labour
Consumption of work and the work of consumption
Issue Editors: Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Rashné Limki and Bernadette Loacker
Work and consumption have always been intertwined, their interaction shaped by social and historical circumstances. The ‘consumer society’ (Baudrillard, 1998/1970) that we arguably live in is often associated with a fading interest in work. On this view, wage labour is seen simply as a way of funding consumption during leisure time (Berger, 1964; Gorz, 1985). However, the boundaries between consumption and work have become increasingly blurred.
Tales of ‘Much of a muchness’: Adventures in the land of social capital
Ben Fine’s argument in his second book on social capital, Theories of social capital, is straightforward: social capital is a non-sensical concept. With a nod to the Mad Hatter and his tea party in Lewis Carroll’s much-loved Alice in wonderland, Fine’s purpose in this book is to point out to us the circularities, tautologies and oxymorons of the exhaustingly vast academic and policy literature on social capital.
Writing: Labour
From debates about the contribution of labour process analysis to the understanding of emancipatory struggles in organization, through to a treatise on the England national football team as a maternal ‘breast’ that turns spectators into consumers who begin to resemble new forms of labour, ephemera 5.1 assembles a series of apparently disconnected studies.
