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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.

This article analyzes articulations among urban enclaves, finance capital, and glass architecture by exploring MGM’s corporate investments in the Las Vegas CityCenter development and the Chinese enclave of Macau. CityCenter is an unsuccessful $9 billion master-planned urban community financed by MGM and Dubai World. Macau is a former Portuguese colony and Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China which has, since its return to the PRC in 1999, replaced Las Vegas as the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming revenue. Taken together, CityCenter and Macau are illustrative of the political economy and cultural logics of financialization. Foreign investment from Las Vegas entrepreneurs has vitrified Macau, transforming it into a phantasmagoria of glass resorts. Macau in turn plays a crucial functional role in capitalism’s recomposition in East Asia, similar to the autochthonous role of the Italian city-states of Venice and Genoa in the historical origins of capitalism. In order to ‘read’ the cities of Las Vegas and Macau, I explore intertextual legibilities among fictitious capital that relies on glass fiber-optic technology to enable grand architectural projects; expressionist fictional representations of glass architecture and its utopian transformative potential; and glass buildings that themselves dissimulate in a manner not unlike fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the center of contemporary discourse on technology -- or the digital discourse -- is the assertion that network technology ushers in a new phase of capitalism which is more democratic, participatory, and de-alienating for individuals. Rather than viewing this discourse as a transparent description of the new realities of techno-capitalism and judging its claims as true (as the hegemonic view sees it) or false (a view expressed by few critical voices), this article offers a new framework which sees the digital discourse as signaling a historical shift in the technological legitimation of capitalism, concurrent with the emergence of the post-Fordist phase of capitalism. Technology discourse legitimated the Fordist phase of capitalism by stressing the ability of technology and technique to mitigate exploitation. It hence legitimated the interventionist welfare state, the central planning in businesses and the economy, the hierarchized corporation, and the tenured worker. In contrast, contemporary technology discourse legitimates the post-Fordist phase of capitalism by stressing the ability of technology to mitigate alienation. It hence legitimates the withdrawal of the state from markets, the dehierarchization and decentralization of businesses, and the flexibilization of production and the labor process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The apparent de-bordering of the western world under the impulse of economic globalization has been paralleled by a simultaneous process of re-bordering of late-capitalist societies against global migrations. This re-bordering is part of a broader punitive turn in the regulation of migration which has emerged, particularly in the European context, since the mid-1970s. On the one hand, non-western immigrants are targeted by prohibitionist immigration policies which in fact contribute to the reproduction of their status of illegality; on the other hand, the systematic use of incarceration (together with administrative detention and deportation) as the main strategy in the ongoing war against unauthorized immigration configures a dynamic of hyper-criminalization of immigrants, whose result is the intensification of their socioeconomic and political marginality across Europe. Following the materialist criminological approach known as political economy of punishment, this article suggests that these punitive strategies should be analyzed against the background of an increasingly flexible and de-regulated neoliberal economy: in this context, the hyper-criminalization of migrations contributes to the reproduction of a vulnerable labor force whose insecurity makes it suitable for the segmented labor markets of post-Fordist economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fundamental question we pose in this article is how should we understand marketing in the age of increasingly integrated and networked customer databases? This article argues that new forms of database marketing are best described as customer production processes that rely on the exploitation of the multitude of consumer life. We suggest that the recent increase in available consumer data, computational power and analytical skills leads to a reorganization of the gaze of marketers and increasingly reverses the Fordist articulation of production and consumption. More specifically, instead of flexibly adjusting production regimes to shifting consumption patterns, database marketers collapse the production--consumption dichotomy by manufacturing customers as commodities. Hence, theories about the role of surveillance and simulation technologies for strategies of economic value creation need to be updated in order to acknowledge the evolution of database marketing into a central site of flexible accumulation processes in information capitalism. The result of our undertaking is a model of customer databases that foregrounds the far-reaching effect of potent simulational capabilities intersecting with constantly increasing computational power to transform the database into the factory of the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, basic income (BI) will not be considered as a measure to raise living standards and social well-being. Rather, it will be presented as an indispensable structural policy for achieving a healthier social order governed by a more equitable compromise between capital and labor. Embracing the French Regulation School approach, we maintain that such a compromise is founded on the redistribution of productivity gains. Describing the dynamics of productivity enables a better understanding of the main features and development of contemporary capitalism. In advancing our argument, we focus on the socioeconomic transformation that has overtaken the Fordist paradigm within Western countries and propose the term "cognitive capitalism" to describe the new economic system. We argue that BI can be seen as a viable economic policy able to contrast the instability generated by the present form(s) of accumulation, as it increases productivity through network and learning processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the Historical Materialism research stream on immaterial labour, cognitive capitalism and the general intellect, begun in issue 15.1, this articles explores the importance of the expression 'general intellect', proposed by Marx in the Grundrisse, for an analysis of linguistic and intellectual work in contemporary capitalism. It links the notion of general intellect to the crisis of the law of value, the political significance of mass intellectuality, and the definition of democracy in a world where knowledge is a productive force in its own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a series of essays on the related concepts of cognitive capitalism, immaterial labour and the 'general intellect', which will feature in the pages of Historical Materialism from this issue onwards. It outlines the stakes of the theoretical discussion around these concepts and welcomes the recasting in Marxian terms of debates which have o en been monopolised by apologetic treatments of capitalist development. It also identifies five areas which future articles in this 'research stream' will be preoccupied with: (1) the interpretation of Marxian notions, especially arising from the Grundrisse; (2) the philosophy of history and the schemata of social change that underpin concepts such as cognitive capitalism; (3) the identification of hegemonic social figures (e.g. the immaterial labourer, the 'cognitariat'); (4) issues of philosophical anthropology bearing on the definition of knowledge and intellect; (5) the role of debates on value (and its possible crisis) in assessing the idea of knowledge as a productive force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the cultural and social consequences of the new forms of work organisation variously described as engineered workplace culture, flexibilisation, teamwork, employee involvement, quality circles and post-Fordism. Some celebrate the new form of worker this creates as a consumer of organisationally provided meanings. However, the choices are quite limited for workers in engineered cultures, and for the self-discovering subjects of consumer capitalism more generally. The language, norms and values of engineered cultures become internalised and dominate employees' subjectivity. Further, a sociological analysis of institutional structures of consumer capitalism, and engineered cultures in particular, points to how they encourage workers to develop moral frameworks that are individualistic, with little concern for other people. Simone Weil's studies of the workplace are used to argue that a culture that encourages an ethical orientation of respect for the other is at the heart of good work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.