Anthropologies of Unemployment

Anthropologies of Unemployment PDF

Author: Jong Bum Kwon

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2016-09-09

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1501706683

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Anthropologies of Unemployment offers accessible, theoretically innovative, and ethnographically rich examinations of unemployment in rural and urban regions across North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The diversity of case studies demonstrates that unemployment is a pressing global phenomenon that sheds light on the uneven consequences of free-market ideologies and policies. Economic, social, and cultural marginalization is common in the lives of the unemployed, but their experience and interpretation are shaped by local and national cultural particularities. In exploring those differences, the contributors to this volume employ recent theoretical innovations and engage with some of the more salient topics in contemporary anthropology, such as globalization, migration, youth cultures, bureaucracy, class, gender, and race. Taken together, the chapters reveal that there is something new about unemployment today. It is not a temporary occurrence, but a chronic condition. In adjusting to persistent, longstanding unemployment, people and groups create new understandings of unemployment as well as of work and employment; they improvise new forms of sociality, morality, and personhood. Ethnographic studies such as those found in Anthropologies of Unemployment are crucial if we are to understand the broader forms, meanings, and significance of pervasive economic insecurity and discover the emergence of new social and cultural possibilities.

The Liminal Worker

The Liminal Worker PDF

Author: Manos Spyridakis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1317025423

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The Liminal Worker examines the experience of work, employment, employment insecurity and precariousness in a context of high unemployment and welfare state crisis in modern Greece. A theoretically-informed, anthropological exploration of the notion of work in contemporary western society and its relation to processes of political decision making, this book challenges the mainstream conception of work as an economic or purely productive activity, presenting a comparative analysis of work as a social phenomenon. Drawing on original empirical research, it explores the key themes of the transformation, experience, meaning and narrative of work and its relation to attendant social policies. A unique examination of the complicated experience of work and labour relations within power systems, institutions and organisations, as well as the reactions and survival strategies of ordinary actors facing precariousness in their daily existence, The Liminal Worker elaborates upon the notion of the anthropology of work and investigates the connection between ethnographic data (and its critical analysis) and the formation of policy. As such, it will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, policy makers and geographers concerned with questions of work, labour relations and policy formation.

Work and Livelihoods

Work and Livelihoods PDF

Author: Susana Narotzky

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1317602439

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Winner of the Society for the Anthropology of Work book prize 2017 This volume presents a global range of ethnographic case studies to explore the ways in which - in the context of the restructuring of industrial work, the ongoing financial crisis, and the surge in unemployment and precarious employment - local and global actors engage with complex social processes and devise ideological, political, and economic responses to them. It shows how the reorganization and re-signification of work, notably shifts in the perception and valorization of work, affect domestic and community arrangements and shape the conditions of life of workers and their families.

The Magic City

The Magic City PDF

Author: Gregory Pappas

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 150172469X

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Thirty-two million Americans have lost jobs because of permanent factory closings since 1970. Gregory Pappas here provides an intimate account of the economic, social, psychological, and medical consequences of one such closing. Once known as "the magic city" of economic opportunity, Barberton, Ohio, is an industrial working-class town of second- and third-generation factory workers. When the Seiberling tire plant in Barberton was closed in 1980, over 1200 jobs were eliminated. Drawing on extensive research, including surveys and interviews with workers laid off by the closing, Pappas offers an incisive analysis of their responses to unemployment. Pappas first details the ways in which the unemployed rubber workers have met their economic needs in the face of declining income. He next evaluates their success in reentering the labor market, as he examines the job-hunting process, the unemployment insurance system, and workers' initiatives toward retraining and relocation. Turning to the psychological effects of the shutdown on workers and their families, Pappas describes unemployed workers' responses to the loss of status, identity, participation in the community, and sense of time. He next considers central historical questions, offering an explanation of the contemporary rise in unemployment and analyzing the prior development of this community that must now bear the burden of change. Two detailed portraits document the adaptations of individuals to the shutdown and explore the complex relationship between social change and personality.

Critical Times in Greece

Critical Times in Greece PDF

Author: Dimitris Dalakoglou

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-20

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1315299011

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This volume brings together new anthropological research on the Greek crisis. With a number of contributions from academics based in Greece, the book addresses a number of key issues such as the refugee crisis, far-right extremism and the psychological impact of increased poverty and unemployment. It provides much needed ethnographic contributions and critical anthropological perspectives at a key moment in Greece’s history, and will be of great interest to researchers interested in the social, political and economic developments in southern Europe. It is the first collection to explore the impact of this period of radical social change on anthropological understandings of Greece.

Unknotting the Heart

Unknotting the Heart PDF

Author: Jie Yang

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2015-11-25

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0801456177

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Since the mid-1990s, as China has downsized and privatized its state-owned enterprises, severe unemployment has created a new class of urban poor and widespread social and psychological disorders. In Unknotting the Heart, Jie Yang examines this understudied group of workers and their experiences of being laid off, "counseled," and then reoriented to the market economy. Using fieldwork from reemployment programs, community psychosocial work, and psychotherapy training sessions in Beijing between 2002 and 2013, Yang highlights the role of psychology in state-led interventions to alleviate the effects of mass unemployment. She pays particular attention to those programs that train laid-off workers in basic psychology and then reemploy them as informal "counselors" in their capacity as housemaids and taxi drivers. These laid-off workers are filling a niche market created by both economic restructuring and the shortage of professional counselors in China, helping the government to defuse intensified class tension and present itself as a nurturing and kindly power. In reality, Yang argues, this process creates both new political complicity and new conflicts, often along gender lines. Women are forced to use the moral virtues and work ethics valued under the former socialist system, as well as their experiences of overcoming depression and suffering, as resources for their new psychological care work. Yang focuses on how the emotions, potentials, and "hearts" of these women have become sites of regulation, market expansion, and political imagination.

Being Unemployed in Northern Ireland

Being Unemployed in Northern Ireland PDF

Author: Leo Howe

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1990-10-18

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9780521382397

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This is a major ethnography of unemployment and the first community-based book on contemporary unemployment in the United Kingdom.

The Liminal Worker

The Liminal Worker PDF

Author: Manos Spyridakis

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Company

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9781409428237

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The Liminal Worker examines the experience of work, employment, employment insecurity and precariousness in a context of high unemployment and welfare state crisis in modern Greece. A theoretically-informed, anthropological exploration of the notion of work in contemporary western society and its relation to processes of political decision making, this book challenges the mainstream conception of work as an economic or purely productive activity, presenting a comparative analysis of work as a social phenomenon. Drawing on original empirical research, it explores the key themes of the transformation, experience, meaning and narrative of work and its relation to attendant social policies.

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