Reconfiguration of Work After the Corona Pandemic

* Special Issue: Work, reconfigured. Ed. by Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Ozan Nadir Alakavuklar, et al. Ephemera, volume 20, number 4, 2020

URL = http://www.ephemerajournal.org/issue/work-reconfigured pdf

Summary

"This open issue is published against the background of a major global pandemic. The old ‘normal’ seems far away and undesirable, as a socio-ecological transformation becomes even more urgent. The contributions featured here scrutinize the current trends in the capitalist mode of production and envision the alternative organization of our societies. They examine new configurations of work, to which capital-led digitalization is often key, and ways to resist it. Attention is also paid to a fundamental rethinking of work, economy and care. Having been written before the pandemic, the current situation has only accelerated the gravity of the phenomena the contributions engage with. Through various theoretical and practical interventions, this issue can help address ‘what is to be done’ to construct a radically different normal. The follow-up question of ‘how is it to be done’, in turn, requires more thinking and action from us all."

Contents

• editorial: Reconfiguring work and organizing for post-pandemic futures

Ekaterina Chertkovskaya Ozan Nadir Alakavuklar Emil Husted Marton Racz

• From the smart factory to the self-organisation of capital: ‘Industrie 4.0’ as the cybernetisation of production

Simon Schaupp Ramon Diab

• Downshifting: Boundary management for the privileged few?

Rachel L Cockman Laylah Pike

• Designers of competition at work: A neoliberal consensus-machine caught in the act

Christine Schwarz

• Click for work: Rethinking work through online work distribution platforms

Ilana Gershon Melissa Cefkin

• The warehouse without walls: A workers’ inquiry at Deliveroo

Callum Cant

• Thinking like Apple’s recycling robots: Toward the activation of responsibility in a postenvironmentalist world

Stefan Laser Alison Stowell

• Power and management according to Agamben: Some implications of Agamben’s thoughts to management scholarship

Enrico Beltramini

• The struggle for good leadership in social movement organizations: Collective reflection and rules as basis for autonomy

Ruth Simsa Marion Totter

• Revisiting precarity, with care: Productive and reproductive labour in the era of flexible capitalism

Mariya Ivancheva Kathryn Keating

• Discourses of degrowth: New value systems for global environmental governance?

Lucy Ford Gabriela Kuetting

• note: At the heart of new work practices: A paradoxical approach to silence in a coworking space

Stephanie Faure Jeremy Aroles François-Xavier de Vaujany

• note: Mediating resistance: Digital immaterial labor, neoliberal subjectivities, and the struggle for immigrant justice

Frankie Mastrangelo

• review: Doing qualitative research in times of alternative facts

Anna Alexandersson

• review: Time to fix our teaching materials?

Andrea Bernardi

• review: Videogames as a sphere of resistance and play

Dilara Baysal