Search results

Past research on collectivist-democratic organizations has attributed their distinctiveness to their socio-political goals and democratic decision-making and largely ignored their work processes. This ethnographic study examines how such organizations resist alienating forms of work even in the face of direct competition with for-profit companies. It focuses on Scopix, a French cooperative sheet-metal factory where the first author spent one year as a shop-floor worker. Cooperators there developed various practices to retain an emancipatory dimension to their work, regularly putting forward “craft ethics” as a counterweight to the sheet-metal industry’s drive to rationalize work processes. Drawing on the sociology of worth, the authors analyze how these practices emerged from the arrangements that workers made between the industrial world on the one side and the domestic and inspired worlds on the other. This study contributes to the literature into two main ways. First, the authors refine the sociology-of-worth framework by conceptualizing the emancipatory dimension of work as the result of ad hoc arrangements between different worlds. Second, the authors highlight the need for the literature on collectivist-democratic organizations to increase its focus on work, introducing the concept of work degeneration as a step in that direction.

The work of Henri Lefebvre Rhythmanalysis, Space, Time and Everyday Life (2004) is generally known as the original proposer of rhythmanalysis, inspired by the last chapter of Gaston Bachelard's book La dialectique de la durée (1963), entitled ‘Rhythmanalysis’. Nevertheless, it was the Portuguese philosopher Lúcio Pinheiro dos Santos who developed the notion of rhythmanalysis. In this chapter I address this episode of the genealogy of rhythmanalysis aiming to contribute to a broader understanding of its context of origin. I also present fragments of a rhythmanalysis exercise developed in Caminito, Buenos Aires, as part of my research in the field of art studies. Following a pre-Platonic notion of rhythm (Benveniste, 1966), I draw on those fragments as much as on the reflexive confrontation of rhythmanalysis with feminist and ch'ixi epistemologies (e.g., Haraway, 1988; Rivera, 2018) in order to propose what I come to call rhuthmanalysis.

The aim of this chapter is to analyse and to define the role and opportunities offered by the adoption of a new ICT (Information and Communication Technology) tool within an organization, focusing attention on internal collaborative processes that have been induced by the development and use of the new tool. As noted by some authors, ICT tools may create a virtual meeting place where individuals can engage in dialogue and collaboration. However, other authors argue that technology could reduce direct involvement, social interaction, collaboration and reflective conversations that traditionally give rise to knowledge processes and thus to innovation processes inside the organizations. Nevertheless, some research contributions show that it is not an ICT tool itself that provides positive or negative effects on organizations, but how the tool is used in conjunction with complementary human resources. These contributions avoid technological determinism by stressing contingency and by coupling human design intent and activity with the disposition of actors inside organizations.

In order to fulfil the aim of the chapter, a study was carried out in a leading firm in the automotive industry, till now involved in a project aimed at implementing a new simulation tool for the assembly process. The evidence from the case seems to suggest that the development and use of the simulation tool activated the social interactions and collaborations that enacted innovation processes. The simulation tool seemed to facilitate a productive dialogue among the different departments and a deeper understanding of the different challenges involved. The development of the simulation “forced” experts of different departments to meet and to keep the focus on salient aspects. The simulation acted as a boundary object. The development of this boundary object was un-intentional but it is clear that the simulation contributed to the formation of a community of collaborators.

It is worth noting that this was not the result of the simulation tool itself but rather the result of management actions aimed at making sense of the whole project, supporting the initiative and thus motivating users.

Past research has highlighted multiple interrelations between technology and social cognition. In this chapter, building on past studies, as well as on our own research, we advance propositions about the conditions under which technological features are likely to serve as cues for the construction of organizational identity and about the consequences of this fact for the enduringness of these features. In doing so, our emerging framework may contribute to increase more general understanding of how organizational features come to be perceived as part of organizational identity.

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to investigate whether and to what extent economic transactions are influenced by social structures, power distributions, and cultural understandings through an analysis of exchange at a scrap metal yard in Chicago.

Methodology/Approach – Between March 2000 and December 2002, 72 interviews were conducted with collectors who bring metal to City Iron. With 16 of these collectors the author had a working relationship, assisting the collector in all aspects of the job. Data were coded and analyzed with the assistance of NVIVO, a qualitative data management program.

Findings – The author finds that market transactions are not impersonal and that moral characterizations matter. In this universally risky business in which some level of in-market cheating is expected, material and moral appraisals become intertwined as participants look to extra-market cues and clues in evaluating with whom to transact and how. While the ascription of ethnicity serves as a proxy for the particularistic judgment of trustworthiness, this sorting is accomplished and legitimated by an ostensibly universal moral discourse. Actors evaluate each other using a moral yardstick, paying as much – if not more – attention to what one believes the other is doing when not working as to when one is.

Originality/Value of paper – By focusing on exchange-in-interaction and articulating how economic transactions are culturally embedded, this research contributes to scholarship in the sociologies of work and economies, and provides a glimpse into an understudied work world.

This paper presents the second-generation estimates for the Italian engineering industry in 1911, a year documented both by the customary demographic census, and the first industrial census. The first part of this paper uses the census data to estimate the industry’s value added, sector by sector; the second further disaggregates each sector by activity, and estimates the value added, employment, physical product, and metal consumption of each one. A third, concluding section dwells on the dependence of cross-section estimates on time-series evidence. Three appendices detail the specific algorithms that generate the present estimates; a fourth, a useful sample of firm-specific data.

Purpose – This chapter examines the expectation that because the developmental trajectories of cultural frontiers are often seen as being tied to that of their more complexly developed neighbors, increases in interregional interaction provide frontier communities with previously unavailable political-economic opportunities that promote social change.

Design/methodology/approach – This expectation is examined using data from archaeological excavations at the site of El Dornajo in southwestern Ecuador. Models based on external conditions like interregional interaction are considered alongside those based on internal conditions like environmental perturbations.

Findings – The results suggest that increased interregional interaction promoted the emergence of a regional prestige economy that symbolically legitimated (and perhaps made possible) the co-option of traditional risk buffering strategies during a time when the availability of subsistence resources had changed due to local conditions.

Practical implications – This chapter supports the notion that the emergence of institutionalized inequality requires control over both internal and external relationships. Furthermore, it suggests that examining models based on both internal and external conditions of change may help to explain the timing and pace of that change.

Originality/value – Much of the archaeological literature is dichotomized between models based on internal conditions and those based on external conditions. Few archaeologists would take exception to the notion that both conditions matter, but equally few archaeologists are looking at both kinds of conditions in the same case study.