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Though work is important for people's self-esteem and recognition, the sociology of work pays little attention to the meaning of work. This reflects that work in capitalist societies tends to be alienated. But empirical findings show that employees nevertheless try to appropriate their work by asking for its meaning. They claim for a meaningful work and for the possibility to execute work in a meaningful way. If they have to carry out work they feel to be meaningless they can suffer psychological strain. Meaning has not only an individual dimension but it refers to the meaning for society and other people and there are social institutionalizations of recognized meanings of work. Fordism and flexible capitalism are connected to different forms of alienation and difficulties to appropriate work as meaningful. Therefore, meaningful work is embedded in relations of collegiality and cooperation and can be damaged by the fragmentation of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Shaping one's life artistically' implies the principle 'I live as an artist when all my actions, and my expression in general, in connection with any content whatever, remain for me a mere show and assume a shape which is wholly within my power' (Hegel). Drawing on Hegel, the 'young' Marx advocated 'production in accordance with the laws of Beauty' ('artistic work/life'), as a kind of work which, inasmuch as it was 'free', provided a model for the elucidation of the presupposition of human emancipation. 'True Art' appears to be work performed under the umbrella of a 'free community', where the division between masters and slaves, working class and capitalists, emancipators and emancipated, is abolished. Does the conception of 'living artistically' (still) have a critical emancipatory value, and how can it be formulated under the conditions of a global market economy and post-Fordism, where every critical act, event and activity is appropriated? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This speculative paper enquires into the discourse of the 'end of labour' or 'disappearance of labour' as a result of the development of 'intelligent capitalism' clearly seen in 'intelligent manufacturing' systems that are now pursued and developed as Industry 4.0 strategy in East Asia, Germany and others parts of the world. When 'intelligent capitalism' becomes the norm rather the exception what happens to labour as a factor of production and what happens to economy and society based on capital and labour? The paper briefly reviews the sociology of labour from a Marxist view to examine conceptions of Fordist and post-Fordist capitalism, and explore the advert of 'intelligent capitalism' to pose the question concerning education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the historical study of modern American capitalism, labor unfreedom in agriculture has been conceptualized as an exception to liberal labor relations in the post-slavery polity, from debt peonage to the threat of deportation from workplaces populated by non-citizen migrants. At the same time, state-enforced labor compulsions and restrictions are increasingly part and parcel of what scholars call neoliberal exceptionalism. This article argues that agricultural and neoliberal exceptionalisms are related, by tracing the historical genealogy and juridical production of a restrictive work status, the deportable temporary labor migrant, across political economies in the modern United States, from imperial construction in the Panama Canal Zone, to agriculture, to the knowledge economy. Contrary to existing notions of temporary work visas as a new form of unfreedom in neoliberalized advanced capitalist states, I show how the threat of deportation is older and rooted in the rise of the liberal regulatory state in a post-slavery, yet persistently racial capitalist political economy. The import of understanding this history of government intervention increases as the liberal regulatory state's coercive logics and practices intensify and circulate in agriculture and under a post-Fordist regime of accumulation, reproducing racial capitalism in the labor process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine my practice-as-research piecesWhat The Money MeantandSERVUS!in terms of how their design and delivery make visible those labour and exchange relations characteristic of late capitalism. After a brief introduction, I take the reader through theoretical debates around service work’s proliferation and existing arguments about its relationship to performance, as well as an argument for the ‘agonistic’ potential of aesthetic activity. I move on to argue that SERVUS! provides an example of how the one-to-one performance form can both reveal reification in action and rupture or speak back to its enactment, via techniques including explicit payment, over-enunciation or ‘flourish’ and what I term affective dissonance. I then demonstrate howWhat The Money Meantextends these techniques by applying them across a specific scenographic design and participatory structure.What The Money Meantinvites audience members to communicate with the performer by tipping, which I argue might be seen as a dramaturgical tactic of audience participation. I conclude by arguing that the performance of service, especially that which plays upon the one-to-one structure, can work ‘agonistically’ by both revealing the precarity of late capitalist labour and subverting its delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contributes to the discussions concerning immaterial labour and temporality in post-Fordism by examining how accounts of individuality intertwine with accounts of potential in the newly emerged field of work-related coaching. In producing potential individuals, coaching responds to the needs of the anticipatory economy that produces value in terms of future expectations and potentialities. In this sense, coaching is an example of immaterial production that merges subjectivity and individuality with economic value production and transforms subjects into a flexible workforce. However, examining the temporalities inherent in the production of potential in coaching also shows that orientation towards the future is not the only aspect of temporality in this kind of production. It is thus suggested that taking into account the time spent in coaching means that contrary to what is often claimed, questions concerning the measuring of time are not irrelevant to immaterial labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines recent documentary films that have sought to narrate, record and criticise the effects on the French workplace of a shift to a new model of finance capitalism driven by ‘pure’ money. The films give representation to subjective experiences in the workplace showing how abstract economics is played out at the most intimate, personal and material level. The films seem to challenge dominant representations of finance capitalism as an order that has emancipated workers from the physical and disciplinary constraints of industrialism. The workers in these films describe the transition to a new economic order in terms of an intensification of corporeal pain. We see an economic order that pits an infinite accumulation of virtual money against the finite productive capacities of the human body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay offers information on the wages paid in the money form in contemporary post-Fordist capitalism. It analyzes interrelated characteristics and problems with these wages, including an increasing gap between wages paid and the labor performed and exchanged for such wages. It also examines the disconnect between what labor earns and what it needs to spend.

An essay is presented on an analysis of the autonomist theory of post-Fordism which says that capitalism is beyond quantification. Topics discussed include the analysis being a correction of philosopher Karl Marx's quantitative theory of value, the book "Empire" by post-Marxist philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, and the concept of immaterial labor eliding the distinction in Marx's analysis between specialized time thus leading to mischaracterization of contemporary capitalism.