Rethinking the concept of labour

Narotzky, Susana

doi:10.1111/1467-9655.12797

Cited by 35 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 51 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Building upon authors including Bear (2015), Shever (2012) and Ho (2009), we conceptualize capitalist political economies as enacted through relationships and concepts of self, family and community. In this understanding, expectations of kinship, gender and class shape, mediate and mitigate labour markets (Narotzky 2018 andMcNamara 2019). We place unions within this anthropological literature, showing how they enable the relationships and moral projects that made someone a 'worker'.…”

Section: Union Relationships Economic Anthropology and The Anthropolmentioning

confidence: 96%

Introduction—trade unions in times of austerity and development

McNamara

Spyridakis

2020

Dialect Anthropol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This special issue seeks to understand how unions resist and are reshaped as they confront global capital and neoliberal austerity. It was born out of panels at the annual conferences of European Association of Social Anthropologists and the American Anthropology Association and through ongoing conversations about the similarities and differences between the challenges unions face from austerity in the Global North and from Global South aspirations for national 'development'. The papers explore unions' interactions with 'actually existing neoliberalisms', where the state and other actors express extreme faith in markets as policy devices, and in the superior efficiency of the private sector (Rizzo 2017). We describe unions responding to the growing criticism (from the right) that they imped the economic growth that would assist all of society and (from the left) that they represent a privileged and increasingly irrelevant minority of workers. While we explore unions' attempts to dispute these narratives, our special issue is equally invested in detailing how unionism is re-constructed inside a community and, through this, how unions respond to, and co-create, legal, economic and cultural structures. In analysing how unionism shapes and responds to economic practices and workplace subjectivities, we foreground that the obligations and entitlements of being a 'unionist' and a 'worker' are negotiated through intra-community expectations and political histories. We therefore link unions to recent breakthroughs in the anthropological study of capitalism, where political economies are enacted through sociality and subjectivity (cf. Bear et al. 2015 andHann andParry 2018). Unionism is only beginning to be analysed using this framework, yet we show that unions are crucial to the concepts of self and relationships that shape and enable intra-national capitalisms (c.f. Kasmir 2014 and Lazar 2017). We explore how unions guide and respond to what it means to be a miner, steelworker or longshoreman, while simultaneously influencing what it means to be Zambian, Congolese, Greek or Dialectical Anthropology

show abstract

Section: Union Relationships Economic Anthropology and The Anthropolmentioning

confidence: 96%

Introduction—trade unions in times of austerity and development

McNamara

Spyridakis

2020

Dialect Anthropol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Such an anthropological analysis of ‘labour’ offers insight into some of the moral politics shaping enduring practices and shifting flashpoints in the emergent localities, economies and socialities forged out of multi‐scalar dynamics involved in artisanal gold production in Tonkolili district. Such a focus usefully shows how such practices are entwined with differential valuations of human activities, generating ‘distinctions [that] come to shape what counts as proper work, and affect the value of the work, not least in terms of what is and what is not legible and/or recognized by the state’ (Harvey and Krohn‐Hansen, 2018: 16; see also Narotsky, 2018).…”

Section: On the Moral Politics Of Artisinal Mining Women And Labour:mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Moral Politics of Gendered Labour in Artisanal Mining in Sierra Leone

Rutherford¹

2020

Development and Change

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Drawing on current anthropological approaches to labour, this article examines some of the moral politics mobilized around women and artisanal mining in policy-inflected scholarship with reference to particular gold mining zones in Tonkolili district, Sierra Leone. In so doing, the article proposes that such a focus on labour not only allows one to appreciate how sentiments concerning (im)proper behaviour infuse wider policy proposals to amend social arrangements in regard to what is called 'artisanal mining', but it also offers insight into some of the enduring moral politics helping to constitute women as 'family workers' in the actual artisanal gold mining zones. The article suggests that examining the overlapping moral politics constituting women's labour practices provides a more supple understanding of the contested economic possibilities for women in this livelihood practice.

show abstract

“…22 The 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath have made apparent that "the capitalist system seems to have no use for an increasing number of people, either as labor, consumers, or rent providers." 23 Under these conditions, waged work has become a "melancholic object of desire," 24 an object of affective attachment predicated on a misrecognition of the stability of a previous era. 25 Waste work, however, offers a valuable reminder that disposability is not simply a metaphor.…”

Section: Surplus Populations and Surplus Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Labor Laid Waste: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Waste Work

Doherty

Brown

2019

Inter. Labor Working-Class Hist.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Waste studies brings to labor history a suite of conceptual tools to think about precarious labor, human capital, migration, the material quality of labor in urban and rural infrastructures, and the porosity and interchangeability of workers’ bodies in the toxic environments in which they labor. In this introduction, we explore the conceptual insights that the study of waste offers for the field of labor history, and what, in turn, a focus on labor history affords to social science research on waste. We examine the relationship between surplus populations and surplus materials, the location of waste work at the ambiguous fulcrum of trash and value, and the significance of labor for the understanding of infrastructure.

show abstract

Rethinking the concept of labour

Cited by 35 publications

References 51 publications

Introduction—trade unions in times of austerity and development

Introduction—trade unions in times of austerity and development

The Moral Politics of Gendered Labour in Artisanal Mining in Sierra Leone

Labor Laid Waste: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Waste Work

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About