A state of limbo: the politics of waiting in neo‐liberal Latvia

Abstract

This article presents an ethnographic study of politics of waiting in a post-Soviet context.While activation has been explored in sociological and anthropological literature as a neo-liberal governmental technology and its application in post-socialist context has also been compellingly documented, waiting as a political artefact has only recently been receiving increased scholarly attention. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a state-run unemployment office in Riga, this article shows how, alongside activation, state welfare policies also produce passivity and waiting. Engaging with the small but developing field of sociological literature on the politics of waiting, I argue that, rather than interpreting it as a clash between 'neo-liberal' and 'Soviet' regimes, we should understand the doublemove of activation and imposition of waiting as a key mechanism of neo-liberal biopolitics. This article thus extends the existing theorisations of the temporal politics of neo-liberalism.

Waiting for the state: Gender, citizenship and everyday encounters with bureaucracy in India

“…Sociological scholarship has described long-term waiting as 'prolonged' or 'chronic' time, spanning months, years, lifetimes or even generations. 'Chronic' waiting has been explored within un/employment (Axelsson et al, 2015;Ferguson, 2006;Jeffrey, 2010;Jeffrey and Young, 2012;Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald, 2016), migration (Conlon, 2011;Harney, 2014), asylum seeking (Griffiths, 2014;Rotter, 2015;Turnbull, 2015), prison release (Foster, 2016) and marriage (Ramdas, 2012). Here, waiting is often sustained by imagined futures or aspirations which enable tolerance of short to medium term precariousness (Cross, 2014;Jeffrey and Young, 2012) with the wait itself often experienced as 'lost' or 'dead' time (Jeffrey, 2008: 956).…”

Re‐learning to labour? ‘Activation Works’ and new politics of social assistance in the case of Slovak Roma

“…Similarly to cases in other ethnographies on waiting (Auyero ; Hage ; Ozolina‐Fitzgerald ), the long‐term unemployed AW workers were imagined as having plenty of time on their hands and were often made to wait for various reasons before being assigned tasks for the day. Somewhat ironically, making the long‐term unemployed participants keep time was one of the important aspects defined within the AW programme, though occasionally this was maintained to rather extreme degrees.…”

“…More generally, as Narotzky (: 180) argues, this moral(izing) shift towards personal responsibility and the entrepreneurial self of the worker can be seen as one of the constitutive aspects of flexible capitalism in general. In her ethnography of an unemployment office in Riga, Ozolina‐Fitzgerald () shows how the politics of activation and of waiting coexist and operate as a key mechanism of neoliberal biopolitics.…”

Dioquis: Being without doing in the migrant agricultural labor process

“…While those with less power have long been made to wait (Schwartz, 1975), technology and structural transformations – from algorithmic platforms structuring gig work to corporate scheduling software – have created new configurations of temporal domination (Reid, 2013). Neoliberal policies push the poor to wait for basic state services (Auyero, 2012, Ozolina-Fitzgerald, 2016). In the urban US emergency room, race and gender intersect to determine how staff apply criminal stigma to subject certain individuals to longer periods of waiting unrelated to medical indicators (Lara-Millán, 2014).…”