You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book offers a novel examination of the relations, actions, and practices of healthcare workers, analysed in terms of collective mobilisation. Based on successive surveys conducted over a twenty-year period in public and private hospitals, it brings a rich new conceptualisation of both social movements and care work. We’ve all witnessed the collective mobilisation at play in hospitals during the Covid-19 pandemic. In such a structured, hierarchical environment, the parallel with social movements highlights the ethical and collective dimensions of care work, as well as the bonds of solidarity and identification with the collective. Yet, healthcare workers are often caught in a dilemma b...
A political, legal, intellectual, and social history of employment in America In the present age of temp work, telecommuting, and outsourcing, millions of workers in the United States find themselves excluded from the category of "employee"—a crucial distinction that would otherwise permit unionization and collective bargaining. Tracing the history of the term since its entry into the public lexicon in the nineteenth century, Jean-Christian Vinel demonstrates that the legal definition of "employee" has always been politically contested and deeply affected by competing claims on the part of business and labor. Unique in the Western world, American labor law is premised on the notion that "n...
Based on an ethnographic study of mobilisations of the Comorian diaspora in Marseille during political and cultural events, the book examines communitarisation in relation to three thematic areas, namely spaces, cultural markets and local politics. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of the dispositif, the author analyses mobilisations of postcolonial diaspora as part of a dispositif of communitarisation, that is, a set of discourses, practices, institutions and subjectivations of diasporic community. She argues that constructions of ‘community’ are both shaped by and shape ethnicised biopolitics, expressed by modes of governing diasporic groups along ethnicised divisions and a marking of et...
In Jordan, between censorship, repression and election rigging, political activism is limited – despite the democratic opening glimpsed in 1989. In this important new book, Pénélope Larzillière charts the path of longstanding activists in Jordan and shows how opposition movements there have shifted from the underground to a heavily controlled public sphere. Activists discuss their motivation and commitment and the consequences their activism has had throughout their lives. Not only do these accounts highlight the general conditions for political activism in a repressive regime, they also unpack the meaning individuals attach to their political journey and chosen ideology, whether communist, nationalist, Islamist or otherwise.
Why do ordinary people who used to engage in domestic and leisure activities for free now try to make a profit from them? How and why do people commodify their free time? This book explores the marketization of blogging, cooking, craftwork, gardening, knitting, selling second-hand items, sexcamming, and more generally the economic use of free time. It outlines how the development of web platforms, the current economic context and post-Fordist values can account for this extension of market and labor. Drawing on a range of interviews, ethnographic observations, and quantitative surveys, the contributors question the empowering effects of commodification, with a specific focus on how gender and class inequalities affect the social meanings of extra money. Ultimately, the collective findings demonstrate how commodification pervades even the most mundane social activities. This research will be invaluable to scholars and students with a focus on gender and digital sociology, the sociology of work and labour, and the marketization of leisure.
How do we know when physicians practice medicine safely? Can we trust doctors to discipline their own? What is a proper role of experts in a democracy? In the Public Interest raises these provocative questions, using medical licensing and discipline to advocate for a needed overhaul of how we decide public good in a society dominated by private interest groups. Throughout the twentieth century, American physicians built a powerful profession, but their drive toward professional autonomy has made outside observers increasingly concerned about physicians’ ability to separate their own interests from those of the general public. Ruth Horowitz traces the history of medical licensure and the me...
Since 1993, crime in the United States has fallen to historic lows, seeming to legitimize the country’s mix of welfare reform and mass incarceration. The Upper Limit explains how this unusual mix came about, examining how, beginning in the 1970s, declining living standards for the poor have defined social and penal policy in the United States, making welfare more restrictive and punishment harsher. François Bonnet shows how low-wage work sets the upper limit of social and penal policy, where welfare must be less attractive than low-wage work and criminal life must be less attractive than welfare. In essence, the living standards of the lowest class of workers in a society determine the upper limit for the generosity of welfare and for the humanity of punishment in that society. The Upper Limit explores the local consequences of this punitive adjustment in East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood where crime fell in the 1990s. Bonnet argues that no meaningful penal reform can happen unless living standards and the minimum wage rise again. Enlightening and provocative, The Upper Limit provides a comprehensive theory of the evolution of social and penal policy.
'Why Public Space Matters' examines how public space contributes to individual and societal flourishing. Based on thirty-five years of ethnographic fieldwork on plazas, walkways, parks, markets and beaches in the United States, Costa Rica, Argentina, India, Kenya and France, it presents a new understanding of the role of social contact, public culture and affective atmosphere in the creation of places essential to everyday urban life.
London is one of the world’s most popular destinations and visitors contribute approximately £14.9 billion of expenditure to the city every year. Its tourism and events sectors are growing and over the last few years London has received more visitors than ever before. However, detailed accounts of the city’s visitor economy are conspicuously absent. This book analyses how the capital is developing as a destination through the expansion of tourism and events into new urban spaces. The book outlines how parts of London not previously regarded as tourist territory are now subject to the visitor gaze with tourism spreading beyond established central zones into peripheral, suburban and resid...
Authoritarian Absorption unveils the transformation of China's pandemic response system from 1978 to 2018 through its battle against HIV/AIDS. Chinese bureaucrats, facing pressure from foreign agencies--especially those of the US and UK--and grassroots social movements, developed ways to turn epidemics into opportunities for enhancing domestic control and international stature. Drawing on longitudinal-ethnographic research, Yan Long reveals how Western liberal interventions can simultaneously bolster public health institutions and reinforce authoritarian power, a development pivotal to China's subsequent handling of COVID-19 and instrumental in advancing the rights of groups like gay men.