class
Zopa’s lambs: Video ads, internet investment, and the financialization of affect
Affect and its capture
In December 2013 the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending firm Zopa Limited (‘Zopa’) aired a television commercial in the UK which began with an announcer’s plummy tones declaring that ‘when it comes to money, there’s a particular L-word that people don’t like to talk about.’ That ‘L word’ was ‘loan:’ the commercial then substituted every mention of the word ‘loan’ in describing its product with the term ‘lamb,’ an image of a fluffy lamb obscuring the word ‘loan’ in the commercial’s text.
Identity as a category of theory and practice
Identity has emerged as a major theme in management and organisation studies. This is perhaps unsurprising since questions of who one is or who one might become are particularly important in organisational settings (Watson, 2008).
Raniero Panzieri and workers’ inquiry: The perspective of living labour, the function of science and the relationship between class and capital
The role and function of theory in the relationship between class and capital, as well as the position of inquiry as knowledge production and political intervention in the face of basic contradictions of capitalist society, are expressed – perhaps most clearly – in a lecture given by Raniero Panzieri in 1964[1]. On that occasion Panzieri’s contribution both helped to define the instruments of sociological survey and the theoretical, methodological and political issues subtended by the use of workers’ inquiry.
The politics of workers' inquiry
This special issue brings together a series of commentaries, intervention, and projects in various stages of completion, all centred on the theme of workers inquiry[1]. Workers’ inquiry is an approach to and practice of knowledge production that seeks to understand the changing composition of labour and its potential for revolutionary social transformation. It is the practice of turning the tools of the social sciences into weapons of class struggle.
Recomposing precarity: Notes on the laboured politics of class composition
In Precarious rhapsody (2009) Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi argues that autonomous political movements in Italy in 1977 marked an important turning point in moving beyond modernity with its concomitant trends of progressive modernisation and class conflict as the driving motor of social transformation. Putting aside the epochal claims contained in this claim it is interesting to reflect on the role played by the notion of precarity in this description[1].
