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This special issue explores the intertwining reconfigurations of labour and welfare in the Global South by bringing together eight empirical studies of different national and transnational contexts and three commentaries. It asks how Global South people and states alike have come to prioritize market logics as guiding principles for welfare systems, moving away from collective risk-pooling towards individual responsibility, and how this reorientation is connected to the restructuring of labour. In this introduction to the special issue, we discuss the genealogies of the social question and review the growing academic discussion on the changing landscape of welfare in the Global South. We then underscore how the contemporary social question is predominantly framed in the terms of people's capacity for market participation in the specific empirical contexts discussed by our authors. The framing of the social question as such, and the accompanying solutions to it, we argue, disregards politics, political economy and social justice at the cost of the more urgent social question that confronts the increasingly asymmetrical power relations between labour and capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the relationship between law and class formation through the case of migrant care and domestic work, and puts sociological class theory into conversation with critical migration research. It contributes to class theory by analysing how law helps produce class relations in the Finnish context. The Finnish state channels migrants into cleaning and domestic work through policy measures, and migration law ties them to the reproductive sector, making law a central social relation that defines migrants' relation to production. The analysis draws on interviews with migrant care and domestic workers (N = 30) holding temporary work permits and examines their structural and affective descriptions of a position restricted by law. The article argues that the way migrant domestic work is formalised in the legislation produces a class relation for migrants, in which they lack full ownership over their labour power. The findings demonstrate how migrant domestic workers express gratitude for their employment despite experiencing it as devalued, indicating labour as repayment of the 'gift' of the residence permit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poor people in India routinely have to wait for short-term employment, basic services and subsidized goods. Based on fieldwork in Delhi, this paper describes how this waiting blends into an environment where men are underemployed and women try to make ends meet by engaging in contentious public activities. While negotiating destabilized gender roles, the latter downplay their wait for services and describe much of their paid and unpaid work as 'mere' waiting and just 'passing time'. In complex responses, they sometimes internalize the relations of power that keep them waiting, while subverting them on other occasions. Exploring what these women hide or minimize brings to light a host of activities that question our understanding of the boundaries of labour, idleness and the broader work of social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic, a highly disruptive crisis event, significantly impacted economies, societies and organisations globally. It also brought questions of labour and its value to the fore, particularly as workers from key occupational groups sought to protect the most vulnerable individuals in society. It also triggered a mass re-evaluation of the meaning we assign to work. But to what extent has a fundamental re-evaluation of work, labour and value taken place in the aftermath of this crisis? In this introduction to the Special Issue of the 2023 AIRAANZ Conference, we examine this question, exploring new challenges facing labour and value in the aftermath of the pandemic and inviting scholarly discussion on emerging ways of valuing labour that promotes decent work and sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last five decades have witnessed sociologists formulating various scales to measure and assess the degree of alienation of workers. Critical Marxists, however, argue that de-ideologisation and valueneutrality cannot be seen as desirable properties of a reconceptualization of the Marxian notion of alienation. Most Marxist scholars are not in favour of a comparative-quantitative analysis of Marx's theory of alienation. Nevertheless, Sen situates Marx's theory in the category of those which carry out "realization-focused comparison" (as opposed to "transcendental institutionalism"), by comparing societies that actually exist or may evolve. This paper articulates the need for an operationalization of the concept of alienation in empirical terms and calls for a meaningful dialogue between the capability approach to meaningful work and the emerging and significant body of literature on alienation and capabilities. It argues that alienation, translated to the capability vocabulary as "impairments in responsible agency to attain the capabilities one has reason to value" may also be mapped onto failed social relationships. Even when we do not limit the concept of alienation to the system-anti-system binary, we need to understand it in the context of the failures of economic institutions existing in the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I present a rereading of Benedictine spirituality of work in the Rule of St. Benedict, delineating four major points. First, I show that the Benedictine work ethic is grounded primarily in the vow of obedience, with supplemental utilitarian considerations. Second, I explore the various work functions within the monastery, which is akin to a home, as reflected in the monastic spaces. Third, with respect to the concept of time, monastic work is both scheduled and done according to needs, providing flexibility while imposing temporal order. Lastly, monastic work is also a communal endeavour and must be done by monks to the best of their abilities. Even while the monks are apart from each other while travelling, they still consider themselves as working together. I argue that these Benedictine perspectives on work offer valuable insights for individuals working from home (WFH) during and beyond the coronavirus pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of waste work have largely focused on labourers who collect and process materials in exchange for money, including informal waste reclaimers and those now working precariously due to neoliberalization. Researchers have also drawn attention to who sorts waste in and beyond the household. Here we examine voluntary clean-ups as well as waste education in South Africa. State discourse encourages people to engage with the wastescape without framing this participation as work. Yet such engagements require people to act, and changing existing practices and expectations of who does what (and who is paid what) to make waste flow. We argue that understanding such activities as infrastructural helps to explain how the state seeks to enrol citizens into waste configurations, and understanding them as labour enables more capacious politics and claims to waste’s value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article summarises and presents the main findings of Marie-Anne Dujarier’s French book Troubles dans le travail (2021). It focuses on the “travail” category of thought and practice in France, where it has become a ubiquitous and moral notion. The article traces the history of its social uses, highlighting its polysemy with respect to vernacular and scientific uses, then its limited meaning when used in institutions. It examines contemporary situations in which activity requiring effort, the production of use or exchange values, and the status of employment and remuneration are disconnected. Their frequency and importance cast doubt on who is working and when. This disruption in the “work” category of thought indicates that the eponymous institutions do not adequately accommodate real practices. They are therefore questioned. This observation is also an invitation for researchers to unpick this word for a better analysis of contemporary social, psychological and ecological issues. In France, the word “travail” is ubiquitous in our day-to-day exchanges, as well as in our scientific and political discussions (“travail” is often translated as ‘work’ or ‘labour’, translations are part of the history of the category). Although regularly given only one value, it also has a moral domain. But what does it mean? This article offers Anglo-Saxon readers a summary of in-depth sociological research on this issue, published in the book called Work Troubles. Sociology of a category of thought (French original title: Troubles dans le travail. Sociologie d’une catégorie de pensée) by the author of this article.

Debate concerning the value of work and labour has evolved across various dimensions and extended beyond economic considerations. Recent crises, especially in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic, have prompted what appeared to be an accelerated re-evaluation of the value of labour, incorporating a broader inclusive review. This article argues for a more substantive re-configuration that challenges the conventional economic framing of labour as a commodity. Borrowing from Ozkazanc-Pan and Pullen's framing of value, it evaluates the worth, status and utility of essential, women's and academic labour, emphasising the unequal impacts of the global crisis on each. It also explores indigenous perspectives that advocate for a more holistic understanding, integrating the worth, utility and status of labour. The article concludes with a call for a fundamental reassessment of the value of labour through an indigenous lens that transcends traditional economic views; one that envisions a broader conceptualisation of the value of work and labour to encompass well-being and historical considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes the claim that experiences of feminised work are represented through literary forms that recur across disparate genres, periods, and media. Drawing on Caroline Levine’s concept of form and taking a transhistorical approach to the study of literary representations, the article compares the 1952 novel Excellent Women by Barbara Pym and the Instagram comics of Liana Finck. While these texts do not invite immediate comparison, the article demonstrates that Pym and Finck use similar formal strategies in their depictions of feminised labour. Comparing these case studies reveals recurring forms of circularity, incompletion, and ironic comedy, which are used to represent the working lives of women. In both cases, the female protagonists are caught up in feminised experiences of work resulting in resignation to seemingly endless repetition. The article argues that the affordances of these forms capture transhistorically occurring traits of feminised work, thus giving shape to experiences that are not limited to a particular historical moment. Since contemporary working conditions are becoming increasingly feminised, the article concludes that looking to representations of feminised work across time can illuminate experiences of feminisation today, in waged as well as unwaged contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gendered features of adults' attributions of heroism to themselves and others has received substantially less scholarly attention than the gendered dynamics of media representations of (super)heroes. Utilizing 78 interviews and 569 self-administered questionnaires completed by adults in the United States who were voluntarily making personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic, we show how respondents effectively deployed popularized assessments of the relative value of gendered labour in the private and public spheres to shift attributions of heroism from themselves to others. Though media portrayals at the outset of the pandemic depicted these volunteers working in their homes as heroes, respondents insisted that the real heroes were those working in the public sphere. Even if media representations increasingly frame women as heroes, these results suggest that the long-standing associations between men and heroism will likely remain in place if feminized labour associated with the private sphere of households remains devalued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This proposal aims to enhance the dialogue between geography and labour sciences, which is currently underdeveloped. The authors acknowledge the significance of work, as emphasised by occupational psychology and medicine in France. However, they also note that the spatial dimension of work has not yet been fully explored by these disciplines. The authors suggest that geography, as a discipline, can contribute to the labour sciences, and propose methodological ways to address this issue. The authors introduce a test of this prospect for university geography curriculum.

A growing literature demonstrates the significance of aesthetics within processes of world‐class city making, as decisions about who gets to live and work in the city are increasingly made on the basis of codes of appearance. However, less attention has been paid to how such codes are (re)produced and (re)directed by informal workers and their organisations in everyday practice. Drawing upon a multisided ethnography in Kampala and Delhi, this paper explores the ways in which market vendors and waste collectors have responded to the proliferation of three aesthetic technologies: the identity card, the uniform, and the code of conduct. We show that workers have appropriated these technologies in creative ways in order to defend their livelihoods against the threat of displacement. However, this act of appropriation has come at the cost of the exclusion of the more vulnerable workers, who now find their activities policed not only by the state but also by a range of non‐state organisations. These findings contribute to debates on labour organisation and world‐class city making by demonstrating the ways in which aesthetic rationalities emerge through an encounter with the tactics of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article summarises and presents the main findings of Marie-Anne Dujarier's French book Troubles dans le travail (2021). It focuses on the "travail" category of thought and practice in France, where it has become a ubiquitous and moral notion. The article traces the history of its social uses, highlighting its polysemy with respect to vernacular and scientific uses, then its limited meaning when used in institutions. It examines contemporary situations in which activity requiring effort, the production of use or exchange values, and the status of employment and remuneration are disconnected. Their frequency and importance cast doubt on who is working and when. This disruption in the "work" category of thought indicates that the eponymous institutions do not adequately accommodate real practices. They are therefore questioned. This observation is also an invitation for researchers to unpick this word for a better analysis of contemporary social, psychological and ecological issues. In France, the word "travail" is ubiquitous in our day-to-day exchanges, as well as in our scientific and political discussions ("travail" is often translated as 'work' or 'labour', translations are part of the history of the category). Although regularly given only one value, it also has a moral domain. But what does it mean? This article offers Anglo-Saxon readers a summary of in-depth sociological research on this issue, published in the book called Work Troubles. Sociology of a category of thought (French original title: Troubles dans le travail. Sociologie d'une catégorie de pensée) by the author of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review discusses Jonathan Parry's 2020 monograph Classes of Labour in the context of the author's career trajectory since the 1990s. The review critiques the conceptual framework with which the book understands class relations, and notes that the breadth of the study may be daunting for some readers. However, the review characterises the book as an artisanal masterpiece that shows an ethnographer working at the very peak of their abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the social sciences undergo an infrastructural turn, geographers have taken steps to broaden, disrupt, and reconceptualise understandings of infrastructure and its relationship to social, political, economic, and ecological processes. We contribute to this discussion by highlighting the emergence of a comparatively understudied yet crucial aspect within infrastructural geographies – infrastructural labour. We identify key theoretical anchors that guide contemporary analyses of infrastructural labour, which we query by focusing on five key areas of scholarly discussion. Building on these, we offer a working definition of infrastructural labour to help guide further engagement and point to questions meriting additional investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on symbolic bordering perspectives as a conceptual frame to highlight practices that shape the reproduction, justification, masking and distancing of precarious work. Via a case-study of the UK harvest labour market in 2020-2021, at a time of Brexit and COVID-19, we use media, employer and locally-based worker insights to show how us-them bordering practices are embedded within low-wage horticultural work. Three interrelated everyday bordering tropes are identified from the analysis of the data. First, while migrant harvest work is celebrated as valuable and essential, it is also portrayed as work achieved by, and suitable for, a constantly shifting, multi-dimensional, and therefore ambiguously defined 'other.' These 'others' and their work are notably valued in so far as they perform their work in particular ways that define them as 'good neoliberal agents.' Finally, a particular focus at the height of COVID-19, was on how low-wage 'others' were portrayed as providing service and duty to align with a national 'community of shared values.' These interrelated symbolic forms of bordering help to mask the exploitative nature of low-wage work and perform an important role in contemporary (transnational) class production/reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic brought care work to the forefront of attention. In many countries in the Global North, people became painfully aware that they had 'outsourced' a considerable share of this work to temporary migrants. Travel restrictions and lockdown measures disrupted transnational care arrangements and threatened the continuous provision of care. This article uses the example of transnationally organised live-in care in Switzerland to explore measures implemented to maintain care provision during the pandemic. Particularly, it investigates the impacts of these measures on the working conditions and lives of live-in care workers. We build on Emma Dowling's conceptualisation of 'care fixes' and Brigitte Aulenbacher's notions of 'abstraction' and 'appropriation' to identify three short-term solutions and argue that they did not solve, but rather only displaced the underlying care crisis. Our insights are based on the analysis of policy documents, 32 in-depth interviews and informal conversations with workers, clients, care agencies and other experts carried out in Switzerland between April 2020 and April 2021. We emphasise the inequalities implicated in transnational care arrangements and their inherent fragility, both of which were exacerbated by the pandemic. We tentatively point to avenues for contestation and for a revaluation of care, which opened up as result of the pandemic-induced disruption of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the social relationships of precarious workers contribute to employment and labour practices in the hospitality industry. In so doing, it contributes to theoretical discussions about the nature of post-Fordist labour, and to studies of the social relations of precarity as they are enacted in workers' intimate lives. Empirically, the article describes a distinctive mode of interpersonal negotiation and sociality practised by workers that is connected to the requirement that workers be 'fun' at work to facilitate consumption and to support the labour of co-workers. This sociality also shapes access to employment. However, the way that this takes place sheds light on divisions within the service labour force, in which employment opportunities are distributed through a social 'scene' that excludes migrant and ethnic minority workers. Involvement in this scene places the relationship between the public and the private in workers' social lives into a constant tension, but exclusion increases vulnerability to poor working conditions and exploitation. The article concludes by arguing that the relationship between the public and the private in the practice of affective labour is not dissolved so much as posed as a problem that workers must negotiate within the disciplinary requirements of labour in specific industries and the modes of embodied inequality shaping the service labour force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution aims to unpack female public and political agency within tobacco factories while highlighting and contrasting twentieth-century case studies, based on the European and North American continents at the intersections of gender, class, and race. Further, the article analyses the diverse and differing working conditions for women employees in the tobacco sector and their socio-economic implications from a national, transborder, and transatlantic perspective. By examining and discussing gendered processes and cultural norms in cigarette and cigar manufacturing plants in Austria-Hungary, the post-Habsburg territories, and the United States from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War, this study attempts to dissect the parameters sex, social milieus, ethnicity, and migratory backgrounds in conjunction with multi-layered exploitative processes of production and consumption in the tobacco industry.

This article aims to put forward an overarching typology of platform-related work. First, it places the platformisation of productive processes within a characterisation of informational capitalism. Then it proceeds by distinguishing between work behind and through capitalist platforms. The former refers to the informational, industrial and service work and workers who keep the platforms up and running. The greater part of the article is devoted to discussing the latter. This second category is further divided into three sub-categories of work and workers: 'gig labour', 'prosumers' and 'self-employed owners'. Finally, platform work and labour beyond capitalist platforms are addressed, with a further sub-typology. Here, three types of beyond-capitalist platforms are identified: co-ops, commons-based peer production and state-owned agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of distinctions between genres in conflicts over expertise in an American textile mill. Riverway is a struggling 150-year-old New England textile mill where members of a diverse workforce focus on producing high quality fabric in a context that demands daily adaptive expertise. Based on fieldwork from 2015–19, we examine how Riverway workers interacted with documentation systems at the mill. They engaged with managers and coworkers around new forms of technology and shifting valuations about skill and expertise, and, in the process, made sense of their roles as workers in a declining industry where their skills and forms of expertise were nearly obsolete. Through analysis of conflicts in the mill, we examine how members of the mill's community of practice made sense of a changing genre ecology of tools for communicating, recording information, communicating asynchronously, and asserting expertise. We show how technologies for making fabric and communicating about fabric production became symbols of valuations tangentially linked to production. These technologies became lightning rods for debates about expertise, skill, and knowledge, and for everyday distinctions that workers and managers made about the value of their work during a time of economic change marked by mill closures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India presents a rich context for research on work and employment, epitomising the paradox of an 'emerging economy' but one where 92.4% of the workforce is informal – insecure, unprotected, poor – and women and disadvantaged groups most vulnerable. It displays a wide range of production relations in its formal/informal economy, embedded in diverse social relations, and the related forms of exploitation and resistance. This WES Themed Collection aims to review existing WES scholarship on India since 2001, identifying both gaps in scholarship and fruitful avenues for future research on India. The purpose is to showcase some of this scholarship while also advancing the internationalisation and expansion of the journal's presence in countries in the Global South. This effort is timely as decolonisation of scholarship and increased focus on the South is on the intellectual agenda, challenging established structures of power and knowledge in academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is not about work or labour itself, and how it changes historically in South Africa (from pastoral, to agricultural and industrial; native labour, wage labour, migrant labour etc.), but about how the meaning of 'work' and 'labour' itself changes. What we want to suggest, is that an 'original' meaning of the tasks/duties associated with 'work' was 'woman': ukusebenza. What men did, does not constitute 'work' but something else entirely: raiding, moving, occasional, going etc.: ukuphangela. It is in the latter term, ukuphangela, that the term 'raid' emerges, and the argument draws on this notion and meaning of raid to underscore the re-thinking of gender, the subject and her relation to work, and history. The paper operates in two registers, focusing on the historic meanings of work and labour in the Eastern Cape and tracing lateral translations of these meanings into East London in the 1950s. It argues that in re-thinking meanings of labour and work through multiple temporalities, and through the contested meanings of the isiXhosa terms ukusebenza and ukuphangela, these word fragments are read as 'entryways to a wordliness' that puts lateral universals and temporalities of work back into circulation. As such, we pose the question rather, following Anne Kelk Mager and Helen Bradford, of whether it is gender (and what it means to be a man or a woman) that is at the forefront not only of class and race struggles, but of what comes to constitute the meaning of 'work', a concept whose provenance and meaning changes, as we have noted, with the making of modernity, industrialisation/capitalism, and the 'Europeanisation' of the world.

Low-wage labour migrants moving from lower- to higher-income countries have been celebrated for their strong work ethic over recent decades. The paper draws on qualitative insights from European horticulture to explore why low-wage migrants work as hard as they do. We centre our analysis on an ‘alienation–insulation’ dynamic. Specifically, we show how migrants are particularly alienated in ways that are different to that of the immobile working class. However, we also argue that migrants’ spatial (their dual frame of reference) and temporal (their liminal) agency insulates them from this alienation to some degree. It is important, in this respect, to differentiate between alienation as ostensibly encountered (an objective phenomenon) and the actual felt experiences of alienation (as a subjective phenomenon). We conclude that the alienation–insulation dynamic is a key, but underexplored, element in understanding the complex relationship between labour mobility and labour power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the eastern Indian steel town of Rourkela, Adivasis are widely stereotyped as uneducated, jangli ('wild'), and drinkers, and they are therefore held to make for a special type of worker. Their Adivasi 'nature' makes them an ideal fit for facing the heat, dust, and fumes in the so-called 'hot shops' of the local public-sector steel plant. It is also said that Adivasis are, in fact, not well suited for the permanent and well-paid jobs the public-sector steel plant provides, and that they are better employed as contract workers who are paid little and by the day, and on whom the industry has increasingly relied since the 1970s. Critically engaging with Bourgois' concept of 'conjugated oppression', I will show how these casteist stereotypes entrench the class position of Adivasis in the local steel industry, but also how this position has nevertheless changed over time—for some for the better, for many for the worse. Furthermore, although this polarization is driven by larger political economic changes it is exacerbated by the ways in which the better-off among the stereotyped Adivasi workers respond to them. This calls, I argue, for close attention to be given to the historical dynamics in the relations between class and caste (or 'tribe') and in the struggles related to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of three companion papers published in this Journal, we identify and validate the available thermal stress indicators (TSIs). In this first paper of the series, we conducted a systematic review (registration: INPLASY202090088) to identify all TSIs and provide reliable information regarding their use (funded by EU Horizon 2020; HEAT-SHIELD). Eight databases (PubMed, Agricultural and Environmental Science Collection, Web of Science, Scopus, Embase, Russian Science Citation Index, MEDLINE, and Google Scholar) were searched from database inception to 15 April 2020. No restrictions on language or study design were applied. Of the 879 publications identified, 232 records were considered for further analysis. This search identified 340 instruments and indicators developed between 200 BC and 2019 AD. Of these, 153 are nomograms, instruments, and/or require detailed non-meteorological information, while 187 can be mathematically calculated utilizing only meteorological data. Of these meteorology-based TSIs, 127 were developed for people who are physically active, and 61 of those are eligible for use in occupational settings. Information regarding the equation, operating range, interpretation categories, required input data, as well as a free software to calculate all 187 meteorology-based TSIs is provided. The information presented in this systematic review should be adopted by those interested in performing on-site monitoring and/or big data analytics for climate services to ensure appropriate use of the meteorology-based TSIs. Studies two and three in this series of companion papers present guidance on the application and validation of these TSIs, to guide end users of these indicators for more effective use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the work of Tehching Hsieh, a Taiwanese-American conceptual artist who uses boredom – and specifically boring labour – as a mode of production and conceptual influence in his artworks. The paper is introduced by sketching the connections between boredom, work and art; before considering the relationship that artworks have with production and boring labour. Particular attention is paid to the way that time-based artworks – specifically performance works – present a unique opportunity to consider boredom and labour, since they foreground the process of labour itself as art. This enables a reconsideration of the way in which work routines are often culturally coded as meaningful or essential pursuits; without proper consideration of the philosophical assumptions around work or the way that work is experienced. Through considering Hsieh's approach, this paper elucidates the ways in which boredom functions as a critique of the nature of experience offered when undertaking labour in capitalist societies. Hsieh's performance artwork 'One Year Performance 1980-81' – also known as 'Time Clock Piece' – is the substantive focus of the paper. An argument is developed around how artists replicate and critique bored time-spaces characterised by the elements of working life: namely – temporal restrictions, repetition and boring work. This leads to a closing-down of life's textures, experiences and possibilities. This in turn reflects the fact that work often cannot offer the meaning, interest and fulfilment that it promises to the working subject. Hsieh's artwork is emblematic of this void of meaning, but also paradoxically stimulates a movement towards meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]