The politics of collective repair: examining object-relations in a postwork society

In this article we look at repair as an emergent focus of recent activism in affluent societies, where a number of groups are reclaiming practices of repair as a form of political and ecological action. Ranging from those that fight for legislative change to those groups who are trying to support ecological and social change through everyday life practices, repair is beginning to surface tensions in everyday life and as such poses opportunities for its transformation. We survey a few of the practices that make up this movement in its various articulations, to take stock of their current political import. While we suggest that these practices can be seen as an emergent lifestyle movement, they should not be seen as presenting a unified statement. Rather, we aim to show that they articulate a spectrum of political positions, particularly in relation to the three specific issues of property, pedagogy and sociality. These three dimensions are all facets of current internal discrepancies of repair practices and moreover express potential bifurcations as this movement evolves. Drawing on a diverse methodology that includes discourse analysis and participant observation, we suggest some of the ways in which this growing area of activity could play a significant role in resisting the commodification of the everyday and inventing postwork alternatives

The Information Economy and the Labor Theory of Value

This article discusses aspects of the labor theory of value in the context of the information industries. First, taking the Temporal Single-System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx’s labor theory of value as methodology, the paper calculates economic demographics at the level of socially necessary labor time and prices of an example case. Second, the paper questions the assumption that the labor theory of value cannot be applied to the information industries. This paper tests this hypothesis with an analysis of the development of labor productivity in six countries. The paper concludes that the labor theory of value is an important tool for understanding the information economy and the peculiarities of the information commodity

Tutor and teacher timescapes : lessons from a home-school partnership

A partnership project was developed in which parents volunteered to support teachersin training years 1-3 children in computer skills at a primary school in a small, lowsocio-economic community. This article identifies the ways teachers and the &lsquo;tutors&rsquo;(as the volunteers were called) understood the value of the project. &lsquo;Being a teacher&rsquo;and &lsquo;being a volunteer&rsquo; were structured by different forms of social engagement,which in turn influenced the ways individuals were able to work with each other incollaborative processes. We argue that the discursive practices encoded in homeschool-community partnership rhetoric represent ruling-class ways of organising andnetworking that may be incompatible with those of people from low socio-economicbackgrounds. When such volunteers work in schools their attendance may be sporadicand short-term whereas teachers would like &lsquo;reliable&rsquo; ongoing commitment. Thismismatch wrought of teachers&rsquo; and volunteers&rsquo; differing everyday realities needs to beunderstood before useful models for partnerships in disadvantaged communities maybe realised.<br /

Reproduction and transformation of inequalities in schooling: The transformative potential of the theoretical constructs of Bourdieu

This article is concerned with the theoretical constructs of Bourdieu and their contribution to understanding the reproduction of social and cultural inequalities in schooling. While Bourdieu has been criticised for his reproductive emphasis, this article proposes that there is transformative potential in his theoretical constructs and that these suggest possibilities for schools and teachers to improve the educational outcomes of marginalised students. The article draws together three areas of contribution to this theme of transformation; beginning by characterising habitus as constituted by reproductive and transformative traits and considering the possibilities for the restructuring of students’ habitus. This is followed by a discussion of cultural capital and the way that teachers can draw upon a variety of cultural capitals to act as agents of transformation rather than reproduction. The article concludes by considering the necessity of a transformation of the field to improve the educational outcomes of marginalised students

Hegel, Adorno and the origins of immanent criticism

‘Immanent criticism' has been discussed by philosophers of quite different persuasions, working in separate areas and in different traditions of philosophy. Almost all of them agree on roughly the same story about its origins: It is that Hegel invented immanent criticism, that Marx later developed it, and that the various members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno, refined it in various ways, and that they are all paradigmatic practitioners of immanent criticism. I call this the Continuity Thesis. There are four different claims that interest me. (i) Hegel is the originator of immanent criticism. (ii) Hegel's dialectical method is that of immanent criticism. (iii) Adorno practises immanent criticism and endorses the term as a description of his practice. (iv) Adorno's dialectical method is fundamentally Hegelian. In this article, I offer an account of immanent criticism, on the basis of which, I evaluate these four claims and argue that the Continuity Thesis should be rejected

For a political economy of massive open online courses

In understanding the changes that are impacting the global higher education sector, developing a critique of the relationships between technology and technological innovation, new managerialism and financialisation, and the impact of the secular crisis of global capitalism is critical. Moreover, it is important to critique these changes historically and geographically, in order to understand how political economics shapes the space in which higher education policy and practice are recalibrated for capital accumulation and profitability. This article will argue that educational innovations such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) might usefully be examined in light of the relationships between technological and organisational innovation; the historical tendency of the rate of profit to fall that is affecting competing educational providers; the disciplinary role of the State in shaping an educational space for further capital accumulation; and the subsumption of open networks to the neo-liberal project of accumulation and profitability. Such an analysis then enables a critique of the claims that are made for open networks in delivering new forms of sociability that transcend structures of power and domination. As a result of this political economic critique, the article will situate the emergence of MOOCs inside and against Capital’s drive to subsume labour practices inside technologically mediated forms of coercion, command, and control. It will argue that the ways in which MOOCs and the services that are derived from them are then valorised might offer a glimpse of how the neoliberal educational project is disciplining academic labour and how it might be resisted