Confronting Crisis and Precariousness

Confronting Crisis and Precariousness
Author: Stefan Schmalz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2019-07-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786610485

The 2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent Eurozone crisis triggered dramatic changes in European labour relations. Unemployment and precariousness increased considerably. This was further exacerbated by austerity measures, leading to declining minimum wages and layoffs in the public sector. These structural changes varied considerably by country but collectively pose challenges to organized labour as they confront neoliberal restructuring. Concurrently, recent social struggles continue to develop with unemployed and precarious workers playing a major role as protest actors. Focusing on the triangular relationship of precariousness, trade unions and social movements, this book draws on a range of exciting cases, both comparative and country case studies, in order to understand how the shadow of the crisis still haunts organized labour in Europe. The chapters in this collection each offer a unique perspective on how the results of the crisis, in Western, Southern and Eastern Europe, are leading to a variety of new social movements as a consequence of increased precariousness and also how trade unions are attempting to respond.

Labour Market Institutions and Productivity

Labour Market Institutions and Productivity
Author: Beata Woźniak-Jęchorek
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2020-10-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000202550

This book explains the role of formal labour market institutions in keeping the labour utilisation in Central and Eastern Europe above the level characteristic for Western European states. It provides an innovative and enriching take on labour utilisation at large and how various formal labour market institutions can affect the ongoing trend in labour utilisation in a way that is not covered by the extant literature. The impact of labour market institutions on labour market outcomes is analysed throughout 12 chapters, both from a cross-country perspective and in detailed case-studies, by 21 labour market experts from various CEE countries. Most chapters are based on empirical methods yet are presented in an easy-to-follow way in order to make the book also accessible for a non-scientific audience. The volume explores three key questions: How can labour utilisation be increased by labour market institutions? Which CEE countries managed to create a labour market institutional framework beneficial for labour utilisation? How should the labour market institutions in CEE countries be reformed in order to increase labour utilisation? The book argues that the legacy of transition reforms and a centrally planned past is still relevant in explaining common patterns among CEE countries and concludes that increasing the stock of skills accumulated by the employed and improving utilisation of these skills seems to be the first-best solution to increase labour utilisation. The book will be of interest to post-graduate researchers and academics in the fields of labour economics, regional economics, and macroeconomics as well as scholars interested in adopting an institutional analysis approach. Additionally, due to the broader policy implications of the topic, the book will appeal to policymakers and experts interested in labour economics.

Fighting for Water

Fighting for Water
Author: Andreas Bieler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2021-05-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1786997746

In the wake of the global financial crisis, water services have come under renewed neoliberal assault across Europe. At the same time, the struggle against water privatization has continued to pick up pace; from the re-municipalization of water in Grenoble in 2000, to the United Nations declaration of water as a human right in 2010. In Fighting for Water, Andreas Bieler draws on years of extensive fieldwork to dissect the underlying dynamics of the struggle for public water in Europe. By analysing the successful referendum against water privatization in Italy, the European Citizens' Initiative on 'Water and Sanitation are a Human Right', the struggles against water privatization in Greece and water charges in Ireland, Bieler shows why water has been a fruitful arena for resistance against neoliberal restructuring.

Employment, Trade Unionism, and Class

Employment, Trade Unionism, and Class
Author: Gregoris Ioannou
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2021-07-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0429632126

The economic crisis has brought about a watershed in institutional, political, and social relations, reshaping the labour market and the class structure in southern Europe. This book provides a critical comparative assessment of the dynamics of change in the employment field, focusing on Spain, Greece, and Cyprus. The book assesses how the liberalization and deregulation processes and the promotion of market-enhancing reforms progressed in three different national settings, identifying the forces, agents, contexts, and mechanisms shaping the employment and industrial relations systems. The comparative perspective used deciphers the interplay of external and internal dynamics in the restructuring of the labour field in Southern Europe, examining austerity and its contestation in connection with prevailing societal ideologies and class shifts. The first part of the book sets the theoretical and historical context, the second is comprised of three empirical national case studies, and the third discusses comparatively the handling of the crisis, its impact, and its legacy from the standpoint of a decade later. The book presents differences in industrial relations systems, trade union forms, and class composition dynamics, accounting for the development of the crisis and the reshaping of the employment field after one decade of crisis. It will be of value to researchers, academics, professionals, and students working on issues of employment and industrial relations, labour market and labour law, political economy and class structure, as well as those interested in the contemporary society and economy of southern Europe in general, and Spain, Greece, and Cyprus in particular.

Gentrification around the World, Volume II

Gentrification around the World, Volume II
Author: Jerome Krase
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2020-07-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030413411

Bringing together scholarly but readable essays on the process of gentrification, this two-volume collection addresses the broad question: In what ways does gentrification affect cities, neighborhoods, and the everyday experiences of ordinary people? In this second volume of Gentrification around the World, contributors contemplate different ways of thinking about gentrification and displacement in the abstract and “on-the-ground.” Chapters examine, among other topics, social class, development, im/migration, housing, race relations, political economy, power dynamics, inequality, displacement, social segregation, homogenization, urban policy, planning, and design. The qualitative methodologies used in each chapter—which emphasize ethnographic, participatory, and visual approaches that interrogate the representation of gentrification in the arts, film, and other mass media—are themselves a unique and pioneering way of studying gentrification and its consequences worldwide.

State of Insecurity

State of Insecurity
Author: Isabell Lorey
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 118
Release: 2015-02-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1781685975

Years of remodelling the welfare state, the rise of technology, and the growing power of neoliberal government apparatuses have established a society of the precarious. In this new reality, productivity is no longer just a matter of labour, but affects the formation of the self, blurring the division between personal and professional lives. Encouraged to believe ourselves flexible and autonomous, we experience a creeping isolation that has both social and political impacts, and serves the purposes of capital accumulation and social control. In State of Insecurity, Isabell Lorey explores the possibilities for organization and resistance under the contemporary status quo, and anticipates the emergence of a new and disobedient self-government of the precarious.

Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development

Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development
Author: Vanessa Pupavac
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2020-09-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1538144948

Goethe’s 1832 poem Faust offers a vision of humanity realising freedom and prosperity through transcending natural adversity. Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development returns to Faust as a way of exploring the rise and fall of European humanist aspirations to build free and prosperous national political communities protected from natural disasters. Faust stories emerged in early modern Europe linked to the shaking of the traditional religious and political order, and the pursuit of new areas of human knowledge and activity which led to a shift from viewing disasters as acts of God to acts of nature. Faust’s dam building and land reclamation project in Goethe’s poem was inspired by Dutch hydro-engineering and in turn inspired others. Faustian dreams of an engineered future were pursued by the American Yugoslav inventor Nikola Tesla and the country of his birth towards establishing its national independence and escaping the fate of being a borderland. Faust remains a compelling reference point to explore European visions of disaster and development. If Faust captured the European spirit of earlier centuries, what is today’s outlook? Ambitious Faustian development visions to eradicate natural disasters have been replaced by anti-Faustian risk cosmopolitanism sceptical towards human activity in ways counter to building collective protection from disaster. Tesla’s country of birth fears returning to being an insecure borderland of Europe. This powerful and timely book calls for a rekindling of European humanism and Faust’s vision of ‘free people standing on free land’.

The Class Structure of Capitalist Societies, Volume 4

The Class Structure of Capitalist Societies, Volume 4
Author: Will Atkinson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2024-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1040184596

This fourth volume of The Class Structure of Capitalist Societies finishes the series by exploring how class infuses people’s past and present efforts to juggle family, work and leisure. Previous volumes in the series have examined the shape, history and cultural expressions of class structures in capitalist societies as well as their typical intersections with gender, race/ ethnicity, family and more. Now, drawing on in depth interviews with men and women from the US, Sweden and Germany, this instalment endeavours to show how class actually ‘works out’ in people’s biographies and circumstances, and how, thereby, it is given singular form in their lives. Key to understanding how class works and how it is singularised, the book demonstrates, is its interplay with pressures and interests tied up with family, paid employment and leisure. New concepts and tools, it argues, are necessary to accommodate this multiplicity and, as a result, explain people’s lives more fully, advance our understanding of class and even progress the capacities of sociology as a discipline. The volume will be of major interest to scholars of class, family, work, gender and culture, but it will also appeal to anyone interested in social theory and the progress of sociology.

UK Localism in Transition and the Politics of Community

UK Localism in Transition and the Politics of Community
Author: Heather Watkins
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2021-04-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786612747

This book explores the politics of localism, drawing on the work of groups in three communities in post-industrial Nottinghamshire. “Third Way” politics gave a high priority to local participation, seen as a way of rebuilding social networks, and shifting welfare provision from the state onto civil society. However, under increasingly difficult conditions of austerity, significant contradictions emerge between the aims of entrenching new markets for service provision, and reviving communities and democratic participation. Exploring in depth community organisers’ understandings of political economy and its local effects, and the governance practices which set the frameworks for fiercely independent community groups, the book outlines the forms of politics which emerge. This includes a challenge to the dominant thinking of the ‘neoliberal consensus’, but also frustration and a sense of political communal loss which has left these communities alienated from both national politics and the often-unattainable benefits of global mobility – an alienation which makes the Brexit vote of 2016 explicable as the disruptive outcome of a slow-burning political crisis of long duration.

Local Autonomy as a Human Right

Local Autonomy as a Human Right
Author: Joshua B. Forrest
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 589
Release: 2021-08-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 153815451X

Local Autonomy as a Human Right contends that local communities struggle to preserve their territorial autonomy over time despite changes to the broader political and geographic contexts within which they are embedded. Forrest argues that this both reflects and is evidence of a worldwide embrace of local control as a key political and social value, indeed, of such importance that it should be embraced and codified as a human right. This study weaves together evidence grounded in a variety of disciplines - history, geography, comparative politics, sociology, public policy, anthropology, international jurisprudence, rural studies, urban studies -- to make clear that a presumed, inherent moral right to local self-determination has been manifested in many different historical and social contexts. This book constructs a compelling argument favoring a human right to local autonomy. It identifies practical factors that help to account for the relative success of communities that are able to assert local control over time. Here, particular attention is paid to whether localities are able to generate policy and organizational capacity. Forrest suggests that a focus on local policy and organizational capacity can help to explain why some communities attempting to assert greater local control are more successful than others. Local Autonomy as a Human Right contributes to scholarly debates regarding the varied impacts of globalization, with the place-based perspective and moral emphasis on territorial-centered rights put forth herein offering a necessary counter-narrative to the often-presumed predominance of global forces.