Home  About us  Contact
 

Labor History (labor + history)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Doing Labor History: Feelings, Work, Material Power

THE JOURNAL OF THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY, Issue 3 2005
John Womack Jr.
[source]

Gender and United States Citizenship in Nation and Empire

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2006
Beatrice McKenzie
In the past twenty years, women's history, ethnic studies, colonial studies, and labor history have so impacted the field of gender and citizenship that most new scholarship successfully incorporates issues of race, gender and, to a lesser extent, class. The study of sexuality and the impact of globalization on citizenship are important new directions for the field. A deep theoretical divide exists between those who believe that American citizenship has become progressively more inclusive over time and those who believe citizenship is based upon the exclusion of some to the detriment of all. [source]

The Making of American Working-Class Literature

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2008
Janet Zandy
This essay traces a line of American literary history that emerges from the lives of workers. Starting with early ballads and songs from indentured servants and enslaved blacks and concluding with contemporary multicultural writing, it documents a process of cultural formation that is embedded in class relationships and struggles. Events in labor history and conditions of unsafe work become the subjects for cultural expression as poems, songs, stories, and novels at the time of the event and as reclaimed cultural/labor antecedents by future generations. The writing shows a reciprocal worker visibility across time and across race, gender, and ethnic differences. The continuous thread is struggle , for physical and material sustainability , and for the right of human expression. Drawing on the chronology of working-class writing from the anthology, American Working-Class Literature (co-edited with Nicholas Coles, Oxford University Press), the author shows how American working-class literature is at once a literary line, a body of work, and a labor line, the work of bodies. [source]

Skills and selves in the new workplace

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2008
BONNIE URCIUOLI
ABSTRACT In the neoliberal imaginary of contemporary capitalism, workers' employment value depends on their skills. Skills terms, especially communication, team, and leadership, formulate aspects of personhood and modes of sociality as productive labor. The key semiotic properties of skills terms are strategic indexicality (expressing alignment with corporate values) and denotational indeterminacy (knowledge and practices referred to as skills are quite disparate). Yet all skills are assumed to be commensurable and readily available for inculcation into workers. Drawing from Internet sites marketing skills-related services, I explore the semiotic properties of discourses that facilitate skills' commensurability and commodification. [neoliberalism, discourse analysis, corporate culture, labor history, communication, commodification] [source]