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Bodies in Revolt argues that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) could humanize capitalism by turning employers into care-givers, creating an ethic of care in the workplace. Unlike other feminists, Ruth O'Brien bases her ethics not on benevolence, but rather on self-preservation. She relies on Deleuze's and Guttari's interpretation of Spinoza and Foucault's conception of corporeal resistance to show how a workplace ethic that is neither communitarian nor individualistic can be based upon the rallying cry "one for all and all for one."
An innovative contribution to political theory, State Work examines the labor of government workers in North America. Arguing that this work needs to be theorized precisely because it is vital to the creation and persistence of the state, Stefano Harney draws on thinking from public administration and organizational sociology, as well as poststructuralist theory and performance studies, to launch a cultural studies of the state. Countering conceptions of the government and its employees as remote and inflexible, Harney uses the theory of mass intellectuality developed by Italian worker-theorists to illuminate the potential for genuine political progress inherent within state work. State Work...
Today, surveillance and regulation of employees are pervasive at all levels (except the highest) in a wide variety of American workplaces. Digital information systems have become important tools of managerial control. The constraints built into these systems by so-called "business process reengineering" are a continuation of scientific management principles developed during the late 19th century. Additional means of control have included employment-based "welfare capitalism," and human relations and corporate culture approaches. This book provides fresh insight into various practices of managerial control from the 1880s to the present and their effects on work organization and quality, and worker skill requirements. The author highlights current developments--including those focused on highly skilled knowledge workers--accounting for enhanced automation, offshoring and related changes in the production and distribution of goods and services.
This book is the first of its kind to investigate the ongoing significance of industrial craft in deindustrialising places such as Australia. Providing an alternative to the nostalgic trope of the redundant factory ‘craftsman’, this book introduces the intriguing and little-known trade of engineering patternmaking, where objects are brought to life through the handmade ‘originals’ required for mass production. Drawing on oral histories collected by the author, this book highlights the experiences of industrial craftspeople in Australian manufacturing, as they navigate precarious employment, retraining, gendered career pathways, creative expression and technological change. The book argues that digital fabrication technologies may modify or transform industrial craft, but should not obliterate it. Industrial craft is about more than the rudimentary production of everyday objects: it is about human creativity, material knowledge and meaningful work, and it will be key to human survival in the troubled times ahead.
These provocative new essays redefine the goals, methods, and assumptions of qualitative and ethnographic research in composition studies, making evident not only the crucial importance of ethnographic research, but also its resilience. As Ethnography Unbound makes evident, critical ethnographers are retheorizing their methodologies in ways that both redefine ethnographic practices and values and, at the same time, have begun to liberate ethnographic practices from the often-disabling stronghold of postmodern critique. Showing how ethnography works through dialogic processes and moves toward political ends, this collection opens the doors to rethinking ethnographic research in composition studies.
Before the sensational cases of Amanda Knox and Casey Anthony—before even Lizzie Borden—there was Polly Bodine, the first American woman put on trial for capital murder in our nation’s debut media circus. On Christmas night, December 25, 1843, in a serene village on Staten Island, shocked neighbors discovered the burnt remains of twenty-four-year-old mother Emeline Houseman and her infant daughter, Ann Eliza. In a perverse nativity, someone bludgeoned to death a mother and child in their home—and then covered up the crime with hellfire. When an ambitious district attorney charges Polly Bodine (Emelin’s sister-in-law) with a double homicide, the new “penny press” explodes. Polly...
In this first comparative analysis of men's and women's prisons, Dana Britton identifies the factors that influence the genderization of the American workplace, a process that often leaves women in lower-paying jobs with less prestige and responsibility.
The latest in a series focused on improving health conditions, this volume addresses work environments, bringing together diverse sources of literature that support preventive approaches to work design and organization. This reference provides an overview of relevant literature to engineers, managers, accountants, occupational health and safety specialists, and industrial hygienists, so that they and other professionals can understand what has caused our workplaces to become primary sources of physical and mental illness. By focusing on diagnostic and prescriptive approaches, managers can implement designs and decisions that prevent--or greatly reduce--undesired and harmful effects. Other titles in the series include: Healthy Cities Sustainable Production Sustainable Energy
The automobile and Soviet communism made an odd couple. The quintessential symbol of American economic might and consumerism never achieved iconic status as an engine of Communist progress, in part because it posed an awkward challenge to some basic assumptions of Soviet ideology and practice. In this rich and often witty book, Lewis H. Siegelbaum recounts the life of the Soviet automobile and in the process gives us a fresh perspective on the history and fate of the USSR itself. Based on sources ranging from official state archives to cartoons, car-enthusiast magazines, and popular films, Cars for Comrades takes us from the construction of the huge "Soviet Detroits," emblems of the utopian ...