Results by title
9 books match the query 'Labour'
Cultural Crowdfunding
Platform Capitalism, Labour and GlobalizationVincent Rouzé
University of Westminster Press, 2019
This new book analyses the strategies, usages and wider implications of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms in the culture and communication industries that are reshaping economic, organizational and social logics. Platforms are the object of considerable hype with a growing global presence. Relying on individual contributions coordinated by social media to finance cultural production (and carry out promotional tasks) is a significant shift, especially when supported by morphing public policies, supposedly enhancing cultural diversity and accessibility.
The aim of this book is to propose a critical analysis of these phenomena by questioning what follows from decisions to outsource modes of creation and funding to consumers. Drawing on research carried out within the ‘Collab’ programme backed by the French National Research Agency, the book considers how platforms are used to organize cultural labour and/or to control usages, following a logic of suggestion rather than overt injunction. Four key areas are considered: the history of crowdfunding as a system; whose interests crowdfunding may serve; the implications for digital labour and lastly crowdfunding’s interface with globalization and contemporary capitalism. The book concludes with an assessment of claims that crowdfunding can democratize culture.
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Labour and Partition
The Belfast Working Class 1905-1923Austen Morgan
Pluto Press, 1987
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Labour and the Challenges of Globalization
What Prospects for Transnational Solidarity?Andreas Bieler, Ingemar Lindberg and Devan Pillay
Pluto Press, 2008
This book examines the main challenges facing the world labor force and possible responses from trade unions.
The working classes across the world are feeling the effects of globalization and the race to the bottom that it encourages. Core jobs for workers in the developed world are being outsourced to countries where pay and conditions are terrible and union membership is often forbidden. Much of the work of the world economy is now taking place in a burgeoning informal sector, making worldwide organization of labor very difficult.
Case studies from 11 different countries, including China, Germany, Canada and South Africa, illustrate what is happening and show how workers and trade unions can successfully adapt to the neoliberal world.
The working classes across the world are feeling the effects of globalization and the race to the bottom that it encourages. Core jobs for workers in the developed world are being outsourced to countries where pay and conditions are terrible and union membership is often forbidden. Much of the work of the world economy is now taking place in a burgeoning informal sector, making worldwide organization of labor very difficult.
Case studies from 11 different countries, including China, Germany, Canada and South Africa, illustrate what is happening and show how workers and trade unions can successfully adapt to the neoliberal world.
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Labour, Nature and Capitalism
Exploring Labour-Environmental Conflicts in Kerala, IndiaSilpa Satheesh
University College London, 2025
In the fight for environmental justice, who speaks for the working class? A look at the uneasy alliance between labor and industry in Kerala.
Set against the industrial belt of Eloor-Edayar, Labour, Nature and Capitalism investigates the uneasy tensions between trade unions and environmental movements in Kerala, complicating the celebrated “Kerala Model” of development. Through ethnographic research and document analysis, Silpa Satheesh studies how capitalist interests shape and divide movements that appear to share common ground. The book challenges the simplistic “environment versus development” binary, depicting how industrial labor and grassroots environmental activism frequently find themselves at odds, despite both being embedded in struggles for justice.
By foregrounding the lived experiences of movement actors and examining the ideological fractures that emerge in postcolonial capitalism, Satheesh provides a much-needed intervention into debates on labor and ecology in the Global South. This interdisciplinary work is particularly valuable for scholars and activists working at the intersection of environmental justice and working-class mobilization, shedding light on the possibilities and limits of solidarity in the fight for just transitions.
Set against the industrial belt of Eloor-Edayar, Labour, Nature and Capitalism investigates the uneasy tensions between trade unions and environmental movements in Kerala, complicating the celebrated “Kerala Model” of development. Through ethnographic research and document analysis, Silpa Satheesh studies how capitalist interests shape and divide movements that appear to share common ground. The book challenges the simplistic “environment versus development” binary, depicting how industrial labor and grassroots environmental activism frequently find themselves at odds, despite both being embedded in struggles for justice.
By foregrounding the lived experiences of movement actors and examining the ideological fractures that emerge in postcolonial capitalism, Satheesh provides a much-needed intervention into debates on labor and ecology in the Global South. This interdisciplinary work is particularly valuable for scholars and activists working at the intersection of environmental justice and working-class mobilization, shedding light on the possibilities and limits of solidarity in the fight for just transitions.
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Networks, Labour and Migration Among Indian Muslim Artisans
Thomas Chambers
University College London, 2020
Networks, Labour and Migration Among Indian Muslim Artisans provides an ethnography of life, work, and migration in a North Indian Muslim-dominated woodworking industry. It traces artisanal connections within the local context, during migration within India, and to the Gulf, examining how woodworkers utilize local and transnational networks, based on identity, religiosity, and affective circulations, to access resources, support, and forms of mutuality. However, the book also illustrates how liberalization, intensifying forms of marginalization and incorporation into global production networks have led to spatial pressures, fragmentation of artisanal labor, and forms of enslavement that persist despite geographical mobility and connectedness. By working across the dialectic of marginality and connectedness, Thomas Chambers thinks through these complexities and dualities by providing an ethnographic account that shares everyday life with artisans and others in the industry.
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Rethinking the Youth Question
Education, Labour, and Cultural StudiesPhil Cohen
Duke University Press, 1999
Phil Cohen is a founding scholar in the study of British youth subculture and a key figure at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. In Rethinking the Youth Question, essays representing twenty years of Cohen’s work—beginning in 1969—are presented together for the first time. Some of these essays have not previously been published, others have been difficult to locate, and together they provide a precise conceptual history of the development of British cultural studies and a thoughtful contemplation of the significance of the entire cultural studies enterprise.
With a preface that contextualizes Cohen’s essays for an American audience, Rethinking the Youth Question reflects his tenure as a community organizer and activist in inner-city London and includes ethnographic, theoretical, and historical studies of Britain’s urban youth. Cohen offers an enlightening analysis of British educational policy, develops historical and structural accounts of generational and gendered divisions of labor, and discusses such topics as racism and the rise of the New Right. Also exploring broader questions such as the theoretical and sociological significance of youth as a category, this book is a model of useful methodology and engaged cultural reflection.
With empirical research that combines biographical, autobiographical, critical, cultural, and social elements, Rethinking the Youth Question is sure to impact debates surrounding the pedagogical value of cultural studies and the nature and future of this field in both the United States and Britain. This collection will be informative reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, sociologists, and others interested in the category of youth.
With a preface that contextualizes Cohen’s essays for an American audience, Rethinking the Youth Question reflects his tenure as a community organizer and activist in inner-city London and includes ethnographic, theoretical, and historical studies of Britain’s urban youth. Cohen offers an enlightening analysis of British educational policy, develops historical and structural accounts of generational and gendered divisions of labor, and discusses such topics as racism and the rise of the New Right. Also exploring broader questions such as the theoretical and sociological significance of youth as a category, this book is a model of useful methodology and engaged cultural reflection.
With empirical research that combines biographical, autobiographical, critical, cultural, and social elements, Rethinking the Youth Question is sure to impact debates surrounding the pedagogical value of cultural studies and the nature and future of this field in both the United States and Britain. This collection will be informative reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, sociologists, and others interested in the category of youth.
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The Labour of Spirit
Massimo Cacciari
Seagull Books, 2025
A provocative examination of the fate of autonomous, creative labor under capitalism.
Between 1917 and 1919, Max Weber delivered two lectures titled Die geistige Arbeit als Beruf, which we might translate as The Labour of Spirit as Vocation. This weighty formula represented the hope that animated the world of bourgeois culture from the likes of Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, and Hegel and would later form the earliest threads of revolutionary thought from Feuerbach and Marx. The “labor of spirit” is creative, autonomous labor—human labor understood in its fully effectual power. To press for its realization is to liberate all activity from the condition of commanded or alienated work. But the dissolution of the labor of spirit into the capitalist form of production, into the universal machinism that swallows up that science which remains the true engine of development, also ends up delegitimating political authority, whose own foundation lies in the “promise of liberation.”
Massimo Cacciari takes up old questions and confronts them anew: Is the “iron cage” fated to imprison that “labor of spirit” that is political praxis? Will the spirit of capitalism end up completely undermining the space of the political? Or are relations between science and politics still thinkable that might free us from our “debt” as we proceed without means or ends within the techno-economic system?
Between 1917 and 1919, Max Weber delivered two lectures titled Die geistige Arbeit als Beruf, which we might translate as The Labour of Spirit as Vocation. This weighty formula represented the hope that animated the world of bourgeois culture from the likes of Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, and Hegel and would later form the earliest threads of revolutionary thought from Feuerbach and Marx. The “labor of spirit” is creative, autonomous labor—human labor understood in its fully effectual power. To press for its realization is to liberate all activity from the condition of commanded or alienated work. But the dissolution of the labor of spirit into the capitalist form of production, into the universal machinism that swallows up that science which remains the true engine of development, also ends up delegitimating political authority, whose own foundation lies in the “promise of liberation.”
Massimo Cacciari takes up old questions and confronts them anew: Is the “iron cage” fated to imprison that “labor of spirit” that is political praxis? Will the spirit of capitalism end up completely undermining the space of the political? Or are relations between science and politics still thinkable that might free us from our “debt” as we proceed without means or ends within the techno-economic system?
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The Politics of Solidarity
Privatisation, Precarious Work and Labour in South AfricaCarmen Ludwig
Campus Verlag, 2019
Politics of Solidarity explores the transformation of public services in post-apartheid South Africa and the effects of privatization in three cities: Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni, and Cape Town. Drawing on extensive qualitative fieldwork, Carmen Ludwig sheds light on local conflicts on the provision of public services and on trade union strategies that cope with rising public-private partnerships. In the face of persistent social inequality and the rise of precarious work, Ludwig asks how trade unions can create solidarity in fragmented workforces and bridge the gap between permanent workers and those on the margins in the workplace and society. Politics of Solidarity offers insights into the changing world of municipal work, the struggles of precarious workers and more broadly, on the labor dynamics of contemporary South Africa.
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Transit States
Labour, Migration and Citizenship in the GulfOmar AlShehabi
Pluto Press, 2014
The states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar) form the largest destination for labour migration in the global South. In all of these states, however, the majority of the working population is composed of temporary, migrant workers with no citizenship rights.
The cheap and transitory labour power these workers provide has created the prodigious and extraordinary development boom across the region, and neighbouring countries are almost fully dependent on the labour markets of the Gulf to employ their working populations. For these reasons, the Gulf takes a central place in contemporary debates around migration and labour in the global economy.
This book attempts to bring together and explore these issues. The relationship between ‘citizen’ and ‘non-citizen’ holds immense significance for understanding the construction of class, gender, city and state in the Gulf, however too often these questions are occluded in too scholarly or overly-popular accounts of the region. Bringing together experts on the Gulf, Transit States confronts the precarious working conditions of migrants in a accessible, yet in-depth manner.
The cheap and transitory labour power these workers provide has created the prodigious and extraordinary development boom across the region, and neighbouring countries are almost fully dependent on the labour markets of the Gulf to employ their working populations. For these reasons, the Gulf takes a central place in contemporary debates around migration and labour in the global economy.
This book attempts to bring together and explore these issues. The relationship between ‘citizen’ and ‘non-citizen’ holds immense significance for understanding the construction of class, gender, city and state in the Gulf, however too often these questions are occluded in too scholarly or overly-popular accounts of the region. Bringing together experts on the Gulf, Transit States confronts the precarious working conditions of migrants in a accessible, yet in-depth manner.
[more]