatory democracy have long noted dynamic interactions and transformations within and between political spaces that can foster (de)democratisation. At the heart of this dynamism lie (a) the processes through which top‐down “closed” spaces can create opportunities for rupture and democratic challenges and (b) vice‐versa, the mechanisms through which bottom‐up, open spaces can be co‐opted through institutionalisation. This paper seeks to unpick dynamic interactions between different spaces of participation by looking specifically at two forms of participatory governance, or participatory forms of political decision making used to improve the quality of democracy. First, Mark Warren's concept of ‘governance‐driven democratization’ describes top‐down and technocratic participatory governance aiming to produce better policies in response to bureaucratic rationales. Second, we introduce a new concept, democracy‐driven governance, to refer to efforts by social movements to invent new, and reclaim and transform existing, spaces of participatory governance and shape them to respond to citizens’ demands. The paper defines these concepts and argues that they co‐exist and interact in dynamic fashion; it draws on an analysis of case study literature on participatory governance in Barcelona to illuminate this relationship. Finally, the paper relates the theoretical framework to the case study by making propositions as to the structural and agential drivers of shifts in participatory governance.
21 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors develop a model of change in urban context to map key steps towards changing an institutional logic: How can new ideas that aim at changing the dominant logic become practice in a city?
21 citations
References
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TL;DR: In this paper, a translation of the poem "The Pleasures of Philosophy" is presented, with a discussion of concrete rules and abstract machines in the context of art and philosophy.
Abstract: Translator's Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements Author's Note 1. Introduction: Rhizome 2. 1914: One or Several Wolves? 3. 10,000 BC: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?) 4. November 20th, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics 5. 587BC-AD70: On Several Regimes of Signs 6. November 28th, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs? 7. Year Zero: Faciality 8. 1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?" 9. 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity 10. 1730: Becoming Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming Imperceptible... 11. 1837: Of the Refrain 12. 1227: Treatise on Nomadology - The War Machine 13. 7000BC: Apparatus of Capture 14. 1440: The Smooth and the Striated 15. Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines Notes Bibliography List of Illustrations Index
14,735 citations
5,247 citations
Posted Content•
01 Jan 2012
TL;DR: The 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray as discussed by the authors, and a good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan's economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker's Rule.
Abstract: The 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray. Part of the problem is due to Smith’s "veil of ignorance": individuals unknowingly pursue society’s interest and, as a result, have no clue as to the macroeconomic effects of their actions: witness the Keynes and Leontief multipliers, the concept of value added, fiat money, Engel’s law and technical progress, to name but a few of the macrofoundations of microeconomics. A good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker’s Rule. Very simply, the banks, whose lending determined deposits after Roosevelt, and were a public service became private enterprises whose deposits determine lending. These underlay the great moderation preceding 2006, and the subsequent crash.
3,447 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1967
TL;DR: The Society of the Spectacle as mentioned in this paper is one of the most influential theoretical works for a wide range of political and revolutionary practice in the 1960s, and it has been widely used in the literature since.
Abstract: For the first time, Guy Debord's pivotal work Society of the Spectacle appears in a definitive and authoritative English translation. Originally published in France in 1967, Society of the Spectacle offered a set of radically new propositions about the nature of contemporary capitalism and modern culture. At the same time it was one of the most influential theoretical works for a wide range of political and revolutionary practice in the 1960s. Today, Debord's work continues to be in the forefront of debates about the fate of consumer society and the operation of modern social power. In a sweeping revision of Marxist categories, the notion of the spectacle takes the problem of the commodity from the sphere of economics to a point at which the commodity as an image dominates not only economic exchange but the primary communicative and symbolic activity of all modern societies.Guy Debord was one of the most important participants in the activities associated with the Situationist International in the 1960s. Also an artist and filmmaker, he is the author of Memoires and Commentaires sur la societe du spectacle. A Swerve Edition, distributed for Zone Books.
3,391 citations
Book•
01 Mar 1987
TL;DR: Relevance Lost as mentioned in this paper is an overview of the evolution of management accounting in American business, from textile mills in the 1880s and the giant railroad, steel, and retail corporations, to today's environment of global competition and computer-automated manufacturers.
Abstract: "Relevance Lost" is an overview of the evolution of management accounting in American business, from textile mills in the 1880s and the giant railroad, steel, and retail corporations, to today's environment of global competition and computer-automated manufacturers. The book shows that modern corporations must work toward designing new management accounting systems that will assist managers more fully in their long-term planning. It is the winner of the American Accounting Association's Deloitte Haskins & Sells/Wildman Award Medal. It is also available in paperback: ISBN 0875842542.
3,308 citations