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Recent developments in the organization of work and production have facilitated the decline of wage employment in many regions of the world. However, the idea of the wage continues to dominate the political imaginations of governments, researchers and activists, based on the historical experiences of industrial workers in the global North.
This edited collection revitalises debates on the future of work by challenging the idea of wage employment as the global norm. Taking theoretical inspiration from the global South, the authors compare lived experiences of ‘ordinary work’ across taken-for-granted conceptual and geographical boundaries; from Cambodian brick kilns to Catalonian cooperatives. Their contributions open up new possibilities for how work, identity and security might be woven together differently.
This volume is an invaluable resource for academics, students and readers interested in alternative and emerging forms of work around the world.
Do you know where your money is? More importantly, do you know what your money is doing?
Most of us feel confident that we know what money is. But few of us feel confident in taking responsibility for what our money does. We hand over the power of money to banks and mainstream finance with real, often damaging, consequences for people and planet.
A unique collaboration between an academic and a practitioner, this book tells the story of money, from ancient Athens to the Bitcoin revolution, to explain how crowdfunding is the way for people to reclaim the power of their money in pursuit of a fairer and greener society.
ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.
In recent years, the ‘city region’ has seen a renaissance as the de facto spatial centre of governance for economic and social development.
Rich in case study insights, this book provides a critique of city-region building and considers how governance restructuring shapes the political, economic, social and cultural geographies of devolution. Reviewing the Greater Manchester, Sheffield, Swansea Bay City Regions, Cardiff Capital Region and the North Wales Growth Deal, the authors address the tensions and opportunities for local elites and civil society actors.
Based on original empirical material, situated within cutting edge academic and policy debates, this book is a timely and lively engagement with the shifting geographies of economic and social development in Britain.
EPUB and EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Today, production processes have become fragmented with a range of activities divided among firms and workers across borders. These global value chains are being strongly promoted by international organisations, such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, but social and political backlash is mounting in a growing variety of forms.
This ambitious volume brings together academics and activists from Europe to address the social and environmental imbalances of global production. Thinking creatively about how to reform the current economic system, this book will be essential reading for those interested in building sustainable alternatives at local, regional and global levels.
The ‘smart city’ is often promoted as a technology-driven solution to complex urban issues. While commentators are increasingly critical of techno-optimistic narratives, the political imagination is dominated by claims that technical solutions can be uniformly applied to intractable problems.
This book provides a much-needed alternative view, exploring how ‘home-grown’ digital disruption, driven and initiated by local actors, upends the mainstream corporate narrative.
Drawing on original research conducted in a range of urban African settings, Odendaal shows how these initiatives can lead to meaningful change.
This is a valuable resource for scholars working in the intersection of science and technology studies, urban and economic geography and sociology.
. Andrew rents space at the gym and receives a percentage of the fees paid by his clients. As the manager, he also receives a share of the payments collected by the other trainers. Because he has been classified as an independent contractor, there is no withholding from his paycheck for taxes, Social Security (the US federal retirement, disability and survivors income programme), or Medicare (the federal old-age health insurance programme). He is responsible for the paperwork of quarterly estimated tax payments and the financial burden of paying the employer’s share as
disability benefit claimants across the UK – then the more than twofold actual rate of unemployment in the UK identified by the OECD and Centre for Cities is likely to be even higher in this region. These factors illustrate the shortcomings of national employment statistics and the need for more disaggregated approaches that consider particular histories and geographies of work in different regions and localities. For example, despite being situated in a national context with historically low rates of unemployment, it is important to recognize the Valleys as a wage
trade unions and civil society organisations, the proliferation of insecure jobs has caused a diminishing in the social and economic status of individuals. The more that employers depend on insecure employment forms and contractual forms of work that reduce entitlement to employment rights and social protection the greater the risk that segments of the more vulnerable workforce (whether due to age, disability, or limited education for example) are rendered ‘invisible’ and both the worker and their work become marginalised in the city … For their part, unions are
foundations are rocked, the entire economy very quickly starts to shake and crumble (see Berry et al, 2020 ). In this context, as we noted in the Introduction, the state is forced to reconcile an ongoing tension between the neoliberal necessity to maintain the expansion of surplus value, the accumulation strategy of the economy at large, with the need to sustain social harmony and its own legitimation during the crisis. This is most prescient in the context of care, healthcare being obvious, but also broader notions of social care (including childcare, disability care
economic performance, with its GVA ranked 38 out of 39 city regions; the lack of employment demand and poor jobs growth compounds this with, as noted above, an additional 70,000 jobs needed to narrow the gap with other parts of the country; low pay, skills and in-work poverty mean that work is not an automatic route out of poverty; disability health and labour market disadvantage is a significant policy challenge; women and young people are particularly disadvantaged in terms of employment and pay, with a higher proportion of women paid below the living wage compared to
