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Explaining how nations and narratives have been the products of transnational, cross-border forces of migration and cultural exchange, this open access volume presents a global history of the basic ideas that govern our understanding of the modern world and highlight the power of narratives in world history. From the Enlightenment forward, the nation and other global concepts have been conjured and repurposed to manage and make sense of what we now call globalisation. The authors in this volume show how social categories such as empire, race and labour were the centerpiece subjects of collective narratives. For the past two centuries, the practices of shared storytelling aimed to make sense of how groups like nations fit in the wider world. This volume explores how they created bonding narratives for co-members of these groups and bridging stories to explain how groups should relate to each other through trade, war, peace, and other worldmaking processes. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Princeton University, USA.

Nations Apart tells a provocative new story about Nazi occupation of the Czech Lands during World War II. The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia after the 1938 Munich Agreement is typically recalled in Czech historical memory as the beginning of a period of humiliation, occupation, and resistance. Against this narrative of victimhood, this monograph argues that the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia witnessed the unexpected expansion of the Czech welfare state, contributing in turn to the stability of Nazi governance. Local nationalisms played a huge role in this process. Through extensive research in Czech, German and Swiss archives, Nations Apart demonstrates that ethnically exclusive Czech national ideology dominated politics and everyday life after Munich and during Nazi rule. Illustrating similarities between the wartime ‘Protectorate’ and the occupation regimes in Western Europe, the monograph sheds new light on occupied societies during WWII and on the origins of welfare states in post-war Europe.

The phenomenon of labour takes the character of a prism. Labour is thereby always context dependent and constituted through the actions of all protagonists involved in any labour relationship. On the basis of three case studies in colonial German East Africa – the construction of the Central Railway (1905–1916), the Otto Plantation in Kilossa (1907–1916) and the palaeontological Tendaguru Expedition (1909–1911) – labour and labour relations are analysed. The focus lies on hitherto neglected actors and groups of actors of labour in the colonial context of East Africa. These were especially German companies and their staff, white subaltern railway sub-contractors and labour recruiters, Indian skilled workers and (qualified) East African workers. Furthermore, all three sites of labour proved to have their individual logics and characteristics. But all of them were in tension between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’, coercion and voluntariness, machine and manual labour, skilled and unskilled labour, reproductive and wage labour, as well as between black and white. Michael Rösser’s dissertation has been awarded with ‘honorary distinction’ by the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH). ; The phenomenon of labour takes the character of a prism. Labour is thereby always context dependent and constituted through the actions of all protagonists involved in any labour relationship. On the basis of three case studies in colonial German East Africa – the construction of the Central Railway (1905–1916), the Otto Plantation in Kilossa (1907–1916) and the palaeontological Tendaguru Expedition (1909–1911) – labour and labour relations are analysed. The focus lies on hitherto neglected actors and groups of actors of labour in the colonial context of East Africa. These were especially German companies and their staff, white subaltern railway sub-contractors and labour recruiters, Indian skilled workers and (qualified) East African workers. Furthermore, all three sites of labour proved to have their individual logics and characteristics. But all of them were in tension between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’, coercion and voluntariness, machine and manual labour, skilled and unskilled labour, reproductive and wage labour, as well as between black and white. Michael Rösser’s dissertation has been awarded with ‘honorary distinction’ by the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH).

Capital Redefined presents a unique perspective on the nature of “capital,” departing from the prevailing reductionist accounts. Hosseini and Gills offer an expanded perspective on Marxian value theory by addressing its main limitations and building their own integrative value theory. They argue that the current understanding of “value” must be re-examined and liberated from its subservient ties to capital while acknowledging the ways in which capital appropriates value. This is achieved by differentiating between “fetish value” created by capital and “true value” generated through various commons-based forms of coexistence. The authors propose a defetishization of value by rejecting the commonly accepted idea of its objectivity. They introduce their “commonist value theory,” which redefines capital as both the product and process of perverting the fundamental commoning causes of true value into sources of fetish value. Capital is theorized through a “modular” framework, where multiple intersecting processes constitute a comprehensive power structure, a “value regime,” representing an unprecedented degree of the domination of capital over life. Their theory reconciles two apparently incompatible views on the notion of value. One view encompasses all inputs involved in capitalist value production and conflates intrinsic and commodity values. The other warns against this conflation as it treats capital as an entity tightly associated only with commodity production and wage labor. The authors believe that establishing alternative forms of value creation based on normative principles of living in commons is crucial as an analytical base for criticizing existing power structures and economic systems. The book offers a theoretical foundation for transforming our life worlds toward “post-capitalist” futures. It appeals to scholars and students in various fields, such as political economy, capitalism, and post-capitalist studies, economic and political sociology, globalization, development studies, social ecology, and ecological philosophy.

This book explores how Lean – a global management doctrine – operates and is adopted in the real, corporeal, collective, and affective environments of health and social care services. During Lean implementation processes, knowledges, affects, skills, and materialities come together in manifold, complex ways. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and observation, and with empirical and theoretical rigour, the book provides an answer to the question of what happens to care work when processes become ‘Leaned’. As in many other fields, the predominantly female health and social care sectors suffer from devaluation in terms of wages and working conditions. The book explores how Lean management is ultimately lived in this gendered context of work and labour. Moreover, the book situates Lean and related management doctrines in the current mutation of capitalism – that is, biocapitalism – in which bios, life itself, becomes the core of value production. The book adds to the corpus of work, organisation, and management studies on Lean that have rarely focused on gender, affect, or sociomateriality. It provides scholars in Social Science, Management, and Gender Studies with a fresh outlook and a cross-disciplinary take on Lean management.

Brilliant, volatile, and invariably male, the surgeon stereotype is a widespread and instantly recognisable part of Western culture. Setting out to anatomise this stereotype, Cold, Hard Steel offers an exciting new history of modern and contemporary British surgery. The book draws on archival materials and original interviews with surgeons, analysing them alongside a range of fictional depictions, from the Doctor in the House novels to Mills & Boon romances and the pioneering soap opera Emergency Ward 10. Presenting a unique social, cultural, and emotional history, it sheds light on the development and maintenance of the surgical stereotype and explains why it has proved so enduring. At the same time, the book explores the more candid and compassionate image of the surgeon that has begun to emerge in recent years, revealing how a series of high-profile memoirs both challenge the surgical stereotype and simultaneously confirm it.

This multidisciplinary volume offers unique perspectives on the complexity of the work-life course nexus across the globe and throughout the centuries, reaching from the early modern period to the present day, and from Europe and Africa to India, China, and Japan. Historians, anthropologists, and sociologists reveal the crucial influence of age and gender as well as family and kin on work lives and discuss the impact of current societal change.

This book puts Indian garment workers and their organisations at the centre of the analysis. Taking the Bangalore export-garment cluster as a case study, the book explores the conditions that enable but also constrain the capacities of garment workers’ unions to build collective power vis-à-vis employers and thereby improve their conditions. Drawing on theoretical concepts from labour geography, relational economic geography, and Global Production Network (GPN) analysis, the book highlights, on the one hand, how the complex labour control regime in the Bangalore export-garment cluster poses manifold challenges and constraints for workers’ and unions’ collective agency. On the other hand, the book illustrates the various networked agency strategies that local garment unions in Bangalore have developed over the years to overcome these constraints by tapping into coalitional power resources from worker, consumer and labour rights organisations in the Global North. This book is therefore highly relevant for economic geographers and other scholars interested in dynamics of labour and development in GPNs as well as for unionists and labour rights activists committed to improving working conditions in the global garment industry. This is an open access book.

The notion of environmental justice is emerging in the face of evidence of differential access to environmental resources and unequal distribution of environmental risks affecting certain social groups. Often addressed in research in the North, the analysis of criteria of justice or injustice associated with the environment, such as access to water, mineral extraction or the recognition of local communities, has been little studied in Africa. However, many African territories are undergoing unbridled development to accompany their strong growth and to respond to development issues that affect the environment of the local populations. The theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions presented in this book make it possible to identify the issues of environmental justice beyond the traditional perspectives. They show how the historicity of the relations of domination between different types of actors in Africa is a determining variable in the understanding of the notion of justice. This book is intended for researchers interested in socio-environmental justice issues in the South, for NGOs fighting against these injustices, for students of social sciences and spatial planning, and for donors financing infrastructures and confronted with the growing opposition of local or international actors.

Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) are powerful forces that will likely have large impacts on the size, direction, and composition of international trade flows. This book discusses how industrial robots, automation, and AI affect international growth, trade, productivity, employment, wages, and welfare. The book explains new approaches on how robots and artificial intelligence affect the world economy by presenting detailed theoretical framework and country-specific as well as firm-product level-specific exercises. This book will be a useful reference for those researching on robots, automation, AI and their economic impacts on trade, industry, and employment.

Summary: The impetus behind this Special Issue emerged from a quest to move beyondbinary thinking in the contemporary period about people who sell sexual services,including recent disputes about "sex trafficking vs. prostitution" and"criminalization vs. decriminalization", to encourage theoretical and empiricalscholarship by exploring how sex work actually operates under different regulatoryregimes. The volume includes contributions from scholars of different socialsciences backgrounds based in five countries- New Zealand, the United Kingdom,Brazil, the United States and Canada. The article topics range widely,and both quantitative and qualitative research methods are showcased. The empiricalevidence presented adds to our current understanding of the complexityof this phenomenon of sex commerce/prostitution, which is found to be largelya problem of social inequality within and across capitalist societies. The authorscall for policies to address occupational and societal wide inequities faced by sexworkers across many countries.

Summary: A long-term study providing rare insights into the precarious career and ordinary working culture of professional footballers. Away from the celebrity-obsessed media gaze, the work of a professional footballer is rarely glamorous and for most players a career in football is insecure and short-lived. A former professional, Martin Roderick's familiarity with the world of football is the foundation for this privileged research into a world that is typically closed to the public gaze and ignored by media reportage and academic research which prefers to focus on a small, unrepresentative group of elite players. Key themes explored within the text include: the culture of work in professional football the changing identity, orientation and expectations of players during their careers the fragile and uncertain nature of professional sport careers the performance and dramatic aspects of a career under public scrutiny the role of relationships with managers, owners, support staff and partners players' responses to the insecurities inherent in professional football such as injury, ageing, performance and transfer. The text deals with a wide range of issues of interest to sports students and academics, particularly those with a focus on the sociology of sport but also including sport development, sport management and coaching studies. The text will also be of interest to researchers in the fields of careers, industrial relations and the sociology of work.

The Old Poor Law in England and Wales, administered by the local parish, dispensed benefits to paupers providing a uniquely comprehensive, pre-modern system of relief. Remaining in force until 1834, the law provided goods and services to keep the poor alive. Combining short- and long-form articles and essays, Providing for the Poor brings together academics and practitioners from across disciplines to re-examine the micro-politics of poverty in the long eighteenth century through the eyes of the poor, their providers and enablers. From the providence of the parochial sixpence given in order to move a beggar on, to coercive marriages, plebeian clothing and the much broader implications of vagrancy towards the end of the long eighteenth century, this volume aims to bridge the gaps in our understanding of the experiences of people across the social spectrum whose lives were touched by the Old Poor Law. It brings together some of the wider arguments concerning the nature of welfare during economically testing times, and navigates the rising bureaucracy inherent in the system, to produce a radical new history of the Old Poor Law in astonishing detail.

This open access book takes the upheaval of the global COVID-19 pandemic as a springboard from which to interrogate a larger set of structural, environmental and political fault lines running through the global food system. In a context in which disruptions to the production, distribution, and consumption of food are figured as exceptions to the smooth, just-in-time efficiencies of global supply chains, these essays reveal the global food system as one that is inherently disruptive of human lives and flourishing, and of relationships between people, places, and environments. The pandemic thus represents a particular, acute moment of disruption, offering a lens on a deeper, longer set of systemic processes, and shining new light on transformational possibilities.

The Margins of Late Medieval London is a powerful study of medieval London’s urban fringe. Seeking to unpack the complexity of urban life in the medieval age, this volume offers a detailed and novel approach to understanding London beyond its institutional structures. Using a combination of experimental digital, quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the volume casts new light on urban life at the level of the neighbourhood and considers the differences in economy, society and sociability which existed in different areas of a vibrant premodern city. It focuses on the dynamism and mobility that shaped city life, integrating the experiences of London’s poor and migrant communities and how they found their place within urban life. It describes how people found themselves marginalized in the city, and the strategies they would employ to mitigate that precarious position.

This book presents the comprehensive investigation of critical thinking in higher education from the perspectives of the study and labor market. It looks for an answer to the vibrant question of what and to whom critical thinking is. The study brings together findings from systematic literature review, analysis of descriptions of higher education study programs and study subjects, phenomenographical research and survey and supplements the existing perceptions of critical thinking with novel data-driven insights. The book reveals how critical thinking manifests itself in the contexts of higher education and the labor market and advocates for the significance of the critical thinking at personal, interpersonal, and social levels.

With soap, water, and diligence discusses attitudes and practices around cleanliness and health at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At this time, scientific findings on how diseases spread had rendered both the body and the home as particularly risky in terms of the health of an individual. However, the zeal for cleaning was more than just a health issue – it also contributed to societal change at large. This book aims at deepening our understanding of cleanliness in relation to social class, gender, work, consumption, and space, viewed from a Nordic perspective. The battle against dirt was fought on a broad front, and on different levels of society. The book at hands offers glimpses of the long and complex societal process which was required for the Nordic societies to grow cleaner over time. Behind the gradually increasing interest in soap and lather lay challenges, negotiations, and disagreements about the ways in which cleanliness should be advanced, and who would be the ones advancing it. To establish the supremacy of soap required a lot of hard work. The ten chapters shed light on the interaction between debaters, voluntary associations, institutions, and individuals. How was cleanliness promoted and what was the reception like? Who and what was to be cleaned, and on which terms? What did cleanliness mean in different contexts and for different individuals? The book makes both ideals and practices visible by exploring the ways in which the gospel of cleanliness was presented, propagated, understood, questioned and renewed, and also by showing that in some cases people’s quest for cleanliness had motivations other than those intended by the promoters. The chapters have been written by economic historians, ethnologists, social historians, and historians of ideas from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The book is intended for students, scholars and the general reading audience interested in a social historical perspective on cleanliness.