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Diagramming the intersection between the representation of work and the work of representation, this thesis explores how animation has historically mediated technological transformations in film production through its self-reflexive engagement with labour. I track the entanglement between animated images and image production through three key inflection points in animation history: beginning with early animation’s pre-industrial roots; continuing through animation’s industrial rationalisation; and concluding with a discussion of digital animation. Contrary to claims that animation’s self-reflexive address is unique to early animation, I argue that early animation’s turn towards self-reflexivity does not vanish with the disappearance of the animator from the frame. Rather, animation showcases an ongoing preoccupation with labour. It works out tensions between autonomy and automation; movement and mechanisation; labour and alienation at key points throughout its history, especially when the work of animation is transformed by its formalisation, rationalisation, and digitalisation as a medium. This thesis is organised into three chapters. Chapter One takes up cinematic reflexivity and self-figuration to critique *Gertie the Dinosaur* (1914 Winsor McCay) through the lens of the operational aesthetic, underscoring how this aesthetic mode poses limits to theories of cinematic disclosure and problematises representations of work in early animation. Taking up the film as a cinematic treatise on the labour of animation, this chapter argues that the film’s live-action prologue disregards the role photography played in automating the reproduction of Gertie’s animated imagery, electing to prioritise the manual labours of animation as a handicraft. Chapter Two builds on Siegfried Kracauer’s theory of the mass ornament to contemplate masses, multitudes, and crowds for film. It decodes the mass ornament in the musical choreographies of Busby Berkeley; addresses its resonances with assembly line production in classical animation; and concludes with a discussion of homogeneity and heterogeneity in the production of digitally simulated crowds. Chapter Three takes up the ‘quality assurance guarantee’ of Pixar Animation Studios to consider how it articulates its relationship to creativity and the labour of computer animated filmmaking. This chapter investigates Pixar’s post-Fordist labour history to ask how this labour history intersects with the broader turn towards the immaterial labours of creativity— labours which the studio uses to underwrite its reputation as ‘Creativity, Inc.’ Through a critique of its political economy, Chapter Three describes how Pixar curates its public image and optimises worker productivity by indoctrinating animators into a company culture and corporate mythology which foregrounds artistry and creativity over computer-intensive forms of work. Reflecting on animation as a material practice; as an ideology; and through a critique of its political economy, this thesis contemplates the complex configurations between animated imagery; animated film production; and the labour of animation. This interdisciplinary work combines critical methods from production studies, film history, media theory, cultural studies, and animation scholarship to offer incisive contributions to film and media studies. It brings together aesthetic theory with critiques of the technologies, histories, and production methods of animated film. And it raises important questions for film and media studies about the work of animation; animation’s mediation of this work; and asks what animation theory can bring to the study of cinematic labour.

The presented paper deals with the basic issues, dilemmas and social and cultural contradictions in the Polish transformation process against the background of Central and Eastern Europe, the processes of the establishment and development of new states and nations as well as the new markets. The author views these problems through the light of the emergence of a broad class of subcontractors in a turbulent environment and the new modes of production, which are a result of changes in the structure of human labour introduced by post-Fordism (in its final stage, lean management) and postmodernity. The author also analyzes the social change as a consequence of social relations resulting from exchanging the life chances of the actors for the class-conditioned market opportunities in the existing social and political situation (conjoncture) and at the present stage of transformation at the moment when the emergent markets get shaped and mature. The study makes use of the hermeneutic method, which is finding out the essence of the present phase of transformation through the light of new concepts against the background of the historical-comparative analysis. The present article is not aimed at ordering reality but it is an inspiration for studies and for approaching transformation in accordance with a new conceptual apparatus of social sciences, sociology, management and political economy.

The article examines the current problems of the global sphere of work and employment. The author historically assesses the causes and consequences of the structural transformations of the economy and social and labor relations as a result of the transition of the capitalist economy from fordism and keynesianism to post-fordism and neoliberalism at the end of the 20th century. Based on the analysis of a significant array of statistical and sociological information the author concludes that in the conditions of neoliberal economic globalization, labor has undergone significant changes in comparison with the period of the "glorious post-war thirty years" of capitalism. The implementation of radical economic reforms has led to an increase in employment vulnerability and a decrease in the quality of working life for many categories of workers in the modern world. The decline in the share of labor in GDP, the lag in wage growth rates from labor productivity, and the widespread incidence of informal and vulnerable employment, characteristic of this period, have become the main reasons for the growth of socioeconomic inequality and widespread poverty and poverty in the working environment in recent decades. Having considered the impact of the current process of automation, robotization and digitalization of the global economy, the author concludes that without changing the socio-economic and political configuration of the structure of the modern world, the potentially high utility of the latest achievements of science and technology will be significantly limited and subordinated mainly to the economic interests of capital owners, and will not work for the benefit of all humanity and social progress. The article pays special attention to studying the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of their impact on the position of employees in the modern world.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to use spatial thinking (space-time) as a lens through which to examine the ways in which the socio-economic conditions and values of the post-Fordist academy work to diminish and even subsume the immaterial affective labour of librarians even as it serves to reproduce the academy.Design/methodology/approachThe research question informing this paper asks, In what ways does spatial thinking help us to better understand the immaterial, invisible and gendered labour of academic librarians' public service work in the context of the post-Fordist university? This question is explored using a conceptual approach and a review of recent library information science (LIS) literature that situates the academic library in the post-Fordist knowledge economy.FindingsThe findings suggest that the feminized and gendered immaterial labour of public service work in academic libraries – a form of reproductive labour – remains invisible and undervalued in the post-Fordist university, and that academic libraries function as a procreative, feminized spaces.Originality/valueSpatial thinking offers a corrective to the tendency in LIS to foreground time over space. It affords new insights into the spatial and temporal aspects of information work in the global neoliberal knowledge economy and suggests a new spatio-temporal imaginary of the post-Fordist academic library as a site of waged work.

In the context of precarious post-Fordist urban labour markets, Dress for Success in the Netherlands, a non-profit working in the context of the welfare state, provides dress advice to a majority of men. Dress advice consists of moments in which demands for immaterial labour find material translations into items of clothing. Building on ethnographic observations, I argue that dress advice-encounters should be seen as exercises in adaptability to new and ever changing economic circumstances. In these pedagogies, gender is a key instrument. Rather than a straightforward feminization of the economy, what is at stake is a performance of openness towards becoming adaptable to future labour market demands. Asking men to depart their attachments to Fordist working class masculinities and its material translations is an exercise toward becoming pliable enough for post-Fordist precarious labour markets.

The paper consists of three parts. The question, what precarity could mean, is discussed in the first part. It contains a short characteristic of the meanings of “precarity” referring to a) the human body; b) political issues; c) culture, and d) the economic situation. The main question regards insecurity resulting from employment and work relations in the Post-Fordism era. The debate on the precariat is the subject of the second part. The core of this debate is whether the precariat is a “new dangerous class” whose “historical mission” is a transformation of Post-Fordism society. Different answers are given by several experts. The last part concerns the question of the possible reaction on precarity and on the precariat. It presents a short outline of the discourse about project “Social Europe” and “unconditional basic income” regarding the precariat.

This chapter explores structural barriers to effective critical practice in Post-Fordist capitalism, with reference to Jacques Rancière’s Consensus Democracy, Manuel Castells’ Network Power, Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon’s theories of Liquid Power, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s work on New Capitalism, and Jodi Dean’s work around Communicative Capitalism. The chapter introduces a range of digital tactics and techniques successful in disrupting recent hegemonic forms of power. Examples of successful digital activism are drawn principally from histories of Tactical Media and Hacktivism. The chapter closes by considering the continued value of existing tactical and hacktivist techniques in a Post-Trump, Post-Brexit world, where the hegemonic rhetorical and cultural dynamics of liberal consensus have seemingly shifted.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, by pioneering of the international finance institutions, “shock therapy” neoliberal agenda, which were previously applied to Latin America, has been actualized initially in Russia and then in all post-Soviet countries. In the same time, while the state, which commanded both political and economic spheres in the Soviet era, has been diminished by the neoliberal policies in parallel to be through with the economic and socio-economic spheres, nomenklatura, which were Soviet elites, has turned into the oligarchs and the economic power has been acquired by the oligarchs owing to the actualized neoliberal agenda. By the beginning of 2000s, after the coming to power of Vladimir Putin, the process of the rising authoritarianism of the state has started under the name of “strong state” notion. So to say, by coming to power of Putin, who displays a Leviathan profile as the form of the Russian state and even the Russian society, both political and economic transformations in Russia have been guaranteed. Therefore, in this work, it will aim to discuss the changing situation of the Russian state under the Putin’s government within this political and socio-economic framework.

A dominant strand of literature adopting an identity-oriented approach towards industrial decline and post-Fordist flexibilisation argues that we are in a ‘post-industrial’ world in which class struggles and ‘old’ labour movements have been replaced by struggles around identity. This article examines working-class politics in the city of Ahmedabad, India, in the pre- and post-liberalisation phases in order to understand whether class struggle is indeed being replaced by identity struggle. In juxtaposing Marx with E.P. Thompson, the article re-visits concepts such as class, class struggle and exploitation in order to understand them in new ways in an increasingly ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-Fordist’ world.

THE WORKING MAN'S CRASH LANDING Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis have observed that, when it comes to utopian visions regarding the societal benefits of space travel, it is not so much the alleged reasons for making a journey to Mars that matter but "what they can do to you on Mars when they get you there" (58). Programs such as the Apollo missions or even current speculation about manned missions to Mars, whatever scientific benefits might be expected, simultaneously generate a host of less obvious outcomes that are nonetheless useful from the point of view of social control, nation building, and ideological reinforcement. Collecting moon rocks might have added to the storehouse of human knowledge, but the Apollo missions were also immensely useful to the U.S. government for providing a unifying goal by which to capture the national imagination in the midst of such legitimation crises as those related to Vietnam, the Cold War, and environmental destruction. We might go further, with Caffentzis and Federici, and discern in the asceticism and other-worldliness required by space exploration a way of disciplining the terrestrial labour force: "The launch of today's high-tech industry needs a technological leap in the human machine--a big evolutionary leap in creating a new type of worker to match capital's investment needs" (61). Just as a space program that trains only a handful of actual astronauts might have a much larger effect on the national imaginary, creating the utopian fascination needed to implement new disciplinary structures, so too can popular culture about science and technology provide the fantasy scenarios that help generalize new modes of control even while entertaining and stimulating our imaginations. (1) The popular 1970s television show The Six Million Dollar Man (hereafter Six) is a case in point. Celebrating technological aspiration in the face of sensational failure, the show's opening montage uses historic footage of the 1967 crash of nasa's experimental M2-F2 lifting body aircraft, in which test pilot Bruce Peterson was almost killed when his plane hit the ground at over 400 km/hr. The M2-F2 was part of a series of experimental aircraft that led to the development of the U.S. Space Shuttle program in the 1980s. In Six, Peterson's crash is used as the background for an opening sequence detailing the reconstruction of the fictional astronaut Steve Austin, a man literally reduced to "human scrap," in the words of the government agent who oversees Austin's transformation into a cyborg super-soldier. Using digital sound effects with computerized graphics superimposed on images of Austin receiving his robotic implants, the opening sequence famously proclaims in voiceover: "gentlemen, we can rebuild him ... we have the capacity to create the world's first bionic man." The show's dramatic juxtaposition of high and low, of "human scrap" with $6 million of high-tech machinery, offers insights into the tensions faced by a largely white male American workforce confronting the contradictions of capital in the 1970s, a decade that saw the fraying of postWorld War II Keynesianism and the initial stirrings of the more turbulent and unruly neoliberal market that would replace it. With the escalation of Cold War tensions, labour unrest, energy prices, economic and environmental crises, and an increasingly unpopular military entanglement in Vietnam, the value of American lives seemed under question in a more nebulously unsettling manner than the century's two horrific but spatially and temporally circumscribed world wars (and the economic depression in between) had managed to do. The white male factory worker privileged by postwar Fordism was further confronted with threats of deskilling and obsolescence through technological innovations and shutdowns ferociously pursued by industrialists as a means of both "streamlining" the workplace and disciplining the workforce. In the midst of these tensions, like the fallen astronaut from the opening of Six, hegemonic American masculinity might have keenly felt the proximity of the "human scrap heap" confronted by Austin. …

Robin Murray talks to Jeremy Gilbert and Andrew GoffeyInTrODUCTIOnThis issue of New Formations is concerned with a complex of issues around the politics of networks, 'control' and 'security' societies as defined by Deleuze and Foucault respectively, and post-Fordism. In fact Maurizio Lazzarato, for one, has explicitly linked the latter two phenomena, understanding postFordism as more-or-less the direct consequence of new techniques of power and governance as described by Foucault being deployed in the context of processes of capitalist production.Today the 'post-Fordist' hypothesis seems more or less irrefutable. While some of the key features of 'Fordist' capitalism - such as assemblyline production - remain central to global manufacturing (above all in China), they are no longer bundled with the other key features of 'Fordism', such as a strict gendered division of labour and a macro-economic policy committed to maintaining high aggregate demand within the same nation state in which production is concentrated. Industrial automation, market differentiation, corporate disaggregation, labour market specialisation, justin-time production and the expansion of the retail, IT and service sectors have transformed economies beyond recognition, not just in the old industrial heartlands of northern Europe and north America, but in differentiated ways on a global scale. What's more, these changes have been bound up with profound cultural, social and political changes, as commentators such as David Harvey were already discerning at the end of the 1980s. It is worth bearing in mind, then, that when the hypothesis was first advanced at the end of the 1970s, the idea that such changes would have any significant results at all was widely regarded as controversial, and was much resisted.Robin Murray has been one of the UK's leading radical economists for many years. An expert on co-operatives, social enterprise and institutional and technological innovation, he was Director of Industry for the Greater London Council during the 1980s. This was the period during which the GLC was led by Ken Livingstone, enacting one of the most radical progressive programmes of any major governmental body in British history. Directly influenced by this experience, Murray wrote two celebrated articles for the British monthly Marxism Today on the subject of emergent 'post-Fordism' in the second half of the 1980s. These two essays 'After Henry' and 'Benetton Britain' were key in introducing the concept of post-Fordism to the wider left in the UK.1 new Labour would later take up the idea of post-Fordism as dictating a narrowly individualist culture and an approach to economic management and publicservice reform which was wholly informed by neoliberal ideology. But this was never Murray's conclusion. Instead he has argued consistently that the new technological and organisational forms of contemporary production are adaptable to classic democratic socialist objectives, and facilitate collaborative creativity, democratic self-management and co-operative production.In this interview Andrew Goffey and Jeremy Gilbert discuss a wide range of these issues with Murray, for whose time and co-operation we remain extremely grateful.POsT-FOrDIsM In PrACTICEJeremy I was hoping that initially you could say a bit about the idea of postFordism, and its reception history in this country, because you were one of the first people writing about it robin, at least in a context that was widely read.Robin Well, for me, it originated in our experience at the GLC, not from any writing. Throughout the 1970s, and right up until the drafting of Labour's London Manifesto for the 1981 municipal elections, the predominant economic paradigm was Fordism: left economic industrial strategy was based on the idea of scale and rationalisation. The critique of industrial Britain across the political spectrum was that it was backward. It had too many old family firms, who underinvested and weren't good at managing. …

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

This article reviews the theoretical and political history of the concept of precarity, used to describe various forms of insecurities, primarily those related to conditions of labor, employment, and wage. Precarity and the related neologism precariat have recently gained ground in Anglophone intellectual and political discussions. It is the premise of the article that, with an increasingly globalized economy, discussions and movement action based on precarity may be of growing importance in a Danish context. The aim of the article is to show how the history of these concepts has unfolded in sociological discussions and social movement practices since the turn of the century. I begin with the sociological discussion about the concept of the precariat, a class formation based on the conditions and experiences of precarity. I then show how the concept of precarity has a history in activist thought beyond these sociological discussions and how social movements, based on this thought, throughout the 2000s have mobilized around the concept, primarily in the so-called EuroMayDay parades. In the last section, I discuss how the economic crisis has affected social movement practices and how labor unions have begun paying attention to the predicaments of precarity.

This chapter bears down on neoliberal ideology’s influence on contemporary conceptions of creativity and its education. Under the present post-Fordist system of economic production, artists—with their drive to innovate, flexible production practices, and tolerance for precarity—are being upheld as ideal workers. The resulting requirements of immaterial labor have obliged the restructuring of education through forms of neoliberal governmentality that set about instilling specific values and urgencies manifesting in the governmentalization of learning and economization of education. In my consideration of the convergence of these pressures I focus on how the Partnership for 21st Century Skills mandates the acceleration of post-Fordist economic goals for art education through government of self and others that greatly reduces the possibilities for the nurturing of creativity.

Drawing from various approaches, this chapter has the dual purpose of offering a conceptual framework in which to embed the subsequent analysis and that of locating the emergence of the knowledge economy as an imaginary that came to be embraced by the Indian and the Brazilian state from the late 1980s onwards. The chapter is primarily concerned with explaining the international context in which India and Brazil found themselves in the 1980s, paying particular attention to the changes brought about by the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism in advanced economies, the rise of the competition state orientation, the debt crisis and the rise of the knowledge economy as one of the dominant ways of conceptualising the economy and its future direction. The chapter concludes by explaining why and how intellectual property titles have become central to the way in which the knowledge economy functions today.

Lingotto used to be an important industrial site and a highly symbolic space at the heart of the city of Turin, Italy. The aim of this article is to analyse the multiple trajectories, spatialities and layers of memories, meanings and practices that overlapped within and across Lingotto in the last decades, following the changing economic conditions and connected discursive paradigms associated with the evolution of the local economy since the Fordist crisis of the 1970s. The analysis shows that Lingotto may be interpreted as a mirror of Turin’s resilience strategies used to cope with the economic crises that have hit the city. Furthermore, it shows how Lingotto is a highly resilient urban fragment and building. Contrary to mainstream debates about the need to conserve and stage local urban heritages, this paper offers an account of Lingotto’s resilience, which highlights how forgetting the past may be a strategy for tackling the present and being resilient. The analysis of the evolution of Lingott...

In the last 30 years or so, the relationship between power and resistance has been theorized as a defining feature of organizations and organizing. While there is little consensus around its definition, a useful starting point for thinking about the organization–power–resistance relationship is to view organizations as political sites of contestation where various stakeholder groups compete for resources—economic, political, and symbolic. Much of the research on power, resistance, and organizations has emerged out of a critical tradition that draws on numerous theoretical and philosophical threads, including Marxism, neo-Marxism, critical theory, poststructuralism, and feminism. Common to these threads are various efforts to link power and resistance to issues of meaning, identity, and discourse processes. In this sense—and particularly in the last 30 years—there have been multiple efforts to theorize power as intimately connected to communication. This connection has become particularly important with the shift from Fordist (bureaucratic, hierarchical, centralized, deskilled) organizational forms to post-Fordist (flexible, flat, dispersed, knowledge-based) organizations that place a premium on decentralized, “consensual” forms of power and control (as opposed to the coercive methods of Fordist regimes). Exploring communicative conceptions of power and resistance shows how these phenomena are closely tied to the regulation of meaning and identities in the contemporary workplace.

This essay assesses the feminist potential of workplace flexibility when it emerged as an object of knowledge in 1980s US public culture. The keyword flexibility, which crossed economic discourses about topics ranging from production to remuneration to consumption, was constructed as coextensive with feminism at this time. The essay begins by analyzing popular knowledge concerning labor flexibility created in scholarship and mainstream news. Next, the paper focuses on the contemporaneous articulation of flexibility to feminism. Since 1980, news, scholarship, and film argued that flexibility might provide a feminist antidote for late twentieth-century capitalism's harsh draining of labor from bodies. Particularly, flexible working conditions became publicized as a way that mothers could be better accommodated in the workplace. Yet as the century waned, flexibility failed to uproot standard time-intensive models of work and excluded some women from job opportunities and job security. When flexibility appear...

The article argues that the current financial crisis that began unfolding in late 2007 cannot be explained merely by institutional failure, false economic theories, or human misbehavior. Instead, the crisis must be analyzed against the backdrop of the internal contradictions of capitalist accumulation and the gradual disintegration of the post-war hegemonic world order under U.S. leadership. The specifics of the crisis are inherently related to the failure of Fordism in the 1970s and the emergence of a post-Fordist, neoliberal, and finance-driven regime of accumulation that was pushed to its limits in the lead-up to the current downturn. El artículo sostiene que la crisis financiera que se desencadenó a finales de 2007, y que prevalece en la actualidad, no puede ser meramente explicada por el fracaso institucional, las falsas teorías económicas o el mal comportamiento humano. Más bien, debe ser analizada en el contexto de las contradicciones internas de la acumulación capitalista y la gradual desintegración del orden mundial hegemónico de posguerra bajo el liderazgo de EE. UU. Los detalles de la crisis están intrínsecamente relacionados con el fracaso del fordismo en la década de 1970 y la aparición de un régimen de acumulación posfordista, neoliberal e impulsado por el sector financiero, que finalmente fue empujado a sus límites en los preparativos de la recesión actual.

This chapter, having specified why other theories fail to understand Cosa Nostra and insist on its decline, focuses on the way the Sicilian Mafia adapted its existence to the new political and economic contexts, using its know-how to keep popular consent and to maintain an influence in legal and illegal markets. The Mafia changes at pace with capitalism; in its structure, in the management of its activities, in its relation to the legal world, it has been following – in the late years – the pattern of post-Fordism. Thus relying on a leaner and more flexible structure, which outsources the riskiest activities, downsizes its members to avoid raids and prevent supergrasses, and operates in partnership with other clans to share the risks, and invest in the global market.

This article investigates the historical relationship between gender and precarious labor by analyzing the case study of Italian women in the second half of the twentieth century. A gendered historical approach shows that different production modes and working conditions were simultaneously present in Fordist and post-Fordist societies, and women, as well as migrants, experienced a significant level of precariousness even in the so-called golden age of the twentieth century. Sexual division of labor and sex-based discrimination seem to lie at the very heart of the gendered nature of precarious work, a long dureé nexus that has characterized industrial and postindustrial societies, as the article shows, in regard to the Italian case. By approaching the question of job precariousness as a multifaceted phenomenon, it is claimed that the subsequent spread of precarious work in the second half of the twentieth century was directly affected by labor and women's movement struggles, on the one hand, and by the role of the state and politics in defining and redefining the labor law relationship, on the other.

This article reconsiders the question of nostalgic consumption in East Germany as embedded not within a national or a regional (post-socialist) politics of time, as much literature has done, but rather within a global post-Fordist reconfiguration of the relation between time, consumption, and politics. Examining an underclass East Berlin neighborhood that has come to epitomize ‘pastness’, I show the salience of material prosperity – or its lack – in shaping the senses of time of its inhabitants. Especially for the younger generation, nostalgic commodities mediate the growing abyss between loss and accumulation, futures and pasts, nostalgic longings and unrealistic aspirations. I argue that the nexus of time, politics, and consumption has been transformed with the fading away of what has been called the future perfect (the political temporality of utopian projects) and its metamorphosis into what I term here the past conditional, the temporality of lost futures, irredeemable opportunities, and vanquished p...

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.

The commercial exploitation of scientific knowledge and increased public participation in democratic decision-making about science and technology have emerged as the two central themes of contemporary science policy in Britain. We argue that the prominence of participatory discourse in contemporary science policy is primarily due to the close fit of this discourse with the post-Fordist and post-industrial economic strategy of the British state. Participation is a form of immaterial labour which gains currency in this phase of capitalism, blurring the distinctions between production and consumption, and between the economy and the political or communicative public sphere. Participation is cognitive, interpretative, affective, and social work which enters into the construction of technologies as bundled material artefacts and cultural meanings. Participation operates both in the production and consumption of goods and in the legitimation of social and political relations. Public engagement exercises prepare...

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

This article uses historical research and ethnographic fieldwork to ask how policymakers interpret historical, political, and economic factors to construct inter‐ethnic communities that would bring security and economic growth to an enlarged European Union (EU). Focusing on post‐Soviet Estonia's ethnic integration policy, the article argues that ‘flexibility’ applies not only to post‐Fordist, individualized subjects, but also to relations between subjects of different nationalities that policymakers want to form organically in service sector employment. The article explains how this policy construction emerged in light of Estonia's historical trajectory from 1991 to 2001 and demonstrates how it conceptually resolved the fundamental tension between the territorialized nation‐state and deterritorialized global capitalism. A visual media campaign entitled ‘Many Nice People: Integrating Estonia’ captured the essence of this construction, which obscured how the Estonian nation‐state marginalized minorities whi...

This research analyses how Greece and Ireland have been positioned in the world development since 1945 by using the French Regulation Approach. In particular, this analysis describes three broad periods, notably the Fordist, post-Fordist and the New Economy ones. In each period, apart from the general approach that concerns the world economy transformation, the specific transformations of the economies of Greece and Ireland are also described. It is argued that the different understanding of capitalist dynamism and development by Greece and Ireland, due to their different national characteristics and experiences, had as a result the two countries to implement different policies in order to respond to these changes and consequently differently to take advantage of the new opportunities that have emerged. In this respect, Ireland has advanced a more sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of capitalist development, in relation to Greece and therefore has been able to identify and give preferential assistance to growing sectors (e.g. IT sector).

This article suggests some new lines of research in the field of the political economy of punishment and some possible new directions for a critical approach to contemporary social control strategies. The starting point is the transition from a Fordist economy to what can be defined as a post-Fordist system of production. I outline some tendencies in the actual capitalist dynamic (concerning the labour market, the production process, the relations between the workforce and capitalist power and between work and social citizenship), suggesting that a renewed political economy of social control has to deal with them. Two tendencies are assumed to be structural. On the one hand, the tendency of the capitalist system to make the production (and extraction) of surplus-value more and more independent of the effective working time (a tendency toward the reduction of human labour in the productive process). On the other hand, the tendency towards the massive introduction of new technologies: a tendency whose main consequences seem to be the intellectualisation of human labour and the decline of the classic distinction between manual and intellectual labour. I assume that these tendencies give rise to a new productive subject (the multitude), whose characters exceed the actual organisation of work and deepen the contradictions intrinsic to post-Fordist societies. Hence, an analysis of some new social control strategies follows, where I consider actuarialism as a technology for the control of these contradictions

An unfortunate drift towards theories of structural recurrence informs much of the thinking about post-Fordism. In a typical structuralist manner, the idea is that once a particular regime of regulation collapses, a transition period ensues culminating in a new regime of accumulation. Historical evidence suggests otherwise. The paper re-assesses the concept of Fordism in light of the experience of the US, and in particularl in the context of the powerful anti-trust movement of the early twentieth century, which fused with a broader ‘constructivist’ agenda of the First New Deal administration. I am not arguing that Fordism should not be considered as a social mechanism for coping with the advent of the new corporation and mass production. But it should equally be understood as a wide-ranging political movement that brought together elements of small business, middle and working classes in response to the emerging trusts or cartels and the immense corruption of the ‘robber barons’. Conversely, the Post-Fordist period saw not only the collapse of the Fordist compromise, but also of the collapse of that political movement and its replacement by the pro-business politics associated with the Competition State.

Over half a decade after the collapse of home prices in 2006, and with no shortage of books and essays on the ensuing crisis, the place of the housing bubble in political economic remains contested. Preoccupations of scholars have been high levels of income inequality model, through this brief essay I hope to highlight the usefulness of a debate that preoccupied geographers between the 1970s and 1990s, and suggest how theoretical and empirical work since, as well as the illuminating shock of the Great Recession, should compel us to interpret the political economic function of the housing bubble.

The commodification and the medicalization of everyday life are central trends in contemporary - neo-liberal - societies. This paper studies the interaction between both trends as an explanation for the rapid growth of Israeli health care firms. During the past two decades Israel underwent a process of transformation into a neo-liberal/post-Fordist economy, and witnessed a significant growth of its economy. Firms within the field of health care developed at a much more rapid rate than the economy as a whole. The present paper attempts to explain the central role of the health care business in the contemporary economic system as a result of the combination between the transition to a post-Fordist/neoliberal hegemonic model and the centrality of health within neo-liberal governmentality.

This paper examines new cultural and political movements that have developed outside of traditional leftist politics since the early 1990s in Japan. The new movements, including Dame‐ren, the Cardboard House Art movements in Shinjuku and recent anti‐war protests on the Iraqi war, were mainly led by young people, in particular, the freeter generation, who did not experience the leftist politics of the 1960s. These movements are different from traditional Marxist political ones and even from the new social movements in the 1960s and 1970s in the sense that they incorporate more cultural practices such as art, music, dance and performance into their political activities. The paper also explores the historical background against which the new movements were born and have developed since the end of the Bubble economy. It sees freeters, young part‐time workers, as emerging, new political actors that have appeared through the transition of a mode of production from Fordism to post‐Fordism. The transformation of ...

The transition from the Fordist hegemonic model to post-Fordism is a complex process. It is not the unavoidable result of technological changes, but the contingent consequence of a hegemonic, political, struggle taking place at the different spheres of the social. This article studies the transformations that took place in the Israeli health care system during the last two decades in order to exemplify the political and contradictory character of the transition to post-Fordism. The article emphasises the contradiction between the partial commodification of financing and the privatisation of certain health care facilities, and the legislation of the National Health Insurance Law, which guaranteed the right to access to public health care services.

George Steinmetz is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. He is author of “Precoloniality and Colonial Subjectivity: Ethnographic Discourse and Native Policy in German Overseas Imperialism, 1780s–1914,” in Political Power and Social Theory (2002), and has recently completed a manuscript on precolonial ethnographic discourse and colonial state formation in German Samoa, southwest Africa, and Qingdao.

This paper considers the lineage of flexible or post-Fordist work practices. It traces the introduction and diffusion of new work practices within a major multinational enterprise (MNE), Eaton Corporation. The case study illustrates an important discontinuity in the way in which, in the US, the company abandoned its older established production locations in order to introduce its new work practices and philosophy. However, it also illustrates some of the continuities apparent across continents within the corporation’s workplace restructuring from the 1960s through the 1980s. In the absence of significant union responses, the paper highlights the temporally and geographically uneven effects of a unified corporate strategy to introduce a new workplace philosophy and practices, highlighting the need for sensitivity to national and subnational contexts. The word “restructuring” is cold and abstract and perhaps fails to convey the explosive change which has been taking place in Eaton. (Eaton Corporation 1983:2)

This thesis analyses the extent and limitations of the Icelandic response to the financial crisis in 2008 with the use of Fligstein and McAdam’s Field Theory and Post-Fordist theory of modern Capitalism. The thesis establishes the existence of a pure Post-Fordist regime of accumulation, and holds that while state and labor have asserted significant influence on the post-crisis policies they have primarily served to reproduce the power of capital due to domestic and transnational Post-Fordist constellations. The Post-Fordist structures are found to reduce the effects of the egalitarian policies, and increase the relative power of capital within the Icelandic society. The labor unions have converged with capital interests, defended the Occupational Pension Funds at the cost of labor interests, and become proponents of expanding the Post-Fordist regime. The state has reproduced a refurbished status quo in the bank market and established control by confining to a multitude of social roles inherent within the state- and market structures. The extent of labor and state influence are further found to be the main deviations from the general European context, and the analysis brings out the holistic synergy between the two theories in explaining state decision-making in the contemporary political economy.

This paper investigates urban policy-making and development from a regulation theory perspective. It describes major Toronto urban trends of the past 50 years in order to gauge their conformity to changing regulation conditions. Results indicate that in the 1950s and 1960s, policies in Toronto were in accord with the Fordist mass consumption and welfare orientation. They also suggest a coincidence between the post-1995 period of public-sector retrenchment and the market-driven nature of post-Fordism. The intermediary period, however, was dominated by unsuccessful efforts at maintaining Fordist-type policies in a regulation context shifting towards post-Fordism. These findings confirm the non-functionalist interpretation of links between policy-making and regulation professed by regulation theory researchers. They also cast light on the role the city plays in the changing nature of regulation. Assertive metropolitan planning and socially balanced sub-divisions characteristic of the Fordist period of regula...

In recent years, regulationist research has increasingly focused on questions of subnational governance and regulation. Whilst there has been a shift towards new forms of local governance across the United Kingdom, in this paper I contend that the interaction between new mechanisms of (national) regulation and preexisting local conditions has produced considerable spatial variation in the precise forms of governance that have emerged at the local level. Following Peck, I suggest that this can be seen in terms of the interaction of distinct institutional ‘layers’. This insight is developed by adapting Offe's notion of ‘institutional filters’ to emphasise the role of regional agencies in mediating and ‘filtering’ the effects of wider (national) regulatory mechanisms. In the second half of the paper, I apply these ideas to a particular regional case study, assessing how the national-level shift towards neoliberalism has shaped the practice of economic governance in the Scottish Highlands in the 1990s. As mid-level metaphors, ideas of institutional ‘layers’ and ‘filters’ help to open up a space for the consideration of agency and strategy at regional level, thereby addressing what has been termed the ‘regulationist enigma’, defined in terms of the need to avoid ‘reading off’ regional transformations from the posited logic of broader macrostructural shifts.

This article is intended as a contribution to the ethnography of contemporary capitalism. I analyze the case of the Mondragón cooperative model and consider what its international fame tells us about the regime of post-Fordism. I explore the constitution of the Mondragón model through the singular discourse of labor–management cooperation. I show how the model is produced by the discursive practices of omission and decontextualization. Mondragón can only be constructed as an alternative to and critique of capitalism if (1) workers’ experiences are erased; (2) politics are marginalized; and (3) the cooperatives are de-territorialized from the global economic context. By providing the missing contexts, I offer a competing narrative, portraying cooperation as a class-interested discourse that undermines workers’ power. My account of how the Mondragón model was produced is a revealing case of the production of global capitalist discourses in a period of economic and ideological shifts to post-Fordism.