Loving work: drawing attention to pleasure and pain in the body of the cultural worker

In this article, we present our current research into the body and mind at work, with a particular focus on experiences and implications of enjoyment and love of work within the culture sector. This research is developed through the project Manual Labours that explores the historical conditioning between the body and mind in the so-called immaterial labour conditions. The project aims to identify positive and negative affective labour and the role that physical relationships to work can have in helping conceptualise current working conditions. The enjoyment of work leads to complex differentiations between work and life. This article explores the implications of exploitative labour conditions as self-employed or salaried passionate workers are internalising and developing a sense of ‘un-alienated’ ownership over their wage labour

Drivers and outcomes of work alienation: reviving a concept

This article sheds new light on an understudied construct in mainstream management theory, namely, work alienation. This is an important area of study because previous research indicates that work alienation is associated with important individual and organizational outcomes. We tested four antecedents of work alienation: decision-making autonomy, task variety, task identity, and social support. Moreover, we examined two outcomes of alienation: deviance and performance, the former measured 1 year after the independent variables were measured, and the latter as rated by supervisors. We present evidence from a sample of 283 employees employed at a construction and consultancy organization in the United Kingdom. The results supported the majority of our hypotheses, indicating that alienation is a worthy concept of exploration in the management sciences

Voiceless but empowered farmers in corporate supply chains: contradictory imagery and instrumental approach to empowerment

There have been calls for a shift of focus towards the political and power-laden aspects of transitioning towards socially equitable global supply chains. This paper offers an empirically grounded response to these calls from a critical realist stance in the context of global food supply chains. We examine how an imaginary for sustainable farming structured around an instrumental construction of empowerment limits what is viewed as permissible, desirable and possible in global food supply chains. We adopt a multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine the sustainable farming imaginary for smallholder farmers constructed by one large organization, Unilever, in a series of videos produced and disseminated on YouTube. We expose the underlying mechanisms of power and marginalization at work within the sustainability imaginary and show how “empowerment” has the potential to create of new dependencies for these farmers. We recontextualize the representations to show that while the imaginary may be commercially feasible, it is less achievable in terms of empowering smallholder farmers

Review Essay : Industrial Organization and Socialist Development in China

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68697/2/10.1177_009770047900500204.pd

Communication media and the dead:from the Stone Age to Facebook

This article argues as follows: (i) The presence of the dead within a society depends in part on available communication technologies, specifically speech, stone, sculpture, writing, printing, photography and phonography (including the mass media), and most recently the internet. (ii) Each communication technology affords possibilities for the dead to construct and legitimate particular social groups and institutions – from the oral construction of kinship, to the megalithic legitimation of the territorial rights of chiefdoms, to the written word’s construction of world religions and nations, to the photographic and phonographic construction of celebrity-based neo-tribalism, and to the digital reconstruction of family and friendship. (iii) Historically, concerns about the dead have on a number of occasions aided the development of new communication technologies – the causal connection between the two can go both ways. The argument is based primarily on critical synthesis of existing research literature