post-Fordism

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pages: 350 words: 110,764

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks

antiwork, basic income, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deskilling, feminist movement, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, low-wage service sector, means of production, Meghnad Desai, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, pink-collar, post-Fordism, post-work, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Shoshana Zuboff, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Struggling only within, rather than also against, the terms of the traditional discourse of work both limits the scope of the demands that are advanced and fails to contest the basic terms of the work society’s social contract. For all their successes, few political movements have managed to confront directly what Weber calls the “social ethic of capitalistic culture” (1958, 54). POST-FORDISM AND THE WORK ETHIC The political and economic developments associated with post-Fordism exert some new pressures on the work ethic. Current trends suggest that our attitudes toward work are of increasing importance to the continued viability of contemporary modes of work and their governance. One could argue that with neoliberal restructuring and the shift in the balance of power between capital and labor that it signals, the coercive inducements to hard work and long hours are often sufficient to deliver manageable workers to the labor market.

CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction: The Problem with Work THE WORK SOCIETY GENDER AT WORK WORK VALUES WORK AND LABOR WORK AND CLASS FREEDOM AND EQUALITY MARXIST FEMINISM REDUX CHAPTER OVERVIEWS Chapter 1: Mapping the Work Ethic THE PRIMITIVE CONSTRUCTION OF SUBJECTIVITIES DEFAMILIARIZING THE WORK ETHIC A “WORLDLY ASCETICISM”: PRODUCTIVISM MEETS CONSUMERISM AUTONOMY AND COMMAND: MANAGING INDEPENDENCE THE WORK ETHIC AND THE LABORING CLASSES RACE, GENDER, AND THE PROPAGATION OF THE WORK ETHIC POST-FORDISM AND THE WORK ETHIC MANAGING POST-FORDIST INDEPENDENCE: BEING PROFESSIONAL CONCLUSION Chapter 2: Marxism, Productivism, and the Refusal of Work MARXISM AND PRODUCTIVISM SOCIALIST MODERNIZATION SOCIALIST HUMANISM HUMANISM REVISITED AUTONOMIST MARXISM THE REFUSAL OF WORK THE ABOLITION OF WORK (AS WE KNOW IT) BETTER WORK OR LESS WORK?

In fact, there are at least two related problems with the analyses from a contemporary perspective. First, whereas these authors arguably succeeded in developing more-complete accounts of the relationship between production and reproduction typical of Fordist political economies than were available elsewhere at the time, these accounts are no longer adequate to the project of mapping post-Fordism. In the classic texts from this period, production and reproduction were associated according to the logic of a dual-systems model with two different spaces: the waged workplace was the site of productive labor, and the household was the site of unwaged, reproductive labor. Reproductive labor in these accounts usually included the forms of unwaged work through which individuals met their daily needs for food, shelter, and care and raised a new generation to take their place.19 However, under the conditions of postindustrial, post-Fordist, and post-Taylorist production, the always vexing exercise of distinguishing between production and reproduction—whether by sphere, task, or relationship to the wage—becomes even more difficult.


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Winner’s case has been contested by scholars who, pointing out that nowadays the bridges are a hindrance to luxury SUV-cars, have stressed the failure of artefacts to affect political outcomes. Bernward Joerges, “Do Politics have Artefacts?” Social Studies of Science, vol. 29, no.3 (1999). 26. For a summary of different positions on post-Fordism, see ed. Ash Amin, Post-Fordism: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Sceptics have objected to the sharp distinction drawn between Fordism and post-Fordism and questioned if there is solid empirical evidence for the periodisation. Andrew Sayer, “Postfordism in Question”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (1989). The qualifications against the theory are valid.

In conclusion, the decision over what the next generation of computer technology will be like is spread out to every computer user. Informated and Automated Production in Post-Fordist Capitalism Marxists tend to use Fordism and post-Fordism to categorise the historical transformation that elsewhere is talked about as the industrial and informational society. The categorisation of Fordism/post-Fordism centres on differences in the labour process, out of which technology is one component.26 Liberal commentators understand Fordism as a period when productivity in society was rapidly increased but with some unfortunate consequences for workers.

They argue that it was not the advancement of science and technology, but the resistance of workers, that spelled the end to Fordism. When workers organised against the old factory regime, Fordism became increasingly costly to keep up. Post-Fordism is a renewed attack on the positions of workers and, in this regard, it is in complete continuance with Fordism. The passing from Fordism to post-Fordism was first noted in the 1970s by a group of Marxist scholars known as the French Regulation School. One of the leading names of the school, Michel Aglietta, characterised the labour process of Fordism as semi-automatic assembly-line production.27 At the time he wrote, managers had come to the conclusion that the strategy of Fordism was failing.


pages: 372 words: 152

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Two FACES OF TECHNOLOGY The End of Work Trickle-down Technology and Market Realities 3. Visions of Techno-Paradise 3 15 42 PART II THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 4. 5. 6. 7. Crossing into the High-Tech Frontier Technology and the African-American Experience The Great Automation Debate Post-Fordism 59 69 81 90 PART III THE DECLINE OF THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE 8. No More Farmers 9. Hanging Up the Blue Collar 10. The Last Service Worker 109 128 141 PART IV THE PRICE OF PROGRESS High-Tech Winners and Losers 12. Requiem for the Working Class 13. The Fate of Nations 4. A More Dangerous World 11. 16 5 181 198 208 PART V THE DAWN OF THE POST-MARKET ERA 15.

Even developing nations are facing increasing technological unemployment as transnational companies build state-of-the-art high-tech production facilities all over the world, letting go millions of laborers who can no longer compete with the cost efficiency, quality control, and speed of delivery achieved by automated manufacturing. In more and more countries the news is filled with talk about lean production, re-engineering, total quality management, post-Fordism, decruiting, and downsizing. Everywhere men and women are worried about their future. The young are beginning to vent their frustration and rage in increasing antisocial behavior. Older workers, caught between a prosperous past and a bleak future, seem resigned, feeling increasingly trapped by social forces over which they have little or no control.

The emerging world of lean management, high-technology production, and global commerce had its beginnings in the mid-lg60s. The ink barely had time to dry on the report issued by the National Commission on Automation, when the world economy began to make its historic shift into the post-Fordist era, laying the organizational groundwork for a workerless future. ·7· Post-Fordism I N THE MID-1960s few Americans were aware of the sweeping changes taking place in management practices inside Japanese companies that would, in less than a generation, force the United States and the world to rethink the very way they do business. In 1965 the United States was the most powerful nation on the face of the earth.


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

On the alienation of emotional labor, see Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 204-41. Hochschild gives statistics of the gender breakdown of jobs that call for emotional labor. 15 This is the primary argument of Doug Henwood, After the New Economy. 16 For an overview of post-Fordism and flexible specialization, see Ash Amin, ed., Post-Fordism: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 17 See Pascal Byé and Maria Fonte, “Is the Technical Model of Agriculture Changing Radically?” in Philip McMichael, ed., The Global Restructuring of Agro-Food Systems (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 241-57. 18 See Michael Flitner, “Biodiversity: Of Local Commons and Global Commodities,” in Michael Goldman, ed., Privatizing Nature: Political Struggles for the Global Commons (London: Pluto, 1998), 144-66. 19 For the U.S.

Beginning in the 1970s, however, the techniques and organizational forms of industrial production shifted toward smaller and more mobile labor units and more flexible structures of production, a shift often labeled as a move from Fordist to post-Fordist production. The small mobile units and flexible structures of post-Fordist production correspond to a certain degree to the polycentric guerrilla model, but the guerrilla model is immediately transformed by the technologies of post-Fordism. The networks of information, communication, and cooperation—the primary axes of post-Fordist production—begin to define the new guerrilla movements. Not only do the movements employ technologies such as the Internet as organizing tools, they also begin to adopt these technologies as models for their own organizational structures.

The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), which first appeared in Chiapas in the 1990s, offers an even clearer example of this transformation: the Zapatistas are the hinge between the old guerrilla model and the new model of biopolitical network structures. The Zapatistas also demonstrate wonderfully how the economic transition of post-Fordism can function equally in urban and rural territories, linking local experiences with global struggles.103 The Zapatistas, which were born and primarily remain a peasant and indigenous movement, use the Internet and communications technologies not only as a means of distributing their communiqués to the outside world but also, at least to some extent, as a structural element inside their organization, especially as it extends beyond southern Mexico to the national and global levels.


pages: 268 words: 112,708

Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

For insightful discussions of other aspects of the Nike phenomenon, refer to J. Ballinger, “Nike in Indonesia,” Dissent (fall 1998): 18–21; L. B. A. Brewer, “There Is No Finish Line: Telling the Nike Story with Signs, Video, and Doorknobs,” Identity (May–June 1995): 44–49; C. L. Cole and A. S. Hribar, “Celebrity Feminism: Nike Style: Post-Fordism, Transcendence, and Consumer Power,” Sociology of Sport Journal 12:4 (1995): 347–69; M. DeMartini, “The Great God Nike: Good or Evil?” Sporting Goods Dealer, March 1997, 34–39; N. K. Denzin, “Dennis Hopper, McDonald’s and Nike,” in Smart, Resisting McDonaldization; M. T. Donaghu and R. Barff, “Nike Just Did It: International Subcontracting and Flexibility in Athletic Footwear Production,” Journal of the Regional Studies Association 24:6 (1990): 537–51; N.

For most of the twentieth century, the commercial mass media played a crucial role in spurring and managing demand for products, through advertising and marketing, in economies prone to overproduction.41 Mass production requires mass consumption, and the media’s job has been to whet the appetite for buying. More recently, economic restructuring—variously theorized as inaugurating a regime of flexible specialization, flexible accumulation, or post-Fordism—has wrought changes in the role of the media in market economies.42 Although there are real differences in how these theories portray the causes, dynamics, and breadth of change, they point to some common features of the current economy that are especially relevant to the rise of the Web. First, the acceleration of economic activity reflects a need to produce and distribute products more quickly, cutting the turnover time between the investment of capital in production and the realization of profits in sales.

Turning to a free search engine rather than a library catalog to look for information turns users’ research into productive activity for the portal, because the search terms entered allow for customizing ads. These targeted ads sell for 50 percent more than general advertising on the Web.47 For example, when I searched the Go Network for articles on “post-Fordism” for this essay, I was greeted with ads for Ford trucks above my search results, because the company has bought this keyword from the portal, either for a 214 The Web flat fee or on a per-ad basis. (Curiously, no one appears to have bought the keywords “Karl Marx” from the Go Network at this time, although a search on these terms did yield an ad that urged me to run my own business.)


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The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

.: Edward Elgar and United Nations University Press. Cooper, James C. (1995) “The new golden age of productivity”, Business Week, September 26: 62. Coriat, Benjamin (1990) L’Atelier et le robot, Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur. —— (1994) “Neither pre- nor post-fordism: an original and new way of managing the labour process”, in K. Tetsuro and R. Steven (eds), Is Japanese Management Post-Fordism?, Tokyo: Mado-sha, p. 182. Council of Economic Advisers (1995) Economic Report to the President of the United States. Transmitted to the Congress, February 1995, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, pp. 95–127. Crick, Francis (1994) The Astonishing Hypothesis: the Scientific Search for the Soul, New York: Charles Scribner.

Organizational Trajectories in the Restructuring of Capitalism and in the Transition from Industrialism to Informationalism The economic restructuring of the 1980s induced a number of reorganizing strategies in business firms.5 Some analysts, particularly Piore and Sabel, argue that the economic crisis of the 1970s resulted from the exhaustion of the mass-production system, constituting a “second industrial divide” in the history of capitalism.6 For others, such as Storper and Harrison,7 the diffusion of new organizational forms, some of which had already been practiced in some countries or firms for many years, was the response to the crisis of profitability in the process of capital accumulation. Others, like Coriat8 suggest a long-term evolution from “Fordism” to “post-Fordism,” as an expression of a “grand transition,” the historical transformation of the relationships between, on the one hand, production and productivity, and, on the other hand, consumption and competition. Still others, like Tuomi,9 emphasize organizational intelligence, organizational learning, and knowledge management as the key elements of new business organizations in the Information Age.

They must be considered separately before proposing their potential convergence in a new kind of organizational paradigm. From mass production to flexible production The first, and broader, trend of organizational evolution that has been identified, particularly in the pioneering work of Piore and Sabel, is the transition from mass production to flexible production, or from “Fordism” to “post-Fordism” in Coriat’s formulation. The massproduction model was based on productivity gains obtained by economies of scale in an assembly-line-based, mechanized process of production of a standardized product, under the conditions of control of a large market by a specific organizational form: the large corporation structured on the principles of vertical integration, and institutionalized social and technical division of labor.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

One of the classic analyses of the Bretton Woods crisis from the perspective of Marx’s theory of money and credit was advanced by Christian Marazzi in his 1976 paper, “Money in the World Crisis” (Marazzi 1995). Marazzi, an economist, is one of several Marxist thinkers who explored the theoretical implications of post-Fordism (Marazzi 2008, 2010). During the 1970s, his work—together with other notable theorists of the Left such as Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and Franco Berardi—was associated with the Italian extraparliamentary movement, Autonomia Operaia (Lotringer and Marazzi 2008).29 Their philosophy was informed by autonomism, i.e., the belief that society’s wealth is the product of collective work that goes unaccounted for; consequently, few of its proceeds are redistributed to workers themselves.

By seeking solutions in austerity, a vicious circle was being reproduced that could only lead back to the same underlying contradictions and ultimately to a “permanent state of international emergency,” in which multinational banks would play the leading role. This state of emergency was a breakdown in the capacity of the state to use money and credit to mediate class relations and thereby maintain its own power. In his recent analyses of post-Fordism and cognitive capitalism, Marazzi has subsequently reconfigured Marx’s distinction between the real economy (where material and immaterial goods are produced and sold) and the monetary–financial economy (where investment and speculation take place). Cognitive capitalism (or the cognitive–cultural economy) refers to the New Economy: high-technology industry, business and financial services, personal services, the media, and e-cultural industries.

For example, money is crucial to the forms of mobility that characterize Empire as Hardt and Negri conceive it. Within Empire, capitalist exploitation is no longer confined to work but extends across the social terrain, embracing not just commodities but “rich and powerful social relationships” (Hardt and Negri 2001: 210). This position is similar to that associated with post-Fordism and put forward by Christian Marazzi, who (like Negri) was closely linked with Autonomia Operaia (see Chapter 2). This position is the view that capitalism has drawn not just economic but also qualitative, social relations into its nexus: as emotional labor, for example. “Empire is the non-place of world production where labour is exploited … The non-place has a brain, heart, torso, and limbs, globally” (Hardt and Negri 2001: 210).


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The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

As infrastructure, a platform's regularity is often guaranteed less by laws than by technical protocols, and this is one of several ways that the sovereign decision is built into the platform's interfacial partitions and surfaces. This kind of intrasystemic standardization was essential to the epochal metatechnologies of industrialization and post-Fordism, revolutionizing the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of massive quantities of identical tangible and intangible items. Because protocols are in place to standardize physical and immaterial properties of integral components and discontiguous manufacturing processes—from the width and direction of grooves in a screw, to the costs of stamps and the nomenclature of international postal zones, longitudinal mean times, cryptographic keys for international monetary transfers, stochastic synchronization of data transfers, and so on—the pace and predictability of industrialization could unfold as it did.6 Artificial standardizations become naturalized as if they were always the measure of things.

Thanks to Josh Taron for making the initial link with stack models. 15.  See also Rem Koolhaas, “Bigness or the Problem of the Large,” in S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995). 16.  In terms of Benjaminian forms of violence, its force is simultaneously “constituent” and “constituted.” 17.  See Galloway, “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism,” Critical Inquiry 39 (2013): 347–366. Here we are amused to learn that “capitalism” uses computation to treat all things as interchangeable data, that certain kinds of “realism” define things according to a flat ontology, and so by analogical transfinite induction, mathematics is thought captured by capital.

Peter Watts, Echopraxia (New York: Tor Books, 2015), tinkers with this inflection quite effectively. 15.  Or consider instead Friedrich Kittler's association of film, the gramophone, and the typewriter with three distinct modes of modern thought. 16.  The ideological position is made in Alexander Galloway, “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism,” Critical Inquiry 39 (2013): 347–366. Aesthetic suspicion of digital systems couched in political suspicion (perhaps also couched in professional anxiety) has also led to awkward schisms in art. See Clare Bishop, “The Digital Divide: Contemporary Art and New Media,” Artforum (September 2012). 17. 


On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World by Timothy Cresswell

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 747, British Empire, desegregation, deskilling, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, global village, illegal immigration, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, moral panic, post-Fordism, Rosa Parks, scientific management, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, urban planning

Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992); Yanarella and Reid, “From ‘Trained Gorilla’ to ‘Humanware’: Repoliticizing the Body-Machine Complex between Fordism and Post-Fordism.” Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoff rey Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 277–318, 298. RT52565_C011.indd 280 3/7/06 9:01:51 PM Notes • 281 16. Yanarella and Reid, “From ‘Trained Gorilla’ to ‘Humanware’: Repoliticizing the Body-Machine Complex between Fordism and Post-Fordism.” 17. Cited in Congressional Record, 63rd Congress, 3d. sess. Vol. 52, no. 69, 4905. 18. Cited in Congressional Record, 63rd Congress, 3d. sess.

For critical accounts of Taylorism, see Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); Bernard Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness (London: Free Association, 1988); Judith A. Merkle, Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Ernest J. Yanarella and Herbert G. Reid, “From ‘Trained Gorilla’ to ‘Humanware’: Repoliticizing the Body-Machine Complex between Fordism and Post-Fordism,” in The Social and Political Body, ed. Theodore Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter (New York: Guilford, 1996), 181–220. Lenin cited in James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 101. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 112.

Cultural Studies 6 (1992): 224–39. Wright, John K. “Terrae Incognitae: The Place of the Imagination in Geography.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 37 (1947): 1–15. Yanarella, Ernest J., and Herbert G. Reid. “From ‘Trained Gorilla’ to ‘Humanware’: Repoliticizing the Body-Machine Complex between Fordism and Post-Fordism.” In The Social and Political Body, edited by Theodore Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter, 181–220. New York: Guilford, 1996. Young, Iris Marion. Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. ————. Justice and the Politics of Difference.


pages: 353 words: 91,211

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, British Empire, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deglobalization, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

Even in the 1960s the superpower USSR made only 1 per cent of the world’s private vehicles, and 12 per cent of commercial ones; in comparison Britain made 10 per cent of the cars, and 9 per cent of the trucks.53 So committed were the Soviets to mass production that they suffered from ‘premature mass production’, the putting into production of not properly tested goods.54 But mass consumption in the richest countries was more typically about the extensive multiplication of firms, styles, types, rapid model change, the pursuit of endless novelty.55 The mass-producing car industry informed a whole understanding of modern production. It was modern industry, the place where the pace was set. The post-war years were labelled with such terms as ‘Fordism’, at least when the mass production of cars in Europe and North America ceased to grow fast from the 1970s. Rapidly expanding Japanese car production became a model for ‘Post-Fordism’. But just as the significance of mass production, or ‘Fordism’, was exaggerated, so were reports of its demise. At the end of the twentieth-century Ford had capacity in Europe to build 2 million cars a year; one factory was making 400,000 Focuses per annum, and another 330,000 Mondeos. In 1996 Volkswagen worldwide turned out over 800,000 Golfs, the car that took over the production record from the Beetle, which itself took over from the Model T.

., The Country Boats of Bangladesh: Social and Economic Development Decision-making in Inland Water Transport (Dhaka: The University Press, 1989). 33. http://www.sewusa.com/Pic_Pages/singerpicpage.htm. 34. Robert C. Post, ‘“The last steam railroad in America”: Shaffers Crossing, Roanake, Virginia, 1958’, Technology and Culture, 44 (2003), p. 565. 35. Tim Mondavi, quoted in Independent, 8 January 2002. 3. Production 1. See Paul Hirst and Jonathan Zeitlin, ‘Flexible specialisation versus Post-Fordism: theory, evidence and policy implications’, Economy and Society, Vol. 20 (1991), pp. 1–56. 2. In the Scandinavian countries, estimates of national income from the interwar years included household production. Duncan Ironmonger, ‘Household Production’, in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Oxford: Elsevier Science, 2001), pp. 9–10. 3.

78–80 lifetime costs 77–8 maintenance 80–82 maintenance and large scale industry 85–7 mass production and the art of car maintenance 82–5 malaria 25–7, 207 Malaya 136, 150–51 Malaya, HMS 93–4 Malaysia 109, 137 Malta 91, 96 Manchester 37 Manhattan Engineer District Project 198, 199 manufacturing electric control 2 mass production 67 working alone 60 Marconi, Guglielmo 193 Marconi Company 116, 131 marketing 71 Marx, Karl 60 Marxism 152 masculine/feminine xii mass production x, xii, 55, 57, 67–72, 105 Mau Mau rebellion 178 Maudslay, Henry 60 mechanical engineering 188 medicine 1, 38, 132, 199 Medvedev, Roy 128 merchant fleet, world 73–4 meritocracy xiv Mesopotamia 76 Messerschmitt, Willy 125 metal, cutting x metal working 4, 62 metallurgy 4, 28 Metaxas, Aloannis 118 micro-electronics 188 micro-organisms, killing of 160, 163 Microsoft 72, 78, 188, 196 microwave oven 57 MiG15 jet aircraft 123, 125 militarism 117, 141, 158 military funding 159 military museums 159 military science 141 military technology x, 141, 142 milling machine 4 Minas Gerais (battleship) 92, 93, 208 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) 186, 196 Mitchell, Billy 141 Mitrione, Dan 157 mobile phones 71, 195 Model A Ford 126 Model AA trucks 126 Model T Ford 44, 54, 60, 69, 70, 82–3, 197, 202 Moldova 207 molecular biology 185 Mondavi 50 Mondavi, Tim 50 Moore, Gordon 203 Morris, Errol 182 Morris meat packers 171 motor cars ix, x, 1, 6, 28, 203 deaths from accidents 27 design costs 188 electric-powered 9, 82 Ford on 114 Ghanaian car repairers 83–5 increased usage 5 Japanese car industry 136 in the long boom 68–70 maintenance and repair 80–82 mass production 68–70 mass production and the art of car maintenance 82–5 modification 97–8 number on US farms 55 petrol-powered 9, 10, 82 production 44, 45 R&D 196–7 reserve technologies 11 in rich households 55 trade in old cars 81 uptake as a new technology 31, 32 motorcycles 43–4, 69 motorisation 2, 6, 22, 32, 69, 111, 141 Mozambique 145 Mr Death (film) 182 Mujahedeen 145 ‘mule’ spinning machines 36–8 mules xi, xiii, 34, 35, 36 Müller, Dr Paul 26 multinationals 129–31 Mumford, Lewis 76, 141 Museum of the Industrial Revolution, Fray Bentos, Uruguay 175 museums 28–9, 38, 104, 139, 159, 164, 175, 207 Mussolini, Benito 118 mustard gas 149, 153, 164 N Nagasaki bomb 15 Nanking, China 179 Napoleon Bonaparte 34, 36 NASA viii, xv, 20–21 National Medal of Technology (US) 170 national technologies 117 nationalisation 115 nationalism 103, 106, 114, 115–16, 122, 137, 140, 180 nations 103–37 Asia and techno-nationalism 136–7 autarchy and things 117–19 foreign technology and socialism in one country 126–9 hydrogenation 119–22 nation, empire, race 131–6, 135 the nation is not everything 122–6, 124 national innovation and national growth 106–113, 107 nations versus firms 129–31 techno-globalism 113–17 techno-nationalism 106 NATO 149 Naxalites 153 Nazis 118, 120, 122, 156, 177 Nene jet engine 123, 125 Nernst, Walter 193 nerve gases 153, 164 Neufeld, Michael 17 neutron bombs 164 new chemical entities (NCEs) 201, 202 ‘new economy’ 52 New Jersey, USS 94 ‘new times’ 52 New Zealand 172 Nicaragua 153 Nikon 158 Ninotchka (film) 101 nitrates 119, 120 nitrogen 119, 120 Nobel prizes, industrial 134, 205 Nobel’s Explosives Company xiv Nokia 196 North America: mass production 105 North Korea 118 North Vietnamese army 152 Norway (cruising ship) 96 nostalgic journals 38 Novartis 188, 196 nuclear physics 158, 185 nuclear power vii, x, 1, 3, 19, 38, 158, 191 nuclear power stations x, 77, 189 nuclear reactors 20, 21 nylon 199 Nystatin 164 O Oak Ridge nuclear factory, USA 198 oil 73 Arab embargo (1973) 122 crisis (1970s) 97 crude 68 synthetic 180 oil-from-coal 120 Omega (square-rigged ship) 95 on-line shopping xiv Operation Ranch Hand 163 Oppau, Germany 119 Oppenheimer, Robert 158, 199 organic foods x, 50 organic movement 50 organophosphates 161, 162–3, 164 Orwell, George 115, 116, 140–41 Nineteen Eighty-four 75 Ottoman Empire 178–9 oxen 35, 36, 207 Oxtrike 1912 P Padua (sailing ship) 95 Pakistan 208 Palestinians 153 paludrine 164 paper-clips 8 Pasteur, Louis 103 patents vii, 134, 164, 186–7, 200 Patriot anti-missile systems 155–6 penicillin 163, 186, 199, 202, 203 Perón, General Juan 94, 118, 124 pervasiveness 5 pesticides 50, 163 petrol engine 3 petroleum production 120, 121, 122 Pfizer 196 pharmaceuticals 196, 201, 202, 203 Philippines 137, 177 Phoenix, USS 94 phosgene 164 photography 111, 130 aerial 143 picana eléctrica 157 pig production 66 Pill, the 1, 22–5, 49, 190 Plate River 170, 172, 173, 175 plutonium 21 bomb 123, 164 Pol Pot regime 182 polio 163 political systems xiv poor countries and innovation 110 lack of maintenance in 79 Popov, Alexander Stepanovitch 103 population cities of the poor world 39–40 European 39 world 39 Porta, Livio Dante 97 Post-Fordism 70 post-modernism 52 poverty cities of the poor world 39–40 new technologies of xi–xii power stations 67–8, 81, 96 Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp engine 88 Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp engine 88 President Péron (liner) 124 pressurised water reactor (PWR) programme 21 procurement policies, nationalistic 117 production 52–74 the agricultural revolution in the long boom 64–6 cars in the long boom 68–70 family farms in the USA and the USSR 62–4 household production 55–8 industry and mass production 67–8 service industries 70–74 the sewing machine and the spinning wheel 58–60 tools and small trades 60–62 productivity slowdown (1970s) 206 proguanil (paludrine) 26 Propliner 38 Prudential Insurance Company 14 public transport 22 Puertollano (Ciudad Real) 121 Pulqui (jet fighter) 124–5 Punjabi lascars 136 Pushkin (Soviet freezer trawler) 167 Q Queen Elizabeth 2, RMS (QE2) 96 Queen Elizabeth, HMS 93, 94 quinine 25 quotas 117 R race, and technology 132–6 racial segregation 132 radar 3, 103, 138, 158, 159, 199 radio ix, xiv, 2, 3, 7, 55, 58, 99, 103, 159, 190, 193, 203 and empires 132 military origin 116 and nationalism 116 Radio Corporation of America 116, 131 RAF (Royal Air Force) 12, 14, 15, 18 railways xi, xiv, 5–6, 19, 113 China 44 diesel locomotives 44, 50, 87 electric locomotives 44 and horses 33 India 96, 134–5 maintenance and repair 86–7 privatisation of British railways 87 spin-off 19 steam locomotives 44, 50, 87, 97, 98, 191 underground trains 96 Raleigh, Sir Walter (20th century) 104 ramjet ix raw materials 73, 118 RCA 130, 131 Reagan, Ronald 94 Red Army 147 refrigerants 211 refrigeration 169–70, 171 Reggio di Calabria, Italy 168 replicas 50 Republic F-24 Thunderjet fighter-bomber 89 research and development (R&D) vii, 105, 108, 109–110, 121–2, 128, 192–8 expenditure 200–202, 203, 204 research organisations 193 research revolution 192, 193 reserve technologies 11 resistance to new technology 9 restaurants, family-owned and run 60 retrogression 207, 208 Rheinau, Germany 120 Rhone Poulenc 196 rice production 64–6, 190 rich-world technology 39 rich/poor xii rickshaws 30, 45–6, 191 rifles civilianisation of war 145–6 G3 assault rifle 145 Kalashnikov 144–5 Lee-Enfield 144 M-1 and variants 144, 189 road materials 10 Roche 196 rockets x, 1, 2, 6, 17–18, 19, 142, 154, 181, 188, 189, 191 Roll Back malaria programme 27 roofing xi, 41–2 Rosing, Boris 130 Royal Dutch Shell 120, 121 Royal Navy 91, 94, 116, 136, 150 rubber 180, 199 Rural Electrification Agency 56 Rwanda 41–2, 182–3 S Sabatier, Henri 119 SAGE project 196 ‘sailing ship effect’ 190 St Mary’s Medical School, London 186 salting plants 170–71 Salvarsan 163 Sandoz 195 Sanger, Margaret 23–4 sanitation: Kenyan ‘flying toilet’ 40 Sao Paulo (battleship) 92 Sarin 164 SASOL company 122 satellites 7 Scapa Flow 149 Schockley, William 195 Schoenberg, Isaac 130–31 Schumacher, E.


Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres by Jamie Woodcock

always be closing, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, David Graeber, emotional labour, gamification, invention of the telephone, job satisfaction, late capitalism, means of production, millennium bug, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, profit motive, scientific management, social intelligence, stakhanovite, technological determinism, women in the workforce

The ‘soul’ is considered ‘in a materialistic way’ as ‘the vital breath that converts biological matter into an animated body’. While ‘industrial exploitation’ dealt with ‘bodies, muscles and arms . . . those bodies would not have any value if they weren’t animated, mobile, intelligent, reactive’. The rise of post-Fordism, on the other hand, ‘takes the mind, language and creativity as its primary tools for the production of value’.19 Although there remains a manual component to the labour process in the call centre – the demand to be at the desk for a set amount of time, the physical interaction with the computer and the headset, the verbalisation of communication at a particular pitch, tone and speed – the key element is mental labour.

R. 145 job insecurity see firing of workers; precarity job quality, measurement of 19 Johnson-Forest Tendency 25, 26, 27, 145–6 Kafka, Franz 6–7 Keynes, John Maynard 116 Kolinko inquiry (Germany) 31–2, 120, 124, 152 labour alienation of 53–9, 88, 137–8 indeterminacy of 3, 68–9, 92–6 intensification of 55, 58–9, 69, 90–2, 116 subsumption of 56, 93–4 see also organisation; resistance laziness 142–3 Lebowitz, Michael 23 Lewig, Kerry 53 liberation management 88 Linheart, Robert 43 management affective dimension as challenge for 8–9, 52–9, 73–80, 89–92, 103, 154–5 computerised Taylorism 49–52 control and 49–52, 93–6 196 Index discipline and punishment 36, 67–8, 72–80, 82–3, 90–1, 93, 148–50 humiliation/infantilisation tactics 3, 8–10, 40, 71, 75–6, 90–1, 125–6 media portrayals of 1–11, 51–2, 60, 152–3 panopticon analogy 80–8, 95–6, 155–6 power abuses 9–11, 65, 70–2, 157 processes and methods 39–40, 42–3, 49, 50, 59, 74–80, 154–7 supervisors, role of 67–72, 68, 84–5, 96 undercover 60–4, 156–7 victimisation of activists 119, 126–7, 131, 132–4, 143 wages of 20–1 see also surveillance Marazzi, Christian 55 Marx, Karl on alienation 56–7 on economic compulsion 100 on exchange 15 on labour and machines 54 on technology 12 workers’ inquiries and 22–4, 27, 30, 150, 164 Marxism anti-work and 145–7 reclaiming of 25–6 sociology and 28–9 Matheron, Francois 31 McKarthy, Kidd 138 McKinlay, Alan 85 media portrayals of call centres The Call Centre (TV show) 1–3, 5–6, 8–11, 51–2, 60, 152–3 Wolf of Wall Street, The (film) 1, 2, 3–4, 9, 10–11, 152–3 meetings buzz sessions 40, 69, 74–6, 105–6, 130–1, 149, 157 ‘1-2-1’ meetings 43, 77–80, 148, 149, 157 mental labour 49–50, 52, 55–9, 155 Metcalf, David 83 migrant workers 138 Miliband, Ralph 143 Miller, Toby 63 Mirchandani, Kiran 19 Mitropoulos, Angela 137 Mohandesi, Salar 24, 26 monitoring see surveillance Mulholland, Kate (framework of) 98–113, 128, 157–60 Negri, Antonio 114, 145 neoliberalism 32–3, 86–8, 136–8, 140, 161 Ness, Immanuel 94, 143 Nev (Wilshire) 1–3, 5–6, 8–11, 51–2, 60, 152–3 Office Space (film) 89–90 Ollman, Bertell 54 ‘1-2-1’ meetings 43, 77–80, 148, 149, 157 Operaismo 145–6, 151, 160 organisation by workers 118–47, 160–2 in author’s inquiry 120–3, 152 challenges for 118–19, 122–3, 135–8, 143, 162 concept of 142–3 at other call centres 123–35, 161–2 potential for 140–4, 160–2 victimisation of activists 119, 126–7, 131, 132–4, 143 see also trade unions outsourcing 17, 18–19 panopticon analogy 80–8, 95–6, 155–6 part-time work 58 pay bonuses 21, 37–8, 39, 69–70, 81, 93 disputes over 128–9 for management 20–1 rates of 37–8 197 Working the Phones peasants 100 Peter Lafargue, Paul 144–5 piecework pay structures 81 political composition of working class 31, 113, 162–3 Pollert, Anna 138 post-Fordism 52, 55, 137–8, 155 power, abuses of 9–11, 65, 70–2, 157 precarity call centre work as 36, 64, 71–2, 82–3, 124 ‘chain workers’ 56, 138, 155 historical context 137, 163 marketing of 139 organisation and 114–15, 124, 135–6, 143, 163–4 presenteeism 88–9 pressure 39–40, 43, 51, 65, 125, 148–9 privatisation 14, 87, 139 profits, drive for role of call centres in 14–15, 32–3 value extraction and 17–18, 50, 55–7, 58–9, 103 public see consumers punishment see discipline and punishment Rawick, George 98–9 reality shows Back to the Floor 62 Benefits Street 153 The Call Centre 1–3, 5–6, 8–11, 51–2, 60, 152–3 Undercover Boss 62–3 recipients of calls see consumers recording of calls 7, 37, 42–3, 59, 66, 82–3, 90–1, 95 recruitment on The Call Centre 9–10 in inquiry 34–9 refusal of work 21, 110–11, 113–17, 119, 144–7, 155, 157–60, 163–4 continuation of after quitting 151, 152 regulators 5–6 research see inquiries resistance 97–117 anti-work 145–7, 160 in author’s inquiry 103–12 collective acts of 44, 48–9, 106, 108, 158 computer technology and 48, 103, 107–9, 127 concept and forms of 98–103, 163–4 refusal of work 21, 110–11, 113–17, 119, 144–7, 155, 157–60, 163–4 continuation of after quitting 151, 152 soldiering 64, 66–7, 92, 158 by supervisors 70 trade unions and 161–2 see also organisation by workers retail sector 140 retention issues see turnover of staff Rieser, Vittorio 28, 151 Roediger, David 146 Roggero, Gigi 98, 113 Roscigno, Vincent J. 112 scientific management see Taylorism Scorsese, Martin see Wolf of Wall Street, The Scott, James C. 100 scripts for calls job quality and 19 role of 49, 59, 66, 93, 96, 103, 154 use of in author’s inquiry 38, 40–2, 45–6, 48, 49, 73–4, 92, 103 service sectors call centres in 16–18 organisation in 102, 125, 140 sexism 9–10, 70–1 Seymour, Richard 136 Simms, Melanie 142 Slammin’ Scammin’ Smokin’ an’ Leavin’ 98–112, 157–60 slavery 146, 160 smile strike 102 smoking areas 128 198 Index social value of call centres 95 Socialisme ou Barbarie (Chaulieu-Montal Tendency) 25, 26–7, 145, 151 sociology 28–9 soldiering 64, 66–7, 92, 158 staff turnover see turnover of staff Stalinism 25, 145–6 Standing, Guy 136 Strangleman, Tim 97 strikes 99, 102, 124–35, 139–40 subsumption of workers 56, 93–4 ‘subterranean stream of resistance’ 100–1, 117, 159 supervisors pay of 69–70 role of 67–72, 68, 84–5, 96 see also management surveillance affective labour and 52–9 call recording 7, 37, 42–3, 59, 66, 82–3, 90–1, 95 computer technology and 17–18, 43–4, 49–52, 51, 64–7, 81–3, 155–6 continual monitoring 39–40, 42–3, 50, 81–4, 155–6 as counterproductive 51, 53 of customers 37 to maximise value extraction 17–18 panopticon analogy 80–8, 95–6, 155–6 undercover managers 60–4, 156–7 see also management Tartanoğlu, Şafak 103 Taylor, Christopher 145, 146, 147, 160 Taylor, Frederick 29, 63–4, 154 Taylor, Phil, on call centres on control 13, 51, 59, 85, 96, 156 on growth of 14, 50 on job quality 112, 154 on organisation 140–1 on unions 118, 161 Taylorism 9, 27, 49–52, 58–9, 96, 146, 154 technical composition of working class 31, 113 technological development 11–15 see also computer technology and control telephone, invention of 12–13 telephone preference service 5 temporary nature of jobs see firing of workers; precarity; turnover of staff Thompson, Paul 93, 119, 139 Trade Union Congress (TUC) 139–40, 143 trade unions inquiries on 26 limitations of 112, 113, 118–19, 127–8, 136, 161 in other service sectors 102, 125, 140 potential for 140–4, 161–2 successes and learnings 131–5 unionisation attempts 47, 123, 127–35 victimisation of activists 119, 126–7, 131, 132–4, 143 see also organisation of workers Tronti, Mario 30, 57, 113, 114 turnover of staff as challenge for worker organisation 119, 162 as problem for call centres 21, 39, 157 as rejection of work 21, 110–11, 114–15, 117, 158–60 TV reality shows Back to the Floor 62 Benefits Street 153 The Call Centre 1–3, 5–6, 8–11, 51–2, 60, 152–3 Undercover Boss 62–3 undercover managers 60–4, 156–7 unionateness 118, 141 199 Working the Phones UNISON, on numbers of call-centre workers 20 van der Linden, Marcel 110–11, 114, 135 victimisation of activists 119, 126–7, 131, 132–4, 143 VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) 66 wages see pay Walter, Sally 140 Wilshire, Nev 1–3, 5–6, 8–11, 51–2, 60, 152–3 Wolf of Wall Street, The (film) 1, 2, 3–4, 9, 10–11, 152–3 women discrimination and sexism 9–10, 70–1 precarity and 138 work to rule 102 workers’ inquiries see inquiries working class composition 30–1, 113, 162–3 working hours management manipulation of 58–9, 71–2, 105, 106–7, 157 modern increase in 55, 116 precarity and 137 worker manipulation of 107–9, 158 Zerzan, John 144 200


pages: 268 words: 75,490

The Knowledge Economy by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, balance sheet recession, business cycle, collective bargaining, commoditize, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, global value chain, information asymmetry, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, means of production, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, post-Fordism, radical decentralization, savings glut, secular stagnation, side project, tacit knowledge, total factor productivity, transaction costs, union organizing, wealth creators

They may make certain regions, and the social and cultural networks that have developed in them, hospitable to the development of today’s insular vanguardism. For example, it has often been observed that pre-Fordist craft production, with its traditions of customized artisanal labor, of apprenticeship, and of dense ties in the local community, generate a setting favorable to the development of the post-Fordist knowledge economy: pre-Fordism favors post-Fordism. And indeed many of the regions where a confined form of the knowledge economy has taken hold, especially among midsized firms, such as Emilia Romagna in Italy, Baden-Württemberg in Germany, and Catalonia in Spain, are places with a long past of craft production. Wherever such a historical sequence stands in the place of wider structural change, guided by a vision of the unrealized potential of the knowledge economy, the most advanced practice of production will exist only in the socially and geographically restricted way that I have called insular vanguardism.

The question presented by these circumstances was whether the whole country would need first to become the São Paulo of the mid-twentieth century in order later to become something else, pining in the purgatory of belated Fordism, or whether it and its government could organize a direct passage from pre- to post-Fordism outside the old industrial centers of the Southeast. The former answer to this question seemed to offer no hope for all the reasons enumerated at the beginning of this section: to retread the earlier path would not achieve the earlier results. But the latter answer seemed to require an accomplishment for which there existed no ready-made model in the world.


pages: 1,015 words: 170,908

Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, late capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois

It would have been content for several 276 P A S S A G E S O F P R O D U C T I O N good reasons: because the natural limits ofdevelopment served it well; because it was threatened by the development ofimmaterial labor; because it knew that the transversal mobility and hybridization ofworld labor power opened the potential for new crises and class conflicts on an order never before experienced. The restructuring of production, from Fordism to post-Fordism, from modernization to postmodernization, was anticipated by the rise ofa new subjectiv- ity.26 The passage from the phase of perfecting the disciplinary regime to the successive phase ofshifting the productive paradigm was driven from below, by a proletariat whose composition had already changed.

New Left Review, no. 132 (1982), 33–47. On the reception ofLipietz’s work among Anglo- American economists, see David Ruccio, ‘‘Fordism on a World Scale: International Dimensions ofRegulation,’’ Review of Radical Political Economics, 21, no. 4 (Winter 1989), 33–53; and Bob Jessop, ‘‘Fordism and Post-Fordism: A Critical Reformulation,’’ in Michael Storper and Allen Scott, eds., Pathways to Industrialization and Regional Development (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 46–69. 20. See, for example, Giovanni Arrighi and John Saul, ‘‘Socialism and Eco- nomic Development in Tropical Africa,’’ in Essays on the Political Economy of Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), pp. 11–43; John Saul, ‘‘Planning for Socialism in Tanzania,’’ in Uchumi Editorial Board, ed., Towards Socialist Planning (Dar Es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1972), pp. 1–29; and Terence Hopkins, ‘‘On Economic Planning in Tropical Africa,’’ Co-existence, 1, no. 1 (May 1964), 77–88.

., 162 298, 314–315, 371–373 police, 12, 17–18, 20, 26, 87; and Roman Republic, 162–163 imperial intervention, 37–39, 189 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 242, 348 political theory, 63, 388 Roosevelt, Theodore, 174–175, 177, Polybius, 163, 166, 314–316, 371 242 posse, 407–411 Rosenzweig, Franz, 377 postcolonialist theories, 137–139, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 85, 87, 303 143–146 royal prerogatives ofsovereignty, post-Fordism, 55, 409–410 38–39, 343, 360 posthuman, 215 postmodernist theories, 137–143 Said, Edward, 125, 146 postmodernity, 64–65, 187, 237 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 129–131 postmodernization, 272, 280–282, Schmitt, Carl, 16, 377–378, 463n6 285–289 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 81–82 poverty, 156–159 secularism, 71–73, 91, 161 Prakash, Gyan, 146 segmentations, social, 336–339 primitive accumulation, 94, 96, service economies, 286–287, 293 256–259, 300, 326 Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph, 101, 104, progressivism, 174–176 113 proletariat, 49–50, 63, 256–257, 402; singularity, 57, 61, 73, 78, 87, 103, defined, 52–53 395–396, 408.


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The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Companies also found novel ways to undercut unions rather than confront them head on, decentralizing and outsourcing production, offering job security for older workers while eliminating jobs for new workers, and increasing technology to replace workers altogether. In the end, they often simply stopped producing things, opting to earn money through the financial markets instead. By the 1990s a different kind of capitalism had emerged, one that scholars have described using various terms: post-Fordism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, late capitalism, and even neoliberalism or globalization. The movements of the 1960s and 1970s persisted, but their radical vision had vastly diminished. People began retelling stories about better times, when people were engaged in a vibrant civil society. As sociologist Francesca Polleta argues, many stories treasured by civil rights activists and progressive scholars—such as those told about the Montgomery bus boycott and Freedom Summer—began to serve a commemorative purpose rather than as a blueprint for changing society.4 Today these stories have even become fodder for the Right: Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin quote Martin Luther King without batting an eyelash.


pages: 265 words: 15,515

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike by Eugene W. Holland

business cycle, capital controls, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, commons-based peer production, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, deskilling, Eben Moglen, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Mumford, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-Fordism, price mechanism, Richard Stallman, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, slashdot, Stuart Kauffman, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wage slave, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Foreign policy based on expropriat­ ing scarce resources around the globe, meanwhile, is perfectly consonant with insistence on the private right to drive a sports utility vehicle; in fact, one function of the Death-State as a “model of realization” for capitalism is precisely to align a psychological compulsion to consume, instilled in subjects since prolonged infancy, with the economic imperative to expand production and consumption in the service of private accumulation—an imperative that, often enough, requires military action abroad to fulfill. In the sphere of production, the situation is more complicated, even if the resulting pattern is more of the same. In the context of global com­ petition and post-Fordism, income guarantees and, more important, job security itself have been drastically curtailed. That is why what T. H. M ar­ shall has famously called “social citizenship” as the “third stage” in the evolution of modern citizenship—bolstered or guaranteed in the last in­ stance by the welfare state—was either not a stage but a variable within an older stage, or if it was a stage, it is now over, for social citizenship itself is steadily getting stripped away.44 At the same time, the State is losing economic sovereignty in the face of a number of institutions and agree­ ments, including, most notoriously, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization but also trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

Axioms involving production ma­ chinery and technology are added, for example, to supplement absolute with relative surplus-value to counteract the tendential fall of the rate of profit; marketing and advertising axioms are added to address crises of realization. Fordism designates a set of axioms that combine both of the preceding with, perhaps surprisingly, axioms of State support for trade unions and income redistribution; post-Fordism designates yet another (neoliberal) regime of axiomatization that subtracts many of the Fordist axioms while adding others. Whatever works: axiomatization is a flexible, experimental, even innovative process revolving around the core axiom that characterizes capitalism—the capture of surplus-value from capitallabor exchange circuits throughout society.113Axiomatization thus emerges from and then revolves around the inaugural conjunction and the ensu­ ing world-historical advent of a society based on abstract labor but is in no way completely determined by it: axiomatization operates by bring­ ing together abstract, quantified factors of production in anticipation of a positive differential return on investment.


pages: 872 words: 135,196

The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security by Deborah D. Avant

barriers to entry, continuation of politics by other means, corporate social responsibility, failed state, Global Witness, hiring and firing, independent contractor, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, operational security, Peace of Westphalia, post-Fordism, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, The Nature of the Firm, trade route, transaction costs

The term neomedievalism comes from Bull, Anarchical Society, pp. 254–55. Cerny, “Neomedievalism, Civil War and the New Security Dilemma,” p. 40. Others have noted this trend for a variety of reasons. See, for instance, George Steinmetz, “The State of Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism: Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism,” Public Culture Vol. 15, No. 2 (2003); Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, “The Imperial Peace: Democracy, Force and Globalization,” European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1999): 403–34. Conclusion 263 do the mechanisms reinforce one another, etc.?). Those actors that play roles as consumers, standard setters, and legitimators are likely to have influence over both the structure of the market and its organizational ecology.

., Millennial Reflections on International Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). Starr, Paul, “The Case for Skepticism,” in William T. Gormley, Jr., ed., Privatization and Its Alternatives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Steinmetz, George, “The State of Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism: toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism,” Public Culture Vol. 15, No. 2 (2003). Stephen, Chris, “Doing it for Love,” New Statesman and Society Vol. 5 (10 January 1992), 184. Stern, Seth, “Contractors Hover in Gray Area Regarding Legal Liability,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report (8 May 2004). Stetz, Michael, “Private Bodyguards are Essential in Iraq,” Union Tribune (3 June 2004).


The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

In its Manifesto for New Times (1989) the party told its workers that socialists did ‘not yet confidently speak the language of the future’, that capitalism was entering a new phase – of robots, computers, satellite television – and that what was needed was an alternative to Thatcherism’s ‘regressive modernisation’.3 The party journal, Marxism Today, opened its pages to politicians to its right, including Tony Blair, before he became Labour leader.4 The central idea of New Times was a classic vulgar-Marxist technological determinism, which, it must be noted, is, while vulgar, generally rather richer than the usual non-Marxist variety. The post-war ‘settlement’ was being remade, it was claimed: Fordism, standardized mass production, was giving way to post-Fordism (‘the economic and industrial core of the new times’), a more flexible system of production. The end of Fordism meant the end of large, unionized workforces in nationally organized welfare states. There were, they suggested, two ways of managing post-Fordism – the Thatcher way and an alternative which involved creating new solidarities, a new politics of consumption, an ‘alternative socialism adequate to the post-Fordist age’.5 The appeal was real – it was time to get rid of the grim, old-fashioned politics of production and embrace consumption, where the politics was essentially environmental, at this time focused on pollution, rainforests and whaling.6 It was also attractive in that it pointed to new forms of intellectual enquiry for the left – towards culture and consumption, identities and ideology, and away from political economy, production, international relations and indeed politics.

It was anti-nuclear and called for modernization and the expansion of coal.8 The Labour Party Policy Review of 1989 also mentioned the environment as a new concern.9 As is so often the case, these technological determinist arguments failed to identify the key technologies, and indeed the social phenomena they sought to explain. For all the confidence of analysis, it was derived not from serious analysis of machinery and society but from boosterist commentary of the moment. Realities, as ever, were rather different. For example, for all the talk of post-Fordism, the Ford Motor Company itself had a giant new engine plant come into operation in 1980, in Bridgend, which was to become the largest engine plant the United Kingdom had ever seen, making a very small range of globally standardized engines. Of course, technical change in manufacturing reduced labour needs, often very radically, as in the Ford case, but the new small, flexible manufacturing hardly replaced mass production.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

The country – indeed, the Global North as a whole – was on the cusp of, but had not yet begun to experience, revolutionary transformations in the organization of production. On the way out were the vertically integrated manufacturing giants of the Fordist era. When ‘flexible specialization’ and ‘just-in-time’ production became strategic watchwords of post-Fordism, from the mid-to-late 1970s, the Fordist dinosaurs began relentlessly to disaggregate and outsource operations, thus spawning the web of complex contractual relationships – between end-product producers, contractors and subcontractors – that is more familiar today.27 In 1970, that is to say, contract rents, at least in UK manufacturing, were rare.

National income statisticians include this imputed value in their estimates because, if it were not included, between-country comparisons would be affected by differences in rates of homeownership, and the rate of change in overall gross operating surplus (and thus GDP) between two periods would be affected by changes in the rate of homeownership. Neither of these problems is pertinent to the case at hand. 26. Gross value-added equates to gross operating surplus plus compensation of employees and taxes, less subsidies on production. 27. H. Paul and Z. Jonathan, ‘Flexible Specialization versus Post-Fordism: Theory, Evidence and Policy Implications’, Economy and Society 20: 1 (1991), pp. 5–9. 28. S. Broadberry and N. Crafts, ‘Competition and innovation in 1950s Britain’, Business History 43 (2001), pp. 97–118, at p. 108. 29. B. Christophers, The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 182–8, 204–7. 30.


pages: 236 words: 67,953

Brave New World of Work by Ulrich Beck

affirmative action, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, job automation, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, mini-job, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, scientific management, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

An attempt must now be made to introduce such a category-change against the background of the ten foregoing scenarios of the future of work, and to fill this in with data, dilemmas and political implications. The Fordist regime In the academic and wider public debate about changing structures of work, such keywords as ‘post-industrialism’, ‘post-Taylorism’, ‘post-Fordism’ or ‘neo-Fordism’ usually hold the stage. But for our purposes, we need to consider this debate only as a backdrop to the theory and sociology of work in the second modernity. The first key category, borrowed from Michel Aglietta, is that of regimes of accumulation internally connected to the dominant mode of regulation.47 Regimes of accumulation denote periods of economic growth in terms of a fundamental correspondence between what is produced and what is consumed.


pages: 7,371 words: 186,208

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times by Giovanni Arrighi

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business logic, business process, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, double entry bookkeeping, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, means of production, Meghnad Desai, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, reserve currency, scientific management, spice trade, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

., “Comparing Transnational Production Systems: The Automobile Industry in the USA and Japan,” International ]ournal of Urban ana’ Regional Research, 13, 2, 1989, pp. 462-80. Hirschman, Albert, 77Je Strategy of Economic Development, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1958. Hirst, Paul and Jonathan Zeitlin, “Flexible Specialization versus Post-Fordism: Theory, Evidence and Policy Implications,” Economy and Society, 20, 1, 1991, pp.1-56. Hobsbawm, Eric, 771e Age of Revolution 1789-1848, New York: New American Library 1962. Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain since 1750, London: Weidenfeld 8C Nicolson 1968. 771e Age of Capital 1848-1875, New York: New American Library 1979. —— 771e Age of Empire 1875-1914, New York: Pantheon Books 1987.

Thrift, Nigel, “The Internationalization o Producer Services and the Integration of the Pacific Basin Property Market,” in M. Taylor and N. Thrift, eds., Multinationals and tbe Restructuring of tbe W/orld Economy: 77Je Geograph)! of Multinationals, Vol. 2, London: Croom Helm 1986, pp. 142-92. REFERENCES 403 Tickell, Adam and Jamie A. Peck, “Accumulation, Regulation and the Geographies of Post-Fordism: Missing Links in Regulationist Research,” Progress in Human Geograph , 16, 2, 1992, pp. 190-218. Tilly, Charés, “Reflections on the History of European State Making,” in C. Tilly, ed., 77Je Formation of National States in W/estern Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1975, pp. 3-83.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

What about the vast amounts of informal labour that works for a wage and produces for a market? Other problems arise if one defines the surplus in terms of productive and unproductive labour. In particular, one is led to the conclusion Negri and Hardt draw – that since socially productive labour exists everywhere under conditions of post-Fordism, the term no longer has meaning. (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire [New York: Penguin, 2005], p. 131.) We reject that conclusion and attempt to demonstrate here that the concept still has important analytical and explanatory utility. We believe that the surplus can be defined as those who are outside of waged labour under capitalist conditions of production.


pages: 251 words: 88,754

The politics of London: governing an ungovernable city by Tony Travers

active transport: walking or cycling, bread and circuses, congestion charging, Crossrail, first-past-the-post, full employment, job satisfaction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, post-Fordism, radical decentralization, urban sprawl, vertical integration

Another strand of the ‘governance’ literature takes inspiration not from the US ‘urban regime’ approach but rather from the French ‘regulation’ school. In the latter, the shift from government to governance is seen as a change in the mode of regulation, an institutional restructuring which parallels the shift from ‘Fordism’ to ‘post-Fordism’ (Stoker, 1995). In this analysis local government has become more concerned about the politics of production and competitiveness and less concerned about services and redistribution (Stoker, 1999). The ‘governance’ mode of regulation implies a network mode of activity and the incorporation both of several levels of government and of agencies from beyond government.


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

Those human traits—creativity, “people skills,” caring—are what employers seek to exploit in the jobs we’re supposed to love. Exercising them is what is supposed to make work less miserable, but instead it has helped work to worm its way deeper into every facet of our lives. 12 The political project that brought us here is known as neoliberalism, though it sometimes goes by other names: post-Fordism, maybe, or just “late capitalism.” As political philosopher Asad Haider explained, “neoliberalism… is really two quite specific things: first, a state-driven process of social, political, and economic restructuring that emerged in response to the crisis of postwar capitalism, and second, an ideology of generating market relations through social engineering.”


pages: 554 words: 158,687

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Since a mechanism of this kind has been historically constructed for credit money through the institution of state-backed central money, there is no reason why it could not also be constructed for e-money.41 Central banks would remain the pivotal institutions of the monetary and credit domain in mature, financialized capitalism. 1 The literature on the periodization of capitalism in recent decades has been dominated by the concepts of Fordism and post-Fordism proposed by the French Regulation School, but no prevalent view has emerged among Marxists, or radicals more generally. For an excellent collection of contemporary views see Robert Albritton et al. (eds), Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crisis and Globalizations, New York: Palgrave, 2001. 2 Note that Uno has proposed a historical periodization of capitalism that draws on Hilferding and Lenin but is also highly distinctive.


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Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

Kiara Nagel, Design Studio for Social Intervention, available at ds4si.org/predatoryplanning. 107 A pivotal example here is the attempted reconstruction of New Orleans as a gentrified, tourist city whilst attempting to deny 250,000 African-Americans the rights to return to the city after Katrina. 108 Mustafa Dikeç, Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 109 Méndez, ‘Capitalism Means/Needs War’. 110 Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, ‘Dominant Capital and the New Wars’, Journal of World-Systems Research 10: 2, 2004, 255–327. 111 Neil Smith, ‘The Military Planks of Capital Accumulation: An Interview with Neil Smith, Subtopia Blog, 10 July 2007. 112 David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 113 For an insightful discussion, see George Steinmetz, ‘The State of Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism: Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism’, Public Culture 15: 2, 2003, 323–45. Steinmetz argues that the emerging condition [following the global financial crisis and recession] does not mark a return to the Fordist-Keynesian welfare state but rather a transition toward and enhanced police state. Security in the disciplinary, not the social, sense in the focus of current government activity’. 114 See Jonathan Michel Feldman, ‘From Warfare State to “Shadow State”: Militarism, Economic Depletion, and Reconstruction’, Social Text, 25, 2007, 143–68, and De Goede, ‘Beyond Risk.


Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America) by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business logic, card file, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, p-value, pattern recognition, post-Fordism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technological determinism, technology bubble, the built environment, transaction costs, union organizing, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Similarly, Robert Manning refers to the “architects of the Credit Card Nation” as if the decades of long-term planning finally came to fruition in the 1980s (Manning, Credit Card Nation, 86.) I find the unintended nature of the economy both more believable and more terrifying than any plot. 8. Historians, sociologists, and economists refer to this process by any number of different labels such as “financialization,” ‘post-Fordism,” “postindustrialism,” and many other neologisms. I have attempted as much as possible to keep these terms, with all their accumulated debates, out of the text. Scholars have tended to focus more on describing this transition’s effect on people rather than explaining why and how this transition occurred.


pages: 607 words: 185,487

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

For recent assessments of the evolution of technology and production in the United States, see Nathan Rosenberg, Perspectives on Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Rosenberg, Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Philip Scranton, Figured Tapestry: Production, Markets, and Power in Philadelphia, 1885-1942 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 40. See the inventive article by Ernest J. Yanorella and Herbert Reid, "From 'Trained Gorilla' to 'Humanware': Repoliticizing the Body-Machine Complex Between Fordism and Post-Fordism," in Theodore R. Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter, eds., The Social and Political Body (New York: Guildford Press, 1996), pp. 181-219. 41. Rabinbach, The Human Motor, p. 272. Rabinbach is here paraphrasing the conclusions of a seminal article by Charles S. Maier, "Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s," Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970): 27-63. 42.