Download or read book Anthropologies of Unemployment written by Jong Bum Kwon and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropologies of Unemployment offers accessible, theoretically innovative, and ethnographically rich examinations of unemployment in rural and urban regions across North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The diversity of case studies demonstrates that unemployment is a pressing global phenomenon that sheds light on the uneven consequences of free-market ideologies and policies. Economic, social, and cultural marginalization is common in the lives of the unemployed, but their experience and interpretation are shaped by local and national cultural particularities. In exploring those differences, the contributors to this volume employ recent theoretical innovations and engage with some of the more salient topics in contemporary anthropology, such as globalization, migration, youth cultures, bureaucracy, class, gender, and race. Taken together, the chapters reveal that there is something new about unemployment today. It is not a temporary occurrence, but a chronic condition. In adjusting to persistent, longstanding unemployment, people and groups create new understandings of unemployment as well as of work and employment; they improvise new forms of sociality, morality, and personhood. Ethnographic studies such as those found in Anthropologies of Unemployment are crucial if we are to understand the broader forms, meanings, and significance of pervasive economic insecurity and discover the emergence of new social and cultural possibilities.
Download or read book The Liminal Worker written by Manos Spyridakis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Liminal Worker examines the experience of work, employment, employment insecurity and precariousness in a context of high unemployment and welfare state crisis in modern Greece. A theoretically-informed, anthropological exploration of the notion of work in contemporary western society and its relation to processes of political decision making, this book challenges the mainstream conception of work as an economic or purely productive activity, presenting a comparative analysis of work as a social phenomenon. Drawing on original empirical research, it explores the key themes of the transformation, experience, meaning and narrative of work and its relation to attendant social policies. A unique examination of the complicated experience of work and labour relations within power systems, institutions and organisations, as well as the reactions and survival strategies of ordinary actors facing precariousness in their daily existence, The Liminal Worker elaborates upon the notion of the anthropology of work and investigates the connection between ethnographic data (and its critical analysis) and the formation of policy. As such, it will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, policy makers and geographers concerned with questions of work, labour relations and policy formation.
Download or read book Work and Livelihoods written by Susana Narotzky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Society for the Anthropology of Work book prize 2017 This volume presents a global range of ethnographic case studies to explore the ways in which - in the context of the restructuring of industrial work, the ongoing financial crisis, and the surge in unemployment and precarious employment - local and global actors engage with complex social processes and devise ideological, political, and economic responses to them. It shows how the reorganization and re-signification of work, notably shifts in the perception and valorization of work, affect domestic and community arrangements and shape the conditions of life of workers and their families.
Download or read book The Magic City written by Gregory Pappas and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty-two million Americans have lost jobs because of permanent factory closings since 1970. Gregory Pappas here provides an intimate account of the economic, social, psychological, and medical consequences of one such closing. Once known as "the magic city" of economic opportunity, Barberton, Ohio, is an industrial working-class town of second- and third-generation factory workers. When the Seiberling tire plant in Barberton was closed in 1980, over 1200 jobs were eliminated. Drawing on extensive research, including surveys and interviews with workers laid off by the closing, Pappas offers an incisive analysis of their responses to unemployment. Pappas first details the ways in which the unemployed rubber workers have met their economic needs in the face of declining income. He next evaluates their success in reentering the labor market, as he examines the job-hunting process, the unemployment insurance system, and workers' initiatives toward retraining and relocation. Turning to the psychological effects of the shutdown on workers and their families, Pappas describes unemployed workers' responses to the loss of status, identity, participation in the community, and sense of time. He next considers central historical questions, offering an explanation of the contemporary rise in unemployment and analyzing the prior development of this community that must now bear the burden of change. Two detailed portraits document the adaptations of individuals to the shutdown and explore the complex relationship between social change and personality.
Download or read book Critical Times in Greece written by Dimitris Dalakoglou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-20 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together new anthropological research on the Greek crisis. With a number of contributions from academics based in Greece, the book addresses a number of key issues such as the refugee crisis, far-right extremism and the psychological impact of increased poverty and unemployment. It provides much needed ethnographic contributions and critical anthropological perspectives at a key moment in Greece’s history, and will be of great interest to researchers interested in the social, political and economic developments in southern Europe. It is the first collection to explore the impact of this period of radical social change on anthropological understandings of Greece.
Download or read book Being Unemployed in Northern Ireland written by Leo Howe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-10-18 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a major ethnography of unemployment and the first community-based book on contemporary unemployment in the United Kingdom.
Download or read book Viral Loads written by Lenore Manderson and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon the empirical scholarship and research expertise of contributors from all settled continents and from diverse life settings and economies, Viral Loads illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic, and responses to it, lay bare and load onto people’s lived realities in countries around the world. A crosscutting theme pertains to how social unevenness and gross economic disparities are shaping global and local responses to the pandemic, and illustrate the effects of both the virus and efforts to contain it in ways that amplify these inequalities. At the same time, the contributions highlight the nature of contemporary social life, including virtual communication, the nature of communities, neoliberalism and contemporary political economies, and the shifting nature of nation states and the role of government. Over half of the world’s population has been affected by restrictions of movement, with physical distancing requirements and self-isolation recommendations impacting profoundly on everyday life but also on the economy, resulting also, in turn, with dramatic shifts in the economy and in mass unemployment. By reflecting on how the pandemic has interrupted daily lives, state infrastructures and healthcare systems, the contributing authors in this volume mobilise anthropological theories and concepts to locate the pandemic in a highly connected and exceedingly unequal world. The book is ambitious in its scope – spanning the entire globe – and daring in its insistence that medical anthropology must be a part of the growing calls to build a new world.
Download or read book The Magic City written by Gregory Pappas and published by . This book was released on with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Unknotting the Heart written by Jie Yang and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-25 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the mid-1990s, as China has downsized and privatized its state-owned enterprises, severe unemployment has created a new class of urban poor and widespread social and psychological disorders. In Unknotting the Heart, Jie Yang examines this understudied group of workers and their experiences of being laid off, "counseled," and then reoriented to the market economy. Using fieldwork from reemployment programs, community psychosocial work, and psychotherapy training sessions in Beijing between 2002 and 2013, Yang highlights the role of psychology in state-led interventions to alleviate the effects of mass unemployment. She pays particular attention to those programs that train laid-off workers in basic psychology and then reemploy them as informal "counselors" in their capacity as housemaids and taxi drivers. These laid-off workers are filling a niche market created by both economic restructuring and the shortage of professional counselors in China, helping the government to defuse intensified class tension and present itself as a nurturing and kindly power. In reality, Yang argues, this process creates both new political complicity and new conflicts, often along gender lines. Women are forced to use the moral virtues and work ethics valued under the former socialist system, as well as their experiences of overcoming depression and suffering, as resources for their new psychological care work. Yang focuses on how the emotions, potentials, and "hearts" of these women have become sites of regulation, market expansion, and political imagination.
Download or read book Timepass written by Craig Jeffrey and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-16 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social and economic changes around the globe have propelled increasing numbers of people into situations of chronic waiting, where promised access to political freedoms, social goods, or economic resources is delayed, often indefinitely. But there have been few efforts to reflect on the significance of "waiting" in the contemporary world. Timepass fills this gap by offering a captivating ethnography of the student politics and youth activism that lower middle class young men in India have undertaken in response to pervasive underemployment. It highlights the importance of waiting as a social experience and basis for political mobilization, the micro-politics of class power in north India, and the socio-economic strategies of lower middle classes. The book also explores how this north Indian story relates to practices of waiting occurring in multiple other contexts, making the book of interest to scholars and students of globalization, youth studies, and class across the social sciences.
Download or read book The Liminal Worker written by Manos Spyridakis and published by Ashgate Publishing Company. This book was released on 2013 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Liminal Worker examines the experience of work, employment, employment insecurity and precariousness in a context of high unemployment and welfare state crisis in modern Greece. A theoretically-informed, anthropological exploration of the notion of work in contemporary western society and its relation to processes of political decision making, this book challenges the mainstream conception of work as an economic or purely productive activity, presenting a comparative analysis of work as a social phenomenon. Drawing on original empirical research, it explores the key themes of the transformation, experience, meaning and narrative of work and its relation to attendant social policies.
Download or read book The Laziness Myth written by Christine Jeske and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When people cannot find good work, can they still find good lives? By investigating this question in the context of South Africa, where only 43 percent of adults are employed, Christine Jeske invites readers to examine their own assumptions about how work and the good life do or do not coincide. The Laziness Myth challenges the widespread premise that hard work determines success by tracing the titular "laziness myth," a persistent narrative that disguises the systems and structures that produce inequalities while blaming unemployment and other social ills on the so-called laziness of particular class, racial, and ethnic groups. Jeske offers evidence of the laziness myth's harsh consequences, as well as insights into how to challenge it with other South African narratives of a good life. In contexts as diverse as rapping in a library, manufacturing leather shoes, weed-whacking neighbors' yards, negotiating marriage plans, and sharing water taps, the people described in this book will stimulate discussion on creative possibilities for seeking the good life in and out of employment, in South Africa and elsewhere.
Download or read book Unemployment and Poverty in Brazil written by Neil Turner and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2012-12-21 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2012 in the subject Ethnology / Cultural Anthropology, grade: none, , language: English, abstract: Brazil has been struggling with the challenges of unemployment, job inequality, insufficient income from labor and poverty for the past three decades. Although the 1990s and early 2000s showed some economic recovery, raising the expectations that living conditions would be better, conditions have improved very slowly and in some areas worsened. This paper seeks to present an overview of labor market performance in Brazil, how inequality interacts with insufficient income and more specifically its impact and relationship to poverty. It reviews policies and initiatives within a socio-economic context undertaken to address these concerns and the distributional impact of these issues. This paper will also provide analysis of labor trends relative to the challenges of working Brazilian families, issues related to the deterioration of employment conditions, and suggest improvements relative to Brazil’s social, economic and cultural transformation.
Download or read book A Company of One written by Carrie M. Lane and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being laid off can be a traumatic event. The unemployed worry about how they will pay their bills and find a new job. In the American economy's boom-and-bust business cycle since the 1980s, repeated layoffs have become part of working life. In A Company of One, Carrie M. Lane finds that the new culture of corporate employment, changes to the job search process, and dual-income marriage have reshaped how today's skilled workers view unemployment. Through interviews with seventy-five unemployed and underemployed high-tech white-collar workers in the Dallas area over the course of the 2000s, Lane shows that they have embraced a new definition of employment in which all jobs are temporary and all workers are, or should be, independent "companies of one." Following the experiences of individual jobseekers over time, Lane explores the central role that organized networking events, working spouses, and neoliberal ideology play in forging and reinforcing a new individualist, pro-market response to the increasingly insecure nature of contemporary employment. She also explores how this new perspective is transforming traditional ideas about masculinity and the role of men as breadwinners. Sympathetic to the benefits that this "company of one" ideology can hold for its adherents, Lane also details how it hides the true costs of an insecure workforce and makes collective and political responses to job loss and downward mobility unlikely.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Organizations written by Susan Wright and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents and analyses the latest anthropological work on the development and management of organizations, examining practical problems which anthropology can help to solve.
Download or read book Ethnographies of Deservingness written by Jelena Tošić and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-08-12 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claims around 'who deserves what and why' moralise inequality in the current global context of unprecedented wealth and its ever more selective distribution. Ethnographies of Deservingness explores this seeming paradox and the role of moralized assessments of distribution by reconnecting disparate discussions in the anthropology of migration, economic anthropology and political anthropology. This edited collection provides a novel and systematic conceptualization of Deservingness and shows how it can serve as a prime and integrative conceptual prism to ethnographically explore transforming welfare states, regimes of migration, as well as capitalist social reproduction and relations at large.
Download or read book Hunters Gatherers and Practitioners of Powerlessness written by Tomasz Rakowski and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The socio-economic transformations of the 1990s have forced many people in Poland into impoverishment. Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness gives a dramatic account of life after this degradation, tracking the experiences of unemployed miners, scrap collectors, and poverty-stricken village residents. Contrary to the images of passivity, resignation, and helplessness that have become powerful tropes in Polish journalism and academic writing, Tomasz Rakowski traces the ways in which people actively reconfigure their lives. As it turns out, the initial sense of degradation and helplessness often gives way to images of resourcefulness that reveal unusual hunting-and-gathering skills.
