Organizing at the Margins

Organizing at the Margins PDF Author: Jennifer Jihye Chun
Publisher: ILR Press
ISBN: 0801458455
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
The realities of globalization have produced a surprising reversal in the focus and strategies of labor movements around the world. After years of neglect and exclusion, labor organizers are recognizing both the needs and the importance of immigrants and women employed in the growing ranks of low-paid and insecure service jobs. In Organizing at the Margins, Jennifer Jihye Chun focuses on this shift as it takes place in two countries: South Korea and the United States. Using comparative historical inquiry and in-depth case studies, she shows how labor movements in countries with different histories and structures of economic development, class formation, and cultural politics embark on similar trajectories of change. Chun shows that as the base of worker power shifts from those who hold high-paying, industrial jobs to the formerly "unorganizable," labor movements in both countries are employing new strategies and vocabularies to challenge the assault of neoliberal globalization on workers' rights and livelihoods. Deftly combining theory and ethnography, she argues that by cultivating alternative sources of "symbolic leverage" that root workers' demands in the collective morality of broad-based communities, as opposed to the narrow confines of workplace disputes, workers in the lowest tiers are transforming the power relations that sustain downgraded forms of work. Her case studies of janitors and personal service workers in the United States and South Korea offer a surprising comparison between converging labor movements in two very different countries as they refashion their relation to historically disadvantaged sectors of the workforce and expand the moral and material boundaries of union membership in a globalizing world.

Organizing at the Margins

Organizing at the Margins PDF Author: Jennifer Jihye Chun
Publisher: ILR Press
ISBN: 0801458455
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
The realities of globalization have produced a surprising reversal in the focus and strategies of labor movements around the world. After years of neglect and exclusion, labor organizers are recognizing both the needs and the importance of immigrants and women employed in the growing ranks of low-paid and insecure service jobs. In Organizing at the Margins, Jennifer Jihye Chun focuses on this shift as it takes place in two countries: South Korea and the United States. Using comparative historical inquiry and in-depth case studies, she shows how labor movements in countries with different histories and structures of economic development, class formation, and cultural politics embark on similar trajectories of change. Chun shows that as the base of worker power shifts from those who hold high-paying, industrial jobs to the formerly "unorganizable," labor movements in both countries are employing new strategies and vocabularies to challenge the assault of neoliberal globalization on workers' rights and livelihoods. Deftly combining theory and ethnography, she argues that by cultivating alternative sources of "symbolic leverage" that root workers' demands in the collective morality of broad-based communities, as opposed to the narrow confines of workplace disputes, workers in the lowest tiers are transforming the power relations that sustain downgraded forms of work. Her case studies of janitors and personal service workers in the United States and South Korea offer a surprising comparison between converging labor movements in two very different countries as they refashion their relation to historically disadvantaged sectors of the workforce and expand the moral and material boundaries of union membership in a globalizing world.

The Symbolic Politics of Labor

The Symbolic Politics of Labor PDF Author: Jennifer Jee Hae Chun
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Comparative industrial relations
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description


The Book in Movement

The Book in Movement PDF Author: Magalí Rabasa
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822986868
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Over the past two decades, Latin America has seen an explosion of experiments with autonomy, as people across the continent express their refusal to be absorbed by the logic and order of neoliberalism. The autonomous movements of the twenty-first century are marked by an unprecedented degree of interconnection, through their use of digital tools and their insistence on the importance of producing knowledge about their practices through strategies of self-representation and grassroots theorization. The Book in Movement explores the reinvention of a specific form of media: the print book. Magalí Rabasa travels through the political and literary underground of cities in Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile to explore the ways that autonomous politics are enacted in the production and circulation of books.

Organizing at the Margins

Organizing at the Margins PDF Author: Jennifer Jihye Chun
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457211
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
The realities of globalization have produced a surprising reversal in the focus and strategies of labor movements around the world. After years of neglect and exclusion, labor organizers are recognizing both the needs and the importance of immigrants and women employed in the growing ranks of low-paid and insecure service jobs. In Organizing at the Margins, Jennifer Jihye Chun focuses on this shift as it takes place in two countries: South Korea and the United States. Using comparative historical inquiry and in-depth case studies, she shows how labor movements in countries with different histories and structures of economic development, class formation, and cultural politics embark on similar trajectories of change. Chun shows that as the base of worker power shifts from those who hold high-paying, industrial jobs to the formerly "unorganizable," labor movements in both countries are employing new strategies and vocabularies to challenge the assault of neoliberal globalization on workers' rights and livelihoods. Deftly combining theory and ethnography, she argues that by cultivating alternative sources of "symbolic leverage" that root workers' demands in the collective morality of broad-based communities, as opposed to the narrow confines of workplace disputes, workers in the lowest tiers are transforming the power relations that sustain downgraded forms of work. Her case studies of janitors and personal service workers in the United States and South Korea offer a surprising comparison between converging labor movements in two very different countries as they refashion their relation to historically disadvantaged sectors of the workforce and expand the moral and material boundaries of union membership in a globalizing world.

Slow Anti-Americanism

Slow Anti-Americanism PDF Author: Edward Schatz
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503614336
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Negative views of the United States abound, but we know too little about how such views affect politics. Drawing on careful research on post-Soviet Central Asia, Edward Schatz argues that anti-Americanism is best seen not as a rising tide that swamps or as a conflagration that overwhelms. Rather, "America" is a symbolic resource that resides quietly in the mundane but always has potential value for social and political mobilizers. Using a wide range of evidence and a novel analytic framework, Schatz considers how Islamist movements, human rights activists, and labor mobilizers across Central Asia avail themselves of this fact, thus changing their ability to pursue their respective agendas. By refocusing our analytic gaze away from high politics, he affords us a clearer view of the slower-moving, partially occluded, and socially embedded processes that ground how "America" becomes political. In turn, we gain a nuanced appreciation of the downstream effects of US foreign policy choices and a sober sense of the challenges posed by the politics of traveling images. Most treatments of anti-Americanism focus on politics in the realm of presidential elections and foreign policies. By focusing instead on symbols, Schatz lays bare how changing public attitudes shift social relations in politically significant ways, and considers how changing symbolic depictions of the United States recombine the raw material available for social mobilizers. Just like sediment traveling along waterways before reaching its final destination, the raw material that constitutes symbolic America can travel among various social groups, and can settle into place to form the basis of new social meanings. Symbolic America, Schatz shows us, matters for politics in Central Asia and beyond.

An Empire of Touch

An Empire of Touch PDF Author: Poulomi Saha
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549644
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
In today’s world of unequal globalization, Bangladesh has drawn international attention for the spate of factory disasters that have taken the lives of numerous garment workers, mostly young women. The contemporary garment industry—and the labor organizing pushing back—draws on a long history of gendered labor division and exploitation in East Bengal, the historical antecedent of Bangladesh. Yet despite the centrality of women’s labor to anticolonial protest and postcolonial state-building, historiography has struggled with what appears to be its absence from the archive. Poulomi Saha offers an innovative account of women’s political labor in East Bengal over more than a century, one that suggests new ways to think about textiles and the gendered labors of their making. An Empire of Touch argues that women have articulated—in writing, in political action, in stitching—their own desires in their own terms. They produce narratives beyond women’s empowerment and independence as global and national projects; they refuse critical pronouncements of their own subjugation. Saha follows the historical traces of how women have claimed their own labor, contending that their political commitments are captured in the material objects of their manufacture. Her analysis of the production of historical memory through and by the bodies of women spans British colonialism and American empire, anticolonial nationalism to neoliberal globalization, depicting East Bengal between development economics and postcolonial studies. Through a material account of text and textile, An Empire of Touch crafts a new narrative of gendered political labor under empire.

Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa

Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa PDF Author: Bridget Kenny
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319695517
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This book argues that we need to focus attention on the ways that workers themselves have invested subjectively in what it means to be a worker. By doing so, we gain an explanation that moves us beyond the economic decisions made by actors, the institutional constraints faced by trade unions, or the power of the state to interpellate subjects. These more common explanations make workers and their politics visible only as a symptom of external conditions, a response to deregulated markets or a product of state recognition. Instead – through a history of retailing as a site of nation and belonging, changing legal regimes, and articulations of race, class and gender in the constitution of political subjects from the 1930s to present-day Wal-Mart – this book presents the experiences and subjectivities of workers themselves to show that the collective political subject ‘workers’ (abasebenzi) is both a durable and malleable political category. From white to black women’s labour, the forms of precariousness have changed within retailing in South Africa. Workers’ struggles in different times have in turn resolved some dilemmas and by other turn generated new categories and conditions of precariousness, all the while explaining enduring attachments to labour politics.

The Work of Nations

The Work of Nations PDF Author: Robert B. Reich
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307772993
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
There is no longer such a thing as an American economy, say Robert Reich at the beginning of this brilliant book. What does it mean to be a nation when money, goods, and services know no borders? What skills will be the most valuable in the coming century? And how can our country best ensure that all its citizen have a share in the new global economy? Robert B. Reich, the widely respected and bestselling author of The Next American Frontier and The Resurgent Liberal, defines the real challenge facing the United States in the 21st century in this trail-blazing book. Original, readable, and vastly informed, The Work of Nations is certain to set a standard for the next generation of policy-makers.

The Symbolic Uses of Politics

The Symbolic Uses of Politics PDF Author: Murray Jacob Edelman
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252012020
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The symbolic manifestations, purposes, and uses of politics are revealed in this provocative analysis of the institution of politics and man as a political animal. Unlike the conventional study of politics that deals with how people get the things they want through government, this book concentrates on how politics influence what they want, what they fear, and what they regard as possible. In examining politics as a symbolic form, it looks at man and politics as reflections of each other.''Written with clarity and preciseness uncommon in the social sciences, . . . The Symbolic Uses of Politics is a classic statement of a theme whose importance is inescapable.''--The Activist ''This is a truly social-psychological study of politics, done in an unconventional, imaginative, and appealing style.''--Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

Cognitive Capitalism

Cognitive Capitalism PDF Author: Yann Moulier-Boutang
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745647324
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This book argues that we are undergoing a transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism - what the author calls & lsquo; cognitive capitalism & rsquo;