1st Edition
Work and Livelihoods History, Ethnography and Models in Times of Crisis
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.
1. Work and Livelihoods: an Introduction Victoria Goddard
Section I - Past, Present and Future: Generations in Times of Crisis
2. Lost Generations? Unemployment, Migration and New Knowledge Regimes in Post EU Poland Frances Pine
3. Credentialism and Recommendations: The Bases of the Reproduction of the Metallurgical Working Class in Contemporary Argentina Laura Perelman and Patricia Vargas
4. Continuity and Disruption: the Experiences of Work and Employment Across Three Generations of Steelworkers in Volta Redonda Gonzalo Díaz Crovetto
Section II - Continuities and Discontinuities
5. Postfordist Work Organization and Daily Life from a Gender Perspective: the Case of FIAT-SATA in Melfi Fulvia D’Aloisio
6. Profession, Masculinity, and Identity: Biographical Crisis of British and German Steelworkers in Comparison Vera Trappmann
7. Employment Precariousness and Social Reproduction in the Shipbuilding Industry of Piraeus Manos Spyridakis
Section III - Lives of Worth
8. Regimes of Value and Worthlessness: How Two Subaltern Stories Speak Don Kalb
9. Post-industrial Landscape. Space and Place in the Personal Experiences of Residents of the Former Working-class Estate of Ksawera in Będzin Kazimiera Wódz and Monika Gnieciak
Section IV - The Politics of Resistance
10. Workers and Populism in Slovakia Juraj Buzalka and Michaela Ferencová
11. ‘A Trojan Horse in our Midst’: The Saturn Plant and the Disorganization of Autoworkers in the US Sharryn Kasmir
12. Getting by Beyond Work, or the Intertwining of Production and Reproduction among Heavy Industry Workers and their Families in Ferrol, Spain Irene Sabaté Muriel
Afterword - Making Difference: Concluding Comments on Work and Livelihoods Susana Narotzky
Biography
Victoria Goddard is Senior Lecturer and National Teaching Fellow at the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths.
Susana Narotzky is professor of Social Anthropology at the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.
"Should anyone be interested in recent ethnographies of the working class, political ecology, anthropology of space and place, extractive industries, post-socialism and understanding precarity and informal workers’ networks, this volume is indispensable." - Imola Püsök, University of Pécs, American Anthropological Association