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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Labour, ethnography'
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Mollona, Massimiliano. "Steel lives : an ethnography of labour in contemporary Sheffield." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2003. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/1706/.
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My doctoral research focuses on the experience of labour in a deprived area of Sheffield, UK, where I lived and worked in two steel factories for eighteen months. In my thesis, I study the factory as a physical, economic and political space located between society and the state, and explore how state neo-liberal policies and globalisation affect working class productive and reproductive strategies, and narratives of labour; and reshape the spaces of the factory, the family and the neighbourhood. In the first part of the thesis I reconstruct the history of steel labour on the shopfloor and in the neighbourhood. In Chapter 1, I show that industrial capitalism fragmented the workforce into 'artisans' - skilled casual labourers - and 'proletarians' - unskilled wage workers. In Chapter 2, I show how this fragmentation was reproduced in the neighbourhood by public social and economic policies and by the 'medical discourse' centred on the health of working classes. The two shopfloor ethnographies in Chapter 3 and 4, show that the historical fragmentation between 'artisans' and 'proletarians' is reproduced in the capitalist labour processes today. The neighbourhood ethnographies in Chapter 5 and 6 challenge the hypothesis of 'late capitalism' scholars of the social fragmentation of the artisan-labourers and of the social stability of the families of the aristocracy of labour, and show the relative economic and social stability of the former and the fragility of the productive and reproductive institutions of the latter. I the conclusion I claim that 'late capitalism' does not entail the dissolution of the working class and the consolidation of an aristocracy of labour under the impulse of technological innovation and capital intensification. Rather, it increases both the fragmentation, and the close interaction, between the spaces of wage labour, nuclear families and civil society and the spaces of casual labour, extended families and local politics.
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Carter, Keith William. "The occupational socialisation of prison officers : an ethnography." Thesis, Cardiff University, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.309356.
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Aitieva, Medina. "Reconstituting transnational families : an ethnography of family practices between Kyrgyzstan and Russia." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2016. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/reconstituting-transnational-families-an-ethnography-of-family-practices-between-kyrgyzstan-and-russia(8216e73e-8a34-4315-8485-a16c6cf2e19e).html.
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This dissertation examines transnational family practices between Kyrgyzstan and Russia. Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan experienced intensive internal and external mobilities. As one of the poorest Soviet republics, independent Kyrgyzstan continued to battle with poverty and high unemployment, which pushed nearly 20% of its population to seek jobs internationally. Transnational families have become a norm for Kyrgyzstan that receives the equivalent of one-third of its GDP in remittances. Using the transnational perspective, I explored the role of migration in reconstituting 'family practices' (Morgan, 1996, 2013). In a multi-sited ethnography of family life between Alcha village and Yakutsk city, the study demonstrates the everyday lives of transnational family members maintaining ties across time and space. Treating families as groups of configurations, rather than households, the study illustrates the multitude of family and kin relationships and networks that family members are embedded in. Through the examination of remittances and monetary ties, communal celebrations, arrangements of caregiving in migrants' absence, the study describes the contradictory effects of migration. I argue that migration has dramatically transformed and reconstituted family life. Divided and fragmented, Kyrgyzstani transnational families continued to maintained strong ties with home. I demonstrate that transnational families coped with the contradictory consequences of migration that shifted the family meanings, practices, constitution, and architecture of Kyrgyz family lives. The dissertation argues that Kyrgyzstani families, characterized by extended family relations, are nonetheless increasingly engaged in nuclear family type of relations in the transnational social fields.
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com, coble-neal@bigpond, and Fiona Elaine Coble-Neal. "Post-compulsory curriculum reform and teachers' work: A critical policy ethnography in a Western Australian State Secondary school." Murdoch University, 2008. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20091117.130012.
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This thesis set out to examine how teachers understand, experience and respond to mandated curriculum reforms in English in years 11 and 12 at a Senior High School in Western Australia over the period 2004 2005. The time period is significant as it is a halfway point between the commencement of the new policy driving reform of senior secondary education and the partial settlement of the policy and curriculum reform. The research is conceptualised using labour process theory as a means of analysing how teachers are being separated from their intellectual work throughout this curriculum reform process. The methodology chosen to inform this research is a dual approach using critical ethnography of lived individual experiences and critical policy ethnography to analyse the changing landscape of education policy in Australia. This dual approach offers a system level of understanding of mandated curriculum reform with an emphasis on the individual experience of expert teachers implementing the contested curriculum reform.
Several central themes emerged over the course of the research: growing deprofessionalisation of teachers work; intensification of workload and curriculum creation; technocratisation of teacher roles; diminishing autonomy, increased accountability and responsibility; and heightened external surveillance and control. Significantly, the data also captured and analysed in this research demonstrates how teachers are continually experiencing the processes of reprofessionalisation as a consequence of sustained critical reflective practice and the imposition of mandated curriculum reform. The data also relates the need for an authentic consultation between teachers and policy makers/government authorities in order for curriculum reform to be successfully established and taken up in secondary State schools. The processes of reprofessionalisation are a source of continued professional renewal and reinvigoration for the teachers involved.
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Wang, Chen. "Highly Skilled Chinese Immigrant Women’s Labour Market Marginalization in Canada: An Institutional Ethnography of Discursively Constructed Barriers." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/42505.
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Canada has been active in attracting highly-skilled, foreign-trained workers to overcome its labour shortage, facilitate its economic growth, and enhance its global competency. While promoting gender equality in the workplace and advancing women’s labour market participation are ongoing focuses of Canada’s attention, the arrival of an increased number of skilled immigrant women and their marginalized experiences in the Canadian labour market reflects a critical problem that the underuse of highly skilled immigrant women’s professional skills might be a loss for both Canada and individual immigrants.
This research reveals the lived experience of highly skilled Chinese immigrant women in the Canadian labour market, and analyzes how the barriers to their career restoration were constructed. It adopts Seyla Benhabib’s weak version of postmodern feminist theory and Dorothy Smith’s Institutional Ethnography methodology. Based on interview data with 46 highly skilled Chinese immigrant women, this research identifies these immigrant women’s standpoint within the institutional arrangements and understands the barriers to their career restoration as discursively constructed outcomes. This research contends that the settlement services for new immigrants funded by the federal government fall short of meeting the particular needs of highly skilled immigrants who intend to find highly skilled jobs that match their qualifications. This research also makes recommendations for improving existing language training and employment-related settlement services in order to better assist highly skilled immigrants in using their skills to a larger extent.
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Alam, Aqeeb Rafi. "Doing Everyday Justice: labour, resources, and emotions in the community legal sector." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/21056.
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Community legal centres (CLCs) emerged from social movements organising for increased access to justice for disadvantaged Australians. Over the past decades, however, CLCs have become increasingly integrated into the mainstream legal system and derive the majority of their funding from state and federal governments. This has generated tensions between their frontline services in assisting clients with legal matters and their goals of systemic advocacy, law reform, and community education, particularly as conservative governments continue to limit the political activities of CLCs and threaten ever-impending funding cuts. This turbulent relationship between governments and CLCs has an impact on the everyday realities in these organisations, including the values, identities, activities, and actions of the people who work, manage, and volunteer in CLCs. This thesis will argue that everyday realities of work in the New South Wales CLC sector have a structural impact on the provision of services for clients and the community. By employing critical sociological perspectives on everyday life, organisations, social movements, and law and justice, this thesis will consider how CLC work practices aim to navigate tensions between resource scarcity, the chaos this produces in the sector, and organisational goals of expanding access to justice. This thesis will ultimately argue that to understand CLCs, we must examine how labour is recognised and alienated in the sector, how CLCs become fragmented as a result of government policy, and how CLCs mobilise power in intriguing, multi-faceted ways. This thesis expands the scholarship on social movement and legal organisations and reaches a sociological understanding on the relationship between labour, resources, emotions, power and the ‘doing of everyday justice’
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Hookham, Williams Claire Lesley. "47 square miles of globalization : an ethnography of 'skin close' emotional labour control methods at Walt Disney World." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.569896.
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Motau, Marjorie Disebo. "Love relationships, texting and mobility : an ethnography of cell phone use in intimate relationships among labour migrants in Cape Town." Thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/11394/3971.
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Magister Artium - MAThis thesis explores the different ways in which labour migrants in contemporary South Africa make use of cell phones in their daily lives to maintain their love relationships. I start by tracing the history of labour migration and show how the gradual change of migration has played a role in the assertion of labour migrants in their communities in Cape Town. I look specifically into the use of cell phone by Setswana and Sesotho speaking migrants in Delft, Thornton, Brackenfell and Gugulethu. While the focus of the research is on the role of cell phones in maintaining love relationships between migrants and the partners they left behind ‘at home’, I also show how the negotiation of the cell phone in the social lives of migrants helps build wider social networks. The value of the functions of the cell phone through employed communication patterns that encourage social relations and interactions are also the focus of this thesis.
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Saltalippi, Matteo. "Frames of class struggle : an ethnography about local labour and global capitalism during the 'ThyssenKrupp Acciai Speciali Terni' steel plant strike in Terni, Central Italy." Thesis, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 2018. http://research.gold.ac.uk/24091/.
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This thesis, which focuses on a prolonged period of unrest that took place at the TK-AST Terni steelworks in Central Italy in 2014 and addresses the ways in which labour activism contributes to the articulation of working class self-identification and consciousness. The thesis draws on anthropological approaches to class in a context of historical change that requires the Terni workers to engage in multiple and contradictory relations with local and global capital and with political entities. The thesis shows how contemporary labour struggles incorporate coercion and solidarity and demonstrates that the strike is reassessed as the main instrument of protest, while the Terni steelworkers’ political agency fails to resonate with traditional repertoires of class struggle transmitted through memories and narratives about a glorious past. Through visual ethnographic methods, the thesis explores the steelworkers’ engagement with their current possibilities: film and text draw on and illustrate the Terni workers’ search for visibility for their cause and show how the fragmentation underpinning the organisation of production is reflected in the different ways that contractors and blue and white-collar workers engage with the struggle, thus undermining the emergence of a united front. The thesis considers how new configurations and geographies of power undermine the pivotal role of local trade unionists and shape the demands of workers and the innovative forms of struggle they adopt to ensure media visibility. This leads to a proliferation of new forms of struggle that reflect the fragmentation of the Terni labour force even while they are pursuing the shared aim of safeguarding the future of the plant and the town. By analysing workers while they are stepping outside the boundary of the protected sphere of production and occupying public space, thereby transforming the economic struggle into a political one, the thesis demonstrates that the working class has not disappeared and highlights its relevance in the present socioeconomic landscape.
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Woolley, Jonathan Paget. "Rede of reeds : land and labour in rural Norfolk." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/273374.
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The central aim of this thesis is to provide a detailed ethnographic account of the human ecology of the Broads - a protected wetland region in the East of England - focussing upon how working lives shape and are shaped by this reedy landscape. In conversations about the management of the Broads, the concept of "common sense" is a frequent trope; encompassing a wide range of associated meanings. But what are these meanings of "common sense" in English culture, and how do they influence the peoples of England, and landscapes in which they work? This thesis addresses these questions ethnographically; using academic and lay deployments of common sense as a route into the political economy of rural Norfolk. Based on 12 months of fieldwork in the Broads National Park, this thesis draws together interviews and participant observation with land managers of various kinds - including conservationists, farmers, gamekeepers, volunteers, gardeners, and administrators. Chapter 1 dissects the differences between academic and popular understandings of "common sense" as a phrase, and produces an ethnographically-derived, working definition. Chapter 2 examines the attitudes of farmers, establishing "the common" as a root metaphor for social and practical rectitude, actualised through labouring in a shared landscape. Chapter 3 explores how the common is sensed, reflecting upon the diverse sensoria afforded by different degrees of enclosure on a single nature reserve. Chapter 4 explores how the concept of common sense intersects with a prevailing culture of possessive individualism, creating a fragmented society in the Park, wracked by controversies over management. Chapter 5 examines bureaucracy in Broadland - frequently cast as the very antithesis of common sense. In the conclusion, we return to the title, and ask - what do the reeds have to say about land, labour, and human nature?
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Gosling, Nicole. "Making Sense of Cattle: A story from farm to food." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Antikens kultur och samhällsliv, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-354672.
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This thesis explores how those involved in a mobile-slaughtering mode of beef production engage with, and experience cattle bodies throughout the beef producing process. These experiences are examined in relation to historical accounts of how people have experienced cattle bodies in both pre-industrialized and post industrialized modes of beef production. Furthermore, an ethnographic study of a Swedish mobile-slaughtering company was conducted, followed by analysis using hermeneutic phenomenology and the concepts of liminality and Ellis’ boundary labour (2014). This thesis has shown that cattle bodies are experienced differently depending on the context of interaction, and that these experiences are both similar and different from those in pre-industrial and industrial beef production. This research contributes to a larger body of research exploring human-animal interactions, and contributes to understanding the experiences of those who are engaged in beef production.
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Porras, Santanilla Laura Cecilia. "“Viviendo del Rebusque:” A Study of How Law Affects Street Rebuscadores in Bogotá." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/37305.
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In the last decades, scholars from different disciplines, ranging from economy to law, have tried to better identify and target the working poor in order to provide them with legal protection. Some have referred to categories such as ‘non-standard or precarious forms of employment,’ ‘informal labor’ and ‘popular economy’ to refer to the working poor. My dissertation questions those categories and their ability to target the workers most in need, as well as their underlying assumptions that the activities of the working poor are not regulated by law, but rather fall into a legal vacuum. Using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, I conducted research with one group of vulnerable workers (whom I refer to as street rebuscadores) in Bogotá (Colombia) to answer two main questions: 1) how can we better target and characterize the social grouping to whom the most vulnerable segment of the working poor in Bogotá belongs? 2) How do both State and non-State legal regimes, such as constitutional law, labour law and derecho de policía, interact to influence the productive strategies of the most vulnerable workers in Bogotá? Following Bourdieu’s theory of practice, I found that street rebuscadores constitute the most vulnerable segment of the working poor in a city deeply segregated by class, that they share a similar volume and composition of overall capital (or habitus) and that they share similar practices associated with that habitus. Following a legal pluralist approach, I also concluded that as a social group engaging in regulatory activities, street rebuscadores are situated in a semi-autonomous social field generating internal normative rules, but that is also vulnerable to rules from the larger social matrix in which it is situated. Within that semi-autonomous social field, the vulnerability of street rebuscadores is legally constructed and accentuated by the State, and existing regulatory frameworks are perpetuating and reproducing their condition, although not without resistance.
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Larsson, Jennie K. "Integrationen och arbetets marknad : Hur jämställdhet, arbete och annat "svenskt" görs av arbetsförmedlare och privata aktörer." Doctoral thesis, Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för samhälls- och välfärdsstudier, 2015. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-122907.
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Avhandlingen belyser vad som hänt i svensk integrationspolitik sedan etableringsreformen genomfördes 2010 och ansvaret för flyktingmottagandet överfördes till Arbetsförmedlingen. Utöver förändringen som Arbetsförmedlingens ansvar innebar medförde reformen också ökad marknadsorientering, införande av valfrihetssystem, villkorad aktiveringspolitik samt andra genomgripande organisatoriska förändringar. I fokus står aktörer som på olika sätt har makt att påverka hur integrationspolitiken görs i praktiken. Studien analyserar vad som händer när privata företag bedriver arbetsförmedlande verksamheter där ersättningen kopplas till uppnådda resultat. Vidare analyseras betydelsen av ”svenskhet” i görandet av integrationspolitik. Avhandlingen är etnografisk och det empiriska materialet består av intervjuer och observationer med individer som arbetar på arbetsförmedlingskontor, som etableringslotsar samt samhällskommunikatörer på utbildningsföretag. Genom att syntetisera teorier om gatubyråkratier med en intersektionell ansats visar avhandlingen att görandet av integrationspolitik också är ett görande av ojämlikheter som grundas i stereotypa bilder av ”svenskhet” och ”invandrarskap”. Studien visar vidare hur föreställningen om Sverige som jämställd nation påverkar hur politiken görs. I analysen framkommer att de strategier som arbetsförmedlarna utvecklar för att hantera de krav som ställs på dem, i form av aktivering och resultat, inte leder till att de nyanlända kommer närmare arbetsmarknaden. Studien visar även att privata företag prioriterar resultat, lönsamhet och satsar på de nyanlända som de lättast kan nå resultat med.This dissertation examines how Swedish integration politics have been affected by the Establishment Reform 2010 and the transfer of responsibility for refugee reception to the Swedish Employment Service. In addition to the changes wrought by the transfer of responsibility, the reform also brought an increase in market orientation, the implementation of systems of choice, a conditional activation policy and other fundamental organizational changes. The focus is on actors who, in different ways, have the power to influence how integration policy work is done in practice. The study analyzes what happens when private companies run employment service activities where financial support is contingent upon results, as well as the significance of “Swedishness” in the shaping of integration policy. The dissertation is an ethnographic one, and the empirical materials consist of interviews with and observations of individuals who work as employment service officials, establishment pilots, and civic orientation guides. By synthesizing theories on street-level bureaucracies with an intersectional approach, the dissertation shows that the making of integration policy is also a making of inequalities which are based on stereotypical images of “Swedishness” and “immigranthood”. Moreover, the study shows how policy-making is influenced by the perception of Sweden being a gender-equal nation. The analysis makes it clear that the strategies developed by the employment service officials, in order to live up to the requirements imposed upon them regarding activation and results, do not lead to newly arrived immigrants getting closer to entering the labour market. The study also shows that private companies prioritize results and profitability, and focus on the new arrivals with whom they can easiest attain results.
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Pastori, Bianca. "Agricoltrici per scelta. Percorsi di vita e di lavoro, saperi, pratiche e relazioni delle produttrici agricole a Primiero (Trentino orientale)." Doctoral thesis, Università degli studi di Padova, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/11577/3421832.
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Women farmers by choice. Life and work histories, skills, practices, networks among agricoltural producers of Primiero (Eastern Trentino region)
The research presents an ethnographic account of four women farmers' everyday work in the alpine valley of Primiero. The analysis is framed by a survey of peasant studies - especially in the italian anthropologic tradition - alpine anthropology and feminist studies of work and labour.La tesi si inserisce nel quadro del rinnovato interesse degli studi antropologici sull'agricoltura contemporanea descrivendo le storie di vita e il lavoro quotidiano di quattro produttrici agricole di montagna che vivono e lavorano nella Comunità di Primiero (Trentino orientale). Il resoconto entografico è stato inquadrato, nei capitoli introduttivi, da una disamina degli studi antropologici - sopratutto italiani - sul mondo contadino, dell'antropologia alpina e degli studi sul lavoro femminile.
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Lindeborg, Anna-Klara. "Where Gendered Spaces Bend : The Rubber Phenomenon in Northern Laos." Doctoral thesis, Uppsala universitet, Kulturgeografiska institutionen, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-179293.
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This thesis seeks to understand and explain gendered everyday life in the village of HatNyao in Northwestern Laos, specifically in relation to rubber cultivation, by using an ethnographic approach and methods. The ‘rubber boom’ is changing the landscape of Northern Laos, and in the process is reshaping gendered everyday life. Gender relations in the village of HatNyao are undergoing various transformations whereby previous gender structures start to erode. Additional changes will probably continue to occur, largely due to increasing labour shortages. Gendered everyday life in HatNyao is therefore ‘bending’ with the changes associated with rubber cultivation, as well as in relation to different spaces of the everyday and household diversity. The concept of ‘paradoxical gendered spaces’ is invoked to capture the ways in which the dimensions and activities of the everyday vary with, in particular, ethnicity and age. Most households in HatNyao have improved their living conditions due to rubber cultivation. Nevertheless, inequalities are increasing within the village: better-off households have improved their situation, while for others it has been more difficult to adapt to the new conditions of everyday life and rubber cultivation. As the number of villages introducing rubber in Laos is increasing, alongside the number reaching the crucial tapping stage, it is essential to understand how rubber cultivation in smallholder communities interacts with gender relations and the division of labour. There are thus both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ outcomes from introducing rubber in Laos, since it depends on the context, as well as on the diverse spaces of the everyday.
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Samuelsson, Tobias. "Children’s Work in Sweden : A part of childhood, a path to adulthood." Doctoral thesis, Linköpings universitet, Tema Barn, 2008. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-12580.
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Föreliggande arbete är en etnografisk studie av barn, barndom och arbete i Sverige. Studien var förlagd till två samhällen, ett på landsbygden och ett nära en stor svensk stad. I studien undersöks hur barndom konstrueras i dagens Sverige. I studien används ett barnperspektiv och fokus är på barnens definitioner av arbete. I studien undersöks hur barnen förstår de olika aktiviteter i vilka de deltar i sitt vardagsliv, vilka aktiviteter barnen menar är arbete och varför. I studien undersöks vilka motiv barnen har för att delta i de olika formerna av arbete. Sammanlagt deltog 100 barn i klass 4-9 i studien. Materialet till studien samlades in mellan 2004-2006. Materialet samlades i under ett fältarbete där metoder som gruppintervjuer, enkäter och tidsdagböcker användes. Material samlades också in med hjälp av deltagande observation, genom att barnen tog bilder med engångskameror samt skrev essäer och ritade teckningar. Dessa metoder användes för att öka barnens möjligheter att delta och påverka forskningsprocessen samt för att lyfta fram barnens perspektiv vad gäller arbete. Studien visar att arbete är ett mångtydigt begrepp. Barnen vidgar den traditionella betydelsen av arbete och använder två olika definitioner av arbete. Den ena är en definition där arbete jämställs med formellt, betalt förvärvsarbete, ett jobb. Den andra definitionen är mer inkluderande. I denna ryms både betalt, obetalt, formellt och informellt arbete. I denna definition inkluderar barnen dessutom utbildande aktiviteter såsom skola och fritidsaktiviteter vilka innehåller element av lärande. Detta arbetsbegrepp inkluderar således även olika former av identitetsarbete. Studien illustrerar att barnen genom sina aktiviteter bidrar till konstruktionen av barndomen samt understryker den roll arbete spelar i denna konstruktion.This is an ethnographic study of children, childhood and work in Sweden. The study was conducted in two communities, one rural and one urban, and it explores how childhood is constructed in contemporary Sweden. The study uses a child perspective and focuses on the children’s definitions of work. It investigates how children understand the different activities in which they take part in everyday life and which activities they understand as work and why. Furthermore, it investigates children’s incentives for engaging in various forms of work. In total, 100 schoolchildren in grades 4-9 participated in the study. The material used was collected during 2004-2006. During the fieldwork, material was collected through group interviews, questionnaires and time diaries, through participant observation and the use of disposable cameras and children’s essays and drawings. The methods were chosen to increase the children’s possibilities to participate and influence the research process and to highlight the children’s perspective on work. The study shows that work is a multifaceted concept. The children broaden our traditional definition of work, using two concurrent definitions. One definition equates work with formal, paid, gainful employment – a job. The other definition is more inclusive, accommodating paid, unpaid, formal and informal work. Moreover, in the latter definition, children also include educational activities such as school and spare time activities that involve an element of learning. Thus, various forms of identity work are also included in the concept of work. The study illustrates children’s contribution to the social construction of childhood and underlines the role work plays in this construction.
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CANDIANI, GIANLUCA. "HLJEB SA SEDAM KORA ovvero IL PANE DALLE SETTE CROSTE. Lavoro e identità tra i minatori illegali di carbone di Zenica (BiH): etnografia di una realtà post-socialista." Doctoral thesis, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10281/305212.
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Una vasca da bagno risale lentamente, come sospinta dal soffio di Madre Terra, dalle viscere di una collina metallifera nei pressi di Zenica, nella Bosnia centrale. Un carico di carbone fumante appena estratto è pronto per essere setacciato e caricato su un vecchio camion dell’esercito jugoslavo dalla squadra di minatori che opera in superficie. È così che, dalle profondità della terra dove trovano lavoro centinaia di minatori illegali bosniaci, nasce un florido commercio parallelo di carbone che andrà ad alimentare caldaie e cucine di migliaia di famiglie in tutto il Paese. Ciò avviene in totale assenza di contratti, norme di sicurezza, tutele assicurative o garanzie di alcun tipo per i lavoratori.
Nella città considerata una «Jugoslavia in miniatura», modello del socialismo reale, trainata dalla sua acciaieria (Željezara Zenica) e dall’indotto metallurgico-minerario (più di 50.000 operai), fino agli inizi degli anni Novanta a inebriare l’ambiente economico e socio-culturale era il senso di sigurnost (sicurezza) e di fiducia nel futuro, sprigionate da un paradigma lavorativo fondato sulla Samoupravljanje (Autogestione). Questo metteva al centro la figura dell’uomo-operaio, autentico simbolo del progresso e del miglioramento delle condizioni di vita e lavoro avvenuto nel secondo Dopoguerra.
La dissoluzione della Jugoslavia e la Guerra che ne è seguita, ha portato al collasso del sistema-vita in cui gli abitanti di Zenica hanno vissuto per 50 anni. I lavoratori dell’acciaieria e delle miniere statali sono stati espulsi in massa dal mercato del lavoro senza alternative valide a livello occupazionale, sfavoriti da un contesto economico che orbitava intorno a una sola cometa: l’industria pesante.
Alla luce dei profondi mutamenti occorsi in Bosnia ed Erzegovina nelle ultime decadi, come sono andati riconfigurandosi dal punto di vista lavorativo e sociale, le traiettorie esistenziali degli abitanti di Zenica?
Ho cercato di avvicinarmi a questo interrogativo analizzando il prisma dell’economia sommersa che, negli anni dell’ultimo Dopoguerra e dei piani di aggiustamento strutturali in chiave neoliberista (apertura al libero mercato, privatizzazione delle proprietà sociali, deregolamentazione finanziaria, de-sindacalizzazione delle imprese), ha guadagnato un ruolo di primo piano nell’intero panorama economico-produttivo bosniaco (Divjak & Pugh, 2013).
Attraverso l’etnografia e l’esperienza di lavoro con i minatori illegali di Zenica, ho cercato di indagare la situazione inerente al mercato del lavoro (in particolare l’estrazione abusiva del carbone) e i temi ad esso correlati quali disoccupazione, emigrazione, diritti dei lavoratori, corruzione, sfruttamento, genere e processi di produzione di illegalità in questo particolare contesto post-industriale, post-bellico e post-socialista. L’estrazione illegale dell’oro nero bosniaco, unitamente all’interesse per le questioni che riguardano il complesso e sfaccettato quadro economico-sociale e politico-culturale del Paese, mi ha portato ad intercettare il filone di studi delle Artisanal and Small Scale Mining (ASM), da cui la presente tesi ha attinto parte dell’impalcatura teorica.
Come primo progetto di studi in ambito europeo sulle ASM il lavoro non gode di una letteratura d’area cui appoggiarsi, pertanto l’impianto teorico prenderà spunto da più fonti, rinunciando ad ogni pretesa di esaustività. La speranza è semmai quella di contribuire al dibattito accademico cercando di rendere, attraverso l’etnografia, da un lato la complessità delle nuove relazioni sociali ed economiche legate ad un mutato universo di significati in cui agiscono gli attori del panorama estrattivo artigianale zeničano, dall’altro di presentare le prospettive future di un vasto mondo del lavoro illegale, connesso a scelte politiche ed economiche non solo di carattere locale ma soprattutto federale, nazionale e globale.A bathtub rises slowly, as pushed by the Mother Earth’s breath, from the bowels of a metallic hill near Zenica, in central Bosnia. A cargo of freshly extracted steaming coal is ready to be sieved, stowed in 50 kg bags, and loaded into an old Yugoslav army truck by the miners working outside. Here, from the depths of the earth where hundreds of Bosnian illegal miners find work, a thriving parallel coal trade is born, in order to feed stoves, boilers and kitchens for thousands of families across the country. This occurs in the total absence of contracts, any kind of safety regulations, insurance protections or guarantees for the workers. During the Tito period, this city was considered a «miniature Yugoslavia», a true model of real socialism, driven by both its steel mill (Željezara Zenica) and the metallurgical-mining industries (which employed more than 50,000 workers). Until the beginning of the nineties, the economic and socio-cultural environment was enhanced by the pervasive sense of sigurnost (security) and the confidence in the future, released by a work paradigm based on Samoupravljanje (Self-management). This was focused on the man-worker, an authentic symbol of progress and improvement of living and working conditions, which took place in the second post-war period. The dissolution of Yugoslavia and the consequent war led to the collapse of this life-system, known by the inhabitants of Zenica for 50 years. The steel mill and State mines workers were all expelled from the labor market without valid alternatives in terms of employment. They were also penalized by an economic context based on a single, great and bright direction: the “heavy” industry, fundamental and everlasting point of reference for thousands of workers and citizens. Considering the deep changes occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the last few decades: how the lives of the Zenica (the "Incandescent City") inhabitants have been set up again from a working and social point of views? I tried to approach this question by analyzing the condition of the underground economy. During the last postwar period and throughout the structural adjustment plans in a neoliberal view (for example, the opening to the free market, privatization of social property, financial deregulation, de-unionization of companies), this hidden economy has gained a leading role in the entire Bosnian economic-productive landscape (Divjak & Pugh, 2013). Considering the ethnography and my experience working with the illegal miners in Zenica, I wanted to investigate the situation of the labor market (in particular illegal coal mining) and the related issues, such as unemployment, emigration, rights of workers, corruption, exploitation, gender, conflicts, cooperative methods and illegal production processes in this particular post-industrial, post-war and post-socialist context. The illegal "private" extraction of Bosnian black gold, together with my interest in issues like the complex and diverse economic-social and political-cultural framework of the Country, led me to the specific studies of the Artisanal and Small Scale Mining (ASM), from which the theoretical framework of this thesis is based. As the first European study project on ASM, this work does not have a literature background to rely on, therefore the theoretical framework will be inspired by different sources, without claiming to be exhaustive. My aim (and hope) is to contribute to the academic debate. Through ethnography, I am trying to explain the complexity of the new social and economic relationships connected to the changed life meanings in which the artisanal miners of Zenica are working now. Also, I want to present the future possibilities for the large world of illegal work, deeply linked to political and economic choices, not only local but especially the federal, national and global ones.
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Ouahab, Alban. "Contester et Consentir : la mise au travail des membres d’une organisation alternative : le cas d’un supermarché coopératif et participatif." Thesis, Paris 1, 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019PA01E044.
Full textAbstract:
Cette thèse explore la question du travail dans les organisations alternatives et propose de répondre à la problématique suivante : « comment peut s’organiser le travail dans des organisations alternatives en dehors d’une logique capitaliste ? Une telle organisation peut-elle permettre de s’émanciper des formes d’oppression au travail ? » Le manuscrit s’inscrit dans les perspectives émergentes sur les organisations alternatives qui proposent un nouveau projet d’émancipation pour les études critiques en gestion. Nous proposons une approche anti-essentialiste de ces organisations et insistons sur l’enjeu théorique des imaginaires pour accompagner l’émergence des alternatives. Toutefois, nous soulignons l’absence de recherche sur le travail dans ces organisations. Nous mobilisons ici la Labour Process Theory qui a particulièrement étudié la question de l’aliénation au travail en expliquant le contrôle du travail par des dispositifs coercitifs et une fabrique du consentement. Classiquement centrées sur les conflits sociaux dans les usines, nous suivons de récentes perspectives qui appliquent la LPT à de nouvelles organisations. Nous présentons ensuite notre méthode ethnographique de trois ans au sein de la Louve, le premier supermarché coopératif et participatif de France. Les résultats montrent que le travail à la Louve se présente comme la construction permanente d’un équilibre entre contestation et consentement. Les membres de la coopérative s’organisent pour porter un projet contestataire vis-à-vis des acteurs traditionnels de la grande distribution. Un imaginaire commun est activement fabriqué, régulé et stabilisé pour obtenir le consentement des membres au contrôle de leur travail volontaire. Cependant, cette organisation du travail maintient des rapports de pouvoir au sein de la coopérative en séparant les coopérateurs qui contrôlent la politique alimentaire de l’organisation de ceux qui ne font que la mettre en œuvreThis thesis explores the issue of labour in alternative organizations to understand “how labour can be organized outside the logic of capitalism? Could it be a source of emancipation?” This research is anchored in perspectives on alternative organizations which emergence proposes a new emancipatory project for critical management studies. We follow an anti-essentialist view of alternative organizations and insist on the theoretical significance of conceptualizing imaginaries to develop those organiza tions. However, we note the lack of research on labour in those alternative structures. To bridge this gap, we draw on Labour Process Theory which particularly explore alienation at work. It explains labour control as the combination of coercive apparatuses and the manufacture of workers’ consent. While originally focused on factory life, we follow recent research on labour process in new contemporary forms of organizations. We then present our ethnographic fieldwork of three years in la Louve, the first new wave food coop in France. Our results show that labour at la Louve is the permanent equilibrium between contestation and consent. Members organize and unite to enact a rejection of mainstream food retailers. A common imaginary is actively manufactured, regulated and stabilized to secure members’ consent to the control of their workforce. This work organization is however not neutral but sustain power relations within the coop. It divides members between those in control of the food policy and those only enforcing this policy through deskilled manual work
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Humphreys, Alison Mary. "Massively Multiplayer Online Games Productive Players and their Disruptions to Conventional Media Practices." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2005. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/16119/1/Alison_Humphreys_Thesis.pdf.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores how massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), as an exemplary new media form, disrupt practices associated with more conventional media. These intensely social games exploit the interactivity and networks afforded by new media technologies in ways that generate new challenges for the organisation, control and regulation of media. The involvement of players in constituting these games - through their production of game-play, derivative works and strong social networks that drive the profitability of the games - disrupts some of the key foundations that underlie other publication media.
MMOGs represent a new and hybrid form of media - part publication and part service. As such they sit within a number of sometimes contradictory organising and regulatory regimes. This thesis examines the negotiations and struggles for control between players, developers and publishers as issues of ownership, governance and access arise out of the new configurations.
Using an ethnographic approach to gather information and insights into the practices of players, developers and publishers, this project identifies the characteristics of the distributed production network in this experiential medium. It explores structural components of successful interactive applications and analyses how the advent of player agency and the shift in authorship has meant a shift in control of the text and the relations that surround it. The integration of social networks into the textual environment, and into the business model of the media publishers has meant commerce has become entwined with affect in a new way in this medium.
Publishers have moved into the role of both property managers, of the intellectual property associated with the game content, and community managers. Intellectual property management is usually associated with the reproduction and distribution of finished media products, and this sits uneasily with the performative and mutable form of this medium. Service provision consists of maintaining the game world environment, community management, providing access for players to other players and to the content generated both by the developers and the other players.
Content in an MMOG is identified in this project as both the 'tangible' assets of code and artwork, rules and text, and the 'intangible' or immaterial assets of affective networks. Players are no longer just consumers of media, or even just active interpreters of media. They are co-producing the media as it is developed. This thesis frames that productiveness as unpaid labour, in an attempt to denaturalise the dominant discourse which casts players as consumers.
The regulation of this medium is contentious. Conventional forms of media regulation - such as copyright, or content regulation regimes are inadequate for regulating the hybrid service/publication medium. This thesis explores how the use of contracts as the mechanism which constitutes the formal relations between players, publishers and developers creates challenges to some of the regimes of juridical and political rights held by citizens more generally.
This thesis examines the productive practices of players and how the discourses of intellectual property and the discourses of the consumer are mobilised to erase the significance of those productive contributions. It also shows, using a Foucauldian analysis of the power negotiations, that players employ many counter-strategies to circumvent the more formal legal structures of the publishers. The dialogic relationship between players, developers and publishers is shown to mobilise various discursive constructions of the role of each. The outcome of these ongoing negotiations may well shape future interactive applications and the extent to which their innovative capacities will be available for all stakeholders to develop.
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Humphreys, Alison Mary. "Massively Multiplayer Online Games Productive Players and their Disruptions to Conventional Media Practices." Queensland University of Technology, 2005. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/16119/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores how massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), as an exemplary new media form, disrupt practices associated with more conventional media. These intensely social games exploit the interactivity and networks afforded by new media technologies in ways that generate new challenges for the organisation, control and regulation of media. The involvement of players in constituting these games - through their production of game-play, derivative works and strong social networks that drive the profitability of the games - disrupts some of the key foundations that underlie other publication media. MMOGs represent a new and hybrid form of media - part publication and part service. As such they sit within a number of sometimes contradictory organising and regulatory regimes. This thesis examines the negotiations and struggles for control between players, developers and publishers as issues of ownership, governance and access arise out of the new configurations. Using an ethnographic approach to gather information and insights into the practices of players, developers and publishers, this project identifies the characteristics of the distributed production network in this experiential medium. It explores structural components of successful interactive applications and analyses how the advent of player agency and the shift in authorship has meant a shift in control of the text and the relations that surround it. The integration of social networks into the textual environment, and into the business model of the media publishers has meant commerce has become entwined with affect in a new way in this medium. Publishers have moved into the role of both property managers, of the intellectual property associated with the game content, and community managers. Intellectual property management is usually associated with the reproduction and distribution of finished media products, and this sits uneasily with the performative and mutable form of this medium. Service provision consists of maintaining the game world environment, community management, providing access for players to other players and to the content generated both by the developers and the other players. Content in an MMOG is identified in this project as both the 'tangible' assets of code and artwork, rules and text, and the 'intangible' or immaterial assets of affective networks. Players are no longer just consumers of media, or even just active interpreters of media. They are co-producing the media as it is developed. This thesis frames that productiveness as unpaid labour, in an attempt to denaturalise the dominant discourse which casts players as consumers. The regulation of this medium is contentious. Conventional forms of media regulation - such as copyright, or content regulation regimes are inadequate for regulating the hybrid service/publication medium. This thesis explores how the use of contracts as the mechanism which constitutes the formal relations between players, publishers and developers creates challenges to some of the regimes of juridical and political rights held by citizens more generally. This thesis examines the productive practices of players and how the discourses of intellectual property and the discourses of the consumer are mobilised to erase the significance of those productive contributions. It also shows, using a Foucauldian analysis of the power negotiations, that players employ many counter-strategies to circumvent the more formal legal structures of the publishers. The dialogic relationship between players, developers and publishers is shown to mobilise various discursive constructions of the role of each. The outcome of these ongoing negotiations may well shape future interactive applications and the extent to which their innovative capacities will be available for all stakeholders to develop.
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Bruckert, Chris. "Stigmatized labour, an ethnographic study of strip clubs in the 1990s." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ52315.pdf.
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Bruckert, Chris (Christine Marion) Carleton University Dissertation Sociology and Anthropology. "Stigmatized labour; an ethnographic study of strip clubs in the 1990s." Ottawa, 2000.
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Pan, Darcy. "Laboring Through Uncertainty : an ethnography of the Chinese state, labor NGOs, and development." Doctoral thesis, Stockholms universitet, Socialantropologiska institutionen, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-134505.
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This study sets out to understand how international development projects supporting labor activism work in contemporary China. It focuses on the lived experiences of and relationships among a group of grassroots labor NGOs in the province of Guangdong, South China; intermediary NGOs in Hong Kong; and Western funding agencies that try to bring about social change in postsocialist China where the political climate is still highly restrictive and the limits of the state’s tolerance for activism are ambiguous and uncertain. Foregrounding the notion of uncertainty, this study investigates how state control is exercised by examining a specific logic of practices, discourses, and a mode of existence that constantly mask and unmask the state. More specifically, this study explores how the uncertainty about the boundaries of permissible activism is generative of a sociopolitical realm in which variously positioned subjects mobilize around the idea of the state, which in turn leads to articulations and practices conducive to both self-censorship and a contingent space of activism. Viewed as such, the idea of uncertainty becomes an enabler through which certain kinds of practices, relationships, and networks are made possible and enacted, and through which a sociopolitical realm of intimacy is constituted by and constitutive of these relationships, networks, and practices. Situated in the domain of uncertainty, this study examines the ways in which uncertainty, both as an analytical idea and an ontological existence, produces an intimate space where labor activists not only effectively self-censor but also skillfully map the gray zone between the relatively safe and the unacceptably risky choices.
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Neal, Timothy. "A labour of leisure : an ethnographic account of a village in rural France." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2015. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/10112/.
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This thesis contributes to the literature on lifestyle migration and the repopulation of rural areas by looking at British migration to rural France from the perspective of the social world that forms and of which they are part rather than the experiences of the migrants alone. My interest is the way in which a group of British lifestyle migrants have been incorporated into the village. In chapter one, I introduce the theoretical and conceptual framework informing my ethnographic methodology and in the following two chapters I develop the background to French rural history and the British citizen susceptible to such migration. In chapter four I discuss methodology and introduce the village of Alaigne where my fieldwork took place. From chapter five onwards I give prominence to examples from my fieldwork in a small village called Alaigne where I lived for one year. I have selected such material to illustrate my understanding of the processes through which the migrants find themselves part of a village community. Noting that integration does not mean being comfortable, in chapter five I suggest that integration in the village, albeit 'weak' or local, is real. Chapter six shows where this finds expression through shared desires for the village, my example being a concern with patrimoine, heritage. In chapter seven I develop this idea further to suggest that there is a category of practice I term public life, the practice through which village reproduces itself and something in which the British and other villagers partake, each finding in the other shared support for their own habitus. Chapter eight summarises the thesis and offers some suggestions for further research and conclusions. In this I suggest that in lifestyle migration studies we can re-conceptualise leisure as a form of labour. Alaigne's social life as a working, that is functioning, village requires labour to maintain it and the leisure cycle which public life manifests and reproduces is a co-production by a variety of villagers including those not present.
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Vesneske, Staci S. "School districts, labor conflicts, and framing processes : an ethnographic study." Online access for everyone, 2007. http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Dissertations/Spring2007/s_vesneske_043007.pdf.
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Varde, Abhijit. "Local looking, developing a context-specific model for a visual ethnography a representational study of child labor in India /." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1132682652.
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Sosa, Georgina. "Midwifery one-to-one support in labour : ethnographic study of midwife-led birth environments." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2016. https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/63941/.
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Background: This research is about midwifery one-to-one support in labour. One-to-one support in labour is associated with improved birth outcomes. Uncertainty exists however as to what it is that produces such positive birth outcomes. UK publications advocate the midwife to provide one-to-one support in labour, but research findings question their ability to focus entirely on women due to their medical, technological and documentation responsibilities. All of these studies were based within hospital environments and none were completed in the UK. This indicates a gap in knowledge concerning how midwifery one-to-one support translates into practice in the UK and within midwife–led environments. Methods: The aim of this research was to explore midwifery one-to-one support in labour in a real world context of midwife-led care. An ethnographic approach was completed over three case study sites (Alongside midwife-led unit, freestanding midwife-led unit and women’s homes) each including ten labouring women receiving midwifery one-to-one support in labour. Findings: Two main themes: Balancing the needs of the woman and balancing the needs of the NHS organisation. Inside the birth environment midwives used their knowledge, experience, intuition and motivation to synchronise six components. These included presence, midwife-woman relationships, coping strategies, labour progress, birthing partners and midwifery support. Outside the birth environment midwives experienced surveillance and territorial behaviours which were heightened during transfer from a midwife-led birth environment to the labour ward. Conclusion: When a ratio of one midwife to one woman was achieved, midwives were 100% available for a woman in their care. This enabled midwives to be constantly present when required and provide total focus to tune into the needs of women and synchronise their care. Although midwives balanced the needs of the NHS organisation this did not impact on midwives capability to be present with women in labour.
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Mmadi, Mpho Manoagae. ""Mzabalazo on the Move" : organising Workers on a Commuter Train in Tshwane -An Ethnographic Study of Mamelodi Train Sector." Thesis, University of Pretoria, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/2263/67406.
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In this thesis, I examine the centrality of travel geographies – with a specific focus on
urban commuter railway lines between Mamelodi and central Tshwane – and their
influence upon political identities of South African workers. By adopting a historical
approach to our understanding of the South African working class, the thesis brings
into sharper focus the relationship between the social dynamics of apartheid and how
workers perceived the concept of a train. These have permeated into the new era with
the formation of the Mamelodi Train Sector (MTS), as an organisation dedicated to
organising workers on the trains since 2001. The emergence of MTS in the era of the
neoliberal labour regime and its associated assault upon labour movements present
opportunities for labour revival strategies. Drawing on the data collected, I show that
the train can be used as a strategic site of mobilising, particularly for those workers
without workplace representation. By portraying the train as a site of worker power
and political consciousness, I accord primacy to the train as a space of potential union
revival. This is informed by educational sessions on labour rights and labour law that
take place on the train en-route to and from work. Because during these educational
sessions; workers ask workplace or problem specific questions, I suggest, such
questions are informed by the need to seek out useful information that can be utilised
to address specific workplace problems.
The theme ‘labour movement revival’ has gained global traction as labour scholars
from both the north and south grapple with the aftermath of globalisation on organised
labour. This has seen an increase in poverty, unemployment and inequalities in
countries such as South Africa. Labour revitalisation theme came about because, as
Beverly Silver correctly observes:
During the last two decades of the twentieth century, there was an
almost complete consensus in the social sciences literature that
labo[u]r movements were in a general and severe crisis. Declining
strike activity and other overt expressions of labo[u]r militancy, failing
union density and shrinking real wages and job insecurity were among
the trends documented (Silver, 2003: 1).
Reacting to the reality as described by Silver (2003), labour scholars, activists and
likeminded individuals set about to rescue the once militant labour movement from its
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perpetual decline. Drawing on case studies from various countries, author after author
sought to offer new ways in which the erstwhile flourishing trade unionism can be
restored to its former glory. This ethnographic study hopes to make a contribution to
this growing body of knowledge. By exploring the activities of the Mamelodi Train
Sector (MTS), the study attempts to show that the train can become a strategic locus
of worker social power.
By historicising the role of the train, it is possible to trace various phases of the ‘making
of the South Africa working class’ starting in 1652 (colonialism era). This was followed
by the period of mineral discovery, segregation and lastly, apartheid. These historical
epochs were characterised by an oppressive and racist capitalist industrialisation
process, which sough, as a point of departure to turn into cheap migrants the
indigenous populations of South Africa. This saw the advent of an elaborate
proletarianisation process backed up a battery of oppressive legislative measures.
Due to these conditions, a particular kind of trade unionism – social movement
unionism (SMU) – emerged in this context as response to the abuse, exploitation and
lack of industrial citizenship of the African majority both as workers and citizens of this
country. As an expression of black anger, SMU was primarily concerned with
liberating South African from the abuses of both the apartheid state and the racist
capitalist system operational in South Africa at the time. This saw black Africans being
accorded labour rights for the first time in 1979 and finally achieving democratic
majority rule in 1994. A social partnership was put in place with the militant labour
movement under COSATU entering into an alliance with the ruling ANC and SACP.
Post-1994, the SMU of the 80s faced new challenges with the advent of the neoliberal
labour regime as the ANC government adopted market friendly macro-economic
policies. The corollary presented the weakening of the labour movements as capital
put in place measure to counter labours organisational power.
This led to a crisis of representation as South Africa’s largely industrial unionism
struggled under the new work paradigm. Under the new work conditions,
casualisation, externalisation and outsourcing were adopted by capital with a view to
weaken labour’s traditional forms of power – associational and structural power. It is
this shifting terrain that required innovative ways to theorise and understand labour’s
attempts to ameliorate the juggernaut that became neoliberalism. Fracturing the
workplace as traditionally understood severely raptured worker solidarities. It is within
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this context that this thesis seeks to understand MTS and its locus of operation – the
train. The data collected shows that MTS plays a critical role in filling some of the gaps
left by the weakened SMU. By organising on the train, MTS provides a space of
articulation for the vulnerable sections of the workforce – those without workplace
representation. Drawing from the power resource approach (PRA), the thesis makes
a case for a need to expand our understading of workers’ assciational power. The
case of MTS demonstrate that workers’ associational power need not be limited to the
workplace.
Based on this, the thesis suggests that at the conceptual level, the train, due to its
strategic importance to workers’ daily travel, can substitute the meaning laden
workplace. Drawing on Havery’s concept of spatial fix, the findings demonstrate that
just like capital, labour is also capable of fixes. These are demonstrated by MTS’s
ablity to: (a) provide workers with a space for friendships and political influence, (b)
provide workers with a space of solidarity and belonging and, (c) act as a knowledge
hub. Herod argues that, much like capital, workers also have vested interests in how
the geographies of production are produced and configured. Therefore, workers can
arguably draw strength from this coach and radiate such strength outwards in order to
challenge capital’s spatial fixes. This, Anderson (2015) refers to as a resonant place.
Observations clearly show that workers actively seek out information that can be
useful in their lives. This is a form of agency that can be located at the level of the
individual – scaled at the body. This form of agency, however, needs to be understood
in its context – what Soja refers to as socio-spatial dialctic.Thesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2019.
National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Sociology
DPhil
Unrestricted
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Gayibor, Agnes. "Integration of immigrants into the Swedish labor market: An intersectional perspectiv." Thesis, Linköpings universitet, Tema Genus, 2015. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-118885.
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As an immigrant in Sweden, I connect this study to my embodied experiences in the labor market and reflect throughout this research as I discuss the experiences of other immigrants who struggle with labor market integration. This qualitative study focuses on the phenomenon of the integration of immigrants in the Swedish labor market from an intersectional perspective and from my position as an immigrant which enriches the discussions. I analyzed how immigrants are integrated into the Swedish labor market and how gender intersects with other human factors to influence labor market integration. The study was based on a reflexive ethnography methodology in which interviews and documentation studies were used in collecting the empirical data. A semi-structured interview guide was used during the interviews and the documentation study was focused on scrutinizing integration policy documents in Sweden. The findings provide a detailed account on the genesis of immigration policies and how they have evolved into integration policies in Sweden. It traces this from the 1950s when integration policies were intertwined with immigration policies. Also it provides an account of how the integration policies are implemented in Sweden focusing on the activities of two main organizations namely Arbetsförmedlingen and the Linköping’s municipality. Furthermore the findings highlights that, men and women experience labor market integration differently therefore there is the need for this subject to be studied from a heterogeneous perspective instead of a homogenous perspective. It also highlights that women’s gender intersects with other human endowments factors such as education, gender roles, marital status, language and skills that complicate their labor market integration. In addition the findings highlight the transnational lives of some of the participants who hold on to traditional ideologies from their countries of origin. Furthermore, immigrants conceptualized labor market integration according to their own understanding. The results shows that the conceptualization of some of the immigrants was similar to what is common in the literatures but there was one new conceptualization of the term labor market integration that can be added to the already existing conceptualizations.
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Pandeli, Jenna. "Orange-collar workers : an ethnographic study of modern prison labour and the involvement of private firms." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2015. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/83532/.
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Work routines are integral to prison life. One recent development, at the behest of the government, especially in privatised prisons, has been the contracting out of work by private companies to prison. This type of work is usually organised under the guise of rehabilitation, employability and skills development to help offenders enter the labour market upon release. This thesis aims to provide an insight into the experiences and everyday existence of what I term ‘orange-collar workers’ - prison inmates who carry out privately contracted work in a prison setting. The research uses an ethnographic approach to explore this phenomenon; forty semi structured interviews were conducted as well as participant and non-participant observation in a private prison, Bridgeville. The themes that developed through the fieldwork included boredom, unskilled work, humour, masculinity and hierarchical structures within the workshops. The discussion of these themes illustrates the mundanity, the lack of skill and the particular culture in the orange-collar workshops which is not conducive to rehabilitating prisoners as it does not acclimatise them to a real work environment. It is found that orange-collar work does very little in terms of rehabilitating prisoners. Instead, it merely provides them with the immediate benefit of keeping busy which is considered better than the alternative of being ‘locked up’. With regard to rehabilitation, the primary triumph of orange-collar work is preparing prisoners for low-skilled, low-paid work, dominated by hierarchical conflict, little autonomy and few prospects - the characteristics of the work most likely to greet them on release. This serves to reinforce their antipathy to the mainstream world of work and (coupled with their exposure to alternative avenues of earning money in criminality) only discourages many prisoners from entering legitimate employment. But prisoners admire the private firms who are utilising their labour. They respect the ability to make money by whatever means necessary and they see exploitation as part and parcel of economic success.
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Nawaz, Sajida. "Understanding the lives and labours of lone-mother students." Thesis, Liverpool John Moores University, 2016. http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/4533/.
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This study has explored the experiences of lone mothers and their labours as lone- mother students in Higher Education and en route to accessing Higher Education. The main aim of the study was to investigate barriers and constraints in provision of support for lone mothers wishing to study in Higher Education. The importance of education for lone parents has been well documented (Fryer, 1997; Scottish Office,1998; Powney et al., 2000), and there has been a plethora of research undertaken on Higher Education. However, the connection between the lone mother and education has not received much attention; little is known about the support that is offered to lone mothers whilst accessing Higher Education. Research by the National Union of Students (NUS) (2009) has shown that in many ways the responsibilities of mothering and mothers have not been considered by educational institutions as many courses operate in a climate of assumption that most students are free from family obligations of providing care. Due to lack of empirical research undertaken in this area, this study adopted a qualitative ethnographic approach to investigate the lives of lone-mother students. Furthermore, the study was conducted by an international student from Pakistan who is a lone mother herself and whose experiences also form a part of this research. An ethnographic approach was adopted and developed, to enable a holistic understanding of the lone mothers’ experience in Higher Education and specifically in relation to their cultural background. Hence, in-depth, semi-structured interviews were opted for to collect data. The research revealed in-depth knowledge about the relationships that the lone mothers share with their children, extended family, friends and with studies. The data suggested the need for socio - economic support for lone mothers in Higher Education. The qualitative inquiry method used in this study allowed for an examination of the phenomenon of ‘lone motherhood’. The depth, range and longitudinal nature of the data allowed to see contradictions or contrasts in the data (e.g. extrinsic/intrinsic motivations), as well as changes and developments over time (anxiety/self-esteem). The iterative approach also enabled emerging theories and concepts to develop and to be tested over time (e.g. ‘modelling’, ‘utopian’ narratives). Thus, the ethnographic approach enriched the possibilities of ‘grounded’ theorising, and also improved the possibilities of extending previous studies. Thus it indicates that lone-mother students’experiences of education are complex and therefore it is argued that the study of lone- mother students should be extended to conduct further research into different aspects of lone mother students in Higher Education.
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Avril, Emmanuelle. "Ethnographie des congrès politiques : le cas du congrès annuel du parti travailliste britannique." Paris 3, 1995. http://www.theses.fr/1996PA030029.
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L'objectif de la recherche est de comprendre comment l'identite du parti travailliste se construit a l'occasion de son congres annuel (congres de 1992, 1993 et 1994), le "parti politique" etant ici defini comme le produit de l'interaction de ses membres, sur lesquels le parti ainsi constitue a en retour des effets. L'analyse se concentre sur les participants au congres annuel, en ce qu'ils sont les agents de la construction de la realite du congres, et emprunte a des techniques d'enquete tres variees : techniques classiques de la politologie (entretiens et questionnaires) ou ethnographie (observation participante). Le congres, organe souverain du parti travailliste selon les statuts du parti, acquiert en outre une dimension rituelle tres forte du fait de son caractere annuel. Il s'agit de comprendre comment la diversite des representations contribue a la constitution de cette "entite" sociale qu'est le parti travailliste, simultanement groupe en interaction avec d'autres groupes et lieu d'une interaction entre des agentsThe aim of this research is to understand the process by which the identity of the labour party is being constructed during its annual conference (1992, 1993 and 1994 conferences), the "political party" being defined as the product of the interaction of its members on whom the resulting entity in turn has an effect. This analysis concentrates on the participants who are involved in the construction of the reality of the conference, and is based on a variety of research tools : from the traditional tools of political science (interviews and questionnaires) to those of ethnography (participant observation). The annual conference, which, according to the party constitution, is the sovereign body of the labour party, also acquires a very strong ritual dimension because of it is an annual event. The aim is to understand how the diversity of representations contributes to the construction of this social entity known as the labour party, which is simultaneously a group interacting with other groups and the place where different agents interact with one another
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Forrester-Jones, Rachel. "One step to freedom? : An applied social network and ethnographic study of people with long-term mental health problems resettled from hospital to the community." Thesis, Bangor University, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.283839.
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Xyrichis, Andreas. "The division of labour in day-to-day practice : an ethnographic study of health professional work in intensive care." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 2014. http://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/the-division-of-labour-in-daytoday-practice(0a08a5ae-2023-45c0-9238-f23062fe964d).html.
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This study examines health professional work in intensive care units (ICUs) aiming to draw out the associated interplay of context-specific factors and social processes through which clinicians accomplish their day-to-day practice. The study was conducted against a backdrop of political and public pressure for safe, quality and efficient healthcare, in which inter-professional work was argued as key to containing these challenges. The study has been theoretically informed by an interactionist perspective to the division of labour and has followed an ethnographic approach. Data have been collected through fieldwork in three London ICUs employing observation of actual and in situ practice complemented by interviews with health professionals. Findings indicated that in response to the critical and fluctuating nature of patients’ conditions in ICUs, day-to-day health professional work was organised in dynamic terms, in which professional jurisdictions were shared and disputed, influenced by professional care priorities, staff seniority and work urgency. Differing professional priorities regarding patient care posed a challenge to conventional professional boundaries, giving rise to inter-professional disputes. These were managed through interaction as they arose in day-to-day practice. Senior staff made confident claims over aspects of work and utilised direct communication approaches while junior staff evaded overt confrontation. Under conditions of intense urgent work, where patient deterioration was rapid and the potential for death was high, jurisdiction concerns appeared suspended as professionals coordinated their work through non-verbal and highly attuned interaction. Considered together, these findings indicate that health professional work in ICU operates within an intricate system of professions which is influenced by wider health policies and context-specific clinical exigencies, is prone to disputes over jurisdictions, and is accomplished through day-to-day discursive and tacit interaction. Through this study a deeper insight into health professional work in ICU is gained that can inform the development of more refined and resilient health policies. Understanding the ways in which health professional work is organised and delivered in ICU will help to equip clinicians with the insight required to shape the future of this service towards the provision of safe and high-quality healthcare.
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Baily, Heather Rose. "The Digital Labor Ward: Teleconsultation in Rural Ghana." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1586514278335033.
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Elliott, Michael H. "Economic Specialization in Sugar Cane Wage Labor: Ethnographic Case Study of a Rural Nicaraguan Community." Ohio : Ohio University, 2008. http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/view.cgi?ohiou1212519949.
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Wu, Ling, and 吴玲. "Migrant workers and informal economy in urban China: an ethnographic study of a migrant enclave inGuangzhou." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2013. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B50899673.
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China's internal migration has drawn extensive interest since the 1980s, and numerous studies have focused on migrant workers who are employed by the "world’s factories". However, less attention has been paid to migrant workers participating in the informal economy in urban China. In fact, the informal economy, which refers to income-generating activities that are not regulated by the state, has been estimated to have expanded dramatically over the past two decades, and migrant workers comprise the overwhelming majority of participants in the informal sector. These informals are mostly self-employed or paid employees working for informal factories hidden in the urban villages.
This study, taking an urban village known as Kangle village in Guangzhou as its research site, adopts an ethnographic method to understand the lives of China's migrant workers engaged in the informal economy. It attempts to (1) examine the institutional environment for the expansion of the informal economy in urban China, (2) understand the individual choices of migrant workers in terms of being formal or informal, (3) explore their economic performance and (4) discover whether the informal economy could represent an alternative for migrant workers to achieve upward mobility in receiving cities.
It is found that institutional factors, including policy practices of the state, regulation enforcement by local government and the relative autonomy of the migrant enclave all contribute to the development of the informal economy in urban China. Individual choices in being formal or informal are based primarily on participants' rational calculations comparing costs and benefits; howbeit these choices have actually been largely affected by the social networks of migrant workers. Migrant workers engaged in the informal economy receive relatively higher incomes than their counterparts in the formal sector. However, the higher monthly incomes for the wage employees in the informal economy can also be viewed as compensation for their willingness to undertake the risky, dirty, long-hour informal jobs. Social networks have also played an essential role in the economic performance of migrant workers in the informal economy. For instance, the strong social ties of migrant workers largely facilitate the process of becoming self-employed or migrant entrepreneurs by providing market information, financial support and labor resources. Also, the use of social networks reduces the transaction costs between different business owners in the informal sector where formal contracts are absent. Economic stratification among the migrant workers in the urban village is obvious, and a small number of migrants have achieved economic success by becoming self-employed or migrant entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, migrant entrepreneurship cannot continue to be a sustainable alternative for the majority of migrant workers to achieve upward mobility due to the vulnerability of the informal economy and the absence of institutional inclusion for the participants in the informal economy. It is thus suggested that society and government rethink and adjust current institutional settings to improve work conditions, promote entrepreneurship, and facilitate the formalization of the informal economy on the one hand; meanwhile initiate top-down reforms for the integration of migrant workers in both the formal and informal sectors.published_or_final_version
Social Work and Social Administration
Doctoral
Doctor of Philosophy
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Tarrabain, Chloe. "Identities in the margins : an ethnographic study of migrant agency workers." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2015. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/84596/.
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Migrant workers have long constituted a fundamental part of the hospitality sector in the UK. Taking up jobs such as housekeeping, kitchen portering and plate waiting, these workers have formed an essential yet undervalued role in the service economy. Typically insecure and low paid; such work is normally secured through a third party agency presenting a complex employment relationship between the worker, agency and organisational setting. It is this relationship that forms the focus of this PhD research, which aims to understand the daily experiences of migrant workers focusing on the dynamic relationship between power, discourse, subjectivity and work processes and the performing of identities in specific socio-cultural settings. The study draws on data gathered from a twelve-month full-participant ethnography in a hospitality employment agency to provide insights into the ways through which agencies seek to control workers remotely to craft migrant agency workers as compliant subjects. The research considers how contracting organisations use both regulatory and disciplinary practices to construct migrant agency as organisational non-members in order to sustain transactional impersonal relationships with them. Finally, the study explores the ways in which migrant agency workers negotiate their identities, drawing on a range of national, cultural, religious and moralistic discourses to craft acceptable versions of the self. The study suggests that the subject positions crafted from the discourses of the employment agency, contracting organisations as well as migrant workers own identity discourses often work in tandem to sustain and reproduce agency work and agency workers. This thesis offers three contributions which provide greater insights to the current understandings of identities, migrant labour and temporary employment. Firstly through taking an identities lens, the thesis has provided new insights into the control and regulation of migrant agency workers. Secondly, this thesis contributes to a more nuanced depiction of migrant agency workers’ identity work. Thirdly, the thesis sheds new light on how experiences of stigma and liminality are constituted and contested at the level of identity.
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Jones, Sean Wilshire. "Assaulting childhood : an ethnographic study of children resident in a Western Cape migrant hostel complex." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22433.
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Bibliography: pages 335-348.This study documents the lives of children between the ages of 10 and 15 years who reside in migrant worker hostels in the Hottentots-Holland region of the Western Cape. It focuses on three particular aspects of the children's lives: their domestic circumstances and relationships prior to their residence in the hostels; their experiences of everyday life in the hostels; and the quality, extent, and determinants of their education over time. The children's domestic circumstances before moving to the hostels had been disrupted in the extreme. This disruption took various forms, but was caused primarily by the participation of parents and other significant adults in labour migration. Consequently, the children's histories are characterised by high levels of mobility, where children themselves have migrated, by frequent separation from parents, and by high incidences of foster-parenting. Testimony by the children indicates that they have felt this domestic disruption acutely. A further consequence of the children's residential and domestic mobility has been regular interruptions over time in their schooling. Factors such as the frequency of the children's own movement, separation from their parents, devaluative attitudes towards education by temporary foster parents, and vicissitudes in their economic circumstances have meant that most of them have progressed less than half as far at school as they should have done. This is compounded at Lwandle by the state's refusal to provide a school for hostel children, and by the inadequacy of the 'self-help' teaching which takes place there as a result. The children's everyday lives in the hostels are examined in relation to the severe limitations on space and privacy which exist there. Particular attention is granted to children's perceptions of the hostel milieu, to the difficulties which parents experience in rearing children in the hostels, to parent-child relations, and to the games and other play-activities in which the children engage. Perhaps the most prominent feature of life in the hostels which emerged during the research is the frequency with which children are exposed to acts of extreme violence. The study documents both the children's accounts of this violence, and their diagnoses of it. In conclusion, questions are raised about the future of these children and others like them. Attention is also directed towards the potential for further research into childhood by anthropology and other social sciences. The study grants primacy to children's viewpoints over and above those of their parents and other adults in the hostels, and one of its implicit objectives is to demonstrate the value to anthropology of children's insights into social life. It makes extensive use of the children's own testimony, both written and oral, and of life history material.
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Humphreys, Michael. "An ethnographic study of the work cultures of two higher education faculties : reminiscing in tempo." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1999. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11503/.
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The aim of this thesis is to describe and interpret the professional life of academics in two higher education faculties, one in a Turkish university and the other in a UK Institute of Higher Education. This research employs the ‘culture’ metaphor to provide categories, models, and definitions to structure the longitudinal and contextual processes of the ethnography. ‘Jazz’ is also employed as an aesthetic, linking metaphor throughout the thesis, to illuminate the processes of ethnographic research, highlighting particularly, issues of reflexivity, representation, gender, and paradigm incommensurability. Data collection was by semi-structured interviews; participant observations; document analysis; and informal informant conversations. The resultant research account is subjective, socially constructed, interpretive, idiographic and impressionistic. It is constructed through the surfacing of core themes from qualitative data to create an interpretation of the plurivocal chorus of interviewees set against observational and documentary evidence. Both case studies answer the question ‘what is it like to work as an academic in this faculty?’, and are presented as narratives within an inductive theoretical framework. The study also provides a reflexive commentary, in a set of vignettes, where the author's presence within the text is overtly acknowledged and represented by an ‘I’ characterisation. The thesis attempts to extend the limits of organisational ethnography by applying three interpretive readings to the two ethnographic case studies. The readings are intended to enrich the case studies by: directly addressing the issues of researcher ‘presence’ and reflexivity; ‘empiricising’ the Hatch (1993) cultural dynamics model; and providing a ‘power and gender’ theoretical perspective notably under-deployed in the ‘culture’ literature. The thesis produces significant insight into rule-based bureaucracies and higher-education management behaviour, making suggestions for further research in these fields. The main conclusion, is however, methodological and concerns representational strategies within the ethnographic approach to the study of organisations. The thesis argues that, the combination of case studies and interpretive readings, in creating an idiosyncratic, paradigm-bridging representation of the two professional cultures, achieves additional subtle and penetrative organisational insights unavailable to traditional stand-alone ethnographies. The thesis concludes with an invitation to the reader, as a member of the occupational culture of higher education academics, to ‘sit in’ with the band for the last number and use their own improvisational skills and experience, to create a final ‘interpretation of the ‘culture song’
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DuBord, Elise M. "Performing Bilingualism: An Ethnographic Analysis of Discursive Practices at a Day Labor Center in the Southwest." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/195691.
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This ethnographic research examines the social implications of the ethnolinguistic contact that occurs in the U.S.-Mexico border region at a day labor center in Tucson, Arizona. I discuss the multiple values of English and Spanish in this setting and how individuals interpret and negotiate these values in the construction and performance of identity. More specifically, I analyze how discourses of linguistic capital shape the organization of this community and influence the dynamics of employment negotiations. The research setting includes immigrant day laborers (primarily from Mexico and Central America), employers who contract workers, and bilingual volunteers who act as language brokers between workers and their employers; all of whom use language to interactively negotiate their social status as they construct identities vis-à-vis other members of the community. My analysis reveals a discourse that places a high level of linguistic capital on Spanish-English bilingualism in the economic market. Although I have not found evidence that this linguistic capital has a real exchange rate into dollars, my data demonstrates that immigrants rapidly acquire and contribute to this locally constructed discourse. I explore the techniques that workers use to exploit and promote their language abilities through ‘performances’ of bilingualism that are realized not only to secure employment, but also for social positioning within this community of practice. Language, then, is one of the many tools that both workers and employers use in the construction of interpersonal relationships and social hierarchies. In addition, I analyze gatekeeping encounters focusing on the rapid employment negotiations that occur between day laborers and their employers, building on previous research with regard to the concepts of rapport, co-membership, and the presentation of an institutional self. Finally, I propose a model for the study of intercultural communication and contact that reflects the dynamic nature of contact and the complexity of overlapping categories of identity. Identity formation is a multiplex and multidirectional social construction that necessitates pushing beyond binary models of intercultural communication. Identity construction is informed not only by face-to-face interlocutors, but also by the linguistic ecology of dominant and subordinate discourses and the imagined individual and collective interlocutors they evoke.
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Humphreys, Alison M. (Sal). "Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Productive players and their disruptions to conventional media practices." Thesis, QUT, 2005.
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Summary
This thesis explores how massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), as an exemplary new media form, disrupt practices associated with more conventional media. These intensely social games exploit the interactivity and networks afforded by new media technologies in ways that generate new challenges for the organisation, control and regulation of media. The involvement of players in constituting these games – through their production of game-play, derivative works and strong social networks that drive the profitability of the games – disrupts some of the key foundations that underlie other publication media.
MMOGs represent a new and hybrid form of media – part publication and part service. As such they sit within a number of sometimes contradictory organising and regulatory regimes. This thesis examines the negotiations and struggles for control between players, developers and publishers as issues of ownership, governance and access arise out of the new configurations.
Using an ethnographic approach to gather information and insights into the practices of players, developers and publishers, this project identifies the characteristics of the distributed production network in this experiential medium. It explores structural components of successful interactive applications and analyses how the advent of player agency and the shift in authorship has meant a shift in control of the text and the relations that surround it. The integration of social networks into the textual environment, and into the business model of the media publishers has meant commerce has become entwined with affect in a new way in this medium.
Publishers have moved into the role of both property managers, of the intellectual property associated with the game content, and community managers. Intellectual property management is usually associated with the reproduction and distribution of finished media products, and this sits uneasily with the performative and mutable form of this medium. Service provision consists of maintaining the game world environment, community management, providing access for players to other players and to the content generated both by the developers and the other players.
Content in an MMOG is identified in this project as both the ‘tangible’ assets of code and artwork, rules and text, and the ‘intangible’ or immaterial assets of affective networks. Players are no longer just consumers of media, or even just active interpreters of media. They are co-producing the media as it is developed. This thesis frames that productiveness as unpaid labour, in an attempt to denaturalise the dominant discourse which casts players as consumers.
The regulation of this medium is contentious. Conventional forms of media regulation – such as copyright, or content regulation regimes are inadequate for regulating the hybrid service/publication medium. This thesis explores how the use of contracts as the mechanism which constitutes the formal relations between players, publishers and developers creates challenges to some of the regimes of juridical and political rights held by citizens more generally.
This thesis examines the productive practices of players and how the discourses of intellectual property and the discourses of the consumer are mobilised to erase the significance of those productive contributions. It also shows, using a Foucauldian analysis of the power negotiations, that players employ many counter-strategies to circumvent the more formal legal structures of the publishers. The dialogic relationship between players, developers and publishers is shown to mobilise various discursive constructions of the role of each. The outcome of these ongoing negotiations may well shape future interactive applications and the extent to which their innovative capacities will be available for all stakeholders to develop.
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Dillon, Jeanette M. "Toward a Better Understanding of Social Enterprises: A Critical Ethnography of a TOMS Campus Club." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1491320558214315.
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Fang, I.-Chieh. "Growing up and becoming independent : an ethnographic study of new generation migrant workers in China." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2011. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/373/.
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Based on anthropological fieldwork in factories in China’s Special Economic Zones (SEZs), this dissertation examines the process of ‘growing up’ and ‘becoming independent’ for young migrant workers from the countryside, especially in relation to their decisions about employment and marriage. In ‘post-socialist’ China, as many writers have observed, the old systems and ideas have not entirely faded away but new market logics have been imposed on them. Partly as a result of this, the process of achieving adulthood – i.e. the process through which young people should, in theory, learn how to position themselves as full members of society – is now filled with uncertainties. Old expectations about interactions with others have become invalid. This is especially so for young migrant workers from the countryside who, as I argue, possess a double social being, i.e. they are caught somewhere between childhood and adulthood, and who face the challenges of multilocality, i.e. they shift back and forth between rural and urban environments. For them, migration is a mandatory rite of passage, but one that often leaves them suspended in a position of liminality and uncertainty. The research found that young workers learn, in the course of migration, that manipulating personal networks is the most efficient way for them to get the resources they need – so that they can deal with the problems of uncertainty they face. They rely on the rather traditional mode of ‘interconnected personhood’, instead of developing what might be called ‘individualistic personhood’. Having said this, they are meanwhile enjoying the freedom, opportunities and symbolic values that individualistic personhood can bring them. They stand in between the two systems and typically avoid fully committing to one or the other. This is how they deal with risks and responsibilities within the constraints imposed by their background, gender, and class position.
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Kobayashi, Yusuke. "The Study of Japan's Economy with Reference to Ethnographic Publications and Quantitative Data." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/2143.
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The study is an informative presentation of both qualitative and quantitative values observable in Japan today. By utilizing two uniquely distinct fields of study, I hope to gain greater context of Japan’s economy and its contemporary challenges. With close focus on ethnographical studies, I hope to derive potential relationships and develop further context for quantitative results highlighted in previously published economic studies. Ethnography provides an intimate look into specific groups, culture or subcultures in Japan. With emphasis on close observations, interviews, and field notes, empirical studies like that of many ethnography papers provides an intimate scope into the lives of Japanese people. Detailed publications of Japanese people and their daily lives should be valued with equal relevance to that of quantitative results. Moreover, in response to the stagnancy and demographic challenges highlighted by policy makers and political parties, I believe the value of ethnographical publications will continue to grow. Japan struggled to develop effective policies to combat issues of falling birthrates, an aging population and shortages in labor.
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Connolly, Heather Margarita. "Exploring union renewal in France : an ethnographic study of union activists in SUD-Rail." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2008. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/2852/.
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This thesis considers the nature and extent of union renewal in France through an ethnographic case study of the breakaway trade union movement 'Fidiration des Syndicats Solidaires, Unitaires et Dimocratiques' more commonly known as SUD. The research was conducted in a local level union of SUD-Rail, a union which emerged in the French public railway sector in 1996 from an ideological split with one of France's largest trade union confederations, the Confidiration Franqaise Dimocratique du Travail (CFDT). As with other SUD trade unions, SUD-Rail emerged with the stated aims to renew and revitalize French trade unionism. In the context of trade union decline and even 'crisis', this research considers to what extent and how the union was able to extend its membership base, replenish activists, maintain links with workers and develop and sustain collective organisation, interests and identity, in spite of the external and internal constraints. The research presents a thick description of trade unionism at the local level and the findings show how activists make attempts to confront and renew existing practices and structures in trade unionism. Overall, the evidence suggests that, in support of existing research on SUD trade unions in various sectors, there has been a partial renewal of trade unionism in the railway sector from the emergence of SUD-Rail. SUD-Rail has been able to influence the industrial relations context and challenge existing trade union identities, practices and organisation. The union has been able to organise previously unorganised workers, replenish activist members and combine an engagement in local as well as more global issues. The research demonstrates how this was achieved through a continuous set of frame alignment processes where activists sought to legitimise and encourage some level of support in the union. However, this research brings to light the tensions in the approach adopted by the SUD unions. To an extent the union could be seen to be reproducing features of the very form of unionism that it sought to confront, including low membership levels and tendencies towards institutionalisation and bureaucracy. This research shows that there are limits to renewal and revitalization which reflect the context of industrial relations and traditions in trade unionism in France. However, they also reflect the universal and perennial dualisms within trade unionism between democracy and bureaucracy and between movement and organisation. This research has shown how these tensions are dealt with in the day-to-day of activities in SUD-Rail. This thesis contributes an in-depth study of the social processes of developing and sustaining trade union renewal in France. The research develops the union renewal debate by helping to further understand how the choices and actions of actors mediate and influence the processes towards building and sustaining collective organisation and identity. The thesis demonstrates the utility of the framing processes concept for organising and analysing the ways in which collective interests and identity are or are not developed and sustained, which has important implications for the prospects of building and sustaining trade union renewal.
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Bax, Trent Malcolm. "Sex and work in the city: Shanghai's service industry and the Chinese Modern Project: an ethnography of Chinesehairdressers and Australian blokes." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2007. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B39558149.
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Hjorth, Isis Amelie. "Networked cultural production : filmmaking in the Wreckamovie community." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c5baae87-6667-463a-bef2-b22d25c75896.
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This thesis challenges core assumptions associated with the peer production of culture using the web-based collaborative film production platform Wreckamovie to understand how peer production works in practice. Active cultural participation is a growing political priority for many governments and cultural bodies, but these priorities are often implemented without a basis in empirical evidence, making it necessary for rigorous scholarship to tackle emerging networked cultural production. Existing work portrays peer production efforts as unrealistically distinct from proprietary, market-based production, incorrectly suggesting that peer production allows distributed, non-monetarily motivated, collaboration between self-selected individuals in hierarchy-free communities. In overcoming these assumptions, this thesis contributes to the development of a consolidated theoretical framework encompassing the complicated and multifaceted nature of networked cultural production. This theoretical framing extends Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production and reconciles it with Becker’s Art Worlds framework, and further embeds and draws on Benkler’s notion of commons-based peer production. Concretely, this research tackles the emergence of new collaborative production models enabled by networked technologies, and theorizes the tensions and challenges characterizing such production forms. Secondly, this thesis redefines cultural participation and considers the divisions of labour in online filmmaking materializing from the interactions between professional and non-professional filmmakers. Finally, this study considers the social economies surrounding networked cultural production, including crowdfunding, and characterizes associated conversions of capital, such as the conversion of symbolic capital into financial capital. Methodologically, this thesis employs an embedded case study strategy. It examines four feature film productions facilitated by the online platform Wreckamovie, as well as the online community within which these productions are embedded. The four production cases have completed all production stages, and have resulted in completed cultural goods during the course of data collection. This study’s findings were derived from two and half years of participant observations, interviews with 29 Wreckamovie community and production members, and the examination of archived production-related discourses (2006-2013). Ultimately, this study makes concrete proposals towards a theory of networked cultural production with clear policy implications.
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Kennedy, John. "Minding their own business : an ethnographic study of entrepreneurship in Putin's Russia." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2017. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/7305/.
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Russian entrepreneurs have long faced considerable difficulties. While much is known about what these difficulties are, less is known about how entrepreneurs respond to them, what it is like to be an entrepreneur under these circumstances and why they bother in the first place. In this thesis I address these questions by conducting a multi-sited ethnography within three small Siberian enterprises, observing the directors as they conduct their everyday business. I find that these entrepreneurs all resent their vulnerable position in the political economy but that they have developed a capacity to survive or thrive in spite of the obstacles and threats they encounter. This capacity, I argue, is less a consequence of their commercial acumen than their understanding of what can be achieved given their particular circumstances, their knowledge that business-state relations take an informal, personalised form, and their preparedness to resist predatory outsiders. This leads me to reconsider the meaning of entrepreneurship in the Russian context. Furthermore, my informants’ agency presents a challenge to the idea in predominant political economic theories that the Russian state dominates the private sector. I therefore reconceptualise business-state relations using Douglass C. North et al’s Limited Access Order theory in combination with my empirical materials. This provides a more accurate theory that accepts the pre-eminent role of the state in the political economy while accommodating the agency displayed by my informants.
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Raftery, David Jonathon. "Competition, conflict and cooperation : an ethnographic analysis of an Australian forest industry dispute." Title page, contents and abstract only, 2000. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09ARM/09armr139.pdf.
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Bibliography: leaves 135-143. An anthropological analysis of an industrial dispute that occurred within the East Gippsland forest industry, 1997-1998 and how the workers strove to acheive better working conditions for themselves, and to share in the wealth they had created.