24 research outputs found
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From passionate labour to compassionate work: Cultural co-ops, do what you love and social change
This article focuses on the relation between work and pleasure in the cultural sector. I first unpack the concept of passionate work, situating it within four possible ways of relating work and pleasure. I argue that the work ethic of do what you love, contrary to what it promises, limits the prospects of loveable work. As part of a neoliberal work culture, do what you love transfers the battleground from society onto the self. It favours self-management over politics. Drawing on findings from interview research with members of worker co-operatives in the UK cultural industries, I then go on to explore the relation between work and pleasure within cultural co-ops. I discuss how cultural co-ops might inspire and contribute to a movement for transforming the future of work by turning the desire for loveable work from a matter of individual transformation and competition into a practice of co-operation and social change
Working at the weekend: supermarket and shopping centre workers in Salford/Manchester (UK) and Porto (Portugal)
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Review Article: When 'life itself' goes to work: Reviewing shifts in organizational life through the lens of biopower
This review article suggests the English publication of Foucault’s lectures on biopower, The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), might be useful for extending our understandings of how organizational power relations have changed over the last 20 years. Unlike disciplinary power, which constrains and delimits individuals, the concept of biopower emphasizes how our life abilities and extra-work qualities (bios or ‘life itself’) are now key objects of exploitation – particularly under neoliberalism. The term biocracy is introduced to analyse recent reports on workplace experiences symptomatic of biopower. Finally, the conceptual weaknesses of biopower for organizational theorizing are critically evaluated to help develop the idea for future scholarship
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Death contested: morphogenesis and conflicts of interpretation
This chapter lays the groundwork for a realist analysis of the disappearance or ‘death’ of social forms. How social forms disappear is particularly relevant in societies experiencing intensified social transformation. Yet, whilst the notion of morphogenesis can account both for the acceleration of change and for the multiplication of coexisting social forms (Al-Amoudi 2014), it does not allow us, on its own, to theorise their disappearance. of social entities . Addressing this gap in the theory of morphogenesis opens interesting avenues for the philosophical study of society.
Our contribution is organised around three related questions. Firstly, how should we conceptualise the disappearance of social forms and how can this conceptualisation draw from the biological conception of death? Secondly, how do concept-dependence and reflexivity differentiate social death from biological death? Thirdly, how can we observe and interpret the agonies that accompany the death of social forms?
We conclude by providing an illustration of how the theory might be applied to a case with significant current socio-economic ramifications: the disappearance of life-long employment in developed capitalist economies