[Linganth] AAA - Call for Papers - Contesting Neoliberal Configurations of Labor Value

[Lauren A Hayes]

*CALL FOR PAPERS  – Contesting Neoliberal Configurations of Labor Value*


AAA 2016, November 16-20, Minneapolis, MN

Organizers: Lauren Hayes (University of Arizona) and Megan Sheehan (Lehigh
University)




            In the contemporary late capitalist labor market, workers
appear to have less control over the time, location, duration, and
permanence of their work—structures of production that are often attributed
to the faultless and abstract market (Ho 2009). Temporary work and
unpredictable work schedules persist as many of the institutional
protections afforded workers, such as unions, are disappearing or declining
globally. These neoliberal changes favor more flexible engagements with
labor (Ong 2006), and workers are forced to keep up with constant cycles of
long-term unemployment, re-skilling, and career re-definition (Dunk 2002).

            At the same time, the organization of production relations in
many workplaces from factory floors to corporate offices seems to suggest
that even an entry-level workforce now enjoys the social benefits of a more
independent and egalitarian work environment. Such relations manifest in
various ways: in the ordinary line worker who is called a “team member” and
asked to think of themselves as an innovative problem solver, or among
professionals who sit in “open offices”—supervisors and managers alongside
interns.

            These neoliberal configurations of labor value promise feelings
of empowerment, greater satisfaction with work, access to global markets
and consumer goods, freedom from rigid hierarchies, and even more power
over the production process through the cultivation of responsibility. This
panel draws on case studies that explore the relationship between economic,
temporal, and hierarchical precarity and the apparent social power that
frames the neoliberal workplace: what Nikolas Rose has referred to as a
contradiction between companies’ pursuit of profit and assumptions about
the “humanization of work” (1990). Papers on this panel will explore this
contradiction through examinations of the way that workers across all sites
conceptualize, resist, or consent to such postionality. They will highlight
the complexities of worker adaptation to neoliberal economic conditions,
such as the ways that workers may espouse neoliberal ideologies while
undermining the material conditions these ideologies naturalize through
informal economic strategies (Prentice 2015), or the ways that ties of
kinship may be relied upon to make sense of privatization schemes (Shever
2008).



Papers that explore (but are not limited to) the following themes and
questions are invited to submit a 250 word abstract to Lauren Hayes (
lahayes at email.arizona.edu) or Megan Sheehan (mes715 at lehigh.edu) on or
before Monday, April 11th for notification by the end of the day on
Tuesday, April 12th.



How is consent to neoliberal projects of work obtained?



What are the affective dimensions associated with work policies that claim
to empower workers and promote egalitarianism?



How do neoliberal configurations of labor value shape gendered subjects?



How do workers who enact ideal neoliberal subjectivities come up against
established organizational hierarchies?



How is the transformation of the workplace and labor value conceptualized
cross-culturally?



Have discussions of growing income inequality given workers the tools to
articulate work precarity and make claims to collective identity or
collective power?





-- 
Lauren A. Hayes
Ph.D. Candidate
School of Anthropology
University of Arizona
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