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The purpose of this article is to analyze the problem of non-professional creativity in contemporary self-help literature. Creativity, an element of work organization in the post-Fordist era, has been the subject of many critical analyses. I focus on creativity as it appears in everyday life, with the support of an examination of self-help handbooks that refer to far-east traditions, at the same time being critical of the Western lifestyle. Self-help literature is viewed here as a tool aiding the neoliberal governmentality of society. I am most of all interested in how contemporary discourse on non-professional creativity promotes technologies of autonomy aimed at the production of responsible and self-sufficient individuals. I argue that creativity is today a key mechanism of governance. It is not limited to the professional sphere but is playing an increasing role in our private lives. It is used to produce more elusive and flexible forms of self-governance than more openly repressive forms of power (based on top-down order and control).

This article explores how the ‘post-Fordist work ethic’ contributes to the formation of classed subjectivities. Drawing on the work of Kathi Weeks, the article approaches the post-Fordist promise of self-realisation through work in terms of the individualised accrual of value that has become so central to the experience of class within the cultural politics of neoliberalism. Empirically, the article draws on a programme of research on the formation of young workers to describe two ideal typical manifestations of the post-Fordist work ethic, characterised as ‘subjects of achievement’ and ‘subjects of passion’, which reflect classed differences in the way that self-realisation through work is defined and experienced. In this way, the article argues that the contemporary work ethic is inflected with forms of class distinction that pre-date the shift to post-Fordism, and that these distinctions within the post-Fordist work ethic are critical to classed modes of contemporary subjectification. This differentiation reflects the ideological history of work and class under capitalism as well as the promise of individualised self-realisation that is so critical to subject formation in the post-Fordist present.

From an obscure sector synonymous with mercenaryism, the private military and security industry has grown to become a significant complementing instrument in military operations. This rise has brought with it a considerable attention. Researchers have examined the role of private military and security companies in international relations as well as the history of these companies, and, above all, the legal implications of their use in the place of military organizations. As research progresses, a significant gap has become clear. Only a handful of studies have addressed the complex of issues associated with contractors’ demographics and lived experience. This article sheds some light over this lacuna, examining contractors’ demographics using descriptive statistics from an original data set of American and British contractors who died in Iraq between the years 2003 and 2016. The article augments our understanding of an important population of post-Fordist-contracted workforce, those peripheral workers supplementing military activity in high-risk occupations with uncertain long-term outcomes.

This article provides a study of precarisation through the lens of dress work: the mundane practice of dressing the body for work. Based on intimate in-depth wardrobe interviews and analyses of workers’ narratives about their dressing practices, we develop a perspective on what insecure work feels like for workers in the interactive services and creative industries. We understand dress work as a materially mediated practice in which workers often aim to achieve a level of comfort: a state in which they are allowed to become less reflexive about their bodies. One of the ways in which precarisation makes itself known, we contend, is through the temporal logic of the interruption. The temporality of zero-hours contracts and short-term, insecure labour interrupts the achievement of comfort as workers are not allowed the time to experience their work, colleagues and spaces. The discomfort and sometimes pain of insecurity of post-Fordist labour is thus felt on the body.

The paper investigates two Swedish cases of state regulation of profound infrastructural change in relation to mining above the polar circle. An analytical framework of neoliberal depoliticisation and state regulation is used to investigate the extent to which neoliberal logics, especially the logic of distancing, determine the state relation to peripheral communities dominated by extractive accumulation regimes. The paper finds that the neoliberal prerogatives of distancing and flexibility are dominating the state relation to peripheral communities, and that this relation is determined by different aspects of distance. The dominance of neoliberal prerogatives also leads to a questioning of the widely held notion that the Swedish state has adopted an industrial policy devoted to mining expansion since the release of the Mineral Strategy in 2013. The transformation of Swedish mining politics - Actors, possible worlds and controversies

Post-Fordist employment is characterised by the demand for new forms of labour in which workers are expected to make personal investments in their work and to mobilise their embodied subjectivities in the practice of labour. Whilst employment insecurity is well documented in the sociology of youth, theoretical development in this area has yet to contend with the role of changes in the nature of labour itself in the production of youth. This paper draws on theories of labour under post-Fordism to explore the practice of ‘affective labour’ amongst young people performing ‘front of house’ bar work in a large metropolitan service economy. The paper theorises the role of youth subjectivities – including capacities for relationality and leisure, gendered embodiment, and tastes – in the practice of contemporary labour. The paper describes how young people doing bar work contribute to the production of affective atmospheres, or sensations of ease, pleasure and enjoyment that are offered to clientele of bo...

Based on an in-depth study with 56 informants (25 women and 31 men), across the ICT (Information and Communication Technology), creative and academic sectors in one city/regional hub in Ireland, this article investigates the so-called revolution in work/life practices associated with the post-Fordist labour processes of the Knowledge Economy from the perspectives of workers themselves. Recent theorisations of post-Fordist work patterns emphasise a rearranging of work and life place boundaries; a reconfiguring of work and life time boundaries; and a dissolving of the gendered boundaries of work and life (production and social reproduction)(Adkins and Dever 2014; Morini and Fumagalli 2010; Gill and Pratt 2008; Weeks 2007; Hardt and Negri 2004). Our findings suggest that, instead of dissolving boundaries, workers constantly struggle to draw boundaries between what counts as work and as life, and that this varies primarily in relation to gender and stage in a gendered life trajectory. Work extensification is compensated for via a perceived freedom to shape one’s own life, which is articulated in terms of individualised boundary-drawing. While younger men embraced ‘always on’ work, they also articulated anxieties about how these work habits might interfere with family aspirations. This was also true for younger women who struggled to make time for life in the present. For mothers, boundary drawing was articulated as a necessity but was framed more in terms of personal choice by fathers. Although all participants distinguished between paid work and life as distinct sites of value, boundaries were individually drawn and resist any easy mapping of masculinity and femininity onto the domains of work and life. Instead, we argue that it is the process of boundary drawing that reveals gendered patterns. The personalised struggles of these relatively privileged middle-class workers centre on improving the quality of their lives, but raise important questions about the political possibilities within and beyond the world of post-Fordist labour.

Recent legislation in the Netherlands takes conditional welfare to a new level. Local welfare offices can now give benefit sanctions to welfare clients that ‘obstruct employment’ by their appearance. Through a qualitative and ethnographic study of aesthetic evaluation practices in Dutch welfare offices it is argued that: (1) an everyday aesthetic labour is pivotal in post-Fordist labour markets; (2) in times of precarization, this is so for unemployed as well as formally employed populations; (3) welfare clients are expected to give an aesthetic performance of work-readiness and adaptability; and (4) case managers use aesthetics as a pedagogy to achieve this readiness and adaptability. Aesthetic labour, it is then argued, is best conceptualized as a continuous, everyday, backstage labour for labour: a daily calibration for work contexts in flux.

Recent changes in open plan office design are intended to facilitate flexible and collaborative work practices. Though promoted in terms of aesthetics and functionality, these changes in layout and furnishing communicate a great deal about how work and the workers that perform them are understood. Drawing upon the semiotics of framing and the chronotope, the open plan office is analyzed as a multimodal realization of neoliberal discourses on the flexibilization and deregulation of work. As such, the collaborative open plan office does more than represent or give expression to neoliberal ideologies, it normalizes and makes durable the work processes, identities and temporalities of neoliberalized labour.

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.

We lack a compelling account of the post-Fordist labor process. When firms can no longer provide secure jobs at good pay, how do they motivate workers? Rather than a return to despotism, this ethnography of call center work documents a novel system of indirect control. New employees are rushed onto the production floor, where their lack of preparation discomfits them and motivates them to play an autonomous learning game. Although initially generative of effort, the game is difficult to master and offers few rewards for sustained participation. Intense effort and high attrition coexist, a management system that the author labels permanent pedagogy.

‘Post-environmentalism’ is an approach to ecological modernisation in the United States which criticises mainstream environmentalism's emphasis on placing limits on economic activity to address the climate crisis. Building upon Ronald Inglehart's analysis of shifting cultural values, post-environmentalists Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger reject this antipathy towards economic growth because it undermines the material conditions that enable post-material, quality of life concerns like environmentalism to flourish in the first place. Yet some of the policies advocated by Nordhaus and Shellenberger to promote economic growth actually serve as obstacles to the realisation of post-material values. An alternative account of the emergence of modern environmentalism situates it within the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist model of economic growth. This analysis reveals more promising possibilities for promoting post-material values such as autonomy, self-realisation, and environmental concern tha...

In recent publications Paolo Virno and Carlo Vercellone have called attention to Marx’s category of the general intellect in theGrundrisse, and to the unprecedented role its diffusion plays in contemporary capitalism. According to Virno, the flourishing of the general intellect, which Marx thought could only take place within communism, characterises post-Fordist capitalism. Vercellone adds that Marx’s account of the real subsumption of living labour under capital is obsolete in contemporary cognitive capitalism. Both authors regard Marx’s value theory as historically obsolete. I argue that these views rest on a confusion of value and wealth, a neglect of Marx’s account of the role of ‘free gifts’ to capital, an underestimation of the role of the general intellect in the period prior to the rise of post-Fordism/cognitive capitalism, and an underestimation of the restrictions on the diffusion of the general intellect in contemporary capitalism.

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.

A number of commentators have suggested that the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist regime of political economy has had positive consequences for sociology, including the reinforcement of critical sociologies ( Burawoy, 2005 ; Steinmetz, 2005 ). This article argues that, although disciplinary hierarchies have been destabilized, what is emerging is a new form of instrumental knowledge, that of applied interdisciplinary social studies. This development has had a particular impact upon sociology. Savage and Burrows (2007) , for example, argue that sociological knowledge no longer has a privileged claim to authority and is increasingly in competition with social knowledge produced by the private sector and agencies of the public sector. The response of many sociologists to such claims has been to reassert the importance of the discipline as the purveyor of critically relevant knowledge about society. The article traces how the idea of internal critique within sociology has developed to embrace ‘knowing capitalism’ ( Thrift, 2005 ), at the same time as declaring the impossibility of sociological knowledge. The critique of sociology also becomes the critique of critique and what remains is the instrumentalization of knowledge. Where many sociologists continue to claim a special interest in critical knowledge, the article suggests that, in contrast, we potentially confront the problem that such knowledge may itself be facing a crisis of reproduction.

This paper examines the way in which the anime industry has developed since the mid-1960s, by looking at transnational production systems and the international division of labor. First, it tries to demonstrate that anime, though seen both as a cultural product originating from Japan and as an export within the recent Cool Japan project promoted by the Japanese government, has, from the beginning of its history, been a very hybridized product due to the transnational production system, in particular among Japan, Korea and China. Second, the paper also shows how this transnational production system has led to the lasting poor labor conditions suffered by Japanese animators, one of the prototypes for freeters in the 1990s. Third, by examining the anime promotion policy led by the Chinese government, I would like to discuss the possible future of anime production systems in the age of digital production in Asia.

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...

Autonomy, or the extent to which employees can control their own work, is a central theme in debates on organizational flexibility and labour market stratification. Predictions of upskilling and autonomy, for manual workers too, have been a striking component in visions of post-Fordism and post-industrialism. The two main comparative labour market theories — the varieties of capitalism school and the power resources approach — suggest that both the level and the distribution of autonomy vary across production contexts, either because of national differences in skill requirements or because of the varying strength of organized labour. The objective of the article, based on the 2004 European Social Survey, is to test these two hypotheses by examining national variation regarding mean levels and class differences in autonomy among 21 countries. The main conclusion is that both mean levels and class differences in autonomy have much more to do with the strength of organized labour than with the skill requirements of production. The analysis also questions a central element of the varieties of capitalism theory, namely the notion of national production strategies based on differences in skill specificity.

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...

There are two competing labor law reform proposals in the Mexican legislature, both of which would profoundly reshape labor-capital-government relations should they be passed. The Plan Abascal is based on idealized relations of production derived from the post-Fordist theory that new global economic realites demand new regulations that allow employers more flexibility to deal with sudden market shifts. In contrast, the reform authored by an independent union confederation protects workers against employer and government unilateralism and exploitation.

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

This paper considers the current debate on the changing position and meaning of paid work in Western societies. In the wake of a structural crisis of fulltime employment, a new role and potential is attributed to voluntary work. With data drawn from a survey of Red Cross volunteers in Flanders (Belgium), this research assesses empirically the value volunteers attach to paid and unpaid work and their disposition to combine paid and unpaid work more flexibly. Contrary to current theorizing about the advent of a brave new world of work, this study provides evidence for a continuing existence of strong paid work orientations, even among a population that actually performs unpaid work. Moreover, it is not the economic (dis)embedding of volunteers, but the extent and nature of their social participation that primarily explains the strength of paid work orientation and the propensity to tailor paid work more flexibly to volunteer work.

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

This article explores organizational restructuring in one large public institution as a situated response to the instabilities brought on by globalization. Drawing upon ethnographic research with the Los Angeles public school system, I argue that a process of fragmented centralization is taking place, whereby decision-making authority is becoming more centralized while accountability for centrally made decisions is becoming more distributed. This process is propelled, in part, by the rise of a new occupational group of information technology (IT) specialists that is integrating itself into places of power and altering all aspects of organizational operations, transforming the school system into a post-Fordist organization.

Formidable changes are occurring in the organization of work, production and the labour process. The emerging world of flexibility, part-time contracts and ‘just-in-time labour’ has invoked systemic disruptions in the sequential ordering of time/space. Feminists have been less than sanguine in their resistance to the placeless, timeless logic of ‘just-in-time labour’. The flexible fragmented present of post-fordist production is variously argued to be in contradiction to the embodied social relations through which women ‘weave’ their own autobiographies. While sympathetic to the concept of ‘feminine time’, its application to the present labour market context requires intense inquisition and critical reflection. The modern episteme consisted of a constellation of discourses linked to narrative realism. This is to appreciate that basic to all forms of gendered subjectivity is a conscious subject living in time and capable of uniting the literal with the virtual, or linking one temporal order (the present) with others (the past and future). The ‘timeless times’ and dislocated ‘spatial flows’ of our current era threaten the ability of gendered subjects to form their identities into sustained narratives. Focusing on post-fordist flexible specialization, this article challenges the fixed, unitary, relational subject of feminist critique and begins to deconstruct the problematics of gender and work in the time/space economy of ‘just-in-time’ labour.

Post-Fordism is a term which has largely been rejected by the Left, mainly on the grounds that it dignifies aspects of capitalist society that should be challenged. In this article I aim to redeem the political value of the concept by showing how it can contribute to a positive critique of wage-based society. Radicalising the theory of post-Fordism requires a deepening of the principles of autonomy and responsibility which are central to the post-Fordist work paradigm. These principles should be extended, I argue, to apply to the wider social repercussions of post-Fordist labour, including destructive environmental consequences, the manipulation of consumer needs and above all the production of non-work or unemployment which flexible production methods entail. I argue that workers’ recognition of their wider social responsibilities therefore requires theoretical mediations capable of loosening the reductive equation of ‘autonomy’ with ‘work’. I also argue that the trend towards knowledge-based societies, because of the difficulties it creates in the definition and measurement of individual labour time, is making the abolition of waged work an increasingly rational ideal. I conclude by highlighting the alternative scenario towards which post-Fordist capitalism is otherwise heading. This is a society where every social activity — including consumption — is recognised, formalised and remunerated as work, as people are paid to produce themselves in accordance with the needs of social reproduction.

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

Grounded in feminist cultural studies perspectives, this article criticizes the marketing of postfeminist ideologies in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA). While seeking to create new consumers, WNBA accounts construct the league and its advertisers as advocates for gender justice. It is argued that this strategy also reinforces a neoconservative project based on the advocacy of personal responsibility and self-help as antidotes to social problems and inequities that have been magnified via late capitalist economic arrangements.

Diaries are important texts in the world, and provide textualizations of time that incorporate revealing features of the contemporary organization of time. Much previous analysis of diaries has confined itself to the nature of their contents rather than their form and layout. This paper redresses this. It argues that the design of the diary contains important clues as to the modern organization of time, particularly as it has developed over the last 100 years or so. It also argues that the diary is an important technology of self, designed to act as a place to store aspects of the enumerated self such as telephone numbers, biological information and financial details. Finally, the paper suggests that the temporal templates of the diary lead to a distinctive, succinct form of literary expression.

Social scientists increasingly claim that work structures based on the mass production or “Fordist” paradigm have grown obsolete, giving way to a more flexible, “post-Fordist” structure of work. These claims have been much disputed, however, giving rise to a sharply polarized debate over the outcome of workplace restructuring. I seek to reorient the debate by subjecting the post-Fordist approach to theoretical and empirical critique. Several theoretical weaknesses internal to the post-Fordist approach are identified, including its uncertain handling of “power” and “efficiency” as factors that shape work organizations; its failure to acknowledge multiple responses to the crisis of Fordism, several of which seem at odds with the post-Fordist paradigm; and its tendency to neglect the resurgence of economic dualism and disparity within organizations and industries. Review of the empirical literature suggests that, despite scattered support for the post-Fordist approach, important anomalies exist (such as the growing authority of “mental” over manual labor) that post-Fordism seems powerless to explain. In spite of its ample contributions, post-Fordist theory provides a seriously distorted guide to the nature of workplace change in the United States. Two alternative perspectives toward the restructuring of work organizations are sketched—neoinstitutionalist and “flexible accumulation” models—which seem likely to inspire more fruitful lines of research on the disparate patterns currently unfolding within American work organizations.

This article examines the claims that we are living in a new, global, post-Fordist era. The claims of both globalization and post-Fordism are examined, as well as some of the implications for development. Both theses are questioned, and in particular it is argued that in some respects the two arguments contradict rather than complement each other. An alternative approach is put forward, focusing on the contemporary context for development in the global economy, critically using the notion of global commodity chains. It is argued that we are currently witnessing a variety of strategies of capital accumulation in the world economy, and insofar as generalizations can be made, we have witnessed the end of the Third World as a homogeneous block. While some formerly peripheral countries are now a constituent part of the world economy, others are marginal to its needs. These countries are not so much exploited as simply left out.

This article examines the changing relationship between global cities and territorial states in contemporary Europe, and outlines some of its implications for the geography of world capitalism in the late twentieth century. Most accounts of global cities are based upon a ‘zero-sum’ conception of spatial scale that leads to an emphasis on the declining power of the territorial state: as the global scale expands, the state scale is said to contract. By contrast, I view globalization as a highly contradictory reconeguration of superimposed spatial scales, including those on which the territorial state is organized. The state scale is not being eroded, but rearticulated and reterritorialized in relation to both sub- and supra-state scales. The resultant, re-scaled coneguration of state territorial organization is provisionally labeled a ‘glocal’ state. As nodes of accumulation, global cities are sites of post-Fordist forms of global industrialization; as coordinates of state territorial power, global cities are local-regional levels within a larger, reterritorialized matrix of increasingly ‘glocalized’ state institutions. State re-scaling is a major accumulation strategy through which these transformed ‘glocal’ territorial states attempt to promote the global competitive advantage of their major urban regions. Global city formation and state re-scaling are therefore dialectically intertwined moments of a single dynamic of global capitalist restructuring. These arguments are illustrated through a discussion of the interface between global cities and territorial states in contemporary Europe. A concluding section argues that new theories and representations of spatial scale and its social production are needed to grasp the rapidly changing political geography of late twentieth-century capitalism.

This article examines attempts by Marxist thinkers such as Fredric Jameson and David Harvey to explain the cultural transition from modernism to postmodernism by the economic transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. They argue that the movement of advanced industrial societies from standardized mass production to diverse flexible production has created a new culture that stresses difference, superficiality, and ahistoricality. But in their attempts to portray a synchronous development of economy and culture, these thinkers ignore the uneven developments between and within each realm. I argue that in the United States the popular arts like automobile design developed postmodern traits long before the high arts like architecture. Instead of this change in popular culture resulting from post-Fordism, it dialectically influenced this economic change.

Post‐Fordist approaches offer a stimulating account of recent educational restructuring. There is, however, a problem with the term itself and the way it has framed and defined the debate. Mot only does it combine a number of diverse frameworks, applications and conclusions, but it also composites different levels of definitional coherence. In this way post‐Fordist education tries to operate as a generalised metaphor whilst also incorporating more tightly‐defined conceptual narratives. The result is that these different meanings become collapsed and the term itself swamped by overuse. A consequence is that the model is less able to offer an incisive or distinctive perspective on educational change. When specific post‐Fordist narratives are used to interrogate educational restructuring it is clear that they are unable to capture the range of levels in which change is both generated and manifest. This raises a broader issue for educational theorisation—identifying the structures that mediate and li...

This article was first presented as the RIPE annual lecture at Durham University on 7 November 1995. It seeks to explore the transformation of the capital-labour relation in the aftermath of the postwar crisis of Fordism. It examines how various solutions to this crisis, in the developed world, the newly industrialized world and, latterly, the former socialist bloc, have brought about a radical restructuring of the world's economic hierarchy. One consequence has been the emergence of continental blocs characterized by the heterogeneity of the economic systems within their sphere. The coexistence of countries with differing labour regimes within integrated continental blocs is the primary focus, with each bloc analysed in turn for its particular aspects. This leads to consideration of the possibility of a third international division of labour. The article concludes with an examination of an unexpected consequence of this restructuring, namely the relation between systems of labour-capital relations and at...

We interrogate Nike’s implication in the developments of 1980s and 1990s popular feminisms by contextualizing and examining the advertising strategies deployed by Nike in its efforts to seduce women consumers. Although Nike is represented as progressive and pro-women, we demonstrate Nike’s alliance with normative forces dominating 1980s America. We suggest that Nike’s solicitation relies on the logic of addiction, which demonized those people most affected by post-Fordist dynamics. While Nike’s narrations of “empowerment” appeal to a deep, authentic self located at the crossroads of power and lifestyle, we suggest that these narratives offer ways of thinking/identities that impede political action. Finally, we consider the relations among Nike, celebrity feminism, and the complex and invisible dynamics that enable transnationals to exploit Third World women workers.

This article situates the debate about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in on-going economic, social and political global restructuring, which has commonly been termed post-Fordism. The author examines two broad theoretical discourses, the neo-liberal and the State interventionist, which are useful for analyzing the debate about NAFTA and other free trade agreements. The author concludes that both discourses have overlooked particular realities of the post-Fordist transformation that will be important in future debates.

International audience; Gentrification is currently perceived by many critical scholars as a global urban strategy. However, cities differ in their attractiveness for the globalized actors often described as the main force behind this process. The question of the origin of the capital fuelling gentrification in unattractive cities appears therefore crucial. Drawing on the case of Roubaix, an example of the ‘successful’ politics of gentrification in a French ‘repulsive’ city, I will show that it is indeed local capital which starts the process. In this perspective inspired by both the regulation and the Lefebvrian theories of urbanization, the spread of gentrification in declining cities appears less the result of a top-down project driven by the key players of the globalized real estate market, than of a bottom-up project resulting from the needs of local capitalists to find a new way of realizing profits after the collapse of industrial production. In terms of urban politics, the implications are huge.

(1994). Consuming Culture: Postmodernism, Post-Fordism, and Economics. Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 62-80.

Technology is changing not only our material reality, but also our social roles and power positions within the social structure. Whilst its increasingly widespread applications in industry, on the one hand, facilitate production processes they also contribute to the marginalisation and displacement of particular groups of people within the labour force (Sivanandan, 1989; Pollert, 1988). Thus, technology can “embody specific forms of power and authority” (Winner, 1986, p. 19). This article considers the view that Technology as a reconstituted subject in the National Curriculum in England and Wales functions to a large extent as a means of naturalising evolving work practices and specific worker awarenesses required within the technological production process. It also serves to legitimate real and symbolic differences created between the new ‘technical’ knowledge elites and the functionaries within the production process. The accommodation in the technology curriculum of new structural changes occurring wit...

The workplace provides a very important context for the development of community. Structural changes that have occurred in the workplace in the last 25 years have impacted on how community has been constructed and experienced in the workplace. These structural changes have often been accompanied by particular types of organisational cultures and forms of work organisation. One such form of work organisation has been teamwork. Some have argued that management induced forms of employee collectivism, such as teamwork have undermined more genuine employee generated forms of community and solidarity. Through in-depth interviews with employees in a number of organisations from two research projects, this article explores employee's experiences of community and highlights the different ways in which teamwork is interpreted and experienced by workers.