Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

As migrant Filipina mothers embark on domestic labor abroad, their children respond in novel and dynamic ways to the work that needs doing within their households. Such work includes caring for siblings and responding to parents’ emotional and marital struggles. This labor emerges from the feminization of the global labor market, which leaves a care slot that young people register and work to fill. Attention to young people’s perspectives on their families and to their enactments of what I call “tender labor” recasts ongoing discussions about care work by highlighting how young people actively participate in the processes of transnational family separation and reunification. A pair of case studies reveals the impact of care extraction in the recesses of domestic life, as children struggle to mitigate the precarity of life for themselves and their loved ones.

By indexing several key variables in the industry to the “ficha,” the taxi fare multiplier, Buenos Aires’ taxi union recreated economic, fiscal, and legal relations emerging from taxi work. In principle a perfect example of a market device, an actant facilitating economic exchange, the ficha consistently transformed the taxi industry’s income uncertainties into certainties for the union, abstracting its income from wages, contracts, and the amount or value of work. Examining this case study from a political economy approach, I propose the trope of inscription to understand how structural inequalities can be written into the market devices that reproduce them. The political economy approach is a powerful complement to market devices as emergent technologies revolutionize the nature, quality, and management of work in ways shown to reproduce and naturalize hierarchies.

This article focuses on the rise of domestic outsourcing in the high-tech industry in the Galilee in northern Israel. Outsourcing has emerged as a self-proclaimed mode of development targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel. This industry has expanded significantly in the past decade, attracting lucrative funds from public and private sources, and it has received widespread acclaim. Firms in this industry tend to have ties to the Israeli security establishment, a key player in the architecture of high-tech in Israel. At the same time, a Palestinian capitalist class has coalesced around this industry, embracing the discourse of technology and globalization as forms of self-empowerment. I argue that separation—in terms of wages and physical spaces—is a core operational characteristic within this industry, yet firms simultaneously invoke development as part of their organizational cultures, particularly the integration of Palestinian labor into the Israeli economy, empowerment of women, and peacemaking. Locating the practice of domestic outsourcing within a history of subcontracting to the Galilee, I illustrate that this “new” and “innovative” industry builds on established patterns that reinscribe Palestinian workers as a cheaper labor force. These practices illustrate the intertwinement of inclusion and exclusion within neoliberal economic development as well as the mutual production of Palestinians of 1948 as subjects of Israeli capitalism and colonialism.

In recent decades, activation has become the paradigm of European social policy. This is a move that many scholars have decried as part of the neoliberalization of the continent's once-robust welfare states. Much of the scholarship on activation, however, has focused on the formal and legal dimensions of policy change, obscuring how activation policies function at the level of everyday life and thus what they actually represent with respect to the broader economic and political shifts remaking contemporary Europe. This article, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Norway between 2015 and 2016, examines one increasingly common activation scheme, the mandatory job-seeker course. While confirming that the courses propagate a neoliberal rhetoric of the “sellable self,” ethnographic evidence contests the notion that this rhetoric is itself evidence of a broader ideological shift within Norway. In fact, the opposite is the case. This rhetoric is not only continuous with a longstanding elite understanding of Norway as an “active society” but also potentially beneficial to the country's universal welfare state. Ultimately, this article argues that insofar as neoliberal rhetoric helps Norway’s unemployed overcome feelings of moral abjection and social disorientation to search for formal, tax-generating employment, it protects rather than undermines the social democratic order.

There is a growing consensus that emerging forms of flexibilized platform labor (e.g., Upwork, Uber) necessitate new forms of mobilization to resist exploitation, given workers’ atomization and lack of statutory rights. However, Euro-American concerns about radical reductions in labor security are countered by workforces in the “near South,” where precarious, unprotected work has long been the norm. I explore incrementalist organization in motorcycle taxi (ojek) drivers’ resistance to the flexible labor regime of Go-Jek, an Indonesian ride-hailing app. I examine ojek pangkalan (older-style informal-sector drivers) and Himpunan Driver Bandung Raya (HDBR, a grassroots app-based driver association) in the city of Bandung. Although antagonistic toward each other, ojek pangkalan and HDBR employ similar improvisatory strategies, notably micro-territorial basecamps and grassroots social security, to establish claims to their working lives. Incrementalist strategies in Indonesia are thus highly flexible in helping workers manage precarity across formal and informal contexts. By examining organization repertoires among app-based and older-style ojek drivers, this paper contributes to discussions about how the precarity of platform labor is produced and managed in a global context.

Background: Wixela^® Inhub^® is a dry powder inhaler approved as a generic equivalent to Advair^® Diskus^® (fluticasone propionate [FP]/salmeterol fixed-dose combination) for patients with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). This study aimed at confirming the local (lung) therapeutic equivalence of both the FP and salmeterol components of Wixela Inhub (test [T]) to Advair Diskus (reference [R]) after inhalation. Methods: This randomized, double-blind, double-dummy, placebo-controlled, parallel-group study in patients ≥18 years with mild-to-moderate persistent asthma compared the local therapeutic equivalence (using forced expiratory volume in 1 second [FEV₁]) of FP/salmeterol (100/50 μg) after inhaled delivery via T and R. Results: Randomized patients (N = 1127) received T (n = 512), R (n = 512), or placebo (n = 103). T and R significantly increased day 1 FEV₁ area under the effect curve over 12 hours of the change from baseline (AUC_[0-12]) and day 29 trough FEV₁ over placebo, indicating that these endpoints were sufficiently sensitive for evaluation of bioequivalence. On day 1, T and R each increased FEV₁ AUC_(0-12) over placebo (3.134 L•h [T], 2.677 L•h [R]; each p < 0.0001). Following twice-daily dosing for 28 days, T and R also each increased trough FEV₁ (measured on day 29) over placebo (235 mL [T], 215 mL [R]; each p < 0.0001). Least-squares mean T/R ratios (90% confidence intervals) for day 1 FEV₁ AUC_(0-12) and day 29 trough FEV₁ were 1.120 (1.016-1.237) and 1.069 (0.938-1.220), respectively, indicating that T and R were bioequivalent for both co-primary endpoints. FP/salmeterol was well tolerated when administered via either T or R. Conclusions: These results demonstrate that the therapeutic effects of Wixela Inhub are bioequivalent to Advair Diskus in the lung. Wixela Inhub represents a therapeutically equivalent new FP/salmeterol treatment option for use in the treatment of asthma and COPD.