Search results

Many Ukrainian firms experience managerial difficulties due to a lack of qualified managers. This shortage of managerial talent affects many firms, regardless of their size and origin. To solve this problem, small/entrepreneurial firms as well as medium‐size firms rely mainly on their own managerial talents, while larger organizations turn to consulting management. Consulting management in the Ukraine is still in its infancy and suffers from a lack of managerial and restructuring experience in a free‐market economy. This paper explains an organizational improvement model developed based on a small advertising agency that could be generalized for use by other firms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the elective affinity between sport science and elite football by situating it first, within the wider political economy of football and second, within the dynamics of the market and work situation faced by elite players in the modern game.

The methodology underpinning this paper continues this movement by considering the impact on market and work situation of elite footballers due to wider social structures and the distribution of social power peculiar to the football industry. It is premised on the view that observed events and contingent relations and processes are linked to more enduring social structures and that knowledge must take account of all three.

The resulting impact of sport science on elite football is contradictory, facilitating, on the one hand, the development of football as an aesthetic experience, while on the other hand, threatening to transform the football spectacle into a mundane exercise in the search for increased functional peak performance for its own sake.

The value of this paper is that it considers salaries and player power to determine value by exploring the impact on market and work situation of elite footballers set in the context of wider social structures and the distribution of social power peculiar to the football industry.

Elite footballers yield immense power over their market situation, which sport science has the potential to enhance and sustain by fine honing peak fitness. The football club’s relative lack of control of the player’s market situation necessitates the appliance of sport science to help maximize control over the player’s work situation.

The paper demonstrates that sport science develops elite footballers to peak fitness, while also developing footballers as commodities; and this latter aspect if taken too far may potentially transform football into a mundane exercise in the search for increased functional peak performance for its own sake.

The paper draws together the relatively neglected analysis of the football labour process with the increasing interventions of sport science to football and sets this within a broader political economy of football.

The purpose of this paper is to explore an important nexus of formal/informal economic activity in Russia: “normative” workers (in waged formal employment) by virtue of a strongly embedded work‐related social identity and characterized by a significant number of weak social ties, move with little “effort” between formal and informal work.

The paper presents extensive ethnographic data from the Russian provinces on workers and diverse economic practices. It utilizes participant observation and semi‐structured interviews from periods of fieldwork over the course of a year (2009‐2010).

This study traces the theoretical debates on the informal economy from 1989 to 2008 and argues for a substantivist position on household reproduction that focuses on the interdependence of social networks, employment, class‐identity and (informal) work. The findings demonstrate significant performative and spatial aspects of embedded worker identity, including the workspace itself as a contested domain, that facilitate movement between formal‐informal work.

The originality of the paper resides in its ethnographic approach to informal economies under post‐socialism and the substantivist evaluation of diverse economic practices in Russia as supported by formal work‐based shared identities.

This introduction to the essays that follow argues that the chief problem with the dominant understanding of world affairs in the disciplines of International Relations and International Political Economy, including their Marxist versions, is an a historical, non-contradictory and economically cosmopolitan conception of capitalism. In their place, geopolitical economy is a new approach which returns to the conception of capitalism embodied in the culmination of classical political economy, Marxism. It was historical in two senses, distinguishing capitalism as a historically specific mode of social production involving by value production and understanding that its contradictions drive forward capitalism’s own history in a central way. This approach must further develop and specify uneven and combined development as the dominant pattern in the unfolding of capitalist international relations, one that is constitutive of its component states themselves. Secondly, it must understand the logic of the actions undertaken by capitalist states as emerging from the struggles involved in the formation of capitalist states and from the contradictions that are set in train once capitalism is established. Finally, it must see in the ways that class and national struggles and resulting state actions have modified the functioning of capitalism the possibilities of replacing the disorder, contestation and war that are the spontaneous result of capitalism for international relations the basis for a cooperative order in relations between states, an order which can also be the means for realising the permanent revolution and solidifying its gains on the international or world plane.

Drawing upon Alfred Sohn-Rethel's work, we argue that, just as capitalism produces abstract labor, it coproduces both abstract mind and abstract life. Abstract mind is the split between mind and nature and between subject/observer and observed object that characterizes scientific epistemology. Abstract mind reflects an abstracted objectified world of nature as a means to be exploited. Biological life is rendered as abstract life by capitalist exploitation and by the reification and technologization of organisms by contemporary technoscience. What Alberto Toscano has called “the culture of abstraction” imposes market rationality onto nature and the living world, disrupting biotic communities and transforming organisms into what Finn Bowring calls “functional bio-machines.”

This chapter aims to how Marx's ideas and subsequent Marxist-inspired scholarship have contributed to the analysis of the various forms of work organization. It summarizes Marx's basic philosophy, theory of history, and critique of political economy; it distinguishes more critical and more optimistic variants of Marxist theory; and it then shows how these ideas have been used in the analysis of key organizational forms, contrasting Marxist versus non-Marxist approaches and critical versus optimistic versions of Marxism.

Socialism has institutionalised equality, guaranteeing women legal protection against abuse and discrimination. It has opened doors to women to enter public life, where in many far more developed countries women still lag behind. Nevertheless, in the domain of male‐female interaction and attitudes there has been little real change.