scholarly journals The Making of a Work-ready Individual: The Political Economy of Time in a Workfare Program in Israel

2020 ◽  
pp. 089692052097678
Author(s):  
Sara Helman
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Time Management ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Social Assistance ◽  
The Political ◽  
Flexible Work ◽  
The Unemployed ◽  
Time Density

A neoliberal policy ideal, workfare, aims to transform the long-term unemployed into “work-ready” individuals. Studies of workfare examine their use of technologies of agency and coercion, but do not sufficiently delve into the political economy of time’s role in these technologies. Based on 9 months of participant observation in an Israeli workfare program, this article analyzes how it exploited time and temporality to transform social assistance benefits into a “wage.” I argue that in calculating participants’ activities through “time accountancy,” workfare prepares the unemployed for precarious unemployment at the lower rungs of the labor market. Time accountancy disciplines the unemployed through the enforcement of time regularity and punctuality, under threat of loss of benefits, yet in the absence of time density. Workfare’s apparently incongruous training in efficient “time management” and contrasting “time-filling” practices find concordance in preparing the long-term unemployed for low-wage jobs requiring docility and obedience, for precarious flexible work where new forms of digital and biometric control proliferate.

Many Happy Returns? Investment Governance and the Political Economy of Time in UK Pensions Provision

2021 ◽  
pp. 209-246
Author(s):  
Craig Berry
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Capital Investment ◽  
Pension Funds ◽  
The Political ◽  
Private Pensions ◽  
Pension Schemes ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Uk

We are increasingly conscious that private pension schemes in the UK are primarily financial institutions. UK private pensions provision has always been highly financialized, but the individualization of provision means this dynamic matters more than ever to retirement incomes. Furthermore, individualization has occurred at a time when the UK economy’s capacity to support a long-term approach to capital investment, upon which pensions depend, has declined. The chapter argues that pensions provision essentially involves managing the failure of the future to resemble the present, or more specifically present forecasts of the future. As our ability to manipulate the value of the future has increased, our ability to tolerate forecast failure has declined. The chapter details how pension funds invest, and how this has changed, and provides an original understanding of several recent attempts to shape pensions investment, ultimately demonstrating the limitations of pensions policy in shaping how provision functions in practice.

Crafting Masculine Selves

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Chiovenda
Keyword(s):  
Participant Observation ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Life Trajectories ◽  
Select Group ◽  
Ethnographic Methodology ◽  
The Individual

Crafting Masculine Selves represents a journey into the culture and psychological dynamics of a select group of Afghan Pashtun men. The book is based on eighteen months of fieldwork in a volatile area of Afghanistan, adjoining the border with Pakistan, carried out between 2009 and 2013. In addition to participant observation, the author employed a person-centered ethnographic methodology, wherein he conducted long-term, one-on-one interview sessions with four male individuals, and analyzed four additional life trajectories. The book unveils and chronicles how the creation and use of multiple subjectivities, and the unconscious, dissociative interplay that the individual maintains between them, is one of the “stratagems” with which individuals manage to make sense of what happens to them in real life, and to pragmatically inhabit personal circumstances that are often marred by conflict and violence, both at the interpersonal and at the political level. The main cultural thread the book investigates is that of masculinity, a crucial idiom in a very androcentric Pashtun society. Virtually all the interlocutors the book presents have to navigate deep private conflicts and contradictions related to how society expects them to be appropriate, proper men, against the backdrop of a sociopolitical Afghan context heavily impacted by almost forty years of uninterrupted war. Feeling constrained by the strict norms about a severe and honor-bound masculinity in a quickly changing Afghanistan, but equally striving to be culturally validated by their own peers, these men struggle to create and publicly legitimize their own, idiosyncratic way of being appropriate men. While they suffer at times the stern rebuke of their social environment, all the same they represent the seeds for a change of those very cultural norms.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document