Nicolas Jounin’s undercover immersive fieldwork takes the reader on a postal worker’s route, one week before his office was reorganized—when he had only a week’s seniority.
Slowness is no mere lack of speed, but rather the highest degree of resistance to a world that is spiraling out of control and trying to drag people into an endless race towards acceleration.
China managed to maintain a certain amount of economic activity during the lockdown, but at what cost and under what conditions? This article highlights the regime’s use of the media alongside the political and market logics specific to China.
The excesses of globalisation, including labour exploitation and environmental degradation in global industries, are often seen as the result of a lack of rules. Tim Bartley shows that these rules exist and overlap—they are just failing because they ignore the context in which they operate.
Are intelligent machines attacking human labor? In his study of the digital labor hiding behind the promises of automation and robots, Antonio Casilli notably argues that social media constitute a form of unpaid work.
Could craftwork, which is too often denigrated, be a model not only for intellectual life, but also for reforming contemporary forms of work? This is the position of a young lawyer and philosopher who took a professional detour by learning the carpenter’s trade.
Free labour takes a wide variety of forms today: charity work, civic service, internships, digital labour… Taking as her starting point the teachings on domestic labour put forward by feminists many years ago, the sociologist Maud Simonet provides an updated analysis of these contemporary forms of exploitation.
The term ‘logistics’ refers to work connected to warehouses: storage, order packing, handling etc. These activities, which are often too arduous to be carried out over the long term, now structure the condition of the working classes and their career paths.
Has the digital economy definitively made the main tools of Marxist analysis obsolete? This is Mariano Zukerfeld’s argument, in a lively essay that suggests rethinking the critique of capitalism around the question of knowledge rather than labour. However, his demonstration lacks a convincing theory of value.
Given the large number of social transfers that already exist in France, would a basic income provide a more efficient way of fighting poverty? To do so, it would have to be set high and supplement existing forms of social protection. On these grounds, Clément Cadoret questions this idea’s financial and political feasibility.
During the Belle Époque, the women who took on “men’s work” – doctors, journalists, and lawyers, but also coach drivers and postal workers – met with incredulity, hilarity, and more generally hostility. Postcards began to spread as a medium during the rise of early feminism and offer a striking representation of these reactions.
André Gorz’s multiform thought is entirely centred on liberation: from work, which prevents individuals from thriving; from consumption, which grows ever higher; and from the social system, which reduces individuals to mere pawns in a “megamachine”.
Why has the right to workplace representation been historically denied to millions of employees in the United States? In his highly original history of the category of “employee,” Jean-Christian Vinel lays bare the political stakes embedded in this term. In this way, he fills an important gap in the social history of the United States.
Bruno Trentin’s last book, which has just come out in French, fifteen years after it was published in Italy and five years after his death, explores the failure of the European left to respond to the jobs crisis of the final decades of the 20th century. Will the modern-day left succeed in forging a new nexus between citizens’ rights and workers’ rights?
How can we explain the fact that Northern European countries are remaining relatively untouched by the current crisis? Are the Norwegian, Swedish and Danish social democracies homogenous? Yohann Aucante outlines the various factors that created the Scandinavian-style welfare state and industrial democracy, while assessing the influence they have on the rest of Europe.
This essay analyzes the major strike that occurred at the Nanhai Honda factory in Guangdong province in 2010, as well as subsequent strikes that followed its example. It traces the evolution of strike dynamics in China from the early 2000s to the present. One trend stands out in particular: a shift from law consciousness to rights consciousness.
Sociologist Bénédicte Zimmerman’s empirical studies of employer groups and participative management reveals how the tension that exists between the individual and the collective is being reshaped in today’s flexible organizations. “Flexicurity” is not a mere word. And freedom at work is not just a matter of autonomy.
Historians of business have looked at the development of railroads in the U.S. as a time of “managerial revolution.” Richard White’s latest book shows the role played by disorder and sheer contingency in this process, and runs counter to a view of economic modernity as the history of a rationalization. Business, in his view, was never just business.
In this interview, Michele Lamont explains different facets of her intellectual work. She comments on the cultural sociology she practices and on her urge to both understand how individuals make their lives meaningful and how to make sociology meaningful.
Is work in itself a bad thing? Not at all, according to Michel Lallement, who uses a fine brush to paint an ideology-free portrait of the various forms taken by work today in response to economic changes and management strategies.
For the Dutch, the French social model seems particularly generous. However, no real comparison is possible if the facts are taken out of context. The understanding of the Dutch proverb ‘To live like God in France’ changes somewhat when we consider Antoine Bevort’s investigation of the differences between social relations in France and in the Netherlands.
The RSA (Active Solidarity Income) is supposed to reduce poverty by one third between now and 2012. It is based on the observation that work doesn’t pay enough to keep some people out of poverty. But the reform is based on certain implicit assumptions. According to Hélène Périvier, the problem is not so much inadequate pay as lack of jobs, underemployment, and the numerous problems faced by people without jobs.
Ex-philosopher Matthew Crawford celebrates the virtues of manual labor, lamenting the alienation that he argues is inherent in ostensibly intellectual occupations. Crawford is convinced that only manual work is truly intelligent, and he challenges current educational policies while arguing for a rediscovery of the value of hands-on activity.
Transformations of work disrupt family time. Relying on a rigorous statistical approach, Laurent Lesnard draws attention to the consequences produced in family life by the turmoil of atypical working hours. While his demonstration of this phenomenon is convincing, his interpretation of it is more questionable.
Domestic chores and paid work are unequally distributed between men and women. Elena Stancanelli shows that the taxation system has an impact on the allocation of chores between spouses. Joint taxation system discourages wives who earn much less than their husbands from working. Moving to a separate taxation system would tend to equalize the time devoted to professional activities and domestic work between spouses.
In the USA, husbands are on average two years older than their wives. When people born during a baby boom are ready to get married, there are more women on the “marriage market” than men, their bargaining power is consequently lower. According to Shoshana Grossbard, cyclical variations of the labour force participation of women could thus be explained by demographic conditions on the “marriage market”.
The collective work edited by Duncan Gallie addresses a key issue: can the quality of employment be compared at international level? The authors narrow employment quality down to five dimensions, bringing the quantitative tools available in Europe to bear.
