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ABOUT THE PROJECT |
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Embodied Workers in the New Economy:
Institutional Responses to a Deepening Contradiction
Marjorie L. DeVault, Coordinator
The "new economy" incorporates new groups of workers, embodied in multiple ways, while extending the organizational logic of the "disembodied worker" in ways that require workers to absorb increasing and quite different costs and risks. Discourses of this new era display two prominent themes: more groups of people are expected to work for pay, and workers are increasingly pushed to think of themselves as "free agents," making more choices and taking on increasing kinds and levels of risk. This deepening contradiction has produced an uneven patchwork of intuitional responses, ranging from family leave provisions for some stably employed workers and the childcare subsidies of welfare-to-work, to much more tenuous and contingent provisions for immigrant workers, along with legal restriction that limit their use of any supports. People with disabilities continue to be excluded from jobs and work support (and/or channeled into segregated employment), despite their desires and capacitates for employment and social integration.
Our conference brings together a group of scholars who have been researching the diverse employment situations of particular groups of employees who are variously situated in the so-called "new economy." Our collective goal at the conference is to enhance each area of work by setting it in the larger context of economic restructuring and global economic change. Drawing on the IE approach, we will attempt not only to document the changes, and their contradictory dynamics, but also to examine in some detail the institutional machinery putting them in place in various sites. The goal is to provide maps of these institutional technologies, often in order to suggest points of intervention that could minimize troubles and challenge injustice, from the standpoints of people living everyday lives subject to these regimes.
This project focuses on work experiences and work/life issues; it is designed to complement work underway in Canada (coordinated by Alison Griffith, York University) on economic restructuring in the public sector.