Download or read book Organizing at the Margins written by Jennifer Jihye Chun and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-11 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The realities of globalization have produced a surprising reversal in the focus and strategies of labor movements around the world. After years of neglect and exclusion, labor organizers are recognizing both the needs and the importance of immigrants and women employed in the growing ranks of low-paid and insecure service jobs. In Organizing at the Margins, Jennifer Jihye Chun focuses on this shift as it takes place in two countries: South Korea and the United States. Using comparative historical inquiry and in-depth case studies, she shows how labor movements in countries with different histories and structures of economic development, class formation, and cultural politics embark on similar trajectories of change. Chun shows that as the base of worker power shifts from those who hold high-paying, industrial jobs to the formerly "unorganizable," labor movements in both countries are employing new strategies and vocabularies to challenge the assault of neoliberal globalization on workers' rights and livelihoods. Deftly combining theory and ethnography, she argues that by cultivating alternative sources of "symbolic leverage" that root workers' demands in the collective morality of broad-based communities, as opposed to the narrow confines of workplace disputes, workers in the lowest tiers are transforming the power relations that sustain downgraded forms of work. Her case studies of janitors and personal service workers in the United States and South Korea offer a surprising comparison between converging labor movements in two very different countries as they refashion their relation to historically disadvantaged sectors of the workforce and expand the moral and material boundaries of union membership in a globalizing world.
Download or read book The Symbolic Politics of Labor written by Jennifer Jee Hae Chun and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Slow Anti Americanism written by Edward Schatz and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Negative views of the United States abound, but we know too little about how such views affect politics. Drawing on careful research on post-Soviet Central Asia, Edward Schatz argues that anti-Americanism is best seen not as a rising tide that swamps or as a conflagration that overwhelms. Rather, "America" is a symbolic resource that resides quietly in the mundane but always has potential value for social and political mobilizers. Using a wide range of evidence and a novel analytic framework, Schatz considers how Islamist movements, human rights activists, and labor mobilizers across Central Asia avail themselves of this fact, thus changing their ability to pursue their respective agendas. By refocusing our analytic gaze away from high politics, he affords us a clearer view of the slower-moving, partially occluded, and socially embedded processes that ground how "America" becomes political. In turn, we gain a nuanced appreciation of the downstream effects of US foreign policy choices and a sober sense of the challenges posed by the politics of traveling images. Most treatments of anti-Americanism focus on politics in the realm of presidential elections and foreign policies. By focusing instead on symbols, Schatz lays bare how changing public attitudes shift social relations in politically significant ways, and considers how changing symbolic depictions of the United States recombine the raw material available for social mobilizers. Just like sediment traveling along waterways before reaching its final destination, the raw material that constitutes symbolic America can travel among various social groups, and can settle into place to form the basis of new social meanings. Symbolic America, Schatz shows us, matters for politics in Central Asia and beyond.
Download or read book The Book in Movement written by Magalí Rabasa and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2019-05-08 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past two decades, Latin America has seen an explosion of experiments with autonomy, as people across the continent express their refusal to be absorbed by the logic and order of neoliberalism. The autonomous movements of the twenty-first century are marked by an unprecedented degree of interconnection, through their use of digital tools and their insistence on the importance of producing knowledge about their practices through strategies of self-representation and grassroots theorization. The Book in Movement explores the reinvention of a specific form of media: the print book. Magalí Rabasa travels through the political and literary underground of cities in Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile to explore the ways that autonomous politics are enacted in the production and circulation of books.
Download or read book Cognitive Capitalism written by Yann Moulier-Boutang and published by Polity. This book was released on 2011 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that we are undergoing a transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism - what the author calls & lsquo; cognitive capitalism & rsquo;
Download or read book Organizing at the Margins written by Jennifer Jihye Chun and published by ILR Press. This book was released on 2011-01-15 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The realities of globalization have produced a surprising reversal in the focus and strategies of labor movements around the world. After years of neglect and exclusion, labor organizers are recognizing both the needs and the importance of immigrants and women employed in the growing ranks of low-paid and insecure service jobs. In Organizing at the Margins, Jennifer Jihye Chun focuses on this shift as it takes place in two countries: South Korea and the United States. Using comparative historical inquiry and in-depth case studies, she shows how labor movements in countries with different histories and structures of economic development, class formation, and cultural politics embark on similar trajectories of change. Chun shows that as the base of worker power shifts from those who hold high-paying, industrial jobs to the formerly "unorganizable," labor movements in both countries are employing new strategies and vocabularies to challenge the assault of neoliberal globalization on workers' rights and livelihoods. Deftly combining theory and ethnography, she argues that by cultivating alternative sources of "symbolic leverage" that root workers' demands in the collective morality of broad-based communities, as opposed to the narrow confines of workplace disputes, workers in the lowest tiers are transforming the power relations that sustain downgraded forms of work. Her case studies of janitors and personal service workers in the United States and South Korea offer a surprising comparison between converging labor movements in two very different countries as they refashion their relation to historically disadvantaged sectors of the workforce and expand the moral and material boundaries of union membership in a globalizing world.
Download or read book The Work of Nations written by Robert B. Reich and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is no longer such a thing as an American economy, say Robert Reich at the beginning of this brilliant book. What does it mean to be a nation when money, goods, and services know no borders? What skills will be the most valuable in the coming century? And how can our country best ensure that all its citizen have a share in the new global economy? Robert B. Reich, the widely respected and bestselling author of The Next American Frontier and The Resurgent Liberal, defines the real challenge facing the United States in the 21st century in this trail-blazing book. Original, readable, and vastly informed, The Work of Nations is certain to set a standard for the next generation of policy-makers.
Download or read book An Empire of Touch written by Poulomi Saha and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today’s world of unequal globalization, Bangladesh has drawn international attention for the spate of factory disasters that have taken the lives of numerous garment workers, mostly young women. The contemporary garment industry—and the labor organizing pushing back—draws on a long history of gendered labor division and exploitation in East Bengal, the historical antecedent of Bangladesh. Yet despite the centrality of women’s labor to anticolonial protest and postcolonial state-building, historiography has struggled with what appears to be its absence from the archive. Poulomi Saha offers an innovative account of women’s political labor in East Bengal over more than a century, one that suggests new ways to think about textiles and the gendered labors of their making. An Empire of Touch argues that women have articulated—in writing, in political action, in stitching—their own desires in their own terms. They produce narratives beyond women’s empowerment and independence as global and national projects; they refuse critical pronouncements of their own subjugation. Saha follows the historical traces of how women have claimed their own labor, contending that their political commitments are captured in the material objects of their manufacture. Her analysis of the production of historical memory through and by the bodies of women spans British colonialism and American empire, anticolonial nationalism to neoliberal globalization, depicting East Bengal between development economics and postcolonial studies. Through a material account of text and textile, An Empire of Touch crafts a new narrative of gendered political labor under empire.
Download or read book Radical Space written by Margaret Kohn and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Epoch-making political events are often remembered for their spatial markers: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the storming of the Bastille, the occupation of Tiananmen Square:. Until recently, however, political theory has overlooked the power of place. In Radical Space, Margaret Kohn puts space at the center of democratic theory. Kohn examines different sites of working-class mobilization in Europe and explains how these sites destabilized the existing patterns of social life, economic activity, and political participation. Her approach suggests new ways to understand the popular public sphere of the early twentieth century.This book imaginatively integrates a range of sources, including critical theory, social history, and spatial analysis. Drawing on the historical record of cooperatives, houses of the people, and chambers of labor, Kohn shows how the built environment shaped people's actions, identities, and political behavior. She illustrates how the symbolic and social dimensions of these places were mobilized as resources for resisting oppressive political relations. The author shows that while many such sites of resistance were destroyed under fascism, they created geographies of popular power that endure to the present.
Download or read book Understories written by Jake Kosek and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-08 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively, engaging ethnography that demonstrates how a volatile politics of race, class, and nation animates the infamously violent struggles over forests in the U.S. Southwest.
Download or read book The Politics of Social Inclusion and Labor Representation written by Heather Connolly and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Politics of Social Inclusion and Labor Representation, Heather Connolly, Stefania Marino, and Miguel Martínez Lucio compare trade union responses to immigration and the related political and labour market developments in the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The labor movement is facing significant challenges as a result of such changes in the modern context. As such, the authors closely examine the idea of social inclusion and how trade unions are coping with and adapting to the need to support immigrant workers and develop various types of engagement and solidarity strategies in the European context. Traversing the dramatically shifting immigration patterns since the 1970s, during which emerged a major crisis of capitalism, the labor market, and society, and the contingent rise of anti-immigration sentiment and new forms of xenophobia, the authors assess and map how trade unions have to varying degrees understood and framed these issues and immigrant labor. They show how institutional traditions, and the ways that trade unions historically react to social inclusion and equality, have played a part in shaping the nature of current initiatives. The Politics of Social Inclusion and Labor Representation concludes that we need to appreciate the complexity of trade-union traditions, established paths to renewal, and competing trajectories of solidarity. While trade union organizations remain wedded to specific trajectories, trade union renewal remains an innovative, if at times, problematic and complex set of choices and aspirations.
Download or read book The Third Way written by Anthony Giddens and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-29 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of finding a 'third way' in politics has been widely discussed over recent months - not only in the UK, but in the US, Continental Europe and Latin America. But what is the third way? Supporters of the notion haven't been able to agree, and critics deny the possibility altogether. Anthony Giddens shows that developing a third way is not only a possibility but a necessity in modern politics.
Download or read book Building Power from Below written by Carolina Bank Muñoz and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story that involves as its main players "workers" and "Walmart" does not usually have a happy ending for labor, so the counternarrative offered by Building Power from Below is must reading for activists and union personnel as well as scholars. In 2008 Walmart acquired a controlling share in a large supermarket chain in Santiago, Chile. As part of the deal Walmart had to accept the unions that were already in place. Since then, Chilean retail and warehouse workers have done something that has seemed impossible for labor in the United States: they have organized even more successful unions and negotiated unprecedented contracts with Walmart. In Building Power from Below, Carolina Bank Muñoz attributes Chilean workers’ success in challenging the world’s largest corporation to their organizations’ commitment to union democracy and building strategic capacity. Chilean workers have spent years building grassroots organizations committed to principles of union democracy. Retail workers’ unions have less structural power, but have significant associational and symbolic power. Their most notable successes have been in fighting for respect and dignity on the job. Warehouse workers by contrast have substantial structural power and have achieved significant economic gains. While the model in Chile cannot necessarily be reproduced in different countries, we can gain insights from the Chilean workers’ approaches, tactics, and strategies.
Download or read book Celebrity written by Milly Williamson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a truism to suggest that celebrity pervades all areas of life today. The growth and expansion of celebrity culture in recent years has been accompanied by an explosion of studies of the social function of celebrity and investigations into the fascination of specific celebrities. And yet fundamental questions about what the system of celebrity means for our society have yet to be resolved: Is celebrity a democratization of fame or a powerful hierarchy built on exclusion? Is celebrity created through public demand or is it manufactured? Is the growth of celebrity a harmful dumbing down of culture or an expansion of the public sphere? Why has celebrity come to have such prominence in today’s expanding media? Milly Williamson unpacks these questions for students and researchers alike, re-examining some of the accepted explanations for celebrity culture. The book questions assumptions about the inevitability of the growth of celebrity culture, instead explaining how environments were created in which celebrity output flourished. It provides a compelling new history of the development of celebrity (both long-term and recent) which highlights the relationship between the economic function of celebrity in various media and entertainment industries and its changing social meanings and patterns of consumption.
Download or read book The Labor of Luck written by Jeff Sallaz and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A rich and compelling comparative study of a rapidly growing and little-studied global industry. Sallaz offers an extremely clever and provocative account that is sure to stimulate a lot of debate among scholars."—Ruth Milkman, University of California, Los Angeles and author of L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement "A tremendous tour de force. It is astonishing in its scope, ranging effortlessly from the minutiae of shop floor life to the heights of comparative national political and economic history, from breezily personal (and often amusing) to a brilliant reconstruction of social theory."—Steven Henry Lopez, Ohio State University and author of Reorganizing the Rust Belt: An Inside Study of the American Labor Movement
Download or read book State of Crisis written by Zygmunt Bauman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we hear much talk of crisis and comparisons are often made with the Great Depression of the 1930s, but there is a crucial difference that sets our current malaise apart from the 1930s: today we no longer trust in the capacity of the state to resolve the crisis and to chart a new way forward. In our increasingly globalized world, states have been stripped of much of their power to shape the course of events. Many of our problems are globally produced but the volume of power at the disposal of individual nation-states is simply not sufficient to cope with the problems they face. This divorce between power and politics produces a new kind of paralysis. It undermines the political agency that is needed to tackle the crisis and it saps citizens’ belief that governments can deliver on their promises. The impotence of governments goes hand in hand with the growing cynicism and distrust of citizens. Hence the current crisis is at once a crisis of agency, a crisis of representative democracy and a crisis of the sovereignty of the state. In this book the world-renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and fellow traveller Carlo Bordoni explore the social and political dimensions of the current crisis. While this crisis has been greatly exacerbated by the turmoil following the financial crisis of 2007-8, Bauman and Bordoni argue that the crisis facing Western societies is rooted in a much more profound series of transformations that stretch back further in time and are producing long-lasting effects. This highly original analysis of our current predicament by two of the world’s leading social thinkers will be of interest to a wide readership.
Download or read book To Joy My Freedom written by Tera W. Hunter and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta--the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south--in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post-Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception--and at the heart--of the new south.
