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This paper analyzes three labor documentaries released from 1989 to 1991, which depict the United States' assumed transition from a Fordist to post-Fordist economy. Feminist textual analysis focuses on the depiction of workplaces and gender roles in Roger and Me, American Dream, and Fast Food Women. The analysis demonstrated that discourses of epochal change in the context only held true if one looked at a slice of the U.S. labor market largely dominated by White men. Focusing on feminine sex-typed labor demonstrated the worst elements of industrial Fordism remained in post-Fordist workplaces. Long-standing sexual divisions of labor were unambiguously repeated in post-Fordist work and intensified in a discussion of the family wage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Weber has left a 100-page long text that played a main role in his argumentation on the particular development of Europe in contrast to especially Asia. Main difference, according to Weber, is the development of a 'local society' where freedom and the association of free citizens laid the ground for a democratic society. In the reception of this text, a critical view on main assumptions on the 'European city' has been dominant. In particular, the notions of conflict and inequality have not been integrated into his argumentation. Nevertheless, some sociologists even today, see Weber and his text as a kind of starting point to understand the social and political construction of urban societies in Europe. Firstly, a critical introduction into the core ideas of Weber on the city will be presented. Subsequently, the article discusses whether the 'European city' can still be regarded as a meaningful term to explain the process of urban restructuring taking place today. Although not rejecting the Weberian notion of the city, it will be highlighted that his understanding of 'urban society' leaves out recent processes of the post-Fordist restructuring of space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though flexibility, insecurity and precarity characterise much of today's work, the promise of self-realisation through work remains as powerful as ever. Following Weeks' work on the post-Fordist work ethic and Hochschild's research on feeling rules, this article analyses how young women negotiate the post-Fordist work ethic and its emotional obligations. Drawing on interviews with 39 young women studying in the care and media fields in Finland, the article proposes the conceptualisation of post-Fordist feeling rules as a way to capture how young women become workers by managing contemporary work's emotional requirements and contradictions. This article adds to the sociology of youth and labour in the post-Fordist era by foregrounding the role of feelings in the production of youth as workers and unpacking the post-Fordist work ethic's gendered, industry-specific and emotional dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quality control tools such as certification are the critical infrastructure of sustainable tourism that facilitate triple bottom-line outcomes. Prior scholarship investigates tool adoption, but examination of discontinuance is absent. Using Diffusion of Innovations Theory, we investigate the diversity of discontinuance among practitioners in a destination by tool type, discontinuance manifestations, and influential attributes. Semistructured interviews revealed selective tool discontinuance and salient influence of relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, and observability attributes. Conventional replacement and disenchantment discontinuance manifestations were augmented by emergent induced, episodic, and recalibration forms and organized along an original typology from pure discontinuance to retention. Findings suggest practitioner alignment with "post-Fordist" sustainable tourism. Implications for tool counterdiffusion are assimilated into ongoing discourses of sustainable tourism theory and practice. Prospects for tool-specific attributes also emerge, for the first time, and when paired with those theoretical can inform an entirely novel realm of supply-side tool design; practical applications are illustrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The 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/approach: The 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. Findings: The 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/value: Spatial 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay, based on a 'militant ethnography' of the small radical grassroots activist group Our London,1 outlines the importance of mood in developing political collectivity in oppositional politics. Applying Gilbert's notion of affect as key to sociality, Highmore's discussion of mood and mood work and Dean's concept of affective infrastructure, I develop an account of Our London's activities, and in particular its organisation of public events, that argues for the production of mood in political spaces as key to mobilising political collectivity. The significance of this work is in showing how oppositional political practices, as opposed to mere rhetoric or discourse, can develop forms of political collectivity and action; this is also a study of how forms of class politics can be performed and practised despite the difficulty of articulating such politics discursively – or even conceptualising society in class terms – in the context of a fragmented, neoliberal, post-Fordist city like London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the fascination with performance and performance art in contemporary fiction in relation to post-Fordist culture and society. I employ the concept of general performance in order to analyze configurations of artistic, professional, and economic performance in Niña Weijers's novel The Consequences (2014) and Tom McCarthy's Satin Island (2015). The readings demonstrate that, in different ways, both novels imagine performance as a key practice at the intersection of art, life, and labor. While Satin Island presents a bleak view of generalized post-Fordist performance, The Consequences insists on discontinuities between artistic and other forms of performance. The essay makes a case for general performance as a key concept for the study of the imagination of immaterial and creative labor in twenty-first-century fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic restructuring of the 21st century is changing the production methods and location requirements of most industries. Mass production on the outskirts of cities, as was common in 20th century Fordism, is largely being replaced by an economic model characterised by a multitude of networked small and medium-sized production sites as well as logistics facilities. In this article, we want to examine if this also creates the opportunity to combine some of the smaller industrial areas with the city as a whole and to initiate a transformation of these areas in favour of redensification and mixed use. Examining the case of Kassel, Germany, we take a closer look at the transformation processes from Fordism to post-Fordism and the possibilities for a smarter land use. In this largely industrially shaped region, younger companies such as the solar panel producer SMA are using new approaches in terms of urban planning and land use by building their low emissionfactories on greyfields in an urban environment rather than on suburban greenfields. In our article, we survey selected industrial areas in Kassel and discuss their recent change as part of a broader development from Fordism to post-Fordism. Firstly, the study contains a theoretical discussion of commercial and industrial land-use patterns in both socio-economic models. Subsequently, an on-site analysis is carried out to determine the extent to which both economic models have influenced the use and shape of industrial areas in Kassel. Based on this analysis, we finally show criteria for how urban planning can help to ensure that this change is combined with an improvement in the spatial and design quality of the industrial areas and is meaningfully integrated into the sustainable development of the city region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for gendering affective citizenship and humanitarianism. Both of these 'regimes of care' are understood to work through benevolent affect, to mobilize citizens in the wake of the retrenchment of the welfare state. Ethnography with Italian-origin women volunteers at a Milanese association shows that the affect and motivations of affective citizens can starkly deviate from benevolence and 'do-gooderism'. Analyses of post-Fordist affective citizenship focus on the shift from waged labour and state-mediated forms of social security to precarious labour and privatized responsibilities for welfare, implicitly centring the (male) breadwinner as the subject of these transformations. By contrast, this article seeks to call attention to the continuities in unwaged care. In so doing, it shows how the Fordist legacy of gendered citizenship 'haunts' its post-Fordist affective and humanitarian reconfigurations and highlights the contradictions and contestations that mark ongoing transformations of social citizenship in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing evidence that simultaneous to the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), a less obvious, but equally profound, Revolution in Military Logistics (RML) has occurred that shapes and underpins western military effectiveness. However, there has been no conceptualisation of this RML nor its wider effect on Western force structures. This article addresses this gap in the security literature. Using an interdisciplinary literature review and case studies, it makes two central contributions: first, it details how western military logistics systems and practises have transformed following post-Fordist principles in the last two decades. In doing so, second, it contributes a major new conceptual framework to the military logistics and security studies literature. Finally, the implications of these processes for military effectiveness are examined, with the conclusion asserting that the cumulative effect of this post-Fordist RML has potentially increased western militaries' strategic vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The industrial revolution taking place since the 18th century has brought the global economies to the stage of mass production, mass industrialization and spreading ideas connected with its efficiency. The most famous of its kind is Fordism and its modern variations called Post- Fordism or Neo-Fordism. We can still see traditional way of producing things in some parts of the world, and the leading economies are using Ford's ideas or the modifications of the Ford's concepts. But there is a question about the place of these models in the modern economy, especially because mass-production causes mass-waste and modern societies has woken up to the reality of the global pollution, climate change or just the simple fact that the amount of the raw materials is limited. The social mood is slowly changing so there should be a change to the way we produce and consume things as well. There is a question: can we proceed within existing models or should we think outside the box so we can invent more suitable way of looking at efficiency and effectiveness. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the discussion about the future of how are we going to produce things. It is based on the literature review considering Fordism and its variations, Product Life Cycle facing issues like pollution, massive waste and changes in modern economy, as well as on the case study of implementing waste reduction activities in the product' design phase in the industrial plant based in one of the EU countries -- Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumption perceived more as an economic activity at first sight; beyond being a mere economic reality, it has a social, cultural and psychological dimension and meaning. As a matter of fact, as a result of the progress and transformations of the production system, which is a product of the economic system, consumption emerges as a way of participating in social life as a cultural practice and as an important instrument of developing social relations. In this context, the motto of "consume as much as you need" of the pre-industrial period has left its place to the motto "you have as much as you consume" shaped in line with themes and motives such as "desire, pleasure and status" during and after the industrial period. The subject of this study is the new appearances and new meanings of consumption shaped by changing production systems and consumer expectations. The aim of the study is to discuss the transformations of the production-consumption relationship without neglecting the production aspect of the subject in an effort to present a historical integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though work is important for people's self-esteem and recognition, the sociology of work pays little attention to the meaning of work. This reflects that work in capitalist societies tends to be alienated. But empirical findings show that employees nevertheless try to appropriate their work by asking for its meaning. They claim for a meaningful work and for the possibility to execute work in a meaningful way. If they have to carry out work they feel to be meaningless they can suffer psychological strain. Meaning has not only an individual dimension but it refers to the meaning for society and other people and there are social institutionalizations of recognized meanings of work. Fordism and flexible capitalism are connected to different forms of alienation and difficulties to appropriate work as meaningful. Therefore, meaningful work is embedded in relations of collegiality and cooperation and can be damaged by the fragmentation of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Shaping one's life artistically' implies the principle 'I live as an artist when all my actions, and my expression in general, in connection with any content whatever, remain for me a mere show and assume a shape which is wholly within my power' (Hegel). Drawing on Hegel, the 'young' Marx advocated 'production in accordance with the laws of Beauty' ('artistic work/life'), as a kind of work which, inasmuch as it was 'free', provided a model for the elucidation of the presupposition of human emancipation. 'True Art' appears to be work performed under the umbrella of a 'free community', where the division between masters and slaves, working class and capitalists, emancipators and emancipated, is abolished. Does the conception of 'living artistically' (still) have a critical emancipatory value, and how can it be formulated under the conditions of a global market economy and post-Fordism, where every critical act, event and activity is appropriated? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Post-Fordism describes a situation in which precarity and un/underemployment becomes normalised while the requirement for young people to seek subjectivity through work is intensified. In this context, this article draws on interviews with youth living in regions of high youth unemployment to examine how young people create identities as workers. The article shows that young people approach the cultivation of a working self in terms of how the capacity for productive labour contributes to projects of 'self-realisation'. Classed subjectivities are formed through the different ethics through which young people approach the formation of the self as a worker. This demonstrates how the disciplinary requirements of work contribute to the contemporary experience of class among youth. The article concludes by suggesting that generational shifts in the experience of youth currently associated with employment insecurity can be usefully understood in terms of the dynamics of post-Fordist labouring subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue investigates the relationship between aesthetics and morality. How do the good and the beautiful, the bad and the ugly, happen in everyday life? How do these 'orders of worth' interact? Do they reinforce each other? What happens when they contradict one another? Does one order typically trump the other? Five contributions, from Israel, Italy and the Netherlands, scrutinize different sites where both aesthetics – the continuum of evaluations from beautiful to ugly – and morality – evaluations about good and evil, right and wrong – have a strong presence. The contributions zoom in on everyday cultural consumption, where people create, seek out and discuss 'good' food, clothing, films and architecture, and professional situations where people look for 'good' jobs, want to work in 'good' work spaces and aim to be a 'good' worker. Integrating insights from cultural studies, sociology, valuation studies and science and technology studies, this special issue shows, first, how judgments of aesthetic and moral value are central to the fabric of social life – from the smallest level of everyday interactions to the large scale of economic relations and power im/balances. Second, these valuations often clash, blend and blur. This blurring and blending enables the drawing of social boundaries, the consolidation of identities and the shaping of selves. But it also allows for seduction, manipulation and obfuscation of power dynamics. Third, the contributions show that in contemporary post-Fordist, meritocratic consumer societies, beauty and morality are increasingly entangled with economic and political logics, leading to new social struggles and new forms of alienation and exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central aspect of post-Fordist labour, many claim, is that the personal and the professional are increasingly intertwined. Especially in precarious urban sectors such as the interactive services, the aesthetic presentation of self is part of the product or service offered. Indeed, the separation between consumption and production, between private and work is no longer so strict for many, especially, in terms of aesthetics. Steering clear from sweeping statements about post-Fordism, however, this article offers an empirical examination based on ethnographic vignettes of one particular object that, perhaps surprisingly, appears in self-presentations for labour: the Adidas flip-flop. The Adidas flip-flop became salient in two studies in the Netherlands, in particular, one on the implementation of the Participation Act, which organizes welfare since 2015 and stipulates that it is forbidden for welfare recipients to 'obstruct employment by dress or personal hygiene'. Case managers in Dutch welfare offices, it turned out, often cited the Adidas flip-flop as the ultimate example of an object that would obstruct employment and by consequence is cause for a welfare penalty. At the same time, the Adidas flip-flop is the preferred footwear of tech entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, a surprising fashion item on runways and the highly valued item of Mario, a respondent in one of the ethnographic vignettes. Across several locations, therefore, we ask what aesthetic and moral interpretations of the Adidas flip-flop are offered, by whom and in what context. This allows for (1) an innovative view of aesthetics for labour, (2) an assessment of what that tells us about post-Fordist labour markets and (3) an understanding of how post-Fordist aesthetic norms can be especially opaque though important for those in precarious positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This speculative paper enquires into the discourse of the 'end of labour' or 'disappearance of labour' as a result of the development of 'intelligent capitalism' clearly seen in 'intelligent manufacturing' systems that are now pursued and developed as Industry 4.0 strategy in East Asia, Germany and others parts of the world. When 'intelligent capitalism' becomes the norm rather the exception what happens to labour as a factor of production and what happens to economy and society based on capital and labour? The paper briefly reviews the sociology of labour from a Marxist view to examine conceptions of Fordist and post-Fordist capitalism, and explore the advert of 'intelligent capitalism' to pose the question concerning education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The market for bottled water is growing and increasingly segmented. How do we explain not just the willingness to pay for a substance (water) that is almost free but also the increasing discernment in a drink generally considered tasteless? We argue that bottled water market segmentation is a leading edge of processes of water commodification, associated with the crisis of Fordism and rise of consumerist capitalism, where the assertion of status through commodity consumption is increasingly necessary. The extensive Ray's & Stark water menu is analyzed to show how the taste for bottled waters is cultivated. In the menu, references to gustatory sensation are limited. Instead, the tastefulness of water inheres in the distance from anthropogenic influence, made visible through scientific (geological) discourses. The tension between the desire to consume unmediated nature and the scientific abstraction necessary to recognize it reveals the social character of the taste for bottled waters. The highly refined sense of taste that the water menu's readers are presumed to have is a reflection of consumerist capitalism's distinctive ways of reproducing socio-economic inequality and metabolizing non-human nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the practices through which young people cultivate themselves as subjects of value to the post-Fordist labour force. In this, the article goes beyond an existing emphasis on young people's 'transitions' through employment, to a focus on the practices through which young people are formed as labouring subjects, and therefore on the relationship between youth subjectivities and post-Fordist labour force formation. Theoretically, the article builds upon increasingly influential suggestions in studies of post-Fordism that the formation of post-Fordist workers now takes place through the conversion of the whole of a subject's life into the capacity for labour, including affective styles, modes of relationality, and characteristics usually not considered as productive dimensions of the self. In this context, the article shows that whilst young people form themselves as workers through practices that are not specific to institutionalised definitions of education and labour, these practices – and the modes of selfhood they aim to cultivate – vary in ways that contribute to classed divisions within post-Fordist societies. In this, the study of the formation of young workers offers a critical insight into the way that the formation of subjectivities intertwines with the disciplinary requirements of post-Fordist labour in their classed manifestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an extended version of a plenary talk given at the 2016 Critical Legal Conference. 'The present is notoriously difficult to diagnose', the call reminded us, and yet we constantly hear claims about paradigmatic shifts and turning points. One recurrent theme concerns the shift that the post-Fordist economy seems to have entailed in terms of production - both production of goods and services and that of subjectivity. This argument is articulated through various claims, for instance that about immaterial and cognitive labour having become preponderant forms of labour. In this paper I reflect on the importance of thinking about continuities as well as discontinuities in such claims, and do so by engaging with the suggestion that just as immaterial and cognitive forms of labour become dominant, economic value becomes contingent and beyond measurement. The paper makes two points. The first is that the contingency of value is not a new phenomenon, one brought about by post-Fordism, and that measures indeed still play an important role. The second is that the argument ends up paying little attention to the connections that make up the global economy, and in particular the racial, gender and class articulations of both the productive and social reproductive fields within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The environment is organic to the neoliberal turn, not just as more or less cooperative material inputs or as a surface on which the changes to production and labor relations play out. The frequent finding that nature is being privatized and commodified in new ways is often described as nature's neoliberalization, but these trends do not exhaust the ways in which nature is integral to recent economic transformations. This article is structured around two claims. First, the ways of representing the environment economically that the neoliberal natures literature tends to represent as quite new are actually present and important at the origins of neoliberal policy. A brief genealogy of neoliberalism and nature in U.S. economic policy of the 1970s is surveyed in support of this. Second, work on neoliberal natures has emphasized the commodification and privatization of nature under neoliberalism at the expense of analyzing the environment's role in other important features of neoliberalism. Using qualitative policy analysis and an examination of three modern cases of environmental policy, this article traces the connections between the governance of nature and the governance of other parts of the economy with reference to the more specific economic transformations identified as “post-Fordist.” These similarities are not due to the new application of an established set of techniques of economic governance but because nature was internal to neoliberalism from the beginning not just as resources but as a set of relationships useful for stabilizing capital accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to discuss the idea of creative city that has been used in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and how the so-called creative class seems to be not able to propose alternatives for solving urban and housing problems. This research uses the Foucauldian genealogical method to demystify the discursive formations that validate ritualized utterances, as in the case of the use of creativity, and is based on the literature on economy, cities and creative people as well as newspaper articles and magazines from approximately 2010 up to now combining theoretical research and analysis of social events just as the way they are reported and disseminated in the media. We hope to highlight how creativity is increasingly used as a biopolitical strategy applied in cities, populations and urban plans, economics and subjectivities in a globalized context. The hypothesis is that the creative class, which is supposed to revitalize and transform the urban centers didn´t prove until now that your creativity can be applied in a direction of an urban revolution. In contrast, we intend to show as the main result of the research the growth of a movement that is becoming more and more strategic and coordinated to handle with urban questions, which we are going to call counter-dromologic, alluding to Paul Virilio (1996). They are trying to deal with the very mismatch between the economic changes and the speed of urban operations to countering their advance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trump's campaign slogan forces us to ask a simple question: when was America great? Surely, what he has in mind here is the America of the post-war Fordist and Keynesian social welfare models, which saw both the rise of the new suburban middle class and the rise of the white patriarchal figure, the Oedipal agent of the 'father who knows best'. But the coming post-Fordist society has figured the dismantling of the welfare model under the austerity regimes of neoliberalism, at the same time displacing the phallic signifier of paternal authority. Is it possible to bring back white masculine power and the model that made possible the suburban middle class? Or is 'America' the lost object that cuts into the Trumpian imaginary? The American utopia in 'Make America Great Again', is the very nothingness out of which the loss constitutive of Trumpian ideology consists, turning it instead into an American nightmare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article criticizes the established thesis as to the non-material nature of contemporary capitalism. The author postulates the contrary thesis as to the financial nature of post-Fordism, which can be described as “non-productive” activity. The analysis is centered on Marx’s conception of general intellect, interpreted in terms of inalienable property. The logic of the development of the general intellect is described through the formula “General Intellect-General Intellect'”, which expresses the modern tendencies in the development of financialcognitive capitalism, whereby knowledge becomes a new fetish, embodying the principle of self-increasing value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ron Silliman’s long prose poem Ketjak (1978) is in part a swan song for 1960s radicalism, and the Fordist regime of capital accumulation undergirding that eras struggles for self-affirmation. In Ketjak Silliman develops what he comes to call ‘the new sentence’, which is meant to eschew narrative, along with the very referential mechanisms of capital, foregrounding instead word play and the organic, gestural labour of the author. This paper argues against the grain of Silliman’s poetics, demonstrating ways in which his innovative technique in Ketjak, rather than being autonomous from capital, ironises the regime of flexible accumulation emergent in the 1970s. The restructuring of capital-labour relations during this period has been compellingly theorised by Théorie Communiste as the last gasp of the programmatic workers movement, which sought to build a workers’ world in its own image. The labouring subject that Silliman is preoccupied with in his poetics becomes undermined through the very restructuring of capital that Ketjak harnesses towards its own imaginative ends. Spanning 100 pages, Ketjak’s length is read as an instance of Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic category of ‘the interesting’, which this paper considers as a critical response to hyper-financialisation’s attempt to foreshorten the duration of production cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 boutique bars. In this, we suggest that affective labour mobilises young subjectivities at work in ways that are currently unrecognised within youth studies. The paper concludes by suggesting a new research agenda that goes beyond the existing focus on youth transitions through employment to explore how youth is produced as part of the social dynamics of post-Fordist labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the notion of post-Fordism and the feminization of labour in order to provide deeper insight into the shifting boundaries of work in the Digital Age and how new forms of virtual work emerge. Specifically, this paper approaches digital time banking as a specific form of unpaid virtual work. We analyse six case studies to reveal the different gendered natures of digital and non-digital time banks (TBs) and to suggest that the defeminization (understood fundamentally, but not only, as the lack of presence and involvement of women and affective labour) of digital time banking may be connected with the so-called third gender digital divide. This leads us to discuss the underrepresentation of women in other digitally mediated and sharing economy initiatives, to suggest some possible explanations, and warn against the post-feminization of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article will deal with the phenomenon of globalization bringing reorganizations in the scope of the culture of the peoples, with regard to language, social life, politics, economics, etc. Subsequently, aspects of narrative history that culminate in today's globalized world, from the movement of Fordism to post-Fordism, as well as changes in the systems of accumulation will be dealt with, addressing the current formation of technopoles throughout the world as a result of evolution Industrialization and the advancement of technology. In the sequence, it deals with globalization from the standpoint of the renowned author José Eduardo Faria, especially on what advocates Reflective Law on the current economic and social phenomena. In the end, the article will deal with different regimes of accumulation and regulation in the context of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This article looks at three recent French novels in order to explore key themes in what has become known as the roman d'entreprise: Pierre Mari's Résolution (2005), Nathalie Kuperman's Nous étions des êtres vivants (2010) and Thierry Beinstingel's Retour aux mots sauvages (2010). The figure of the entreprise functions both as a fictional representation of the post-Fordist workplace environment in companies such as France Télécom, and also as a means of tackling wider issues of work and social organisation in an era of neoliberal managerialism. The concepts of capitalist realism, organisational miasma and virtuality are used to analyse the ways in which the three novels convey the distinctive affective landscape of the contemporary entreprise. Fiction is used to consider the prolix and self-referential nature of the managerialist entreprise, which enables it to exert a significant influence on the individual and collective subjectivities of employees. The three novels focus on the capacity of the entreprise to capture language and impose an affect of silence on employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the historical study of modern American capitalism, labor unfreedom in agriculture has been conceptualized as an exception to liberal labor relations in the post-slavery polity, from debt peonage to the threat of deportation from workplaces populated by non-citizen migrants. At the same time, state-enforced labor compulsions and restrictions are increasingly part and parcel of what scholars call neoliberal exceptionalism. This article argues that agricultural and neoliberal exceptionalisms are related, by tracing the historical genealogy and juridical production of a restrictive work status, the deportable temporary labor migrant, across political economies in the modern United States, from imperial construction in the Panama Canal Zone, to agriculture, to the knowledge economy. Contrary to existing notions of temporary work visas as a new form of unfreedom in neoliberalized advanced capitalist states, I show how the threat of deportation is older and rooted in the rise of the liberal regulatory state in a post-slavery, yet persistently racial capitalist political economy. The import of understanding this history of government intervention increases as the liberal regulatory state's coercive logics and practices intensify and circulate in agriculture and under a post-Fordist regime of accumulation, reproducing racial capitalism in the labor process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the different oppression and privilege systems related to gender, class or origin, experimented by women who participate in temporary work programs. The empirical data comes from ethnographic research. The proposal is located in the recognition of the difference between women, a topic in contemporary feminist theory. We rely on intersectionality to make visible the multiple discriminations that women perceive in their everyday life, and the intersection of the hierarchical axes in the international labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the impact of the introduction of lower secondary schools on the educational style of the working classes in Poland. This particular reform is seen as one of the elements of change to the education system adapting it to the general parameters of post-Fordism. The author supports the theory of Pierre Bourdieu, which states that society is divided into three social classes (upper, middle and popular) and each of them produces a specific lifestyle and style of education. The education style of a class provides individuals with certain dispositions to educational institutions and school careers, which are realised in the form of social practices (selection of specific type of schools, learning techniques, ways of spending time, etc.). The changes taking place in the education system in Poland over the last 15 years, i.e. since the 1999 reform, are similar to processes that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s in western countries. They include the economisation of education, the parameterisation and quantification of educational results, as well as the introduction of market mechanisms for managing and financing state-owned schools. The article is based on individual in-depth interviews conducted during two field studies organised in 2013-2014: Cultural practices of the working class (120 IDIs) and Class differences in cultural practices in the North-Eastern Poland (60 IDIs). The findings become the basis of formulating new theoretical and research proposals for the field of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine my practice-as-research piecesWhat The Money MeantandSERVUS!in terms of how their design and delivery make visible those labour and exchange relations characteristic of late capitalism. After a brief introduction, I take the reader through theoretical debates around service work’s proliferation and existing arguments about its relationship to performance, as well as an argument for the ‘agonistic’ potential of aesthetic activity. I move on to argue that SERVUS! provides an example of how the one-to-one performance form can both reveal reification in action and rupture or speak back to its enactment, via techniques including explicit payment, over-enunciation or ‘flourish’ and what I term affective dissonance. I then demonstrate howWhat The Money Meantextends these techniques by applying them across a specific scenographic design and participatory structure.What The Money Meantinvites audience members to communicate with the performer by tipping, which I argue might be seen as a dramaturgical tactic of audience participation. I conclude by arguing that the performance of service, especially that which plays upon the one-to-one structure, can work ‘agonistically’ by both revealing the precarity of late capitalist labour and subverting its delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 howforgetting the past may be a strategy for tackling the present and being resilient. The analysis of the evolution of Lingotto thus contributes to understanding urban processes that entwine with the quest for resilience in the contemporary post-industrial city, stressing the ambiguous role of the often-implicit politics of forgetting and amnesia in a framework of urban resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing mainly on the company Nintendo, this paper examines the political economic and cultural forces underpinning the video game industry’s recent interest in merging entertainment and health promotion. This is a trend best exemplified in sexagenarian actress Helen Mirren’s endorsement of Nintendo’s fitness-themed gameWii Fit Plus. In one sense, ‘health-entertainment’ is deemed a product of the coercive laws of competition that impress the need for reinvestment and innovation as a way of warding off industry rivals. Nintendo’s turn to health promotion is from this perspective an extension of the ‘console wars’ that in the past drove gaming companies to pursue verisimilitude on screen in hopes of attracting (young male) consumers. In another sense, the present moment offers an ideal time to direct innovation towards the issues of health and healthy ageing in particular, as the cultural logics of healthism and the ‘third age’ both emphasise the virtues of ‘healthy’ and autonomous consumer activity. As such, Nintendo has pursued aesthetic simplicity butkinaestheticrealism as a way of extending the appeal of video gaming beyond the male youth demographic. In examining the implications of these developments, it is argued that health and entertainment, as independent constructs, are conceptually reimagined through their integration with one another. The pursuit of entertainment is made ‘responsible’, thereby remedying the concern that video gaming is an unhealthy activity. The pursuit of health, meanwhile, becomes a matter of playful, technology-enhanced and ultimately consumption-based experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Tony Harrison's poetic studies of deindustrialised Yorkshire anticipate Jason Moore's eco-Marxist critique of the neoliberal energy economy. Critical discussion of Tony Harrison's poetry has focused on the characteristic stances and techniques by which the poet first established his canonical standing, essaying his uneasy class consciousness and explosive use of regional dialect. Precious little attention has been paid to the ecological concerns that have become an increasingly integral element of Harrison's work. In the long narrative poem v. (1984) Harrison responded to the hard-fought Miners' Strike (1984-5), protesting the disenfranchisement of the British industrial working class. In some of v.'s more speculative lines, he countenanced the possibility of coal's eventual 'exhaustion'. In the film poem Prometheus (1998), he appraised the Miners' Strike from the distance of a decade, anchoring the poem in the perspective of a cancer-ridden coal miner. In the image of a dying, chain-smoking, Prometheus, Harrison cast the peculiar ironies of Britain's ongoing coal dependency in particularly profound relief. This paper finds that the evolution of Harrison's lyric voice captures much of the underlying music of British society, as it confronts the legacy of industrialisation, as history closes in, unremittingly, on capital's socioecological endgame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the historical emergence of “craft-like” manufacture and labor along the global commodity chains for fast fashion in southern China. Using Guangzhou’s garment district as a case study, I analyze how intensification of transnational subcontracting practices across the Pacific Rim has facilitated a synergistic melding of craft and industrial production that is often described as a post-Fordist model of mass manufacture. Craft-based organization of production and work life has melded with industrial principles of transnational subcontracting and garment mass manufacture in urban villages that serve as China’s “workshops of the world.” While conventional ideas of craft in the contemporary period tend to project an aura of authenticity upon objects and ways of making, flexible mass manufacture in this age of intensified mechanical reproduction has increasingly relied on small-scale, craft-based practices that complicate migrants’ experiences of labor across divergent historical and geographical contexts. The mobility of people, objects, and practices in China and beyond has destabilized the categories of industry/craft, rural/urban, and wage worker/entrepreneur by blurring the divisions of land and labor that once organized centralized modes of industrial and craft production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the practice of hacking in terms of making and modifying three-dimensional objects. In line with the work of a number of prominent thinkers in the field, the practice is considered to be a deliberate act by end users to not only understand, make accessible, de-alienate, appropriate and personalise products but also to demystify what Latour refers to as the ‘black box’ effect of established product archetypes. Where hacking is typically considered a post-production process, it is argued here that upfront, design-led approaches intended to harness downstream end-user post-production hacking (pre-hack) are in line with Jones’ call from over three decades ago for design divergence and continuity through collaborative processes – which we now find in the field of Open Design. This is discussed in light of the broader context of sustainability, which needs innovation from the ground up as well as top down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Le Capitalisme cognitif (2007), Yann Moulier Boutang argues that, under Post-Fordism, workers are expected to invest ever more of their creative, affective, and cognitive powers in their labours. These eminently human qualities, he maintains, are inherently resistant to capture and exploitation by capitalism. Hence, their integration into the capitalist system risks provoking that system's downfall, heralding the emergence of an Aesthetic State in which work itself will be modelled on disinterested creative activity and genuine emancipation will follow. Moulier Boutang is a leading representative of the French brand of néo-opéraïste thought and his work typifies the manner in which néo-operaïstes understand the relationships between work, aesthetics, and political emancipation. This is an understanding that stands in stark contrast to the work of Jacques Rancière. For Rancière, emancipation can only come through an escape from work, in moments of idleness that are prefigured in the disinterested nature of aesthetic experience. This article will examine the nature and stakes of this striking contrast between Moulier Boutang's 'aesthetics of work' and Rancière's 'aesthetics of idleness', between the former's belief in the possibility of emancipation through work and the latter's focus on the possibilities of emancipation from work [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]