Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

This special issue focuses on the work lives of individuals with jobs that take place on and around boats. This introduction to the special issue “Working on Water” provides an overview of the long history of anthropological research on forms of human work that take place in and around salt and fresh bodies of water, such as food harvesting, watercraft construction, and transportation. It also discusses links between the multidisciplinary “mobilities turn” and research on aquamobilities. The last section introduces the ethnographic papers included in this issue of the journal, which focus on various sectors, including seafood harvesting, coastal tourism, passenger and vehicle ferries, and cargo transportation.

This article is an autoethnographic account of growing up and learning to labor on a commercial fishboat. It explores the intersection of labor and masculinity in British Columbia's fishing industry of the 20th and 21st centuries.

This paper focuses on activist labor organizing in call centers in Argentina. Following a strong tradition in anthropology that has debated the nature of resistance, it discusses previous explanations for labor organizing in call centers, critiquing the common assumption that labor conditions, work processes, and the relations that take place on the shop floor constitute the seed from which forms of resistance, protest, or activism progressively emerge. Instead, this paper describes the relations, practices, and tensions through which multiple actors came together to turn call center working conditions into a cause for political action in Argentina and the collaborations that made that process possible. Based on fieldwork with call center activists between 2012 and 2013, this paper reconstructs the forms of collective organization that established the problem of poor working conditions in call centers as a cause for political action.

This article contributes to the anthropological discussion on precariousness and labor precarity, with regard to temporality, potentiality, and subjectivity, by examining how asylum-seeking accounts intersect with, interrupt, and, above all, inform people's everyday labor activities outside the asylum process. Drawing on my ethnographic research among Nepali migrants and asylum seekers in the United States, I document people's adoption of a familiar sociocultural understanding of “the work of making paper” and retrospective logic to describe their subjective entanglement with the asylum documentation process and their impending labor subordination. I argue that it is through asylum-seeking work that people participate in and inhabit the precarization process, sustaining and exacerbating, in some cases, their precarious working lives. In this sense, asylum-seeking work involves a subjective transformation of asylum seekers into precarious “claimant-workers,” providing the condition of possibility for labor precariousness.

This article explores how two steel industry firms operating in northern Spain have adapted to neoliberalism and globalization. Despite their geographical proximity, the comparison between their different trajectories, production, and ownership profiles highlights how their distinct factory regimes, while becoming entangled in global market dynamics, have allowed the emergence of contrasting definitions of workers’ identities, labor politics, and livelihood strategies, raising questions concerning (1) processes of distribution of privileges, skills, and knowledge among the workforce, and (2) the shaping of social relations, values, and meanings that result in the formation of particular factory regimes. The unequal position of steelmaking in regional economies, and the effects of economic policies that framed social relations in each firm, evince important differences between them, including contrasting expressions of resistance, discipline, and sociality on the shop floor. Our comparison considers how particular factory regimes bring forward different prospects as these firms face further industrial transformation, restructuring, and an increasingly uncertain future.