Date of publishing:
25.6.2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21104/CL.2022.2.01
The Český lid provides open access to all of its content under licenseCreative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.
Abstract:
The paper investigates the factory in the context of a multinational corporation. The historical-structural background for capturing the changes in the factory is both post-socialism and the conditions of neoliberalism. Drawing on conceptualizations from critical sociology, critical approaches to neoliberalism, and new working-class studies, the author focuses on how the structural transformation of socioeconomic conditions translates into the work in the factory and what implications this has for how workers and managers experience work and their own identities. Based on ethnographic research at the Baťa shoe factory, I identify a culture of precarious responsibility, which I characterize through four dimensions: management’s disengagement from responsibility, workers’ assumption of responsibility, the imposition of economization.
Keywords
class, factory; working-classness; ethnography; shoemaking; work
Article Text
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