Lisa Adkins

This article argues that the special relationship that Sociology has with the empirical is changing. The change in this relationship is not simply because our tools and methods for ‘knowing’ the empirical or social reality have changed, nor because new theory demands a new take on reality. Nor does this shift amount to a simple reassertion of the adage that the empirical is socially or culturally constructed and therefore open to contestation. Instead, this article raises the possibility that the changing relationship between Sociology and the empirical is to be understood in terms of changes in what the empirical is and how it matters.

Issues of measure and value are emerging as central in current debates concerning the capacity of social science and cognate disciplines to engage contemporary social and cultural life. Debates on the restructuring of time, scale, number, pattern and sequence, for example, as well as those on the changing character and properties of data, evidence and the empirical, point to a need for a re–evaluation of the conventions, devices and practices of measure and value in the social sciences and humanities. Do we need new forms of measure? And what do different forms of measure do? This Sociological Review monograph addresses these and related questions to place issues of measure and value at the core of contemporary social science debate.

This article concerns workfare and especially mandatory work activities for the unemployed. It focuses on the UK government’s Work Programme and recent challenges regarding its lawfulness. Drawing on the resources of actor network theory, and especially the economization approach to the study of markets, it outlines how the Work Programme is configuring a market for the labour of the unemployed, including a space of calculation in regard to that labour. The argument advanced is that the law and its instruments are part of the process of market making, contributing to both its design and calibration. This article therefore locates the law as an actor involved in the assembly of a market for the labour of the unemployed. It also foregrounds what is missing from recent debates on workfare, namely, an account of how the activities of the unemployed are configured and framed as labouring activities.

This special issue poses the question: what is the empirical? More specifically, it raises this question for the discipline of Sociology. This question, we believe, is a vital one to pose in our current juncture which witnesses two seemingly paradoxical movements in regard to the place, status and significance of the empirical within Sociology. On the one hand, the discipline faces what has been termed a ‘coming crisis’ of empirical Sociology (Savage and Burrows, 2007), an impending crisis created by the expansion of the production of data relating to the social world by researchers (and technologies) outside the university. This expansion puts in question the sociologist’s claim to have a monopoly of expertise in the techniques of the generation of social data and the analysis of social life.

La questione della presenza femminile nel mercato del lavoro rimane centrale in una prospettiva femminista. Per molti versi, se guardiamo le recenti analisi critiche di autrici quali Fraser e Eisenstadt e la loro denuncia di una sorta di 'relazione pericolosa' tra femminismo e neoliberalismo, essa è la questione principale con cui ci si deve confrontare oggi, perché l'ingresso delle donne nel mondo del lavoro, anche laddove esso ha raggiunto livelli desiderabili, è lontanissimo dal potersi considerare un indice rappresentativo di una raggiunta parità di genere. Per capire perché le cose stiano così è necessario ricordare le significative e molteplici trasformazioni che ha portato con sé il passaggio dal modello fordista a quello post-fordista. Il modello fordista si fondava su un compromesso tra capitale e lavoro che assicurava al lavoratore un posto fisso per tutta la vita e un salario adeguato al mantenimento della famiglia; malattia, eventuali periodi di disoccupazione e pensione erano garantiti da un welfare che legava il riconoscimento dei diritti sociali allo status di lavoratore. Oltre che sul compromesso tra capitale, lavoro e stato, il modello fordista poggiava su

This article concerns workfare and especially mandatory work activities for the unemployed. It focuses on the UK government’s Work Programme and recent challenges regarding its lawfulness. Drawing on the resources of actor network theory, and especially the economization approach to the study of markets, it outlines how the Work Programme is configuring a market for the labour of the unemployed, including a space of calculation in regard to that labour. The argument advanced is that the law and its instruments are part of the process of market making, contributing to both its design and calibration. This article therefore locates the law as an actor involved in the assembly of a market for the labour of the unemployed. It also foregrounds what is missing from recent debates on workfare, namely, an account of how the activities of the unemployed are configured and framed as labouring activities.

In a context of wage repression, indebted labor, and a pervasive gap between what labor earns and what it needs to spend, in this essay I ask: what are post-Fordist wages? I suggest that the key features of the post-Fordist wage should be understood in terms of broad transformations to the capacities of money, transformations that have rendered wages an unstable measure of value, including any value that may be constituted by labor. Such transformations demand a focus not on what wages should measure and comprise but on their potentiality, that is, on what they can do. In this regard, I suggest that Georg Simmel’s understanding of money as an in-motion surface, as well as his critique of “labor money,” finds important points of resonance for the post-Fordist present. In addition to highlighting the renewed relevance of Simmel’s social theory, I further ask: What are the implications of these transformations to wages for the development of a relevant politics of the post-Fordist wage? Can post-Fordist wages be challenged from within?

Chapter in Theorizing Cultural Work: Labour, Continuity and Change in the Cultural and Creative Industries. Eds. Mark Banks, Rosalind Gill, Stephanie Taylor. (Routledge 2013)

Book description:

In recent years, cultural work has engaged the interest of scholars from a broad range of social science and humanities disciplines. The debate in this ‘turn to cultural work’ has largely been based around evaluating its advantages and disadvantages: its freedoms and its constraints, its informal but precarious nature, the inequalities within its global workforce, and the blurring of work–life boundaries leading to ‘self-exploitation’.

While academic critics have persuasively challenged more optimistic accounts of ‘converged’ worlds of creative production, the critical debate on cultural work has itself leant heavily towards suggesting a profoundly new confluence of forces and effects. Theorizing Cultural Work instead views cultural work through a specifically historicized and temporal lens, to ask: what novelty can we actually attach to current conditions, and precisely what relation does cultural work have to social precedent? The contributors to this volume also explore current transformations and future(s) of work within the cultural and creative industries as they move into an uncertain future.

This book challenges more affirmative and proselytising industry and academic perspectives, and the pervasive cult of novelty that surrounds them, to locate cultural work as an historically and geographically situated process. It will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, human geography, urban studies and industrial relations, as well as management and business studies, cultural and economic policy and development, government and planning.