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In this article I unpack the labour of "networking" to understand the changes in sociality and worker identity that have occurred in the Australian professional managerial class workforce under post‐Fordism. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken at the interface of the pubic service and private consultancy firms in Canberra, I break from dominant readings of intimacy in post‐Fordism which preference either a downwards imposition of "ways of being" from capital to worker, or a reactive self‐regulation in line with objective external structures. Networking, I argue, is as much about being recognised as patron as it is about any tangible economic benefits. The intimate relations and self‐fashioning of networking constitute attempts to embody particular classed, sexualised, gendered fantasies of the figure of "the networker" in post‐Fordist Australian business culture. This interpretation does not necessitate overlooking the tangible results of networking, and I discuss too, how masculine fantasy structures the topography of workplaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interplay between intensifying labour market precarity and gentrification constitutes a hitherto under‐researched topic in the fields of labour and urban geography. To rectify this lacuna, we argue that gentrification and labour flexibilisation are both socio‐spatial manifestations of capital's efforts to confront crises of accumulation. Distinguishing between what we call "weak" and "strong" links between them, and drawing upon the concepts of "gentrification‐supporting" and "gentrification‐fostered" labour flexibility, we outline a framework for connecting gentrification and precarity. This allows us to make links between the restructuring of the built environment and the reorganisation of work in the post‐industrial city; it also allows us to show how workers, through their agency, can shape rent gaps in the contemporary city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an in-depth study with 56 informants (25 women and 31 men), across the ICT (information and communication technology), creative and academic sectors in one city/regional hub in Ireland, this article investigates the so-called revolution in work/life practices associated with the post-Fordist labour processes of the Knowledge Economy from the perspectives of workers themselves. Recent theorizations of post-Fordist work patterns emphasize a rearranging of work and life place boundaries; a reconfiguring of work and life time boundaries; and a dissolving of the gendered boundaries of work and life (production and social reproduction) (Adkins and Dever ; Morini and Fumagalli ; Gill and Pratt ; Weeks ; Hardt and Negri ). Our findings suggest that, instead of dissolving boundaries, workers constantly struggle to draw boundaries between what counts as work and as life, and that this varies primarily in relation to gender and stage in a gendered life trajectory. Work extensification is compensated for via a perceived freedom to shape one's own life, which is articulated in terms of individualized boundary-drawing. While younger men embraced 'always on' work, they also articulated anxieties about how these work habits might interfere with family aspirations. This was also true for younger women who also struggled to make time for life in the present. For mothers, boundary drawing was articulated as a necessity but was framed more in terms of personal choice by fathers. Although all participants distinguished between paid work and life as distinct sites of value, boundaries were individually drawn and resist any easy mapping of masculinity and femininity onto the domains of work and life. Instead, we argue that it is the process of boundary drawing that reveals gendered patterns. The personalized struggles of these relatively privileged middle-class workers centre on improving the quality of their lives, but raise important questions about the political possibilities within and beyond the world of post-Fordist labour. [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]

Starting in the late 1970s, Cape Verdean labor-power became indispensable in a number of sectors of the Portuguese economy, no longer merely filling gaps but serving as a vital part of the workforce in key industries such as civil construction and cleaning services. Assuming a central role in the productive process, these largely 'low-skilled' immigrants came to form a reserve army of labor in the fragmented service-sector economy of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. Although they come from diverse backgrounds and belong to different migratory phases, Cape Verdeans continue to be concentrated in the most precarious and poorly paid strata of the Portuguese labor market. The tenuous situation of most Cape Verdean immigrants has made them especially vulnerable to the post-2010 economic downturn and the accompanying IMF-mandated structural changes and liberalization measures. In this paper, I examine the trajectory of four Cape Verdean workers in the Portuguese labor market prior to 2010 and during the current 'crisis economy.' While these accounts differ in the details, they are alike in how my interviewees have seen their daily lives become more difficult and insecure. In addition to exploring this sequence of events, I contextualize these case studies within the extant literature on precarity. In this regard, I identify a temporal gap in concept of precarity as it has been theorized to date. Whereas most scholars juxtapose the stability of the Fordist period with the precariousness of our post- Fordist times, I wish to highlight how my interviewees simply long for a return to pre-crisis post- Fordism, not Fordism per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the implementation of economic restructuring policies in Turkish agriculture, farming communities experienced significant changes in the patterns of agricultural production over the last decade. The dramatic shift from labor-intensive field crops to maize farming represents such a change, particularly for small-scale farmers, since high-yield maize farming is driven by private agrifood corporate demand. In this article, I explore how this shift influences the relations of production in agriculture through a commodity-system analysis of the maize sector in Turkey. Through the qualitative analysis of the semistructured in-depth interviews and secondary data, I find that small-scale farmers are able to participate in maize farming, even as their dependence on production credits to participate in industrial maize farming crucially reduces their bargaining power with private industry. I argue that the traditional Marxist approach, accumulation by dispossession, is not sufficient to explain the participation of small-scale farmers. Instead, I propose a new concept, entrepreneurial exploitation, to describe the participation of small-scale investors in the post-Fordist regime. Thereby, I point to the important role of expansion of credit markets as a consequence of financialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings autonomist Marxist analyses of post-Fordist transition together with the geographical literature on ecosystem services to argue that the rise of the ecosystem service economy was central to what Paolo Virno has called the neoliberal counterrevolution. By analyzing the discourse of environmental crisis in the 1960s and 1970s, I demonstrate that early efforts to account for the value of environmental functions were a response to the instabilities faced by globalized capital in the postwar era. The rise of the ecosystem service economy is central to what autonomist Marxists describe as a post-Fordist mode of production in which the activities of social (and, I argue, ecological) reproduction become direct sources of value. The paper suggests the need to revise the autonomist analysis to account for both the ecological dimensions of Fordist crisis, and the importance of the ecosystem service economy as a means whereby the counterrevolution was accomplished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrative of the 'fall'-an account by urban residents about a decline in the morality and aesthetics of their surroundings-is common in US urban studies. Researchers typically explain the 'fall' as an outcome of post-Fordist changes in urban resources, neglecting to explore the social construction of this sense of things. Analyzing the oral histories of people who were born in Detroit from the 1920s to the 1970s, the author considers three explanations for the persistence of this narrative: constant urban decline, a moralizing hegemony or doxa, and a clash between objective structures and embodied histories over the life course. This line of inquiry is relevant to concerns about the impact of structural crises on social consciousness, and it is of particular significance to the theorization of the politics of place in post-Fordist cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role that compassion plays in the building of a post-Fordist laboring public in Italy. By exploring how the state has made compassion productive through new regimes of voluntary labor, this piece shows that compassion operates not as a mitigating force against, but as a vehicle for the production and maintenance of a new exclusionary order precisely because it allows for the emergence of a fantasy of spontaneously available public emotion. Affective labor is a desired form of activity for marginalized members of Italian society because it allows them to approximate the form of social belonging that was centrally institutionalized and cultivated within Fordist societies-that of the capacity to belong to and be publicly recognized by the world through waged work. Fordism thus appears not as an era past, but as an object of desire and mourning that still retains much social force as people attempt to recapture or at least approximate Fordist forms and feelings of stability and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article mobilises a strategic-relational approach to state spatial restructuring to overcome the weaknesses of the conventional 'New Regionalist' account in economic geography of the resurgence of the region as a strategic site for economic governance. Focusing on hegemonic projects and the shifting nexus of spatial dependencies and engagements through which these are reproduced, undermined and transformed, the role and geography of political agency in state spatial restructuring is highlighted. To illustrate this point, I analyse the construction of new regional state spaces in Belgium, paying particular attention to the hegemonic projects that create a social basis for particular state spaces, the construction of collective agency on different scales (Belgian-national and Flemish-regional) and the various ways in which these processes are informed by pre-existing state spatial and scalar selectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition from Fordism to post-Fordism has been accompanied by profound changes in the spatiality of west European states. The hierarchical, top-down and redistributive structures that typified the Fordist welfare state have been replaced by more complex spatial configurations as elements of economic and political power have shifted both downwards to subnational territorial levels and upwards to the supranational level. A major debate has developed around the nature of these emerging forms of state spatiality and of the processes underpinning their formation. This paper examines how these processes have operated in the particular case of the Republic of Ireland. Here, the spatiality of the state was founded on a peculiar post-colonial combination of a localised populist politics and a centralised state bureaucracy. While this arrangement was quite suited to the spatial dispersal of industrial branch plants which underpinned regional policy in the 1960s and 1970s, it has become increasingly problematic with the more recent emergence of new trends in the nature and locational preferences of inward investment. This is reflected in the profound conflicts that have attended the formulation and implementation of the National Spatial Strategy, introduced in 2002. The result is a national space economy whose increasing dysfunctionality may now be compromising the very development model upon which Ireland's recent spectacular economic growth has been built. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western armies have undergone substantial organizational-cultural transformations since the end of the Cold War. Two main themes have been suggested to describe these transformations: postmodernity and post-Fordism. This article analyzes these profound shifts. The author portrays the new Western army as a “market army,” distancing itself from the “citizen army,” and envisions a continuum between these extreme types. The market army emulates market practices in order to adapt to modern strategic, economic, political, and cultural constraints. What typifies the market army is the subjection of military doctrine to the market, a post-Fordist structure, a network-centric hierarchy, market values borrowed by the military profession, the convergence of military and civilian occupations, the commodification of military service, and new contractual forms of bargaining between soldiers and the military. Israel serves as a critical case with which to develop the theory of the market army. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article argues the formation of a new type of economic actor at the intersection of a new capitalism and a new technology: The digerati. The article is based on a discourse analysis of the popular magazine Wired, which registers the culture of contemporary technocapitalism. The article suggests that the new persona of the digerati is constructed as a rejection of the ethics, which dominated the Fordist workplace and Fordist society: Hierarchy and differentiation between workers, on the one hand and capitalists and managers, on the other hand. The article describes the transformation of these two categories—workers and capitalists—into the digerati worker and the digerati entrepreneur, respectively. Set within the context of the structural transformations of capitalism from Fordism to post-Fordism, the article shows the ideological fit of the new ethics of the digerati to the new working arrangements of post-Fordist capitalism, characterized by more privatizes, flexible, and precarious working arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the book "Concrete and Clay" by Matthew Gandy. Accolades for Gandy's ability to uncover the complex history of New York's transformation in his book; Observations on the book's structure and details; Assertion that Gandy's analysis resides in the realm of ideas from modernism and Fordism to postmodernism and post-Fordism.

Discusses the historical and theoretical account of knowledge management in the 20th century through European documentation, critical modernity and post-Fordism in regard to the issue of language and community. Discussion of 'knowledge management' as a social, cultural, political and organizational phenomena; Elements of tacit knowledge.

This paper offers a historical review of forms of temporal structuring and experience in the evolution of work organization. Initially, we review some key images of time and temporality to emerge from philosophy and social theory. In particular, we discuss images of temporal structuring reflected in the two key time metaphors, the line and the cycle. Secondly, we examine some of the main images of time to emerge from the history of work organization. While initially the focus is upon those linear time images that stem from the progressive commodification of the labour process, subsequently this analysis is qualified by time images that reflect the social construction of organizational culture. An examination of the homogeneous time-reckoning systems of Taylorism is complemented by examples of heterogeneous time-reckoning from anthropological and ethnographic studies. Finally, we discuss the postmodernist debate in the sociology of time. Much of the foregoing analysis having been devoted to issues of clock-time, this section sees discussion of what has been referred to as "instantaneous-time", whereby organizational practices are based on time-frames that lie beyond conscious human experience. This concept is associated with the complex shifts from Fordism to the flexible accumulation of "post-Fordism". Central to this debate is the notion of the time-space compression of physical processes and human experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The culture of ‘culture’ in National Health Service policy implementation The widespread reference to ‘culture’ in UK NHS policy and organisational literature suggests that culture has, in itself, become a cultural phenomenon. This article draws on anthropological thought to explore this trend, and finds it stems from the way that the term ‘culture’ has become analytically empty. Lack of rigour in the way that culture is conceptualised allows it to be used both to suggest an evolved consensus among the workforce, and to validate the imposition of values and beliefs by management. Such manipulation of ‘culture’ is evident in recent NHS policy demanding cultural change to ensure a flexible, empowered and self-regulating workforce — the type of workforce not only valued by health services, but pivotal to a post-Fordist economy. The findings from an ethnographic study are drawn upon to consider the relationship between nurses’ cultural practices, corporate culture shaped by NHS policy, and the requirements of the economic domain. It is suggested that a commitment to post-Fordist priorities of flexibility, empowerment and self-regulation is not necessarily matched by any shift in the traditional location of power. The article concludes that greater analytical rigour is necessary to challenge the way in which ‘culture’ is manipulated by policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discuses the reflection of emotions and affect in the human geography as stated by S. Pile. He says that Pile relates affect to the eurocentrism of mobilised geographical work that suggests people as product of particular time, world, and place. He adds that the work on affect is often referenced to the influences of Spinoza's philosophy. He mentions the profound connections between intellectual trends of affect and contemporary socio-spatial transformations related to post-Fordist.