Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Labour Power Matters And Capitalist Racism - An Interview With Ken C. Kawashima, Ken C. Kawashima

Class, Race and Corporate Power

Raju Das and Robert Latham interview Ken C. Kawashima about his work and lessons for workers involved in the struggle today.

Essays On The Economics Of Immigration, Phuong Vu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation consists of three papers studying the impact of social networks and employment mobility on Canadian immigrants, and the effects of economic conditions and immigration policy changes on international Ph.D. students in Canada. In the first paper, I use the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada (LSIC) to examine the effects of social networks on labour market outcomes of newly arrived Canadian immigrants. I find that the presence of initial networks at landing significantly increases the probability of getting a network job and reduces the probability of getting a formal job after landing. Across immigration categories, network effects vary, …

Factors Affecting Rural Women’S Involvement In Physical Activity In Ghana, Alice Quainoo, T. A. Loeffler

International Journal of Physical Activity and Health

A qualitative study approach was used to explore the factors affecting rural women’s involvement in physical activity in Ghana. Most prior research has been done in African urban areas thus, neglecting the rural areas. Purposive sampling and a semi-structured interview method were used to interview nine women aged 40-60 years living in three rural areas in the central region of Ghana. The interviews were conducted by phone, translated, transcribed, and then coded using NVivo software package. The constant comparative method was used to analyze the data. The data presented eight enablers and five barriers to physical activity involvement for rural …

Acting "As If": Critical Pedagogy, Empowerment, And Labor, Rafia Mirza, Karen P. Nicholson, Maura Seale

FIMS Publications

In this chapter, we explore the labor of information literacy and its devaluation in professional discourse, which lends appeal to critical library pedagogy as means to reclaim agency in the classroom. We consider how discourses of agency and empowerment in critical library pedagogy fail to account for positionality, power, and context, with the result that critical pedagogy tends to center individual (heroic) efforts rather than collective action. Critical pedagogy thus becomes a decontextualized and disempowering fiction, a practice of “acting as if” the classroom were a safe space. Reframing critical library pedagogy as labor undertaken in solidarity with other workers …

Essays On Disability And The Labour Market, Robert Geoffrey Millard

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation consists of three chapters about the effects of disability and disability policy.

The second chapter analyzes the variation in labour market outcomes across disabilities by representing disability as a bundle of characteristics. Rich with information on the characteristics of a disabling condition, I use the Participation and Activity Limitation Survey to compare the relative importance of each {characteristic} and their interactions on employment, wages, hours worked, and annual employment income. The disability {characteristics} include the type of activity limitation, number of limitations, timing of onset, severity, and persistence. I find substantial cross-sectional variation in labour supply, wages, and …

In A Gig Economy, Do People Work More When Wages Rise?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Study finds that when wages go up, how the supply of labour changes can depend on how the change in pay is communicated

Domesticated: Migrant Domestic Workers In Jordan And Their Place In Jordan’S Law And Homes, Jeromel Dela Rosa Lara

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The purpose of this study is to bring attention to the labor conditions for migrant women domestic workers and what agency they have in the workplace (the home of their employers) and the law in Jordan. Jordan is considered as having a model labor law for migrant workers in the region. Officials from the Ministry of Labor have claimed that this makes the Kafala System––a system of labor that puts migrant workers under the care, standards, and control of the employer––non-existent in the country. This study will look further on the extent that this is reflected to the experiences of …

Returning To 'The Good Life'? Chickens And Chicken-Keeping During Covid-19 In Britain, Catherine Oliver

Animal Studies Journal

Through the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns, humans have been exposed to the threat that the exploitation and eating of animals poses to humanity and public health. It has also become obvious that animals want to and are willing to take up more space. In the relative absence of humans during lockdown, animal populations have spread out and some have entered cities and towns for the first time. At the same time, humans have chosen to bring animals into their domestic spaces in the form of companion animals in staggering numbers. The lockdown’s slowing of time has opened the possibility to …

Assessing The Impact Of Denizenship In The Making And Evaluation Of Temporary Foreign Worker Policies In Canada, Sihwa Kim

MA Research Paper

Despite the larger number of temporary foreign workers (TFWs) that are channelled through a long-standing Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), their experience with the program and, more broadly, within the Canadian society has been overlooked.

This study examines the ways in which a denizen status coupled with other social factors, such as race and amount of human capital, create marginalizing migratory experience for low-skilled TFWs in Canada. As denizens, these migrant workers are isolated in the geographical, economic, political, and social periphery of Canadian society. The longstanding inequality embedded in the structure of TFWP legitimizes differential entitlements and experiences of …

Beyond The Coronavirus: Understanding Crises Of Social Reproduction, Smriti Rao

Economics, Finance and International Business Department Faculty Works

From a feminist political economy perspective, the unfolding of the coronavirus is a further reminder of the fundamental contradiction between a capitalist system that prioritizes profits, and a feminist ethic that prioritizes life-making or social reproduction. This paper argues for a more systematic understanding of crises of social reproduction under capitalism, stressing the difference between such crises for labour, and those for capital. The coronavirus crisis represents an extraordinary example of a crisis of social reproduction for capital, but this paper examines crises of social reproduction for capital and labour that arise from the more ordinary workings of capitalism. The …

Cardio-Metabolic Disease Risk Factors Among South Asian Labour Migrants To The Middle East: A Scoping Review And Policy Analysis, Shiva Raj Mishra, Saruna Ghimire, Chandni Joshi, Bishal Gyawali, Archana Shrestha, Dinesh Neupane, Sudesh Raj Sharma, Yashashwi Pokharel, Salim S. Virani

Public Health Faculty Publications

This paper aims to explore the burgeoning burden of cardiovascular and metabolic disease (CMD) risk factors among South Asian labor migrants to the Middle East. We conducted a qualitative synthesis of literature using PubMed/Medline and grey literature searches, supplemented by a policy review of policies from the South Asian countries. We found a high burden of cardio-metabolic risk factors among the migrants as well as among the populations in the home and the host countries. For example, two studies reported the prevalence of diabetes mellitus (DM) ranging between 9 and 17% among South Asian migrants. Overweight and obesity were highly …

The Uk Labour Party Wants To Abolish Private Schools - Could We Do That In Australia?, Paul Andrew Kidson

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

The UK's Labour Party recently voted in a policy to effectively abolish private schools and integrate them into the state system. This is a courageous move designed to redress social inequity - many of those working in the top levels of the UK government were educated in private schools. Two of Britain's three most recent prime ministers went to the prestigious Eton College, which charges annual fees of more than £40,000. The UK opposition party's plan will likely warm the hearts of similarly minded Australians. Many of the same arguments about educational inequality have been floated in Australia. Many individuals …

The Politics Of Service: Affectivity, Social Relations, And The Power Of Tipping In The Restaurant Industry, Jacqueline A. Ross

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The #MeToo movement and the growing spotlight on sexual harassment and misconduct has increasingly brought industries and individuals into the public eye. The restaurant industry is one such industry to receive this spotlight. While most of the coverage has stemmed from celebrities, the misconduct of celebrity chefs has been paralleled by the stories of servers and their customers. The NY Times published several articles on harassment in the restaurant industry and some specifically focusing on the abuses that tipped workers face. Often these workers were women. When asked about experiences of harassment, responses were often that servers felt that they …

Policy Considerations Regarding The Integration Of Lusophone West African Immigrant Populations, Kezia Lartey, Brandon D. Lundy

Brandon D. Lundy

On January 23, 2012, Resolution No. 3 enacted the National Immigration Strategy for the island nation of Cabo Verde, the first of its kind in the country. As a buffer nation to Western Europe with a rapidly developing economy and good governance indicators, Cabo Verde is transitioning from a sending and transit country to a receiving nation for African mainlanders, especially from Guinea-Bissau. How effective are these immigration policies at managing these changing mobility patterns? Are immigrants successfully integrating into host communities? How might integration be handled more effectively? This policy briefing reports integration successes and failures from ethnographic research …

Industrial Stagecraft: Tooling And Cultural Production, Jennifer A. Hambleton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The tooling of theatrical spectacle requires collaboration between stagecraft technicians and designers in an increasingly globalized and standardized manufacturing process. While hand skills are still used and remain useful, digital fabrication and other tools are now incorporated in labour processes in scenery manufacturing workshops, altering collaborative work in complex ways. This thesis is an inquiry into the epistemological role of software and digital fabrication tools in stagecraft practices and explores how the politics of craft labour intersect with material practices in media production labour. The technical aspects of the fabrication of theatrical spectacles and display environments, the way objects are …

Opening Up About Birth: An Autoethnographic Account Of Prolonged Labour, Petra B. Elias

The Qualitative Report

A woman’s first pregnancy can be both emotionally exciting and daunting. There are many changes to make, but there is little emotional support to adjust to the role, the focus being on the physical process which is most often managed medically (Spear, 2008; Zasloff, Schytt, & Waldenström, 2007) though warnings about what could occur are not routinely told (Kaitz, 2007, pp. 720-721). This paper presents an autoethnographic story of first time pregnancy and the unfolding labour. The methodology of autoethnography is a useful tool for conveying stories of lived experience at a level of detail often previously unrecorded, evoking for …

Policy Considerations Regarding The Integration Of Lusophone West African Immigrant Populations, Kezia Lartey, Brandon D. Lundy

Faculty Articles

On January 23, 2012, Resolution No. 3 enacted the National Immigration Strategy for the island nation of Cabo Verde, the first of its kind in the country. As a buffer nation to Western Europe with a rapidly developing economy and good governance indicators, Cabo Verde is transitioning from a sending and transit country to a receiving nation for African mainlanders, especially from Guinea-Bissau. How effective are these immigration policies at managing these changing mobility patterns? Are immigrants successfully integrating into host communities? How might integration be handled more effectively? This policy briefing reports integration successes and failures from ethnographic research …

Maintenance And Repair Beyond The Perimeter Of The Plant: Linking Industrial Labour And The Home, Chontel A. Carr

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Dominant political economic accounts of manufacturing labour draw on an intellectual heritage that has tended to over-emphasise production culture within the industrial workplace, at the expense of other work cultures such as maintenance and repair. When the latter are foregrounded, new links emerge between work undertaken within the paid workplace, and that undertaken in the home and community. Work that occurs outside the bounds of an industrial site is co-constituted by materials and skills engendered within, raising timely political and geographical questions around the visibility and mobility of these prosaic restorative cultures. Empirically, the paper brings together two perspectives to …

"Sweat Labor" And Wages In Malaysian Manufacturing, David Lim

Prof. David Lim

References have often been made to the presence of "sweat labor" in manufacturing in less developed countries (LDCs) and of the need to introduce minimum-wage legislation to protect the interests of such employees. However, the data on the wages paid to such workers are almost nonexistent, and the discussion so far has been couched in general terms. I shall attempt to provide some of the empirical basis for the discussion in Malaysia.

Creative Management: Disciplining The Neoliberal Worker, Trent Cruz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This integrated article dissertation examines some of the new managerial practices that have emerged to handle cognitive capitalism’s ongoing need for creative, flexible labour power. The three articles included in this dissertation offer a glimpse into the widespread processes employed by management to regulate and discipline a workforce that must also be granted a degree of relative flexibility, creativity, and autonomy in order to be effective under post-Fordist conditions of production. The first chapter looks at the emergence of corporate improvisational training at the turn of the twenty-first century as an attempt to cultivate flexible and innovative workers, a move …

Twenty-Five Years Of Bananas, Beaches And Bases: A Conversation With Cynthia Enloe, Cynthia Enloe, Anita Lacey, Thomas Gregory

Sustainability and Social Justice

Cynthia Enloe’s book Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics brought a new approach to the study of war, conflict and political economy, an approach informed by and starting from a feminist curiosity. Such a starting point allows for recognition of the diverse, often disregarded gendered dynamics of militarization. A feminist curiosity facilitates making visible the politicization of everyday life via what Enloe calls a bottom-up approach to research and investigation. This account of a conversation between feminist scholars draws attention to the means by which researchers exercise the sociological imagination in their work on labour, militarism …

Contributions To The Committee On The Future Economy, Singapore Management University

Research Collection School Of Economics

In response to the call to contribute to the dialogue initiated by the Committee on The Future Economy (CFE), SMU has held a series of engagement sessions with faculty and staff to brainstorm and propose recommendations to add to the government’s deliberations on strategies for the next stage of Singapore’s economic growth. Through the leadership of SMU Provost, Professor Lily Kong, faculty and senior staff produced various recommendations on five key areas namely Corporate Capabilities and Innovation, Future Growth Industries & Markets, Future of Connectivity, Future City and Future Jobs and Skills.

Research In Brief - Can They Teach Each Other? : The Restructuring Of Higher Education And The Rise Of Undergraduate Student “Teachers” In Ontario, Jennifer Massey, Sean Field

Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs

Changes to public funding regimes, coupled with transformations in how universities are managed and measured have altered the methods for educating undergraduate students. The growing reliance on teaching fellows, teaching assistants, and increasingly undergraduate peer educators (administering Supplemental Instruction [SI] programs) is promoted as a means toachieve a greater “return on investment” in the delivery of postsecondary education. Neoliberal discourses legitimating this downloading of teaching labour suggest it offers a “win-win” solution to the “problem” of educating growing numbers of undergraduate students. It proposes universities can deliver the same curricula, and achieve the same “outcomes” (primarily measured through grades and …

Human-Machinic Assemblages: Technologies, Bodies, And The Recuperation Of Social Reproduction In The Crisis Era, Elise D. Thorburn

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation argues that class composition, as defined and theorised by Operaismo and Autonomist thinkers, has had both a major and a minoritarian form. In fact class composition in its major form has always been subtended by a minor current. I examine both historical (the 1905 Russian Soviets, the 1919 Turin factory councils, the Italian social movements of the 1970s) and contemporary examples (the occupation of Tahrir Square in Egypt, the Indignados movement in Spain, and Occupy Wall Street in 2011, as well as the 2012 Quebec student strike) of class composition. From these examples I then argue that the …

Can They Teach Each Other? : The Restructuring Of Higher Education And The Rise Of Undergraduate Student “Teachers” In Ontario, Jennifer Massey, Sean Field

Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs

Changes to public funding regimes, coupled with transformations in how universities are managed and measured have altered the methods for educating undergraduate students. The growing reliance on teaching fellows, teaching assistants, and increasingly undergraduate peer educators (administering Supplemental Instruction [SI] programs) is promoted as a means toachieve a greater “return on investment” in the delivery of postsecondary education. Neoliberal discourses legitimating this downloading of teaching labour suggest it offers a “win-win” solution to the “problem” of educating growing numbers of undergraduate students. It proposes universities can deliver the same curricula, and achieve the same “outcomes” (primarily measured through grades and …

Can They Teach Each Other? : The Restructuring Of Higher Education And The Rise Of Undergraduate Student “Teachers” In Ontario, Jennifer Massey

Jennifer Massey

Changes to public funding regimes, coupled with transformations in how universities are managed and measured have altered the methods for educating undergraduate students. The growing reliance on teaching fellows, teaching assistants, and increasingly undergraduate peer educators (administering Supplemental Instruction [SI] programs) is promoted as a means to achieve a greater “return on investment” in the delivery of postsecondary education. Neoliberal discourses legitimating this downloading of teaching labour suggest it offers a “win-win” solution to the “problem” of educating growing numbers of undergraduate students. It proposes universities can deliver the same curricula, and achieve the same “outcomes” (primarily measured through grades …

Toward A Postmodern Avant-Garde: Labour, Virtuosity, And Aesthetics In An American New Music Ensemble, John R. Pippen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the aesthetic beliefs and labour practices of the American new music ensemble eighth blackbird (lower-case intentional). Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with the ensemble for the past six years, I show how the ensemble responds to specific cultural pressures endemic to the classical music scene, its new music vanguard, and to the contemporary United States. eighth blackbird, I argue, has created an ensemble identity and performance style designed to satisfy numerous audience positions, from experts well-versed in the intricacies of musical techniques to lay-persons unacquainted with the values and practices of new or classical music. This attempt …

Declining Labour Use In Agriculture : A Case Of Rice Cultivation In Andhra Pradesh, Narasimha Reddy Duvvuri, Venkatanarayana Motkuri

Venkatanarayana Motkuri Mr.

The present paper examines the changing nature of labour use in rice cultivation in Andhra Pradesh. Rice production in India is, however, concentrated in a few pockets. A few states in India produce around two thirds of rice production. Andhra Pradesh is the third largest state in India with respect to rice production. In Andhra Pradesh too, rice is the single largest crops occupying around 30% of area cultivated. The state was one of frontrunners leading the Green Revolution, particularly in rice cultivation.

The study observed that there is a fast decline in labour use in respect of rice cultivation …

Women's Land Army Filled Farming Labour Shortage, Ian Willis

Ian Willis

The Women's Land Army was active in the Camden area between 1942 and 1945. They were located at camps in the local area and the largest was at Orangeville.

Manufacturing On The Move? Beyond The High Dollar In The Debate About Making Things In Australia - The Case Of The Australian Surfboard Industry - Ausccer Discussion Paper No. 2012/2, Andrew Warren, Chris Gibson

Chris Gibson

In October 2011 surfboard manufacturer BASE abruptly closed its factory on the Gold Coast resulting in the direct loss of 50 jobs. A few days later, nearby D’Arcy Surfboards also announced it was shedding workers and downsizing from a state-of-the art purpose built factory into a backyard workshop. Each business exported surfboards internationally and employed some of Australia’s best known surfboard-makers. The troubles facing these workshops added to those brewing at the very same in Australia’s steel, aluminium, automotive and garment industries. With renewed public debate and media commentary on the future of manufacturing, we now face a crisis in …