1st Conference of the European Labour History Network – Worker’s Writing in...
14 – 16 December 2015, Torino/Turin (Italy) Workshop : Worker’s Writing in Europe (19th-20th centuries) A contribution to the cultural history of the worlds of work Within the framework of constructing...
View ArticleReclaiming ‘aspiration’ for the left
This is powerful stuff from Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the UK’s Labour Party, in his recent LSE lecture: I am not talking here about the aspiration of the delusional Del Boys – “This time next year...
View ArticleThe tragically incompetent elites of the centre left
This critique by Thomas Frank, on loc 2729 of his Pity the Billionaire, applies as well to proponents of the ‘third way’ within the Labour Party as it does to the leaders of the Democratic Party in...
View ArticleBounded autonomy in the workplace
In John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, he describes what might be termed the bounded autonomy enjoyed by some editorial teams within publishing houses. From pg 128: the devolution of editorial...
View ArticleAn interview with Jamie Woodcock about Working the Phones
Find out more about the book here How did call centre emerge and proliferate? Would it be a mistake to see this as solely a matter of technological feasibility? The growth of call centres in the UK is...
View ArticleLiberating discretionary effort by robbing your staff of a personal life
There’s an interesting extract in The Upstarts, by Brad Stone, concerning discretionary effort: what could your employees do if they were properly motivated? I’m fascinated by this concept because of...
View ArticleConservatism eats itself: An irreverent look at the conservative mind by...
by Deborah Talbot Conservative politics are everywhere, but what is it, and what are they really like? In the cities, you don’t notice conservatism. It’s there, for sure, but is pretty quiet about...
View ArticleHow Corbyn hacked the media
It’s conventional wisdom that Corbyn’s leadership campaign was the target of brutal coverage by the media. I was interested to learn in The Candidate, by Alex Nunns, that this wasn’t quite how the...
View ArticleAgainst the ‘political rulebook’
Much of the reaction to Labour’s election success last week has been framed in terms of their ‘rewriting the rules’. One particularly explicit example of this can be seen in an article by Jonathan...
View Article“Help! Help! Here comes everybody!”: Social Media and Corbynism
How has social media contributed to the growing success of Corbynism? In asking this question, we risk falling into the trap of determinism by constructing ‘social media’ as an independent force...
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