COVID-19 Secure Guidance: Organizational Decision Making and Politics in a Public Health Crisis

23 March 2021, a year since the first “work from home” government instruction so as to rein the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic in the United Kingdom. On 25 March 2020, the Coronavirus Act 2020 gained Royal Assent, came into law and it is a parliamentary consensus that the Act has beneficially enhanced the ability of public bodies to implement measures to save lives. In a commitment to continuously review the COVID-19 secure guidance that operationalizes the Act, the One Year Report on the Status on the Non-devolved Provisions of the Coronavirus Act 2020 was presented to Parliament in March 2021. In parallel response to the Government’s review of measures implemented to mitigate the impact of COVID-19, organizational theorists have investigated the management of compliance with these containment efforts. Bounded rationality, the classical rational choice critique, as espoused by Herbert A. Simon (1955), is a spurious penchant given its inadvertence of structural formulation. Primarily informed by a critical realist approach to the politics of organizational decision-making this article identifies limitations in rational choice theory, coupled with gender blind technological determinism, as insufficiently recognised determinants of compliance with COVID-19 secure workplace guidance

Gender and Work in Capitalist Economies

From the industrial revolution through to more recent advances in information technology, radical changes in working practices have accelerated rates of production to previously unimaginable levels. The establishment of wage relations, in the second half of the 19th Century, precipitated the rise of the 'employment society' and a movement towards synchronized work. Industrialization epitomized the capitalist definition of work time. In Gender and Work in Capitalist Economies, Pamela Odih advances a politics of gender and time, exploring the sociological aspects of work. This book provides a dynamic intervention into Marxist analysis of time and capitalist accumulation, and looks at how in contemporary regimes this translates as the universal appropriation of women?s labour time. Pamela Odih reasons that it is a disconcerting fact of global manufacturing, that accelerated turnover gains have become increasingly dependent on the exploitation of a spatially disaggregated, feminized global assembly-line. The book explores: - Industrial and post-industrial times as moments in a longer-term trend - Manufacturing in the 24 hour economy - Accelerated rates of disaggregated production Gender and Work in Capitalist Economies is key reading for students of gender studies, sociology, organizational analysis and economic history

Ecofeminist Water Ecology

The denaturing of environmental sustainability is observably accelerating; and continuously bringing into question the proficiency of capitalism to superintend the proliferating risks of global climate change. Industrial modernization involves exploitative subjugation; and the capitalization of the natural environment is an integral feature of this capitalist dynamic. It is evident that the preceding modes of industrial capitalism have modernized in disregard of issues of sustainability in the expenditure of renewable resources. ‘Risk society’ is the unintended outcome or reverse-side consequences of industrial capitalist opulence. According to Ulrich Beck, the conditions of the risk society precipitate changes at the level of individual apprehension. In the risk society, insecurities erupt through the disjunctures, contradictions and conflicts that capillary from industrial society into subsequent orders of modernity. The current milieu of privatized securities erodes collective solidarities, individuating identities and undermining a social defense against local experiences of global risks. Nowhere is this clearer than in the paralyzing grip of environmental crisis. Overwhelmed by the unprecedented magnitudes of environmental risks, political institutions no longer profess to guarantee present and future wellbeing. Faced with the local immediacy of international environmental risks, individuals are compelled into defensive action. Beck describes ‘sub-politics’ as confrontational and immediate, a direct political engagement indexed to the particular locality of disjuncture. It is a politics of the moment, in the moment. This book explores the sub-political geographies of river restoration so as to critically examine the extent to which ‘meta-industrial labour’ is the fundamental, material and symbolic mediation of ecological activism. Michel Foucault identifies inter-relationships between sign technologies (inscriptive signs, symbolic medium, signification); technologies of production (transformation of material things); technologies of power (objectivising categorization); and technologies of the self (self-regulating abilities of subjects to impact discourse on the cultivation of body and soul). Primarily informed by organizational ethnographies, extensive interviews and ethnographic observations of river restorations this book empirically examines how symbolic mediations of ecological activism are inextricably bound up with ‘government’ i.e., shifting assemblages of formal and informal agencies, practices and institutions that variously and differentially align the self-regulating ability of subjects with the design, objectives and scope of a regime of governance. Emerging through this assemblage can be located a ‘feminine ideal’ through which river restoration is symbolically mediated. But the operation of assemblages of actions upon actions through symbolic mediations of ecological activism, in terms of the ‘feminine ideal’, is not prescriptive or directly imposed upon subjects. This book extensively illustrates how, the symbolic mediations of ecological activism exemplify the manifold ways in which the exercise of power opens up a field of possibilities for the cultivation of gender identities

#FassonStRedGoldBrickLane; Graffiti Ethno-map of Fashion Street’s Colonial History

This comment piece reassembles a colonial history of Fashion Street London, through the refracted prisms of a graffiti ethno-map and social media hashtag

`It's About Time!' The Significance of Gendered Time for Financial Services Consumption

In recent years numerous financial services companies have explored the profitability of marketing specifically to women. These practices are largely informed by traditional product and service distribution methods where the target is predominantly male `heads of household'. This article provides alternative approaches to the issue of gender and its bearing on financial services consumption. We argue that women's everyday lives frequently result in gendered relations to, and perceptions of `time'. These temporal orientations are often incongruent with the predominant linear, temporal framework within which many long-term financial services products (e.g. pensions) are embedded. Insofar as financial services companies continue to subscribe to a linear model of time, reproduced through marketing discourses and embedded within their temporally oriented products, their efforts to capture the `women's market' will continue to be constrained

Advertising and Cultural Politics in Global Times

Advertising and Cultural Politics in Global Times traces daringly transgressive convergences between cultural politics and global advertising media. It engages with a range of interpolations between cultural politics and advertising technologies including: the governmental rationality of neoliberal vistas, transgressive aesthetics and the cultural politics of representation, the political sign-economy of citizen branding, techno-political convergences between the social and political, and the marking of a new exciting geo-political terrain for cultural politics in global times. Tracing global advertising practices to the cultural politics commonly manifested in the postmodern political caesura of advertising, this book makes use of extensive case studies, whilst drawing on the work of Baudrillard, Giroux, Foucault, Castells and Latour to illustrate the manner in which advertising continues to revolutionize the political sphere. As such, it will be of interest to a range of readers across media studies, cultural studies and sociology. Contents: Preface; Introduction: liberal vistas and the political economy of the sign; Part I Governmentalization of Visual Culture: Governing neoliberal vistas and the cultural politics of economic life; Governmentality and the political economy of the sign. Part II Postmodern-Political Caesura: Inversions in the political economy of global signs; Aesthetic disruptions in the cultural politics of representation; Semiology of time in postmodern cultural politics. Part III Geo-Political Caesura: Political economy of citizen branding; Aesthetics as the transgressive politics of the self. Part IV Techno-Political Caesura: Technoscapes and the geo-politics of global advertising; Conclusion: towards a transgressive techno-political caesura; References; Index

Watersheds in Marxist Ecofeminism

The neoliberal environmental governance of river conservation, coupled with the organizational modernization imposed and sustained by the European Union’s water directives, engenders Other Spaces of feminist ecological alignment. The riparian landscapes of urban cities are manifestations of political and ideological rationalities operating under the constraints of capitalist markets, and are saturated by the contradictions of neoliberal environmental science. Neoliberal rationalities configure river waterways as “sites”, the dimensions of which are analogous to Michel Foucault’s account of spatial heterotopias as polymerous relations of propinquity between junctures. Many of the modernising initiatives instituted by the European Union’s Water Framework Directive can be discerned as biopolitical neoliberal regimes governing local river spaces, through the enfolding into “spaces of emplacement” and the “sites” of programmatic calculation, financialisation of the domestic sphere, and market-based neoliberal environmental science. Primarily informed by organizational ethnographies, extensive interviews and ethnographic observations of river restorations, this book empirically examines how the relationally embodied heterochronies of ecological activism challenge the programmatic rationalities of the European Union’s river ‘government’, namely its shifting assemblages of formal and informal agencies, practices and institutions that variously and differentially align the self-regulating ability of subjects with the design, objectives and scope of the European Union’s neoliberal regime of river governance. This book’s analysis of the complex inter-governmental networking eliding the local governance of rivers with voluntary sector community-outreach and European Union directives identifies new locations of ecological activism precipitated by political affinities, which have become simultaneously public and private. The capacity of river heterotopias to intersect the public and private spheres of urban cities emphasises the intrinsic reproductive labour time of river restoration; for, as Foucault suggests, the heterochronies of urban heterotopia are one and the same time “outside of time”, while also constituting “a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place”. The book shows that the intersecting heterochronies of the urban river space confirm this Other Space as an intriguing gendered heterotopia. Dr Pamela Odih is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths University of London. Pamela's research interests include gender, work and global capitalism; time, social theory and the constitution of subjective identity; environmental cultural politics, international communication media and poststructural semiotics; and neoliberalism, consumer citizenship and healthcare markets

Détournement á la Mode Situationist Praxis: History and Present of Cultural Political Resistance to the Psychology of Advertising Spectacle

Abstract According to neuromarketing advertising techniques, our brains are neurologically segmented into differentially operating zones; consequently advertisements have to be aesthetically designed to communicate and activate precise neural circuits. Neuroimaging technologies have reassured the allegorical attestation of marketing legitimacy: efficacy of practice translates into the vividly surreal-coloured imagery of functional magnetic resonance imaging. In this brand, new cerebral hemisphere of marketing technology, the brain’s neural processes provide the medium for advertising messages. Thus, visual media and aesthetics capable of generating convincing simulacra, depicting the most spectacular variations in levels of neuron activity, are increasingly achieving currency. Interventions, by advertising creatives, into the realm of the artistic avant-garde, raise many fundamental questions about tendering the interiority of human consciousness. This paper traces the history and presence of cultural political encounters with the psychology of advertising spectacle. Primarily informed by the artist avant-garde of Situationist International (SI) (1957-1972), my definition of the advertising psychology spectacle refers to the mediation of social relationships by the currency of advertising psychology. In neuromarketing and advertising, the spectacle translates materiality, affect and embodiment into the sign-currencies of western capitalist commodity culture. Resistance, to the recuperation of the artistic avant-garde into the spiralling vortex of the spectacle, can be traced back to SI and its challenges to the meretricious spectacle of advertising psychology. Indeed, Situationists’ praxis has relevance to an appreciation of Adbusters and their interrogation of the psychology of the advertising spectacle

Advertising in Modern and Postmodern Times

How does advertising position itself in consumer culture? In what ways does it 'create' desire and wants? This richly illustrated, incisive text produces the most complete critical introduction to advertising culture. Advertising in Modern and Postmodern Times: provides a comprehensive discussion of the main theories shows you how real adverts work, together with reproductions of advertising images and copy demonstrates how advertising constructs subjects provides an instructive historical overview of advertising explores the relationship between advertising and industrial capitalis