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How neoliberalism is causing a crisis in Germany Upward social mobility represented a core promise of life under the “old” West German welfare state, in which millions of skilled workers upgraded their Volkswagens to Audis, bought their first homes, and sent their children to university. Not so in today’s Federal Republic, where the gears of the so-called “elevator society” have long since ground to a halt. In the absence of the social mobility of yesterday, widespread social exhaustion and anxiety have emerged across mainstream society. Oliver Nachtwey analyses the reasons for this social rupture in postwar German society and investigates the conflict potential emerging as a result. He concludes that although the country has managed to muddle through thus far, simmering tensions beneath the surface nevertheless threaten to undermine the German system’s stability in the years to come. Recipient of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation 2016 Hans-Matthöfer-Preis for Economic Writing.
Weve had 20 years of government-level conferences at Kyoto, Copenhagen and Cancun, but greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Taking a cosmopolitan approach to climate change in this excellent and timely book, Paul Harris and his contributors argue that citizen action is an essential complement to state action. The challenging, unsettling and absolutely vital argument of these high quality essays is that distance makes no moral difference in our globalised world; individual high emitters have a duty to reduce their emissions, wherever they are. - Andrew Dobson, Keele, University, UK This collection of provocative essays re-evaluates the worlds failed policy responses to climate change, i...
Unique cross-cultural and multimedial approach to class identity and precarity in literature, theatre, and film Contemporary culture not merely reflects ongoing societal transformations, it shapes our understanding of rapidly evolving class realities. Literature, theatre, and film urge us to put the question of class back on the agenda, and reconceptualize it through the lens of precarity and intersectionality. Relying on examples from British, French, Spanish, German, American, Swedish and Taiwanese culture, the contributors to this book document a variety of aesthetic strategies in an interdisciplinary dialogue with sociology and political theory. Doing so, this volume demonstrates the myriad ways in which culture opens up new pathways to imagine and re-imagine class as an economic relation, an identity category, and a subjective experience. Situated firmly within current debates about the impact of social mobility, precarious work, intersectional structures of exploitation, and interspecies vulnerability, this volume offers a wide-ranging panorama of contemporary class imaginaries.
For more than half a century, the Socialist Register has brought together some of the sharpest thinkers from around the globe to address the pressing issues of our time. Founded by Ralph Miliband and John Saville in London in 1964, SR continues their commitment to independent and thought-provoking analysis, free of dogma or sectarian positions. Transforming Classes is a compendium of socialist thought today and a clarifying account of class struggle in the early twenty-first-century, from China to the United States.
Originally a concern primarily of social studies and economics, poverty has emerged as a significant thematic focus and analytical tool in literary and cultural studies in the last two decades. The "new poverty studies" are dedicated to analyzing representations of poverty and the poor in literature and the visual arts, in the news media and in social practices. They aim at exploring the frameworks of representation that impact the affective and ethical responses of audiences to disenfranchised groups such as the poor. The contributions to this volume focus on representations of poverty in the Anglophone postcolonial world, exploring, for example, contemporary discourses on poverty in the UK, filmic representations of Nairobi slums or the agency of the poor in literature from India.
How the European Union handles posted workers is a growing issue for a region with borders that really are just lines on a map. A 2008 story, dissected in Ines Wagner’s Workers without Borders, about the troubling working conditions of migrant meat and construction workers, exposed a distressing dichotomy: how could a country with such strong employers’ associations and trade unions allow for the establishment and maintenance of such a precarious labor market segment? Wagner introduces an overlooked piece of the puzzle: re-regulatory politics at the workplace level. She interrogates the position of the posted worker in contemporary European labour markets and the implications of and regu...
This volume is a collection of subject-oriented studies on paid work. Each chapter refers to the social structures that form conditions for peoples’ working contexts and interprets workers’ and employees’ narrations on work. Work appropriation—a process of formation of subjectivity, in which workers and employees relate to the social status of their occupations and the use-value of their work in actively dealing with the work’s content and conditions—serves as a comprehensive concept for each varying subject-oriented approach in the volume. ‘Work Appropriation and Social Inequality’ focuses on social inequality, understood as the distribution of life chances that privilege so...
This collection engages with translation and interpreting from a diverse but complementary range of perspectives, in dialogue with the seminal work of Theo Hermans. A foundational figure in the field, Hermans’s scholarly engagement with translation spans several key areas, including history of translation, metaphor, norms, ethics, ideology, methodology, and the critical reconceptualization of the positioning of the translator and of translation itself as a social and hermeneutic practice. Those he has mentored or inspired through his lectures and pioneering publications over the years are now household names in the field, with many represented in this volume. They come together here both t...
This Encyclopedia presents a comprehensive collection of entries addressing the normative claims and definitions of the critical concepts, principles, and approaches that make up the field of citizenship studies.
After the ignominious fall of the classical Soviet model of "socialism" in the early 1990s, socialists, communists, and all other kinds of Leftists had felt to have been left in the lurch. With his book Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? A Critical Analysis of Humanity's Fundamental Choices (1999), Saral Sarkar presented and laid the theoretical foundation of a new conception of socialism, which convinced because it organically synthesized the newly arisen imperative of ecological sustainability and the old ideal of equality among members of humanity. On their part, all opponents of any kind of socialism have also been trying to somehow accommodate the inexorable insights and demands of true e...