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(End)Zones And (Out)Fields Of Production: Contemporary Conditions Of Labor And Artistic Critique, Stephanie G. Anderson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In a 2013 exhibition publication titled It’s the Political Economy, Stupid!, John Roberts made the observation that “Over the last ten years we have become witness to an extraordinary assimilation of art theory and practice into the categories of labor and production.” Whereas once art claimed for itself a critical capacity in relation to the larger system of capitalist domination by its status as a putatively ‘autonomous’ sphere of production from which it leveraged its difference and critique, today it is largely acknowledged that there is no longer any such ‘outside’ to be aspired to. If, in the recent …

Ch. 09 - The Music Educator As Cultural Worker, David Lines

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

Estelle Jorgensen’s Pictures of Music Education provides an exploration of music education through figural and literal thinking stimulated by a selection of metaphors and models. This chapter takes inspiration from Jorgensen’s approach to music education and explores how the changing idea of culture resonates with thinking about music education. It is suggested that music education and culture can be thought of together through a more politically aware stance or image of thought that music teachers can adopt: the music educator as cultural worker. By adopting this stance, the music educator enacts music and culture together, is critically informed by the …

Building Momentum For Collectivity In The Digital Games Community, Johanna Weststar, Marie-Josee Legault

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

Studies of digital game labor have tended to document problems in the working lives of developers while devoting relatively limited attention to solutions, or to collective representation as a step toward solutions. An increasing number of game developers are dissatisfied with their working conditions, and dissatisfaction is a necessary condition for workers to engage in collective action to gain the representational power needed to achieve change in the workplace. Noting that the landscape of collective mobilization in the game industry has not yet been systematically mapped, this article documents collective actions over the past five decades, and asks, “Are the …

"When [S]He Is Working [S]He Is Not At Home": Challenging Assumptions About Remote Work, Eric Lohman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this monograph thesis, I explore how at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the prospects for telework, rather than following a straightforward and inexorably rising trajectory, became strangely complex and conflicted. This project explores the reasons for the apparently contradictory and certainly confusing state of telework. It is about these contradictions, and more specifically about who benefits from telework arrangements, and under what conditions these arrangements are deployed.

The study adopts a mixture of qualitative methodologies, including political economic analysis, reviews of popular press articles, and in-depth interviews. The political economic analysis explores the costs …

Marx’S Value Theory: A Critical Response To Analyses Of Digital Prosumption, Edward Comor

FIMS Publications

Abstract

In their assessment of value creation through prosumption and other activities related to the use of digital technologies, despite significant differences, Fuchs (2010) and Arvidsson and Colleoni (2012) misinterpret Marx's value theory. Through their analyses, a totalizing or new form of capitalism is said to have emerged, but these, I argue, entail demonstrably idealist theorizations. The end result is that these authors occlude more than they clarify in their debates concerning value, exploitation, and the role played by digital technologies. However, once we understand the precision needed to apply Marx's complex theory—including his conceptualization of “labor power” and the …

What Makes For Effective Labor Representation On Pension Boards?, Johanna Weststar, Anil Verma

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

This article examines the efficacy of labor representation on pension boards. Using existing literature and interviews with labor trustees, this article develops a model where a more formal approach to recruitment and selection, skill acquisition, and accountability is hypothesized to aid labor trustees in achieving effective integration and representation on pension boards. Data indicate that labor trustees are placed in a challenging environment with insufficient support from their union, other trustees, or the board. These findings have important implications for the selection, training, and integration of labor trustees and the success of a labor agenda on pension issues.

Job Matching And Unemployment Dynamics, John Robert Kennes

Digitized Theses

The first chapter of the thesis considers a job search model with entrepreneurial decisions by unemployed workers. A conventional job search model predicts a log-linear relationship between the vacancy: unemployment ratio and the job finding rates of unemployed workers. However, empirical evidence suggests that the relationship is concave. The model presented in this chapter exhibits concavity as a result of entrepreneurial specialization in the pool of unemployed workers.;The second chapter of the thesis develops a general equilibrium model of vacancies and unemployment with competition between on and off-the-job searchers. Under-employed workers at low productivity jobs make up the pool of …

The Effects Of Government Policies On (Un)Employment In A Search Model, Mingwei Yuan

Digitized Theses

This thesis studies the effects of fiscal and labour market policies on the labour market activities. The study is based on a general equilibrium framework. The models considered in this thesis are built on the recent advances of growth models which incorporate labour market search/match activities. This study extends the previous models to address several important empirical issues.;In Chapter 1, an empirical study using multivariate vector autoregression (VAR) models shows that, in postwar U.S., employment and hours worked per worker respond differently to a temporary shock in government consumption. The shock raises hours worked per worker and reduces employment. The …

Essays In Unemployment And Unemployment Insurance, Guang-Jia Zhang

Digitized Theses

This thesis examines several issues surrounding the causes of aggregate unemployment that relate to both individual work, rest, and search activities, and inter-industry labor reallocation process. On the other hand, this thesis also explores how heterogenous agents (employed and unemployed) react to a given unemployment insurance program as well as its welfare consequences within a general equilibrium search model.;The research in the first chapter is motivated by the three key features of the employment process in the U.S. economy: (1) job creation is procyclical, (2) job destruction is countercyclical, and (3) job creation is less volatile than job destruction. These …

Multi-Sector Labour Market Search: Interactions Between Unemployment Duration And Sectoral Shocks, Paul A. Storer

Digitized Theses

This thesis comprises five chapters which are all concerned with the general theme of sectoral shocks and unemployment duration. The first chapter motivates the issues addressed in the thesis by establishing their relevance and originality. The chapter begins by showing that the interaction between sectoral shocks and unemployment duration has largely been ignored in the sectoral shocks debate. The importance of unemployment duration at the theoretical level is demonstrated and data are presented to establish the empirical relevance of the theory.;The second chapter constructs and analyses a two-sector model of labour market search in which unemployment duration is an endogenous …

Trade Shocks And Employment Change In Canada: 1972-1980, Roderick Hill

Digitized Theses

The thesis examines the relative strengths of domestic and foreign (or "trade") shocks on sectoral employment change in Canada. Chapter 1 surveys several different approaches used in the past. Chapter 2 examines three of these using hypothetical time series data for an artificial economy with a three-industry small, open economy computational general equilibrium (CGE) model. The results show some of the weaknesses of these approaches and their potential for predictive error.;Chapter 3 sets out a similar CGE model to be applied to Canadian data. Competitive domestic industries produce goods that are assumed to be perfect substitutes for foreign goods. The …

A Dynamic Agency Model With Borrowing, Harvey Brian King

Digitized Theses

Recent research on agency models has emphasized multiperiod contracts. However, most research has assumed the principal could control agents' consumption, choosing to deny them access to a capital market. The few papers that have examined the role of capital markets in an agency model (Braverman and Stiglitz (1982), Rogerson (1985a)) do not allow agents a joint choice of effort and borrowing. This thesis extends these models by allowing agents this joint choice of borrowing and effort, showing how previous results change.;Agents are allowed access to two types of imperfect capital markets. In one model of the capital market, agents can …

Asymmetric Information And Union Strike Behavior In Competitive Industries, Glen Alan Stirling

Digitized Theses

When firms have private information a union may use a strike to reveal information about the firm. This thesis has asymmetrically-informed agents in a competitive industry in which union and nonunion firms may exist. This environment makes it possible to derive a wide class of predictions concerning union strike behavior. Many of the new predictions arise from the possibility of less than 100% unionization and the implied demand independence results. Also, multiple firm types may exist at any one time in an industry. This leads to a strong result concerning the joint distribution of wages and strikes within an industry, …

Applied General Equilibrium Analysis Of Customs Unions And Interregional Labour Mobility, Richard Claude Jones

Digitized Theses

This thesis develops various extensions and applications of applied general equilibrium modelling techniques. Essay I deals with the modelling of labour migration and builds on the regional numerical general equilibrium model of Canada developed by Jones and Whalley (forthcoming). Their limited migration decision rule is extended to involve a comparison of relative utility levels across regions. The major implication for model results is that measured migration responses may be dampened under certain policy simulations; this can result in different conclusions being drawn from simulation exercises.;Essay II considers the application of this model to the study of the Canadian equalization system …

A General Equilibrium Model Of Person Specific Information In The Labour Market, M Mobinul Huq

Digitized Theses

In recent years a greater emphasis has been given to the matching/sorting models of human capital investment. In these models, education generates better person-specific information which leads to a return from improved firm-worker matching. The first purpose of this thesis is to explain the factors that determine the real return for education through better firm-worker matching. The second purpose is to examine how this return is affected by two changes in the economy: firstly changes in the age composition of the labour force as a baby boom generation passes through the labour force, and secondly the introduction of a social …

Age-Structure And Unemployment: Some Consequences Of The Post-War Baby Boom, David Kerr Forrest

Digitized Theses

The paper examines the impact of demographic changes on the rate of unemployment in Canada. The central question asked is whether the increase in the number of young people in the population during the 1970s put upward pressure on the overall unemployment-rate. It was expected to have done so because (i) a greater fraction of the labour-force would now fall within an unemployment-prone age-category, and (ii) in the absence of sufficient wage flexibility, a shift in the supply curve of a particular type of labour (defined by age) would generate unemployment in that age-group (this is the so-called cohort-crowding hypothesis). …