Class Conflict (class + conflict)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Can Growth Ease Class Conflict?

ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 1 2002
E. Somanathan
This paper proposes a theory that links labor supply to wage growth and economic growth, and the conflict of interest between capital and labor. During the early stages of industrialization of a country, "surplus" labor drawn from the traditional sector of the economy is available to the modern capitalist sector at a constant or only slowly rising wage. As industrialization proceeds, this labor surplus vanishes, leading to wages rising in tandem with the growth of output. As long as there is surplus labor, workers in the modern capitalist sector, who are organized, have little interest in growth as it does not raise wages. The effect of growth is external to them, simply drawing more workers into the capitalist sector and enabling the entrants to receive rents. So capitalist-sector workers would like to redistribute income regardless of the adverse effect on growth. Once the economy grows enough for the subsistence sector to vanish, further growth raises wages. Hence, this change in the structure of the economy leads to a reduction in the intensity of the labor,capital conflict. The dual economy model implies that growth rates rise over time and fall after the exhaustion of the labor surplus which is consistent with the stylized fact of economic growth. [source]


Working in and around the ,chain of command': power relations among nursing staff in an urban nursing home

NURSING INQUIRY, Issue 1 2002
Lori L. JervisArticle first published online: 3 APR 200
Working in and around the ,chain of command': power relations among nursing staff in an urban nursing home By most accounts, the discipline of nursing enjoys considerable hegemony in US nursing homes. Not surprisingly, the ethos of this setting is influenced, in large part, by nursing's value system. This ethos powerfully impacts both the residents who live in nursing homes and the staff who work there. Using ethnographic methods, this project explored power relations among nursing assistants and nurses in an urban nursing home in the United States. Factors contributing to tensions among nursing staff were the stigma attached to nursing homes and those who work in them, as well as the long history of class conflict and power struggles within the discipline of nursing. The latter struggles, in turn, reflected nursing's quest for professional status in the face of medicine's hegemony over health-care. Ultimately, these factors coalesced to produce a local work environment characterized by conflict , and by aides' resistance to nurses' domination. [source]


Remaking Work, Remaking Space: Spaces of Production and Accumulation in the Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1865,1920

ANTIPODE, Issue 2 2002
Jason W Moore
The era of US capitalist development between 1865 and 1920 offers a good opportunity to analyze the relational nature of social change at multiple scales precisely because it was a time of transition, for US and world capitalism alike. Existing accounts of the transition to monopoly capitalism in the US have focused on one or two geographical scales, such as the national economy or the shop floor. In this literature, scales are essentially treated as "containers" within which social change occurs. The possibility that the containers themselves may be fundamentally altered is not addressed. In contrast, this paper views labor process transformations, and transformations of the social division of labor, as dialectically bound. In particular, I seek to explain how the American transition to monopoly capitalism shaped, and was shaped by, class conflict and competitive pressures at multiple scales,the shop floor, the region, and the national and global divisions of labor. [source]


Falling Apart at the Margins?

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 5 2009
Neighbourhood Transformations in Peri-Urban Chennai
ABSTRACT This article explores the peri-urban dynamics in developing cities using a theoretical examination of the metropolis as the new urban condition. Although a western conceptualization, the notion of the metropolis, and particularly metropolitan planning, was exported to the developing world to address its urbanization problems. Metropolitan development authorities were established for wider city regions and accorded legislative powers to prepare master plans for the metropolitan areas. However, in most instances, their planning strategies resulted in a conflation of the urban,rural interface into a more complex peri-urban condition, marked by heterogeneity and fragmentation. The article illustrates this through an empirical investigation in the Indian city of Chennai, where socio-spatial transformations of two borderland neighbourhoods on its southern periphery are assessed mainly in terms of metropolitan planning decisions over the decades. In outlining their metamorphosis, the study is careful not to perceive such conflicts as simple forms of polarization between the rich and the poor. Rather, it sets the class conflicts against the politico-economic dynamics yielding newer forms of polarization in the peri-urban spaces. [source]