10,099 research outputs found

    ‘Hands Up’: Female Call Centre Workers’ Labour, Protest and Health in the Seoul Digital Industrial Complex, Korea

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    This paper is based on research into the lived experience of female call centre workers in South Korea. A call centre has become a representative field-site to investigate the suffering of female workers in Korea, having been likened to the ‘sweatshop of the 20th century’ because of its panopticon-like supervision, regimentation of time, repetitive work. In reality, the current lives of female call handlers in Seoul Digital Industrial Complex seems not to improve compared to the past lives of the factory girls of the textile industry in the 1970s and 80s at the same industrial area, called Guro Industrial Complex. It can be inferred particularly from the perspectives of ‘chemical employeeship’ (i.e. workers depending on chemicals including caffeine and cigarette to work longer and harder for securing one’s job) and ‘cultural gravity’ (i.e. workers following the cultural force operating to demand their body be docile and industrious) In the context of Korean call centre industry, I have sought the worker’s reality of labour, protest and health through focusing on three different types of ‘hands up.’ The first ‘hands up’ describes that call handlers have to put one’s hands up to go to the toilet, which is humiliating to them and represents the unfair working condition. Secondly, the use of ‘hands up’ is a gesture of defiance of the first call centre labour union in Korea. I explored how hard it was physically and mentally to establish the collective resistance, but also observed the call handlers’ shrunken bodies or daunted mind could stretch out through the opportunity created by the labour union. Lastly, I found female call handlers’ ‘hands up’ gesture as a self-healing exercise, called ‘mompyeogi undong’ meaning ‘stretching body exercise.’ This exercise helped the participants improve their health physically and mentally as well as elevating self-esteem

    An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

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    How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

    IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning. Volume 6, Issue 1, Winter 2017ï»ż

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    IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning is a peer-reviewed, biannual online journal that publishes scholarly and creative non-fiction essays about the theory, practice and assessment of interdisciplinary education. Impact is produced by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at the College of General Studies, Boston University (www.bu.edu/cgs/citl)

    Spartan Daily, March 15, 2001

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    Volume 116, Issue 35https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9671/thumbnail.jp

    Socially Responsible Investing from a Christian Perspective

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    This paper attempts to determine the criteria that make investing in a particular company ethical according to a Christian economic ethic. Categories examined include product, environmental impact, employee relations, multinational corporations, and corporate governance

    Big World, Small Planet – Module 4: Wants Versus Needs: Pushing the Boundaries, Teacher Edition

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    Big World, Small Planet – Module 4: Wants Versus Needs: Pushing the Boundaries, Teacher Edition We live in an interconnected world. Movies, music, news, manufactured goods like clothing and electronics, and people travel across the globe. With this much exchange of ideas, culture, and material goods, our actions in one region are sure to affect people living in other regions. Understanding how and where we connect can help us understand how we might impact others. This understanding can also help us find ways to make these new lines of contact work benefit of all

    The codetermination bargains: the history of German corporate and labour law

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    Why does codetermination exist in Germany? Law and economics theories have contended that if there were no legal compulsion, worker participation in corporate governance would be ‘virtually nonexistent’. This positive analysis, which flows from the ‘nexus of contracts’ conception of the corporation, supports a normative argument that codetermination is inefficient because it is supposed that it will seldom happen voluntarily. After discussing competing conceptions of the corporation, as a ‘thing in itself’, and as an ‘institution’, this article explores the development of German codetermination from the mid-19th century to the present. It finds the inefficiency argument sits at odds with the historical evidence. In its very inception, the right of workers to vote for a company board of directors, or in work councils with a voice in dismissals, came from collective agreements. It was not compelled by law, but was collectively bargained between business and labour representatives. These ‘codetermination bargains’ were widespread. Laws then codified these models. This was true at the foundation of the Weimar Republic from 1918 to 1922 and, after abolition in 1933, again from 1945 to 1951. The foundational codetermination bargains were made because of two ‘Goldilocks’ conditions (conditions that were ‘just right’) which were not always seen in countries like the UK or US. First, inequality of bargaining power between workers and employers was temporarily less pronounced. Second, the trade union movement became united in the objective of seeking worker voice in corporate governance. As the practice of codetermination has been embraced by a majority of EU countries, and continues to spread, it is important to have an accurate positive narrative of codetermination’s economic and political foundations

    Complete Issue 22, 2000

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    The river and the factory: Momentum and shifting dynamics between the Shenandoah River and Avtex Fibers, 1939-1989

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    From 1940-1989, a huge rayon factory—at one time the largest in the world—operated on the banks of the South Fork of the Shenandoah River in the Town of Front Royal, Virginia. Three different companies owned the facility: American Viscose Corporation (AVC) built it in 1939 and ran it until 1963 when the Food Machinery Corporation (FMC Corp.) conglomerate purchased AVC. In 1976, an FMC executive bought the rayon plant in Front Royal in a leveraged buyout, renaming the facility Avtex Fibers, Inc. From early on, the plant had serious problems with waste materials—including many toxic substances—produced when manufacturing rayon. During nearly 50 years of operation, the plant’s approach to toxic waste was to rely on insufficient and frequently outdated procedures and technologies, keeping a significant portion of the waste on-site. The South Fork of the Shenandoah, a crucial resource for the rayon plant and important ecological entity in its own right, suffered the consequences. Although the plant’s engineers were never able to protect the river, many outside people—from sport fishermen to state officials—attempted to do so. Over the plant’s operating life, changes in environmental awareness led to changes in law that ultimately caught up with the plant. In 1989, after years of controversy, Avtex Fibers closed its doors. The operations might have ceased sooner were it not for close connections between the rayon plant and the military, which granted it a strong degree of protection from environmental regulation for most of its operating life. This paper examines the entwined histories of the Shenandoah River and the rayon factory at Front Royal, especially the origins of its problematic waste disposal practices, and focuses on the changing dynamics that ultimately gave the health of the river—treated for so many years as a raw material and waste receptacle—priority over the factory. This history provides a microcosm to examine human interaction with the encompassing natural world, highlighting the limits of human knowledge with regard to predicting environmental consequences, the agency of environmental systems, and the possibilities for checking the momentum of technological systems that harm the environment
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