Identities and Precariousness in the Collaborative Economy, Neither Wage-Earner, nor Self-Employed: Emergence and Consolidation of the Homo Rider, a Case Study

In recent years, courier and home delivery services have experienced extensive growth around the world. These platform companies, that operate through applications on smartphones, have experienced the benefits of the technological leap that has been produced by the conditions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictions on traditional commerce. This business model integrates novel elements that move away from a classic contractual relationship, employer-employee. They combine a strong cooperative culture, integrated by company values and principles that make the rider assume an identity that defines him/her as a worker and a member of a community. In addition, on the other hand, precarious working conditions, in which extreme competitiveness among colleagues and dependence on high standards of service compliance are encouraged. In Spain, there is a lack of research on the identity of workers in this type of platform. By means of in-depth interviews with drivers of two different companies in the Region of Murcia (Spain), the main objective of this article is to identify and describe the figure of what we define as homo rider, understood as a prototype individual in the context of contemporary labor relations, linked to the incorporation of new technologies for the intermediation and interconnection between people, goods and services. We approach to the socioeconomic spectrum and identity imaginary of the homo rider through two dimensions, material and ideological, to construct this broad, ambiguous figure between self-employment and wage-earner that would also represent a complex relation between precarious work and new technologies.

Demographic and Participation Details of Healthy Adult Human Participants of Early Phase Bioequivalence Pharmacokinetic Endpoint Study

This paper presents the results of Demographic and Participation Details of Healthy Adult Human Participants of Early Phase Bioequivalence Pharmacokinetic Endpoint Study. For that data of 50 participants was collected using self-administered questionnaire. After ethics approval, data were collected between between Jul-21 and Aug-21 from Gujarat state of India. Results of demographic and participation details are tabulated by its frequency and percentage. Participants are participating more whose age range were 18-41 years, income less than one lakh, education below Higher Secondary and having private job or wage-earner. Age of first time participation was found in range of 18-41 years and frequency of number studies in which participant participated were found from 01 to 20 studies. Also Chi-Square results suggested there is significant (p < 0.05) relation (I) between the Education and Age of first time participation (II) between the occupation and number of times participated.

Social Robots as the Bride? Understanding the Construction of Gender in a Japanese Social Robot Product

This study critically investigates the construction of gender on a Japanese hologram animestyle social robot Azuma Hikari. By applying a mixed method merging the visual semiotic method and heterogeneous engineering approach in software studies, the signs in Azuma Hikari’s anthropomorphized image and the interactivity enabled by the multimedia interface have been analyzed and discussed. The analysis revealed a stereotyped representation of a Japanese “ideal bride” who should be cute, sexy, comforting, good at housework, and subordinated to “Master”-like husband. Moreover, the device interface disciplines users to play the role of “wage earner” in the simulated marriage and reconstructs the gender relations in reality. It suggests the humanization of the objects is often associated with the dehumanization and objectification of the human in reverse.

A Cautionary Tale

This article examines how the Swedish idea of collective wage-earner funds was received and discussed in Finland in the 1970s and 1980s, especially by the Social Democrats and the trade union movement. The initial proposal entailed profit-sharing with workers and would have made the trade unions co-owners of private enterprise. The Finnish Social Democrats were influenced by the proposal but devised a more moderate idea for company-specific ‘cooperation funds’. The Swedish debate was interpreted in Finland as a cautionary tale of too radical demands causing severe political and labour market conflicts. In negotiations with Finnish employers and bourgeois parties, the idea was further modified into voluntary ‘personnel funds,’ which in effect meant a possibility for personal bonus payments and stock-saving for employees in profitable firms. The outcome was closer to traditional bourgeois and employer ideas of people’s capitalism than to social democratic ideas of ‘economic democracy,’ which had justified the wage-earner fund proposal.

The Western Middle Classes under Stress: Welfare State Retrenchments, Globalization, and Declining Returns to Education

Citation: Chauvel L. (2020) The Western Middle Classes under Stress: Welfare State Retrenchments, Globalization, and Declining Returns to Education. Mir Rossii, vol. 29, no 4,pp. 85–111. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2020-29-4-85-111 Following the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Gustav Schmoller before him, the multipolarity of the middle classes between higher and lower, and between cultural and economic capitalsis well acknowledged. This old vision is useful to understand the “middle classes adrift” of the last 20 years in France and Continental Europe. The expansion of the “new wage earner middle class” of the 1960s to 1990s is now an old dream of the welfare state expansion of Western societies, and the European social structure now faces a trend of repatrimonialization”, meaning a U-turn towards a decline in the value of mid-qualified work and an expansion of the return to the inheritance of family assets. This paper addresses three main points. First, a new description of repatrimonialization is useful in the specific European context of middle-class societies. We need a redefinition of the system of middle classes (plural) in the context of the construction and decline of strong welfare states. Second, there are three ruptures in the social trends of the ‘wage earner society’ of the 1960s to 1990s. In this period, economic growth, social homogenization and social protection were major contextual elements of the expansion of ‘the new middle class,’ based on educationalmeritocracy, the valorization of credentialed skills, and the expansion of the average wage compared to housing and capital assets (‘depatrimonialization’). After the 1990s, the rupture and reversal of these trends, with ‘stagnation’, ‘new inequalities’ and ‘social uncertainty’ as new trends, generated a backlash in the “middle class society”. Third, I analyze the demographic and social consequences of these new trends in terms of the shrinking of the middle classes in a context where the inheritance of assets and resources changed the previous equilibrium. Finally, I highlight the importance of addressing the problem of social stability when large strata of the middle class have less interest in the maintenance of the social order.

The Statistical Research in Evaluation of Human Resources Performance in Rail Transport

The world economical reality from the last years allows the making evident of some indubitable defining features: the diversification and the renewal of the goods offer, the progresses in the technology area, the globalization occurence, the growth of clients’and society’s exigencies. The analyse of the human resources performance in the railway transport, which is the main goal of this project, aims the identification of the performance indicators of the wage earner on one hand, and on the other hand the presentation of the relations and of correlations between the wage level, the work age, the work conditions and the requirements of the workplaces for the wage earner from the Constanta CFR railway station.

From Kolkhoznik to Wage Earner

Collective farms had to muster workers for the labor-intensive work of planting, weeding, and harvesting corn. Combating low productivity and endemic petty theft, Khrushchev pressed collective farms to reject the coercion characteristic of Stalin’s time, when collective farmers received irregular year-end payments calculated from the leftovers after the government had expropriated much of the harvest. New emphasis on material incentives ensured that farmers earned regular monthly wages in kind and, in time, in cash, making them participants in the money economy. These new practices altered established relationships among labor, production, customs, regulations, and state policies. By 1960, authorities began to calculate wages, production costs, and ratios of those costs to sale prices—profits—as part of a system of “intraenterprise accounting,” or khozraschët. Although life “down on the farm” remained difficult, these changes fundamentally altered a previously bleak existence of repression and second-class citizenship.