The Rise of the Creative Class

By Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 2010), xxx + 607 pp. £15.99 paper. A combination of social theory, statistical data, illustrations, and interviews, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judg...

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

/pdf/the-precariat-the-new-dangerous-class-3tq7b7h7fg.pdf

The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

The Limits to Capital

How have the skills of service jobs changed? Have they undergone deskilling, upgrading or some contingent or compensatory development? This study examines these questions as they pertain to frontli...

Deskilling emotional labour: evidence from department store retail

This study examines changes in the U.S. class structure under neoliberalism. Applying a Marxian analytic framework to U.S. Census data from 1970 to 2010, we find that the professional middle class ...

Middle Class Decline? The Growth of Professional-Managers in the Neoliberal Era

[Excerpt] Along with fast-food workers, retail workers are capturing the attention of the public and the media with the Fight for $15. Like fast-food workers, retail workers are underpaid, and fewer than 5 percent of them belong to unions. In Hard Sell, Peter Ikeler traces the low-wage, largely nonunion character of U.S. retail through the history and ultimate failure of twentieth-century retail unionism. He asks pivotal questions about twenty-first-century capitalism: Does the nature of retail work make collective action unlikely? Can working conditions improve in the absence of a union? Is worker consciousness changing in ways that might encourage or further inhibit organizing? Ikeler conducted interviews at New York City locations of two iconic department stores―Macy's and Target. Much of the book’s narrative unfolds from the perspectives of these workers in America’s most unequal city. When he speaks to workers, Ikeler finds that the Macy’s organization displays an adversarial relationship between workers and managers and that Target is infused with a "teamwork" message that enfolds both parties. Macy’s workers identify more with their jobs and are more opposed to management, yet Target workers show greater solidarity. Both groups, however, are largely unhappy with the pay and precariousness of their jobs. Combined with workplace-generated feelings of unity and resistance, these grievances provide promising inroads to organizing that could help take the struggle against inequality beyond symbolic action to real economic power.

Hard Sell: Work and Resistance in Retail Chains

Building on previous research that denotes the centrality of retail trade and employment to twenty-first-century U.S. capitalism, this article explores the potential for union organizing within the U.S. retail sector. First, I review U.S. Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Bureau of Economic Analysis data to assess where “structural power” exists for retail workers and, failing this, the extent to which “associational power” would be needed to counteract employer prerogatives. Then, I discuss the current state of retail unionism and recent organizing campaigns, from which four strategies for union growth are derived: supply-chain leveraging, global city targeting, occupational unionism, and global unionism. Although supply-chain leveraging appears to offer the greatest potential strength for organizing efforts, I argue that intervening factors, such as worker consciousness, union prerogatives, the extent of interunion cooperation, and specific tactics employed, may provide more immediate efficacy for other strategies.

Organizing retail: ideas for labor's ongoing challenge

Service work is seen by many to be less generative of working-class consciousness than non-interactive labor. This article interrogates that hypothesis using an original survey (N = 177) of New York State workers. Deploying intrinsic indicators for the intensity of service interaction and for working-class consciousness, the study finds that both the former and major demographic features fail to predict the latter while managerial status, workplace pain and discomfort, union membership, and job insecurity do. This supports an emergent view that services are broadly continuous with other forms of wage work and an older one that work itself is central to the production of class consciousness.

The continuity of work: Class consciousness in service and non-service jobs:

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