Precarity

Precarity
Author: Shioh Groot
Publisher: Massey University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2017-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0994141521

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Leading UK economist Guy Standing has referred to the precariat as a class-in-the-making. The Precariat are our fellow citizens — be they poor, elderly, disabled, homeless, estranged from their cultural communities, refugees, engaged in casual work — who lead lives of uncertainty, dependency, powerlessness, perilousness and insufficiency. They are the outcome of the gradual dismantling of the welfare state and the withering of union representation. They are also the victims of the changing nature of work. This important book moves beyond the world of labour to identify and illustrate other forms of precarity in New Zealand, including the lack of opportunities for cultural expression and the struggle to be safe. It focuses on New Zealand's emerging class, not to further vilify it but rather to place its members' lived experience in plain sight. As the editors say, &‘It is time that all New Zealanders understood the reality of what many of our citizens endure in the struggle to make ends meet and live dignified lives.'

The Age of Precarity

The Age of Precarity
Author: Dario Gentili
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2021-08-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1788733800

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When Crisis Becomes the Norm: What Can We Do to Demand Change? Crisis dominates the present historical moment. The economy is in crisis, politics in both its past and present forms is in crisis and our own individual lives are in crisis, made vulnerable by the fluctuations of the labor market and by the undoing of social and political ties we inherited from modernity. Yet, traditional views of crises as just temporary setbacks do not seem to hold any longer; this crisis seems permanent, with no way out and no alternatives on the horizon. Reconstructing a political genealogy of the term from the Greek world to today's neoliberalism, this book demonstrates that crisis, understood as a "choice" between revolution and conservation, is a peculiarity of the modern era that does not apply to the present day. However, since its origin, the trope of crisis has proven to be one of the most effective instruments of social discipline and administration. The analytical trajectory followed by this book - which spans from Plato to Hayek, from the juridical and medical science of antiquity to the current technocracy, passing through the "weapons of criticism" of Marx and Gramsci - finally identifies, following Benjamin and Foucault, precariousness as the "form of life" that characterizes crisis understood as an art of government. But we still need to answer the question: "How can we recreate the possibility of political alternatives?"

Technoprecarious

Technoprecarious
Author: Precarity Lab
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 123
Release: 2020-11-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1912685728

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An analysis that traces the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity. Technoprecarious advances a new analytic for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographical sites and cultural practices in the digital age. Digital technologies--whether apps like Uber built on flexible labor or platforms like Airbnb that shift accountability to users--have assisted in consolidating the wealth and influence of a small number of players. These platforms have also furthered increasingly insecure conditions of work and life for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, women, indigenous people, migrants, and peoples in the global south. At the same time, precarity has become increasingly generalized, expanding to include even the creative class and digital producers themselves.

Newswork and Precarity

Newswork and Precarity
Author: Kalyani Chadha
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000535045

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This edited collection brings together leading scholars from around the world to discuss the consequences and implications of precarious labor conditions within the modern news industry. In 14 original chapters, contributors address global concerns in journalism across all platforms, based on the assumption that unstable employment conditions affect the extent to which journalists can continue to play their historically crucial role in sustaining democracies. Topics discussed include work conditions for freelancers and entrepreneurial journalists as well as the risks facing conflict reporters, precarity in media start-ups, unionization and other collective efforts, policies regulating journalistic labor around the world, and the impact of hedge fund money on newswork. Drawing on case studies and data from South America, Africa, the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe, the book highlights how media outlets are forcing newsworkers to work harder for less money, and few countries are proactive in alleviating the precarity of journalists. Newswork and Precarity is a valuable addition to an important still-emerging area in journalism studies that will be of interest to both professionals and scholars of journalism, media studies, sociology, and labor history.

The Quantified Self in Precarity

The Quantified Self in Precarity
Author: Phoebe V. Moore
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2017-09-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317201604

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Humans are accustomed to being tool bearers, but what happens when machines become tool bearers, calculating human labour via the use of big data and people analytics by metrics? The Quantified Self in Precarity highlights how, whether it be in insecure ‘gig’ work or office work, such digitalisation is not an inevitable process – nor is it one that necessarily improves working conditions. Indeed, through unique research and empirical data, Moore demonstrates how workplace quantification leads to high turnover rates, workplace rationalisation and worker stress and anxiety, with these issues linked to increased rates of subjective and objective precarity. Scientific management asked us to be efficient. Now, we are asked to be agile. But what does this mean for the everyday lives we lead? With a fresh perspective on how technology and the use of technology for management and self-management changes the ‘quantified’, precarious workplace today, The Quantified Self in Precarity will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as Science and Technology, Organisation Management, Sociology and Politics.

Capitalism on Edge

Capitalism on Edge
Author: Albena Azmanova
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2020-01-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231530609

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The wake of the financial crisis has inspired hopes for dramatic change and stirred visions of capitalism’s terminal collapse. Yet capitalism is not on its deathbed, utopia is not in our future, and revolution is not in the cards. In Capitalism on Edge, Albena Azmanova demonstrates that radical progressive change is still attainable, but it must come from an unexpected direction. Azmanova’s new critique of capitalism focuses on the competitive pursuit of profit rather than on forms of ownership and patterns of wealth distribution. She contends that neoliberal capitalism has mutated into a new form—precarity capitalism—marked by the emergence of a precarious multitude. Widespread economic insecurity ails the 99 percent across differences in income, education, and professional occupation; it is the underlying cause of such diverse hardships as work-related stress and chronic unemployment. In response, Azmanova calls for forging a broad alliance of strange bedfellows whose discontent would challenge not only capitalism’s unfair outcomes but also the drive for profit at its core. To achieve this synthesis, progressive forces need to go beyond the old ideological certitudes of, on the left, fighting inequality and, on the right, increasing competition. Azmanova details reforms that would enable a dramatic transformation of the current system without a revolutionary break. An iconoclastic critique of left orthodoxy, Capitalism on Edge confronts the intellectual and political impasses of our time to discern a new path of emancipation.

State of Insecurity

State of Insecurity
Author: Isabell Lorey
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 118
Release: 2015-02-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1781685975

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Years of remodelling the welfare state, the rise of technology, and the growing power of neoliberal government apparatuses have established a society of the precarious. In this new reality, productivity is no longer just a matter of labour, but affects the formation of the self, blurring the division between personal and professional lives. Encouraged to believe ourselves flexible and autonomous, we experience a creeping isolation that has both social and political impacts, and serves the purposes of capital accumulation and social control. In State of Insecurity, Isabell Lorey explores the possibilities for organization and resistance under the contemporary status quo, and anticipates the emergence of a new and disobedient self-government of the precarious.

Intersections of Race, Gender, and Precarity

Intersections of Race, Gender, and Precarity
Author: Stephanie M. Baran
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2022-01-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1793608547

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In Intersections of Race, Gender, and Precarity: Navigating Insecurities in an American City, Stephanie Baran argues that when it comes to assistance the United States government often creates more problems than it solves. These institutions are not in the business of creating a pathway for people to escape poverty, often compounding that poverty instead. Through a two-year ethnographic study of poverty and insecurity in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the author shows how people navigate situations of poverty through interviews with recipients and organizations as well as those working at a local community pantry. Consequently, research uncovered how local food organizations with connections to the Milwaukee Chapter of the Black Panther Party hide their more radical roots to protect food donations from white donors, in essence protecting white fragility. People are far closer to experiencing poverty than they realize, as shown by the Government Shutdown of 2019 and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and typically have incomplete and inaccurate ideas of poverty as well as how people can experience upward mobility. Intersections of Race, Gender, and Precarity reveals this gap through a focus on how all these factors show up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity

Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity
Author: Maurice Hamington
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1452966230

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How care can resist the stifling force of the neoliberal paradigm In a world brimming with tremendous wealth and resources, too many are suffering the oppression of precarious existences—and with no adequate relief from free market–driven institutions. Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity assembles an international group of interdisciplinary scholars to explore the question of care theory as a response to market-driven capitalism, addressing the relationship of three of the most compelling social and political subjects today: care, precarity, and neoliberalism. While care theory often centers on questions of individual actions and choices, this collection instead connects theory to the contemporary political moment and public sphere. The contributors address the link between neoliberal values—such as individualism, productive exchange, and the free market—and the pervasive state of precarity and vulnerability in which so many find themselves. From disability studies and medical ethics to natural-disaster responses and the posthuman, examples from Māori, Dutch, and Japanese politics to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, this collection presents illuminating new ways of considering precarity in our world. Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity offers a hopeful tone in the growing valorization of care, demonstrating the need for an innovative approach to precarity within entrenched systems of oppression and a change in priorities around the basic needs of humanity. Contributors: Andries Baart, U Medical Center Utrecht, Tilburg U, and Catholic Theological U Utrecht, the Netherlands; Vrinda Dalmiya, U of Hawaii, Mānoa; Emilie Dionne, U Laval; Maggie FitzGerald, U of Saskatchewan; Sacha Ghandeharian, Carleton U; Eva Feder Kittay, Stony Brook U/SUNY; Carlo Leget, U of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands; Sarah Clark Miller, Penn State U; Luigina Mortari, U of Verona; Yayo Okano, Doshisha U, Kyoto, Japan; Elena Pulcini, U of Florence.

Precarious Rhetorics

Precarious Rhetorics
Author: Wendy S. Hesford
Publisher:
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2018
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780814213766

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First work to couple materialist and rhetorical frameworks with interdisciplinary understandings of precarity to study pressing issues of our time.