Precarious Forms

Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas explores how performance art and poetry convey utopian desires even in the bleakest of times. Candice Amich argues that utopian longing in the neoliberal Americas paradoxically arises from the material conditions of socioeconomic crisis. Working across national, linguistic, and generic boundaries, Amich identifies new political and affective modes of reception in her examination of resistant art forms. She locates texts in the activist struggles of the Global South, where neoliberal extraction and exploitation most palpably reanimate the colonial and imperial legacies of earlier stages of capitalism. The poets and artists surveyed in Precarious Forms enact gestures of solidarity and mutual care at sites of neoliberal dispossession. In her analysis of poems, body art, and multimedia installations that illuminate the persistence of a radical utopian imaginary in the Americas, Amich engages critical debates in performance studies, Latin American cultural studies, literature, and art history.

Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas explores how performance art and poetry convey utopian desires even in the bleakest of times. Candice Amich argues that utopian longing in the neoliberal Americas paradoxically arises from the material conditions of socioeconomic crisis. Working across national, linguistic, and generic boundaries, Amich identifies new political and affective modes of reception in her examination of resistant art forms. She locates texts in the activist struggles of the Global South, where neoliberal extraction and exploitation most palpably reanimate the colonial and imperial legacies of earlier stages of capitalism. The poets and artists surveyed in Precarious Forms enact gestures of solidarity and mutual care at sites of neoliberal dispossession. In her analysis of poems, body art, and multimedia installations that illuminate the persistence of a radical utopian imaginary in the Americas, Amich engages critical debates in performance studies, Latin American cultural studies, literature, and art history.

This book makes a unique and invaluable contribution to our understanding of the changing nature of employment and its consequences for industrialized societies. It combines industry case studies, company case studies, and specific country case studies to paint a multi-dimensional picture of the spread of precarious employment and the responses by trade unions and other worker mobilizations. In addition, the astute theoretical chapters demonstrate how the trend toward precarization is reshaping power relationships in ways that have significant implications for individual security and wellbeing, collective agency and empowerment, societal equality and stability, and the vitality of democracy itself. Together these essays provide an exceptionally rich picture and insightful analysis of these important trends in contemporary industrialized societies.

Since the 1970s the long term decline in self-employment has slowed – and even reversed in some countries – and the prospect of ‘being your own boss’ is increasingly topical in the discourse of both the general public and within academia. Traditionally, self-employment has been associated with independent entrepreneurship, but increasingly it has become a form of precarious work. This book utilises evidence-based information to address both the current and future challenges of this trend as the nature of self-employment changes, as well as to demonstrate where, when and why self-employment has emerged as precarious work in Europe.

'Precarious Employment' explores the nature and dynamics of precarious employment in contemporary Canada.

Tackling precarious work has been described by the United Nations (UN)’s International Labour Organization (ILO) as the main challenge facing the world of work. In this ground-breaking book, leading applied research scholars, advocates, and activists from across the globe respond to this challenge by showing how Industrial and Organizational (I/O) psychology has a significant contribution to make in humanity moving away from precarious work situations towards sustainable livelihoods. Broken down into four key parts on Sustainable Livelihoods, Fair Incomes, Work Security and Social Protection, the book covers a multitude of topics including the role of poor pay, lack of work-related security, social protection for human health and wellbeing, and interventions and policies to implement for the future of work. The volume offers a detailed look into useful and effective ways to tackle precarious work to create and maintain sustainable livelihoods. This curated collection of 22 chapters considers the broader relationships between previous research work and issues of human security and sustainability that affect workers, families, communities, and societies. Each chapter expands the present understandings of the world of precarious work and how it fits within broader issues of economic, ecological, and social sustainability. In addition to I/O psychologists in research, practice, service and study, this book will also be useful for organizational researchers, labor unions, HR practitioners, fair trade, cooperative, and civil society organizations, social scientists, human security analysts, public health professionals, economists, and supporters of the UN SDGs, including at the UN.

This study offers close readings of cinematic and literary representations of the contemporary French workplace, focusing on the dilemmas faced by French workers of different ages, sexes, classes, and ethnicities, workers depicted as being caught between the apparent certainties of French republican citizenship and the precarious forms of subjectivity characteristic of post-Fordism.

Globalisation, the shift from manufacturing to services as a source of employment, and the spread of information-based systems and technologies have given birth to a new economy, which emphasises flexibility in the labour market and in employment relations. These changes have led to the erosion of the standard (industrial) employment relationship and an increase in precarious work - work which is poorly paid and insecure. Women perform a disproportionate amount of precarious work. This collection of original essays by leading scholars on labour law and women's work explores the relationship between precarious work and gender, and evaluates the extent to which the growth and spread of precarious work challenges traditional norms of labour law and conventional forms of legal regulation.The book provides a comparative perspective by furnishing case studies from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Quebec, Sweden, the UK, and the US, as well as the international and supranational context through essays that focus on the IMF, the ILO, and the EU. Common themes and concepts thread throughout the essays, which grapple with the legal and public policy challenges posed by women's precarious work.