The Making of a European Public Sphere

The Making of a European Public Sphere
Author: Ruud Koopmans
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2010-07-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139490001

This book investigates an important source of the European Union's recent legitimacy problems. It shows how European integration is debated in mass media, and how this affects democratic inclusiveness. Advancing integration implies a shift in power between governments, parliaments, and civil society. Behind debates over Europe's 'democratic deficit' is a deeper concern: whether democratic politics can perform effectively under conditions of Europeanization and globalization. This study is based on a wealth of unique data from seven European countries, combining newspaper content analyses, an innovative study of Internet communication structures, and hundreds of interviews with leading political and media representatives across Europe. It is by far the most far-reaching and empirically grounded study on the Europeanization of media discourse and political contention to date, and a must-read for anyone interested in how European integration changes democratic politics and why European integration has become increasingly contested.

How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics

How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics
Author: Laura Briggs
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2018-08-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520299949

Today all politics are reproductive politics, argues esteemed feminist critic Laura Briggs. From longer work hours to the election of Donald Trump, our current political crisis is above all about reproduction. Households are where we face our economic realities as social safety nets get cut and wages decline. Briggs brilliantly outlines how politicians’ racist accounts of reproduction—stories of Black “welfare queens” and Latina “breeding machines"—were the leading wedge in the government and business disinvestment in families. With decreasing wages, rising McJobs, and no resources for family care, our households have grown ever more precarious over the past forty years in sharply race-and class-stratified ways. This crisis, argues Briggs, fuels all others—from immigration to gay marriage, anti-feminism to the rise of the Tea Party.

Offshoring and the Internationalization of Employment

Offshoring and the Internationalization of Employment
Author: Peter Auer
Publisher: International Labour Organization
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9789290147831

This collection of papers examines key trends in the internationalisation of employment, drawing on the proceedings of an ILO conference held in Annecy, France in April 2005. The papers focus on three related issues: the impacts of trade and investment abroad, including the offshoring of production of goods and services, and effects on the winners and losers in terms of employment; adjustment methods for coping with the short and medium term problems related to the globalisation of employment; and the importance of international instruments to help ensure a level playing field in trade and promote development, drawing on established rights and international labour standards.

Clinical Labor

Clinical Labor
Author: Melinda Cooper
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2014-01-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822377004

Forms of embodied labor, such as surrogacy and participation in clinical trials, are central to biomedical innovation, but they are rarely considered as labor. Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby take on that project, analyzing what they call "clinical labor," and asking what such an analysis might indicate about the organization of the bioeconomy and the broader organization of labor and value today. At the same time, they reflect on the challenges that clinical labor might pose to some of the founding assumptions of classical, Marxist, and post-Fordist theories of labor. Cooper and Waldby examine the rapidly expanding transnational labor markets surrounding assisted reproduction and experimental drug trials. As they discuss, the pharmaceutical industry demands ever greater numbers of trial subjects to meet its innovation imperatives. The assisted reproductive market grows as more and more households look to third-party providers for fertility services and sectors of the biomedical industry seek reproductive tissues rich in stem cells. Cooper and Waldby trace the historical conditions, political economy, and contemporary trajectory of clinical labor. Ultimately, they reveal clinical labor to be emblematic of labor in twenty-first-century neoliberal economies.

Regimes of Capital in the Post-Digital Age

Regimes of Capital in the Post-Digital Age
Author: Szymon Wróbel
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2023-06-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000889610

Regimes of Capital in the Post-Digital Age provides a view of the current state of capitalism, through the interrogation of key diagnoses offered by philosophers and social theorists. With attention to questions about the manner in which the advent of the information age has shaped capitalism, the implications of the post- digital age for social capital, and the possible forms of resistance to the problematic aspects of capitalism, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, philosophy, and social theory with interests in critical theory, capitalist society, and digital culture.

Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism
Author: Mark Steven
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2021-01-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501351125

A concentrated study of the relationships between modernism and transformative left utopianism, this volume provides an introduction to Marx and Marxism for modernists, and an introduction to modernism for Marxists. Its guiding hypothesis is that Marx's writing absorbed the lessons of artistic and cultural modernity as much as his legacy concretely shaped modernism across multiple media.

South Asian Technospaces

South Asian Technospaces
Author: Radhika Gajjala
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2008
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780820481227

This book provides perspectives on how South Asian - often, more specifically, Indian - diasporas inhabit techno-mediated environments through their economic and socio-cultural activities. The themes examined include religion, caste, language, and gender in online communities and call centers, and the roles of these factors in the global economy, Bollywood online and offline, digital music, websites for arranging marriages, and so on. The book attempts to map «South Asia» in relation to global technospaces produced through and as a consequence of economic globalization efforts.

Working Lives and in-House Outsourcing

Working Lives and in-House Outsourcing
Author: Jacqueline Zalewski
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2018-09-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429885547

This book offers a sociological account of the process by which companies instituted and continue to institute outsourcing in their organization. Drawing on qualitative data, it examines the ways in which internal outsourcing in the information technologies and human resources professions negatively affects workers, their work conditions, and working relationships. With attention to the deleterious influence of outsourcing on relationships and the strong tendency of market organisations to produce social conflict in interactions – itself a considerable ‘transaction cost’ – the author challenges both the ideology that markets, rather than hierarchies, produce more efficient and less costly economic outcomes for companies, and the idea that outsourcing generates benefits for professional workers in the form of greater opportunity. A demonstration of the social conflict created between employees working for two separate, proprietary companies, Working Lives and in-House Outsourcing will be of interest to scholars with interests in the sociology of work and organizations and the sociology of professions, as well as those working in the fields of business management and human resources.

Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy

Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy
Author: Sarrah Kassem
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2024-03-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1529226554

Drawing on interviews with Amazon workers and original empirical data, this book explores how different working conditions estrange and alienate workers, and how, despite these, workers find ways to organize and express their agency. This is an important analysis of work on the digital shop floor for the scholars of platform economy.

Masses, Classes and the Public Sphere

Masses, Classes and the Public Sphere
Author: Mike Hill
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781859847770

This volume poses fundamental questions about the function and relevance of the public sphere, both politically and practically.