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Introduction Just as in other countries, for most people in France working is first and foremost the activity through which they earn enough to live on and, wherever possible, make plans and investments for their future and that of their families. At the same time, because of the time one spends on it and especially the social meaning it possesses, work is also widely seen as defining who one is in society, whether one fits within it and self-perceptions of success or failure ( Cousin, 2019 ). Indeed, through what Dubar calls ‘the socialization of activity
9 Women at work: activism, feminism and the rise of the female office worker during the First World War and its immediate aftermath Nicole Robertson One of the most dramatic changes to working lives in twentieth-century Britain was the exponential growth of the non-manual labour force. Clerical work was one of the fastest-growing categories within this sector, as the expansion of modern corporations and government administration caused a flood of paperwork, necessitating a dramatic increase in office staff.1 Prominent changes in this sector are often associated
The social dimension of EU–Africa relations 14 Work in progress: the social dimension of EU–Africa relations Jan Orbie Since the early 2000s, the European Union (EU) has explicitly committed itself to promoting the social dimension of globalisation.1 The emergence of this new external policy objective reflects broader trends such as the post-Washington Consensus in the development sphere and the resurrection of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as the core institution for global social governance.2 More specifically, the ILO’s social dimension of
3 Soft power and welfare work Introduction Investigations of the encounter between welfare workers and citizens must use a concept of power that does not automatically privilege, for instance, the particular profession of welfare workers, as is done in much literature on professions. The concept of power must be based on a dialectic relationship between what can be called the objective structures and the subjective experiences of these structures (Giddens’ [1984] concept of structuration). To situate analyses of welfare encounters within the structure
2 Professions, de-professionalisation and welfare work Introduction As stated in the introduction, the concept of welfare worker makes it p ossible to analyse the encounter between citizens and a broad group of people: those who have both long (professionals) and short (semi-professionals) educations, as well as employees without any formal training for conducting welfare work. An important feature – and common denominator – of these people is that their work lives involve (or even revolve around) encounters with citizens in welfare institutions, encounters
“You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that.” President George W. Bush to a divorced mother of three in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2005. (Bush, 2005 , p. 152) Fran Marion, an African American woman with two children, works at a Popeyes fast food franchise in Kansas City, Missouri (Rushe, 2017 ). Her tale makes for sobering reading, and is all-too common an experience for the workers in the United States
3 Memory as border work: the 2008 Italy–Libya Friendship Treaty and the reassembling of Fortress Europe Chiara De Cesari A border is made real through imagination. (Van Houtum 2012: 412) In this chapter, I examine one peculiar border zone, namely the Mediterranean Sea – and more precisely that stretch of sea extending between Italy and Libya – in order to explore how memory-making contributes to its re-bordering. The cemetery of an astonishing and growing number of migrants and asylum seekers, this stretch of sea has become a symbol of Fortress Europe and of
4 Making People Work for Wages: Instituting the Capital–Labour Exchange in the United Kingdom The emergence of large-scale industrial production and waged labour changed the face of the world from the late eighteenth century onwards: the industrial revolution. Making workers sell their labour to capitalists owning factories was at the centre of this great transformation, although, as we propose in the next chapter, only in conjunction with modern and capitalist slavery in the New World. In MEAB, it was argued that the conception of an abstracted and closed
period of simple modernisation that distinguishes it from the subsequent period of reflexive modernisation. A negative characteristic, which he identifies with simple modernisation, is ‘productivism’, by which he means a psychological tendency towards compulsive and uncritical behaviour in areas of work and consumption. 7 In the economic sphere ‘productivism’ is connected with
Recent pressures for change in France have impacted upon a country which, from 1945 to 1975, had featured both unprecedented economic growth and the building of a powerful state. Drawing upon a plethora of social science research and data, this book sets out what has been made in France since that period and, as importantly, what this ‘made’ the French. By examining the institutions and asymmetric power relations that have structured French society, together with the ‘political work’ that has changed or reproduced them, in seven chapters the book takes the reader ‘from the cradle to the grave’ to assess whether and where significant change has occurred over the last four decades, then explain the outcomes identified. Overall, the book provides a comprehensive account of French society and politics, while proposing an original generic analytical framework that is applicable to other nations and their comparative analysis.