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This occurrence is not offered in 2013
This course focuses on the organisation and experience of contemporary worlds of work. It uses documentary film and other forms of visual documentation to raise questions relating to the personal consequences of work in the ‘new capitalism’. Has work lost its privileged position as the key focus of identity? Has the restructuring of employment eliminated the ‘long term’ career in favour of insecurity in the form of short-term, contract and episodic labour? What role do networks and skills play in the organisation of mobile but precarious careers and how are claims to professionalism made today? Areas covered include: the rise of itinerant professionalism; occupational communities; art / fashion worlds; the moral worlds of management and flexible contracting; and ‘free’ labour and emotional labour.
This course deals with work at the intimate level of interaction with things and the messy details of life. It draws on ethnographic accounts, film and video to track the individual, social and collective character of work in contemporary capitalism. It opens with a discussion of everyday images of organizing work in popular culture and documentary film. In this first section of the course the cases of the different worlds of commercial fishing and high fashion are used to explore the ways in which a visual sociology of work engages with the sensuous, embodied and technologically mediated nature of occupations. This use of visual representation is contrasted with accounts of the two worlds of fishing and fashion drawn from written articles and book chapters.The second section of the course is concerned with the reconfiguring of the experience of work and the promotion of the ‘entrepreneurial self’. It opens with a discussion of emotional labour as characteristic of precarious, service sector work. It is argued that this form of work as encounter is increasingly tracked through inscriptive technologies that manage the customer relationship through a software saturated environment. The blurring, redrawing and obliteration of the boundaries of work and life is also discussed.In the third and last section of the course the focus is shifted to the control and ordering of work by managers and the reframing of these efforts through humour and gossip by workers. Work is viewed as a contested set of encounters that articulate the both the hierarchical and networked nature of organizing. The section closes with discussion of the ways in which control is inscribed within the designed spaces of work. The aim of the course is to provide you with some ‘tools’ to analyse the ordering of occupations, organizations and selves. Your own contributions and experience of different worlds of work will be valued.
By the end of the course, students will be able to:Arbitrate between a range of arguments regarding the ‘new cultural economy’, the organisation of (flexible) work, and the implications of these developments for working lives. Trace the different ways in which media developments have led to the circulation of multiple representations of work.Engage in reflexive thinking about the organization of work and the discipline of sociology.
15 points of 100 level SOCI with B grade or better; or 30 points of SOCI at 100 level; alternatively students without SOCI at 100 level but with a B average in 60 points in related subjects may be admitted to one 200 level SOCI course.
SOCI319
Terry Austrin
Library portalLearn Course Reader Assignment Sheet Cover Plagiarism Statement Referencing for Sociology Using EndNote for referencing Writing guides for Sociology
Domestic fee $644.00
International fee $2,800.00
* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.
For further information see Language, Social and Political Sciences .