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INTRODUCTION Th e title indicates the historical dimension, which comprises the development of distance education to include e-learning. Consequently, the chapter is written in two main sections. Th e fi rst (Distance Education) characterizes traditional (Fordist) distance education and describes the methodology, which co-evolved with the corresponding institutional developments. My main reference papers for this period are Wagner (1972) and Jamison & Klees (1975). Th ey illustrate that the strengths of Fordist distance education lie in its potential cost-effi ciency and the potentially high quality of teaching material. Th e lack of student/teacher interactivity is considered as its main weakness.

Globalisation became truly frequented notion of our era. There is wide consent that global processes increase both risks and opportunities for individuals, enterprises as well as whole communities and countries. In spite of this, it is only seldom stated that globalisation involves also numerous local impacts. Indeed, particular manifestations of global processes can be contemplated in concrete localities and polarity between the global and the local is not accurate. The global does include local and globalisation means also the linking of localities. The main objective of this paper consists in the clarification of socioeconomic nexuses between global processes and localities. Taking into consideration recent socioeconomic developments, we are increasingly entitled to talk about the process of glocalisation that involves both global and local aspects. Global and local represent two sides of the same coin and the nature of contemporary time-spatial processes may be better understood by recognizing and analyzing socioeconomic aspects of glocalisation.

The main aim of that paper is to rethinking the connections between complexity and management provoking questions among managers and entrepreneurs, moreover between specialists about consolidated practices of control, governance and predictability. Which compatibility of those practices with emergent complexity of the world. A world where knowledge assume a central role to generate value in a different manner respect to /fordism/ and post-fordism. How to facing permanent innovation and change? Which form of new firm able to match a new global environment? Ecologies of value is a first answer to those great questions, not the sole but probably a good start in particular with an application to local production system and relationship between economic space and complexity about Italian district.

This article examines the strategies of the 'sweatshop-free' clothing company American Apparel in the context of ongoing debates over the cultural turn and cultural economy. American Apparel's key selling point is that it does not outsource: it manufactures in Los Angeles, California, pays 'good' wages and provides health care, yet the workers are not unionized and the migrant labour it depends upon is often temporary. These same employees are used in promotional material to create its brand identity of an irreverent, hip and quasi-sexualized 'community' of consumers and workers. A design- and brand-led company that nonetheless does not see itself as a brand in any conventional sense, and markets itself as 'transparent', the company's ethos turns on consumer anxiety towards the socio-economic injustices of post-Fordism. Indeed, it marks a partial return to Fordist modes of production by aiming to manufacture everything under one roof, whilst deploying modes of informality (and technology) stereotypically associated with the post-Fordist creative industries. This paper considers the complex dynamics of American Apparel's emergence in a reflexive marketplace (in relation to what Callon has termed an 'economy of qualities') and discusses its problematic negotiations with 'fourth worlds', or the zones of exclusion Castells terms 'the black holes of informational capitalism'.

Foundational to this discussion are two papers on "identity" by George A. Akerlof and Rachel Kranton [2000, 2005]. We contribute to their development of this issue with additional factors that are arguably essential to the analysis of identity formation. While they indicate the importance of norms as the bases of identity, we suggest additionally the relevance of independence, individual creativity and the exploration of behaviors beyond norms. A violation of normative expectations has the potential of entering and affecting the social terrain interactively with positive feedbacks, generating non-linear processes of innovation and social change. Our most important finding is that when individuals promote innovation in the performance of a social role, the innovation is unlikely to be mimicked by other role incumbents unless the formal rewards to those innovators are perceived to be more than proportional to the significance of the innovation. If those formal rewards are less than proportional to the significance of the innovation, a general disapprobation of the innovators may arise that potentially vitiates the benefits to innovators, retards the diffusion of the innovation and frustrates further innovation. Contrary to Fordist notions of cost-minimization, our model suggests the development of challenging career paths where all workers of a given category are rewarded for innovation, rather than restricting rewards to specific innovators, in order to create dynamic innovative environments. Our results echo the achievements of Apple and Google, who have created heterogeneous teams of employees, rewarding all members of such teams for advancing innovation.

In different ways, Marxist autonomist, regulation school, and neoliberal theories all claim that work in the new economy is increasingly characterised by high levels of creativity, cooperation, and innovation, albeit accompanied by uncertainty and a relentless pace of work, introducing a new form of labour that differs fundamentally from past forms. This paper does not disagree with the proposition that capital is currently in the process of intensifying its search for more efficient value extraction. However, through a case study of lawsuits launched against the video game company Electronic Arts regarding its labour practices, it argues that the change in the nature of knowledge work and immaterial labour has been overstated by the adherents of these three schools and that what we are witnessing is not so much a replacement of traditional Fordist practices by post-Fordist ones as a new fusion of the two forms.

This paper aims at proposing a first theoretical framework for studying the basic income sustainability. We consider the basic income not only as a tool of a policy to improve living standards and social well-being but, mostly, as the essential requisite to introduce a new stable compromise between capital and labour. Following the French Regulation School approach, we assert that the social compromise between capital and labour is founded on the redistribution of the productivity gains. Therefore we try to trace living standards and social well being problems back to their origins, i.e. the productivity growth. We think that describing the dynamics of productivity means understanding the main features of the contemporary capitalistic production. We first present a survey about BI in economic literature. We then focus on the socio-economic transformation of western countries and propose the term cognitive capitalism (CC) to describe the economic system after the Fordism paradigm crisis, highlighting the strong links between the exploitation of knowledge and the accumulation of surplus. Therefore we investigate the presence of a new type of Kaldor-Verdoorn law in cognitive capitalism (a virtuous circle among BI, increasing productivity - via knowledge and network externalities - output and employment). As a result, we first point out the ambiguous growth circle of the contemporary capitalism. Secondly we highlight that BI is compatible with the new way of accumulation, based on the exploitation of dynamic scale economies. BI increases productivity, through network (externalities) and learning processes and, at the same time, demand, via consumption level. This double result is not always guaranteed. It depends, on one side, on how much BI positively affects productivity, and the greater this probability, the lower the role played by intellectual property rights and the higher the diffusion of network economies (general intellect and social cooperation); on the other side, it depends on the way BI is financed. These results also depend on the assumption of closed economy, in which financial markets play no role at all.

Just over three decades ago Zola (1973) published a paper with the title ‘Pathways to the Doctor: from person to patient’. This seminal work became one of the most influential and cited articles in medical sociology. Based on an empirical analysis of patients’ accounts of their reasons for attending a hospital outpatients in the USA Zola identified his five now famous ‘triggers’ (see below), which prompt consultation with formal health care providers. But of course there have been substantial socio-economic, political and technological transformations since Zola carried out his fieldwork. The late 1960s and early 1970s was a period that is characterised as being an era of Fordism, modernism, professionalism, industrialism and so on. This is in contrast to the post-Fordist, late modern, consumerist, information age which is presumed to more accurately capture the features of contemporary life. The aim of this chapter is to reconsider the work of the likes of Zola and his contemporaries in order to assess whether and to what extent his analyses of ‘pathways to the doctor’ still have any analytic purchase in relation to people’s routine experiences of health care. The chapter argues that while continuities can be discerned over the last 30 years there are also changes; imperceptible perhaps at the level of everyday practice but occurring nevertheless.

About five years ago, Peter Scott presented a paper on “Globalization of Higher Education” at the Salzburg Seminar.1 There he envisioned that universities may soon be bypassed by the new currents of globalization and, more generally, of postindustrial change. Indeed, he argued, they can be regarded as classic “Fordist” institutions still preoccupied with the large-scale production of public service, professional and business elites. In other words—and who would disagree—the universities fail to meet the challenges of change.

The already wide literature on local systems and, in particular, that on industrial districts, has highlighted the role of reputation and trust in the competitiveness of these organizational forms compared to Fordist organization. The work of Becattini (1990), Bellandi (1987), Dei Ottati (1994a, 1994b) can be interpreted in this sense and a similar point is made by Sako (1998; p. 23). Reputation and trust are important parts of what Storper (1997) callsuntraded interdependenciesand of the relational factors of local competitive advantage considered by Amin (1998). Many sociologists and economists utilize the term “trust” in an intuitive way. The common-sense semantics of this term let us conceive a positive relational attitude opposed to distrust. We believe that the concept of trust should be defined in an operational way, as an expectation concerning the convergence between the promised and effective behaviour of an agent. In this paper, the interaction of behavioural rules, reputation, loyalty, and trust will be examined as being framed by a system of norms in the context of industrial districts. Once we have outlined the features of the Marshallian industrial district, we will define the main interacting concepts showing their interdependency.

The aim of this paper is to outline some foundational aspects of a theory of self-organising social change. Synchronous social self-organisation is based on a contradiction between structures and actors that produces emergent results. The cycle of expanded reproduction of capital outlined by Marx can be interpreted as economic type of autopoiesis or self-reproduction. Aspects of Marxist crisis theory can be incorporated consistently into the framework of a theory of social self-organisation. Capitalism is a complex, evolutionary, antagonistic system that is shaped by a dialectic of chance and necessity: In diachronic social self-organisation of capitalism, the evolving economic, political and cultural antagonisms as objective conditions of existence again and again result in phases of crisis and instability where the future development of the system is highly undetermined. The objective structures condition a field of possibilities, it is not pre-determined which alternative will be taken. In such phases of crisis and bifurcation, agency and human intervention play an important role in order to increase the possibility that a certain desirable alternative will be taken. Certainty can't be achieved, but agency also is not made impossible by the principles of self-organising social change. The whole movement of social self-organisation is based on a dialectic relationship of chance and necessity. Regulation theory sees the development of system shaped by a dialectic of chance and necessity as well as by a dialectic of generality and specificity in the same manner as self-Organisation Theory. Mechanistic, reductionistic, economistic and deterministic arguments that have been characteristic for traditional crisis theories are avoided, a crisis of society is not reduced to economic factors and to a single economic antagonism. Regulation theory rather considers besides economical also political and ideological factors as relatively autonomous ones that influence crises of society. An unity of a regime of accumulation and a mode of regulation that is characteristic for a specific mode of development that is shaped by a specific structure of antagonisms is assumed. There are distinct parallels between the regulation approach and self-organisation theory, but the relationship between general and specific categories as well as between chance and necessity is still largely unsettled in the regulation approach (as well as in systems theory). It seems that the regulation school assumes a development of capitalism that is largely shaped by random evolution of antagonistic structures that is not dialectically related to general categories and antagonisms. Nonetheless regulation theory gives us a detailed analysis of Fordism, its crisis and Postfordism as well as a very useful model of the development of society. Hence my own approach is partly based on this theory.

In the present paper, we discuss a key factor in the entrepreneurial and regional capacity of innovation and competitiveness. By basing our arguments on regulation theory, we consider changes in domestic and foreign wage relations and their regulation as an expression and a reflection of flexible accumulation. In doing so, the dominant discussion of a labour market orientated towards innovation and competitiveness is given a critical dimension that focuses on the winners of the modernisation process as well as on possible losers of the flexibilisation. We analyse the trend by using the hotel and catering industry as an example of an industry which assumes a pioneering role as far as the flexibilisation of the labour market is concerned. The Swiss example represents a national «development path», which is greatly challenged by the new conditions of competitiveness, giving rise to a strong call for a reduction in barriers that stand in the way of flexibilisation. The empirical discussion is the result of qualitative interviews. It shows that the changes are characterised firstly by an increasing diversity of labour relations and secondly by an accenluated lower ethnic stratification of the labour market. Thirdly, the increasing diversity and the ethnic stratification are projected on the regulative level. Fourthly, the analysis leads to an expanded notion of regulation, which not only focuses on the conflict line between capital and labour, but also on the conflict line between ethnicities or nationalities (the dual regulation System). Finally, as a coexistence of Fordist and Postfordist labour relations is apparent, the impact of regulation theory is erilieally examined.

Nos anos 70, em função do desenvolvimento da microeletrônica, a automação rígida foi tecnicamente superada pela automação flexível. Mesmo superada, contudo, ela não foi abandonada. Ao contrário, por pelo menos mais uma década, manteve-se como o paradigma dominante em todo o ocidente. Por que isto aconteceu? A hipótese desenvolvida é de que a automação flexível mostrou-se incompatível com o sistema taylorista-fordista de organização da do trabalho/produção. Por esta razão ela só pôde se desenvolver com a emergência do toyotismo. Neste sentido, pode-se concluir, também, que o toyotismo não supera o taylorismo-fordismo por uma superioridade intrínseca, mas sim por uma maior adequação ao novo paradigma tecnológico. A long the 70's, the flexible automation surpassed the traditional one as consequence of micreletronics development. Even supassed the traditional automation was not ,abandoned.lt took a decade to be overtaken as dominant paradigm inthe western world. Why did it happen? The hipothesis in this paper is that flexible automation proved incompatible with taylorist ways of production. Due to this reason, flexible automation could only develop with the toyotism emergence. It can be shown, also, that toyotism do not surpass fordism due to a natural superior status but due to a better match wit the new tecnological paradigm

The paper examines the claim by the regulation school of French economists that the slackening of productivity growth in the advanced capitalist countries reflects the erosion of the ‘Fordist’ system of production. Productivity trends are analysed for the biggest six OECD countries for the period prior to the 1974 oil shock. There are definite indicators of slackening productivity growth, either for labour productivity or for the output-capital ratio, for most of the countries examined. But a disaggregated analysis, and assessment of the relative productivity levels in the countries concerned, does not support the idea that a whole system of technologies and work organization was reaching inherent limits. It is suggested, rather, that the productivity problems reflected the power of the boom of the 1950s and 1960s in eroding the reserves of surplus labour and increasing workers' organizational strength.

Many social theorists assert that in leading sectors and regions of the contemporary economy a transition is occurring from ‘Fordism’ to the ‘lean production’ system of production and distribution. The present paper considers the contemporary significance of Volume Two of Capital in light of the alleged rise of lean production. The first task is to sketch briefly the nature of the transition in question.

This paper makes a comparison between the basic elements of lean production and sociotechnical systems design (STSD) and compares them both with the characteristics of the traditional Fordist system of mass production. It argues that lean production can hardly be considered as an alternative to mass production, as its proponents suggest, but is on the contrary extending the life of mass production methods. However, lean production does appear to contain some building blocks for the innovative production systems that are expected to prevail in the 21st century. STSD, which has always presented itself as an alternative and possible successor to Fordist methods, will need to link its traditional concerns for quality of work and flexibility of work organizations with the new issues of continuous improvement, learning, and innovation.

This paper reinterprets bodily movements in Fordism, the major period of economic and social restructuring that took place in early-twentieth-century America and which subsequently spread throughout western nation-states. I engage at length with Fordism’s key notion: automobility. The Fordist way of life was modelled on the efficiently timed production and consumption of Ford motor cars. Sociologists and historians have argued that the automobile was instrumental to Fordism’s oppression of bodies, because the automobile represented a means of escapism for workers and consumers but in fact secured these subjects’ compliance with exploitative relations of class and gender. I intervene in these debates, however, by arguing that the notion of automobility is not reducible to the car’s reifying function, but can instead be used to uncover sexually significant movements betweens bodies and the technological objects produced on the Fordist assembly line. In sexual automobility, making contact with the car gives rise to subversive acts that do not imply an attempted departure or escape from Fordist time and space.

The recollections of elderly men of work in a time of full employment are the focus of this paper. It is based on in-depth qualitative interviews with men who were young parents in the mid-1950s. Drawing on literature about masculinity, post-war Fordism and the constitution of self-identity through narrative, it explores their themes of how central security was to their identity as providers, and examines what satisfactions they got from working. The narrative bookends of their experience are strong memories of their parents in the Depression, and acute awareness of the contemporary insecurity of their children and grandchildren.

Over the past 20 years or so, Fordist production methods of car construction have by and large been replaced globally by the Japanese lean production system. Out of this has grown modularisation as platform engineering was adopted in the drive to control costs and yet maintain brand identities. Much of this was dependent upon mechanical technologies. More recently, as a consequence of developments in electronics, computer and communications technologies both within and without the automotive industry, the balance has shifted more towards the use of electronics in automobiles. This paper looks at possible developments in the use of telematics in cars and argues that the future lies increasingly in alliances between the auto producers and the electronics, computer hardware/software and communications industries. However, despite this, there remains a degree of consumer resistance to paying for electronic devices and services, and it is suggested here that a considerable consumer education drive is required if the telematics revolution is to take place as forecast earlier.

This paper is situated within two debates. First concerns the theories of ‘disorganised capitalism’ and the like which argue for major restructuring of advanced capitalist societies. Reed (1991) usefully identifies and summarises three varieties of such theory: (i) Post‐Fordism/Flexible Specialisation (e.g. Piore and Sabel, 1982); (ii) Disorganised Capitalism (e.g. Lash and Urry, 1987); (iii) Post‐Modernism (e.g. Poster, 1984). Common to these theories of ‘disorganised capitalism’ is the understanding that the progressive development of an ‘organised society’ (Prestus, 1962) — characterised by concentration, centralisation and corporatism — is being interrupted/challenged by trends in a contrary direction. The second relates to arguments about the work of middle management (e.g. Goffee and Scase, 1986 v. Dopson and Stewart, 1990).

Using a vast interdisciplinary literature, this paper discusses the transition to the post-Fordist economy as an unavoidable trend which affects individual organisations and countries. One of the great dangers of the current debate about post-Fordism is the overlapping of the various levels of discussion. The absence of rigour in posing the question has confused abstract reasoning (the outline of scenarios) with the process of demonstration (the utilisation of concrete, supporting data to validate the theory). This survey is essentially dedicated to the former question, leaving aside the latter (thus, the very complex issue of finding neutral data, nationally unbiased, to test it empirically). In our view, post-Fordism is an organisational paradigm (guidelines for new principles), not a realised model. Nor will it ever be one, since our hypothesis maintains that institutions matter, and that historical modifications of firms/industries/countries are the result of hybridisation and complex co-evolution. This article discusses, in fact, the nature of change implied by the post-Fordist paradigm only in relation to four abstract domains; its model of labour regulation, its organisation of production, its firm organisational model, and its societal and spatial context.

There are many studies concerning the changes in the production paradigm. However, few of them put knowledge transformation as a centrepiece to examine its role in forging the production system. This paper, by introducing an idea of three-existing-form of technology, argues that Fordism is nurtured by a stable and one-step knowledge transformation pattern. In contrast, post-Fordism is nurtured by a dynamic multi-stage, multi-path and multi-centre knowledge transformation pattern.

The burgeoning crisis of capitalist production from the middle of the 1970s helped stimulate a debate as to the existence and character of an emergent crisis of Fordism, both in the broader sense of a Fordism as a macro-scale model of development and in the narrower sense of a particular form of organization of industrial production. One part of this debate came to focus upon alternative methods of organizing production as companies experimented with new strategies and geographies of mass production. Of particular significance was the challenge posed to European and North American producers by the growing importance of Japanese companies and associated 'just-in-time' and lean production methods. This paper examines the resultant restructuring of automobile production, paying particular attention to the regulatory regimes within which production takes place; the social relations of production, both between capital and labour and between capitals; technologies of production; geographies of production; and the local and regional development implications of these changes.

A significant portion of the modern world economy is constituted as a patchwork of dense industrial agglomerations. The currently shifting structure of production from Fordist to flexible accumulation has intensified this state of affairs. In this paper, I describe changes in the thrust and content of regional policy resulting from these developments. I briefly delineate the inner logic of flexible production agglomerations, and I argue that they are likely to be most successful when they secure for themselves appropriate frameworks of institutional and collective order. Generic tasks for such frameworks are described in terms of five main arenas of social intervention: (1) industrial technology, (2) labor training, (3) business service associations, (4) innovation networks and cooperative manufacturing structures, and (5) local government and land use control. The case of recent public efforts to establish an electric car industry in Los Angeles is discussed as an illustration of the argument. Th...

From the turn of the century to the present, industrial production has taken various forms from an initial craft orientation, to a period of ‘Fordism’ when industrialization was characteristically dominated by mass production, to the present when increasing numbers of sectors are adopting ‘flexible specialization’ techniques which incorporate aspects both of mass production and of the craft tradition. As a location with strong craft and mass production lineages, Los Angeles offers unusual insights for understanding developments in the industry. In this paper the evolution of both sides of the Los Angeles automobile industry is traced and its prospects for remaining a viable economic entity are discussed in the region in light of overarching trends.

This paper is concerned with the impact of Fordism on the development of Greek agriculture. Drawing upon historical and contemporary data, the author argues that the importance of technological change and transformations in the labour process of agriculture production have often been underestimated or seen purely in technical terms. Such one-sided accounts are comprehensively criticised and an alternative account is provided which emphasises broader class, social and political conditions.

The possibility of the end of Taylorism and Fordism is increasingly taking a central stage in the sociology of work. Such arguments imply that the increasing use of flexible technology, allied to changes in product markets, requires flexibility within the workforce. This paper concentrates on the US auto industry, where commentators on the recent industrial relations scene tend to stress a move from a system of antagonism to one of cooperation. The author suggests that the worker participation schemes in the industry appear to have taken on an enduring quality in the 1980s with the intensification of Japanese competition, usage of new production methods and transition to higher levels of automation. Yet the production methods remain within the mass production regime and any increased flexibility demanded is limited. The 'new' industrial relations is more about the intensified internationalism and competition in the industry, and less about a new multiskilled worker precipitated by the new technology. Many of its aspects are concerned with increased managerial control which may in themselves become a source of conflict.

The slowness with which British firms adopted Scientific Management and Fordism has often been noted.The paper argues that in Britain, management had difficulty controlling labor effort norms after 1870. The state intervened to resolve the issue and in the process became a major proponent of industrial democracy. It is argued that the early interest in industrial democracy retarded the adoption of American methods that assumed a greater degree of managerial control over factory organization.

The relationship between the transformation of advanced capitalist societies from Fordism to post-Fordism and the simultaneous rise within these societies of postmodern culture is investigated. In art and architecture the exhaustion of high-modernist aesthetic progressivism resulted in a postmodern ‘condition’ of ‘free disposability’ of aesthetic materials which was furthered by societal developments such as the dissolution of the Fordist model of standardized consumption into diversified and aesthetizised consumption, the rise of an experimenting culture industry after the youth revolt of the 1960s, the growth of the service class, and the advent of ‘disposability’ in regard to ways and styles of living. In social philosophy a general delegitimation of the grand narratives of progress and emancipation occurred as ‘high-Fordism’ gave way to stagnating ‘late-Fordism’ and fragmented ‘post-Fordism’. In this process the technocratic–statist narrative of Fordism itself and the labor utopia of the industrial working class lost credibility, without any emergence of convincing utopian or grand reformist alternatives. The spatial (global–local) aspects of these transformations are emphasized and the paper concludes with some left-critical considerations which stress the democratic potential of postmodernism and its openness towards local alliances protective against the powers of global capitals and centralized states.

OBERHAUSER A. (1987) Labour, production and the state: decentralization of the French automobile industry, Reg. Studies 21, 445–458. This paper analyses the influence of the production process and state intervention on the spatial organization of the automobile industry in France since 1950. During this period, the state intervened in industrial production and labour relations to maintain economic acitivity in domestic regions. The production process occurred in two phases, Fordism and neo-Fordism, and is linked with the changing wage relation between labour and capital. Under Fordism, the automobile industry decentralized to peripheral French regions in compliance with its expanding production and shifting labour requirements. Under neo-Fordism, production was modified in response to the increasing internationalization of capital and the new division of labour. This transformation led to the spatial reorganization of the French automobile industry whereby investment increasingly shifted from domestic to ...

In this paper the authors analyze the two most important interrelated processes of social change in Italian agriculture: first the increasing productive specialization of family farming, both full and part-time, lending to the persistence of small farms but also to their growing integration and complementarity with other economic activities; and second the increasing heterogeneity of agricultural workers accompanied by the destructuring of their strong working-class identity, which had matured in the previous decades. This identity, however, also reflected a deep separation between agricultural laborers, their labor market and institutions, and the rest of the working class. The authors argue that these changes are progressively contributing to the full integration of agricultural social relations within an increasingly complex society. The analysis of these two processes in recent Italian experience shows that this trend towards integration differs totally from the hypothesis often advanced in the past according to which the integration of agriculture would occur through the development of green factories, more and more similar to large Fordist manufacturing plants. On the contrary, at least in present-day Italy, integration means increasing heterogeneity, also of organizational patterns in manufacturing, and growing inter-dependence.

O artigo discute a redefinição da origem da pobreza e a forma de administrá-la a partir da virada dos anos 80 para os anos 90 do século XX, tomando como exemplo o caso brasileiro. Resgata as abordagens dominantes que enfatizavam as causas estruturais da pobreza – a partir da dinâmica do mercado de trabalho – até a crise do fordismo e centra-se na nova matriz discursiva sobre a pobreza dos anos 90, que encontra no Banco Mundial a sua formulação mais paradigmática. Nessa visão, o centro do debate sobre a origem da pobreza e sobre as estratégias para o seu enfrentamento é deslocado para os indivíduos e seus déficit, retirando de cena questões estruturais relativas à relação capital x trabalho e, em especial, ao mercado de trabalho e enfatizando a descrição da situação dos pobres e a mensuração da pobreza, essenciais para a formulação de políticas focalizadas na administração da pobreza. Sustenta sua crítica a partir da análise de informações comparativas relativas ao funcionamento do mercado de trabalho nos anos do desenvolvimentismo e no período mais recente. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: trabalho, mercado de trabalho, pobreza, Banco Mundial, Brasil.LABOR MARKET AND POVERTY: discourse and evidences in the recent Brazilian trajectory Ângela Borges Elsa Sousa KraycheteThis paper discusses the redefinition of the origin of poverty and the form of managing it starting from the turning of the eighties to the nineties of the XX century, taking as an example the Brazilian case. It rescues the dominant approaches that emphasized the structural causes of the poverty – starting from the dynamics of the labor market – until the fordism crisis and it is centered at the new discursive matrix on poverty of the nineties, that finds in the World Bank its most paradigmatic formulation. In this vision, the center of the debate on the origin of poverty and on the policies against it is moved to the individuals and their deficit, not reckoning on relative structural issues regarding the relation capital x work and, especially, to the labor market and emphasizing the description of the situation of the poor and the measuring of poverty, essential for the formulation of policies focused in the administration of poverty. It sustains its critic starting from the analysis of comparative information regarding the operation of the labor market in the desenvolvimentism years and in the most recent period. KEYWORDS: work, labor market, poverty, World bank, Brazil.MARCHÉ DU TRAVAIL ET PAUVRETÉ: discours et évidences au sein de la trajectoire brésilienne récente Ângela Borges Elsa Sousa KraycheteL’article présente une redéfinition des origines de la pauvreté et de la manière de l’administrer lors du passage des années 80 aux années 90 du XXe siècle, en prenant comme exemple le cas du Brésil. On reprend les approches dominantes qui mettent l’accent sur les causes structurelles de la pauvreté – à partir de la dynamique du marché du travail – jusqu’à la crise du fordisme et on part du nouveau modèle de discours des années 90 concernant la pauvreté qui trouve, au sein de la Banque Mondiale, sa formulation la plus paradigmatique. Dans cette optique, l’essentiel du débat sur l’origine de la pauvreté et sur les stratégies envisagées pour la freiner concerne les individus et leurs déficits, sans tenir compte des questions structurelles relatives à la relation capital X travail ni, en particulier, de celles relatives au marché du travail. Ceci permet de mettre en évidence la description de la situation des pauvres ainsi que les dimensions de la pauvreté, éléments essentiels pour la formulation de politiques qui focalisent l’administration de la pauvreté. La critique se base sur l’analyse d’informations comparatives relatives au fonctionnement du marché du travail pendant les années de la course au développement et au cours d’une période plus récente. MOTS-CLÉS: travail, marché du travail, pauvreté, Banque Mondiale, Brésil. Publicação Online do Caderno CRH: http://www.cadernocrh.ufba.br

The aim of the paper was to analyze the role of information that occurred during major changes in the area of quality associated with labor transformations. Based on research and analysis of the literature we developed an analytical framework to draw a timeline of the historical evolution of changes in the role and dynamics of information throughout different historical phases of quality and its relationship with labor transformations from Fordism to cognitive capitalism. It may be concluded that information became relevant in the process of quality after immaterial, cognitive and linguistic labor was considered an important and innovative asset, and therefore a key element in quality. Este artigo objetiva analisar o papel da informação nas principais mudanças ocorridas na área da qualidade, de modo associado àstransformações no trabalho. Com base em pesquisa e análise bibliográfica, desenvolveu-se um quadro analítico, em que se apresenta uma periodização dando conta da evolução das mudanças da informação, ao longo das diferentes fases históricas da qualidade, em sua relação com as transformações no trabalho, desde o fordismo até o capitalismo cognitivo. Conclui-se que ainformação ganhou maior destaque nos processos de qualidade a partir do momento em que ganha também importância o trabalho imaterial, cognitivo e linguístico, como gerador de valor e inovação, configurando-se como elemento chave para a qualidade

Google’s dominance over the web allows it to dictate various norms and practices that regulate the state of contemporary capitalism online. The way in which Google operates as a company and generates revenue is often sidelined in academic discussions regarding the cultural implications of how its search engine functions. Almost 90% of Google’s revenue is derived from advertising, despite Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s original academic paper regarding Google in which they argue that advertising produces mixed motives that make it an unfeasible way to fund search engines. This article outlines how Google’s model of advertising reflects and encourages wider changes in capitalism as it shifts from its twentieth-century Fordist incarnation to contemporary Post-Fordist arrangements of labour. In doing so, this article analyses Google’s two main advertising systems, AdWords and AdSense, and proposes that these financial models have significant effects upon online discourse. In discussing AdWords, this article details some of the tensions between the local and the global that develop when tracing flows of information and capital, specifically highlighting Google’s impact on the decline of online language diversity. In outlining AdSense, this article demonstrates how Google’s hegemonic control prescribes which parts of the web can be monetised and which remain unprofitable. In particular, in drawing from existing studies, evidence is provided that Google’s AdSense programme, along with Google’s relationship with Facebook, incentivised the rise of fake news in the 2016 US presidential election. This work builds on existing scholarship to demonstrate that Google’s economic influence has varied and far-reaching effects in a number of contexts and is relevant to scholars in a range of disciplines. As such, this article is intended as a discursive introduction to the topic and does not require specific disciplinary background knowledge. In doing so, this article does not attempt to provide the final word on Google’s relationship to digital capitalism, but rather, demonstrate the profitability of a Post-Fordist perspective, in order to enable a wider engagement with the issues identified.

What is social housing, is it a right or a property? Is it guaranteed for all by welfare state or non-governmental organizations or a commodity in capitalist production and market relations? According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, housing is a human right for ‘a standard for living.’ Nowadays referred next to ‘adequate housing,’ ‘the right to housing’ refers to specific groups of society such as ‘women, children, slum-dwellers, homeless, disabled, displaced, migrants, and indigenous’ as denoted by the UN Habitat for human rights. Either defined in relation to ‘the standard of living’ by mass housing of the Fordist welfare state or to ‘the quality of life’ by ‘the right to buy’ discourse of the post-Fordist neoliberal state, ‘the right to housing’ represents the antinomy of social housing oscillating between public and private entity. It is a means of realizing the eidos of both collective and individual, therewithal of building the wall or the cave to shelter and to evict, or to imprison. Referred as an umbrella term for producing collective habitation for specific groups in need of adequate housing, social housing is inclusive of diverse terminology in terms of political, socio-economic and institutional tools as well as of procedural approaches in building design and construction typologies and of shareholders in production. These terms vary as affordable housing, public housing, self-help housing, core housing, cooperative housing, co-housing, low-income housing, low-cost housing, and so on. Informal housing or self-provisional housing also participate in this sub-terminology of social housing developed as informal responses to housing demand by the poor. However, all the above classifications related to form and content, assessable and evaluable not only to spatial and functional but also social and cultural criteria, do not figure out the critical core in social housing as a field of space production. Through a Platonic reading of space, social housing signifies a dialogue between form and content. Through a Marxist reading of space production, social housing reifies the eidos, thus is a commodity. Superposing both readings on a material ground, social housing dialectically denotes both public and private property due to provision, distribution, use and maintenance of resources and people on land through settlement and eviction processes reproducing itself anew. As long as the notion of dwelling is tied to the land dominated by production and market relations, housing embodies the notion of property as a field of policy, planning and design by searching for equilibrium between land value and population control. It is a ‘right’ neutralizing the tension between accumulation by dispossession and need for shelter as well as a ‘commodity’ fatting up housing industry, thus is a means of reconciliation and of restraint at the same time. Social housing has occupied an urgent field of architecture and urbanism since the Industrial Revolution. It was a ‘space of harmony’ for ‘emancipation’ of the working class in tune with the Fordist everyday life, but rather is a ‘conflict space’ in the post-Fordist age intermingled with the search for forms and tools of common land and home ownership against the rise of poverty and shortage of resources in different geographies. At this specific moment, this paper aims at a critical analysis on the antinomies of social housing by digging Fordist and post-Fordist discourses and practices on social housing and by unravelling the networks between institutions and actors as well as environment and people in housing production. With reference to the praxis of social housing in the last century oscillating between settlement and eviction practices, it suggests a materialist and dialectic re-definition of ‘public’ and ‘private’ for social housing.

Since the nineteenth and twentieth century, information has been pivotal both in the cultural tradition and then in the economic tradition. While the Fordism economic model and its specialisation requirements originated a simplistic zoning and single-use development approach to the design of a city. It, however, determined a fragmented growth of cities. Inevitably, the zoning as an urban strategy affected the architectural scale. Nevertheless, the idea of information, commercial goods and thereby people freely able to flow through the city allowed architects and urban designer to conceive new types of urban infrastructures. For example, trains, which were designed on the model of urban “arteries and veins.” Over time, the persistence of urban and architectural segmentation has strengthened social and economic inequalities among urban society. In addition, information has played a more vital role in this strengthening process. The technological achievements of the twenty-first century such as information technologies have significantly affected cities. The new informational patterns have provided new ways of designing, and in turn how societies experience cities. These “quantified cities” consist of digital data that dynamically interacts with “quantified human beings.” Consequently, a renewed urban semiotics is established, which is built around an alternate sociological comprehension. Is this new urban semiotics able to heal an ill and divided urban body? The paper will investigate a new concept of “quantified city” based on the notion of “Hyper-Reality,” and its inhabitants who are entering in a “post-human” condition while living in a dynamic urban environment. In particular, the critical analysis will be used as a “tool” for redefining the perception of the city (i.e., the image of the Hyper City) through inhabitants’ (post-humans’) relational patterns which are technologically mediated (i.e., Google Maps, Uber, Instagram, etc.). The more traditional notion of urbanisation is questioned with a focus on how the an urban society is embedded within the digital condition and the notion of a city.

This paper explores the way in which a computerised workload system, Excelcare, rationalises nursing care. Excelcare enables management to track, control, time and cost nursing work – a task I will argue is increasingly necessary under Casemix funding. Using a case study approach I argue that Excelcare provides management with refined opportunities to further rationalise production systems through creating records of ‘virtual work time’ as opposed to real working time. The ambiguity surrounding the purpose of Excelcare, ensures worker compliance and provides management with data for further lean production work arrangements. It also illustrates the way in which time is used in the bureaucratic search for both equity and control.

This paper adopts a Marxist political economy approach to locate the place of an occupational health and safety (OHS) legal regime within capitalist economic, political and social relations. A theoretically rigorous account of OHS regulation requires a systemic integration of class and the state as analytic categories. It is argued that OHS regulation is a product of the historical epoch of capitalism in which it is inserted and the nature of the state as a ‘strategic-relational,’ form-determined social relationship. This hypothesis is tested through an analysis of the legislation in New South Wales (NSW) emanating from the findings of the 1972 UK Robens Committee and 1981 NSW Williams Report. It is demonstrated that the case study period represents a transitional era in which the impulses to regulate OHS stem from both a labour movement strengthened by the post-War Fordist boom and an ‘institutional search’ to find ways out of the developing economic crisis.

This paper aims to analyze the changes in the pattern of organization and accumulation of the Brazilian industry in the 2000s. In accordance with the thesis presented here, since the defensive reaction to the crisis of developmentalism and the transformations derived from the exhaustion of the Fordist techno-economic paradigm in the second half of the twentieth century, the emergence of a new pattern of organization and accumulation of the local industry, termed the Brazilian Disease, was consolidated in the first decade of the 21st century. This pattern is characterized by structural reconfigurations toward regressive specialization and deindustrialization alongside the emergence of strategies that ensured the accumulation of capital invested in the industrial sphere. This accumulation, in turn, was associated with the emergence of strategies increasingly disconnected from a strictly productive performance. Resumo O objetivo deste artigo é analisar as transformações no padrão de organização e acumulação da indústria brasileira na primeira década de 2000. Segundo a interpretação defendida neste trabalho, a partir da reação defensiva à crise do desenvolvimentismo e às transformações derivadas do esgotamento do paradigma tecnoeconômico vigente na segunda metade do século XX, observou-se na primeira década de 2000 a emergência de um novo padrão de organização e acumulação da indústria local, denominado de Doença Brasileira. Essa seria caracterizada por um cenário em que se verificam reconfigurações estruturais em direção à especialização regressiva e à desindustrialização em paralelo ao surgimento de estratégias que garantiram a acumulação do capital investido na esfera industrial. Tal acumulação, por sua vez, estaria associada à emergência de estratégias crescentemente desvinculadas do desempenho estritamente produtivo.

In this paper, I attempt to examine the process of reception of the thoughts of the great Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci in China. On the one hand, as a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy, Antonio Gramsci is widely regarded as a highly original and influential thinker within the Marxist tradition, and well-known for his theoretical contributions to the Western Communist movements. Obviously influenced by Marx and Lenin, Gramsci also built his intellectual formation upon a number of Italian philosophers: Niccolò Machiavelli, Antonio Labriola, Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce. When Italian Fascism finalized its dictatorship over the country in the 1920s, Gramsci was arrested at Mussolini’s orders and spent nine terrible years in prison, which eventually killed him in 1937. Prison Notebooks, the most significant work of Antonio Gramsci, contains numerous enigmas because of the censorship and the insufficiency of the resource in the prison. Some of these enigmas still remain unsolved by contemporary scholarship. On the other hand, the People’s Republic of China is the most populous country in the world with over 1.3 billion people. Located in East Asia, China is a single-party state governed by the Communist Party of China after its victory in the Chinese Civil War since World War II. China is unique in the contemporary world for the reason that it is considered to be the largest existing socialist country. Gramsci’s presence in China is a combination of two particular issues in the development of the modern Communist movement. In order to explore this topic, I have analyzed the existing articles and books published by Chinese intellectuals who intended to introduce the thoughts of Gramsci to China.

This paper discusses the basic rationale which has inspired the intellectual and policy reorientation towards “social investment”, with particular attention to child policy. The firstsection outlines the main features of the social investment approach, contrasting it with the more traditional “Fordist” approach. The second and third sections explain why and how early childhood education and care canmake a difference in termsofbothefficiencyandequity.Thefourthsectionbrieflysummarizes the British experience under New Labour, while the fifth section discusses issues of quality and accessibility. The conclusion wraps up, underlining the need to step up the shift to- wards social investment, overcoming the political obstaclesto reform.