L Adkins
Biographic Data
| ID | 1286 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Adkins |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Adkins |
| SIGNATURE | ADKINS L |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7003-0406 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 822 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Femininity work: The gendered politics of women managing violence in bar work
This paper explores how women bar workers manage violence at work. Women bar workers in our study described that the capacity to recognize, intervene, and defuse potentially violent situations was a pragmatic response to the problem of men's violence in the night‐time economy. We analyze the gendered norms and expectations at play in how violence in bar work is managed by staff and locate this as a form of “femininity work” extending from the mod…
Hospitality work and the sociality of affective labour
This article explores how the social relationships of precarious workers contribute to employment and labour practices in the hospitality industry. In so doing, it contributes to theoretical discussions about the nature of post-Fordist labour, and to studies of the social relations of precarity as they are enacted in workers' intimate lives. Empirically, the article describes a distinctive mode of interpersonal negotiation and sociality practised…
Asset-Based Futures: A Sociology for the 21st Century
This article engages with the question of whether the COVID-19 pandemic can be understood as an event that is moving us towards a new era. Highlighting the paradox that this question has emerged in the context of the stoppages and shutdowns associated with the pandemic, we suggest that any assessment of social change and the futures such change might unfold must be situated on the terrain formatted by the temporal logics of capitalism. At our cur…
Dimensions of the asset economy
Queer subjectivities in hospitality labor
This paper explores the experiences of queer workers in the service economy with a focus on hospitality labor. Studies of gender, sexuality and service labor approached mainstream service work as a scene of compulsory heterosexuality, while literature on the position of queer workers has tended to approach work in terms of structural inequalities that prevent queer workers from participating in the labor market, and has therefore focused on notio…
Re-thinking the Liquid Core of Capitalism with Hyman Minsky
While Minsky's work is often identified with the critique of financial speculation, this paper argues that there is a different side to his work. We argue that Minsky can be read as offering a post-foundational perspective on political economy that recognizes the speculative dimension of all economic activity. This post-foundational reading allows for an understanding of neoliberal policymaking in terms of the provision of liquidity to too-big-to…
The asset economy: Conceptualizing new logics of inequality
This paper argues that asset ownership is becoming more important than employment as a determinant of class position. The introduction considers this claim with respect to Piketty’s contribution, arguing that the latter is too focused on the growth of wealth at the very top. The first section draws on the work of Hyman Minsky to outline the logic of assets. We differentiate our approach from competing perspectives that tend to overemphasize the o…
Class in the 21st century: Asset inflation and the new logic of inequality
What becomes of class when residential property prices in major cities around the world accrue more income in a year than the average wage worker? This paper investigates the dynamic of combined wage disinflation and asset price inflation as a key to understanding the growth of inequality in recent decades. Taking the city of Sydney, Australia, as exemplary of a dynamic that has unfolded across the Anglo-American economies, it explains how reside…
The institutional logic of property inflation
Experimenting with Wellbeing: Basic Income, Immaterial Labour and Changing Forms of Productivity
This article is concerned with the recent (2017-2018) basic income experiment in Finland. This experiment attracted global attention, not least because of its break from the conditionalities and sanctions associated with social security payments in workfare states. This article stresses, however, that it is critical to understand how the Finnish basic income experiment was part of a broader programme of government-led reform in Finland. As well a…
Economizing the political: Workfare reform in strategic management mode
The focus of this article is a recent round of workfare reform in Finland. Departing from many existing analyses of workfare, it focuses on issues of governance. Drawing on policy documents and interviews with key policy actors, it shows how this reform and attempts at implementation took place along the lines of a specific form of managerial governance, namely strategic governance, involving the enrolment of strategic management into policy maki…
The Time of Money
Experimenting with Price: Crafting the New Social Contract in Finland
This article is concerned with price and pricing in the context of finance led neoliberal reform. It considers the sentiment often encountered in accounts of such reform that price instability is the outcome of the retreat of the state from the regulation of price and its externalization in the competitive play of the market. Drawing on the case of contemporary Finland, and especially a major round of government reform, we show how unstable price…
Experimental policy, price and the provocative state
There is increasing recognition that the experiment has emerged as a preferred mode of policy making in advanced liberal states and that policy experiments are operating at the frontier of neoliberal reform processes. In this article, by considering Finland’s recent turn to the experiment, we highlight how this non-conventional mode of policy making is connected to a dimension of change so far missing in analyses of experimentality, namely the ac…
Price: An introduction
This special issue is concerned with price and pricing. It seeks to locate price as a critical socio-theoretical concern and as a socio-theoretical problem. This is by no means the first time price
Work in the shadow of finance: Rethinking Joan Acker's materialist feminist sociology
To commemorate the life and work of Joan Acker, this article focuses on the jewel in the crown of her extensive oeuvre: ‘Hierarchies, Jobs and Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations'. I take as my focus the significance of ‘Hierarchies, Jobs and Bodies' for the development of theorizations of labour and especially for theorizations of post‐Fordist work and working. In so doing, I trace the impact of Acker's interventions across a number of bo…
Money: A Feminist Issue
This special issue of Australian Feminist Studies asks: how is money a feminist issue? For second wave feminists, ascendant socio-economic conditions made the answer to this question relatively str
Gender, Sexuality, and Risk in the Practice of Affective Labour for Young Women in Bar Work
This article explores the ways that gender, sexuality, pleasure, and risk are entangled in affective labour and the production of value in 'front of house' bar work. Through their work as bar staff at 'hip' inner-city Melbourne venues, the young women we discuss produce affects in the form of a 'vibe' of relaxation, fun, pleasure, and release. We address McRobbie's call for the 'actual working practices' which comprise affective labour to be expl…
Speculative futures in the time of debt
This article concerns the temporality of debt. Against the claim that the society of debt has emptied out futures via the elevation of the promise to pay to a total social fact, it suggests that the time of securitized debt is speculative in form. Thus, in the time of securitized debt, pasts, presents and futures do not stand in a pre-set relation to one another, but are open to a constant state of revision: they may be drawn and redrawn, assembl…
Disobedient Workers, the Law and the Making of Unemployment Markets
This article concerns workfare and especially mandatory work activities for the unemployed. It focuses on the UK government's Work Programme and recent challenges regarding its lawfulness. Drawing on the resources of actor network theory, and especially the economization approach to the study of markets, it outlines how the Work Programme is configuring a market for the labour of the unemployed, including a space of calculation in regard to that …
Notes toward a sociology of debt
What Can Money do? Feminist Theory in Austere Times
What can money do? Can it be put to work to address deepening forms of social and economic inequality associated with the financial crisis, ongoing recession and still unfolding politics of austerity? Can we have faith in money as an injustice-remedying substance in a crisis-ridden and (still thoroughly) financialised reality? While the latter scenario is implied in recent feminist calls to redistribute resources to redress widening socio-economi…
What Are Post-Fordist Wages? Simmel, Labor Money, and the Problem of Value
In a context of wage repression, indebted labor, and a pervasive gap between what labor earns and what it needs to spend, in this essay I ask: what are post-Fordist wages? I suggest that the key features of the post-Fordist wage should be understood in terms of broad transformations to the capacities of money, transformations that have rendered wages an unstable measure of value, including any value that may be constituted by labor. Such transfor…
Out of Work or Out of Time? Rethinking Labor after the Financial Crisis
Prior to the recent global crisis a consensus was emerging that post-Fordism had ushered in a new sexual contract, one characterized not by exclusion and containment, but by the prospecting for potential, a prospecting that located women's labor not as a reserve for capital but as a site of vitality and possibility. The global financial crisis and ongoing recession, however, have been positioned as undoing these radical transformations in women's…
Introduction: Special Measures
Reflexivity: Freedom or Habit of Gender
In this article the increasing significance of Bourdieu's social theory is mapped in recent sociological accounts of gender in late-modern societies. What is highlighted in particular is the influence of Bourdieu's social theory, and especially his arguments regarding critical reflexivity and social transformation, on a specific thesis which is common to a number of contemporary feminist accounts of gender transformations in late modernity. Here …
The New Economy, Property and Personhood
This article focuses on the new economy. While a number of recent analyses have considered how new economic arrangements rework a range of material relations, this article suggests that such considerations have tended to stop short of considering how material relations may be reconstituting vis-à-vis the people who are working in the new economy. This is so, it will be argued, because there is a pervasive assumption of what is termed a social con…
The labour of identity: Performing Identities, Performing Economies
Recent analyses of workplace organization have stressed that the self-identify of workers constitutes a key resource in new regimes of accumulation. Morever, this significance of self-identify has been understood to form part of an aestheticization of work since the techniques involved in the performance of identity are widely conceived as aesthetic or cultural practices. However, in this article we suggest that in these assumptions the questions…
Class in the 21st century: Asset inflation and the new logic of inequality
What becomes of class when residential property prices in major cities around the world accrue more income in a year than the average wage worker? This paper investigates the dynamic of combined wage disinflation and asset price inflation as a key to understanding the growth of inequality in recent decades. Taking the city of Sydney, Australia, as exemplary of a dynamic that has unfolded across the Anglo-American economies, it explains how reside…
Speculative futures in the time of debt
This article concerns the temporality of debt. Against the claim that the society of debt has emptied out futures via the elevation of the promise to pay to a total social fact, it suggests that the time of securitized debt is speculative in form. Thus, in the time of securitized debt, pasts, presents and futures do not stand in a pre-set relation to one another, but are open to a constant state of revision: they may be drawn and redrawn, assembl…
Introduction: Gender, Living and Labour in the Fourth Shift
Work is being redefined as both literally female and feminized, whether performed by men or women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, explo
Reflexivity: Freedom Or Habit of Gender
In this article the increasing significance of Bourdieu's social theory is mapped in recent sociological accounts of gender in late-modern societies. What is highlighted in particular is the influence of Bourdieu's social theory, and especially his arguments regarding critical reflexivity and social transformation, on a specific thesis which is common to a number of contemporary feminist accounts of gender transformations in late modernity. Here …
Community and Economy: A Retraditionalization of Gender
In recent social theory, there has been an emphasis on the emergence of non-market, non-cash nexus or what are sometimes referred to as 'traditional' forms of organization in the economic sphere. These are sometimes represented as vital to innovation and as constituting the cutting edge of socioeconomic change. In this article, my concern is to interrogate these new modes of organization. Its main argument is that such traditional forms may go ha…
From Retroactivation to Futurity: The End of the Sexual Contract
This article investigates the changing relations between gender and labour in contemporary capitalism. It challenges what has become a default although mostly implicit position for understanding this relationship, namely what I shall term, following the work of Carole Pateman (1988 Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract, Cambridge: Polity. [Google Scholar]), a sexual contract position. This position will be shown to cast labour with a particu…
Out of Work or Out of Time? Rethinking Labor after the Financial Crisis
Prior to the recent global crisis a consensus was emerging that post-Fordism had ushered in a new sexual contract, one characterized not by exclusion and containment, but by the prospecting for potential, a prospecting that located women's labor not as a reserve for capital but as a site of vitality and possibility. The global financial crisis and ongoing recession, however, have been positioned as undoing these radical transformations in women's…
Mobile Desire: Aesthetics, Sexuality and the `Lesbian' at Work
In recent writings on post-industrial economies the idea of the commodification of sexuality is highly visible. Yet many of these analyses tend to overlook the important debates in sexuality studies which have questioned both essentialist and utopic readings of the commodification aesthetic. In this article, I draw on some of these insights to think through the commodification of sexuality at work, especially in regard to the `lesbian' at work. I…
Risk Culture, Self-Reflexivity and the Making of Sexual Hierarchies
Recent social and cultural theory has emphasized that in risk culture the achievement of a reflexive self-identity is a key resource, for example, in terms of employment, citizenship and intimacy. Commentators on shifts in the organization of health have also stressed the significance of achieving a self-reflexive identity. So, for example, knowing, self-monitoring subjects have emerged as optimal citizens in relation to health. While there is ce…
Introduction: Special Measures
Social capital: The anatomy of a troubled concept
Within the social sciences the widespread impact of the social capital concept has prompted strong critique on the part of feminists, for it is a concept which appears to reinstate a version of social worlds which for the past thirty years or more feminist social scientists have sought to problematize and move beyond. Yet do these critiques go beyond the social capital paradigm? It is the contention of this article that they do not and in particu…
Passing on Feminism: From Consciousness to Reflexivity
As has been widely observed, histories of feminism have often been conceived via notions of generation where feminism is positioned as a kind of familial property, a form of inheritance and legacy which is transmitted through generations. Thus feminism and its history have been imagined as following a familial mode of social reproduction. Despite the dominance of this model, it has nonetheless been subject to critique, not least because of its re…
Feminism after measure
This article engages the crisis of measure currently being articulated within social and cultural theory and the associated claim that this crisis should compel an embrace of methods which seek to know the heterogeneous, the multiple, the complex and the vague. Taking the rise of immaterial forms of labour and value as paradigmatic of the crisis of measure, it questions the use of the figure of a domestically labouring woman who lacks ownership o…
Introduction: Feminism, Bourdieu and After
How might Bourdieu’s social philosophy and social theory be of use to feminism? And how might it relate to – or possibly even fruitfully reframe – the ongoing problematics and current theoretical issues of feminism? It is very well recognized that Bourdieu’s social theory had relatively little to say about women or gender (although see Bourdieu, 2001) with most of his writings framed preeminently in terms of issues of class. Yet the premise of th…
Gender, Sexuality, and Risk in the Practice of Affective Labour for Young Women in Bar Work
This article explores the ways that gender, sexuality, pleasure, and risk are entangled in affective labour and the production of value in 'front of house' bar work. Through their work as bar staff at 'hip' inner-city Melbourne venues, the young women we discuss produce affects in the form of a 'vibe' of relaxation, fun, pleasure, and release. We address McRobbie's call for the 'actual working practices' which comprise affective labour to be expl…
The asset economy: Conceptualizing new logics of inequality
This paper argues that asset ownership is becoming more important than employment as a determinant of class position. The introduction considers this claim with respect to Piketty’s contribution, arguing that the latter is too focused on the growth of wealth at the very top. The first section draws on the work of Hyman Minsky to outline the logic of assets. We differentiate our approach from competing perspectives that tend to overemphasize the o…
Sociological Futures: From Clock Time to Event Time
This article articulates a shift from clock time to event time, a shift which raises particular challenges to dominant sociological strategies in regard to temporality, especially in regard to the future. In particular it raises challenges to the idea that alternative futures may be found by stretching time to the time disenfranchised or by seeking out and uncovering counter hegemonic forms of time. Taking feminist sociological approaches to time…
Disobedient Workers, the Law and the Making of Unemployment Markets
This article concerns workfare and especially mandatory work activities for the unemployed. It focuses on the UK government's Work Programme and recent challenges regarding its lawfulness. Drawing on the resources of actor network theory, and especially the economization approach to the study of markets, it outlines how the Work Programme is configuring a market for the labour of the unemployed, including a space of calculation in regard to that …
Experimental policy, price and the provocative state
There is increasing recognition that the experiment has emerged as a preferred mode of policy making in advanced liberal states and that policy experiments are operating at the frontier of neoliberal reform processes. In this article, by considering Finland’s recent turn to the experiment, we highlight how this non-conventional mode of policy making is connected to a dimension of change so far missing in analyses of experimentality, namely the ac…
What Can Money do? Feminist Theory in Austere Times
What can money do? Can it be put to work to address deepening forms of social and economic inequality associated with the financial crisis, ongoing recession and still unfolding politics of austerity? Can we have faith in money as an injustice-remedying substance in a crisis-ridden and (still thoroughly) financialised reality? While the latter scenario is implied in recent feminist calls to redistribute resources to redress widening socio-economi…
Queer subjectivities in hospitality labor
This paper explores the experiences of queer workers in the service economy with a focus on hospitality labor. Studies of gender, sexuality and service labor approached mainstream service work as a scene of compulsory heterosexuality, while literature on the position of queer workers has tended to approach work in terms of structural inequalities that prevent queer workers from participating in the labor market, and has therefore focused on notio…
Money: A Feminist Issue
This special issue of Australian Feminist Studies asks: how is money a feminist issue? For second wave feminists, ascendant socio-economic conditions made the answer to this question relatively str
The Handbook of British Archaeology
Sexual Work and the Employment of Women in the Service Industries
Gendered Work: Sexuality, Family, and the Labour Market
Sex (AD) Dressed: Empiricism, Periodisations and Fetish
Community and Economy: A Retraditionalization of Gender
Community and Economy: A Retraditionalization of Gender
In recent social theory, there has been an emphasis on the emergence of non-market, non-cash nexus or what are sometimes referred to as 'traditional' forms of organization in the economic sphere. These are sometimes represented as vital to innovation and as constituting the cutting edge of socioeconomic change. In this article, my concern is to interrogate these new modes of organization. Its main argument is that such traditional forms may go ha…
The labour of identity: Performing Identities, Performing Economies
Recent analyses of workplace organization have stressed that the self-identify of workers constitutes a key resource in new regimes of accumulation. Morever, this significance of self-identify has been understood to form part of an aestheticization of work since the techniques involved in the performance of identity are widely conceived as aesthetic or cultural practices. However, in this article we suggest that in these assumptions the questions…
Mobile Desire: Aesthetics, Sexuality and the `Lesbian' at Work
In recent writings on post-industrial economies the idea of the commodification of sexuality is highly visible. Yet many of these analyses tend to overlook the important debates in sexuality studies which have questioned both essentialist and utopic readings of the commodification aesthetic. In this article, I draw on some of these insights to think through the commodification of sexuality at work, especially in regard to the `lesbian' at work. I…
Cultural Feminization: "Money, Sex and Power" for Women
Risk Culture, Self-Reflexivity and the Making of Sexual Hierarchies
Recent social and cultural theory has emphasized that in risk culture the achievement of a reflexive self-identity is a key resource, for example, in terms of employment, citizenship and intimacy. Commentators on shifts in the organization of health have also stressed the significance of achieving a self-reflexive identity. So, for example, knowing, self-monitoring subjects have emerged as optimal citizens in relation to health. While there is ce…
Reflexivity and the Politics of Qualitative Research
Reflexivity: Freedom or Habit of Gender
In this article the increasing significance of Bourdieu's social theory is mapped in recent sociological accounts of gender in late-modern societies. What is highlighted in particular is the influence of Bourdieu's social theory, and especially his arguments regarding critical reflexivity and social transformation, on a specific thesis which is common to a number of contemporary feminist accounts of gender transformations in late modernity. Here …
Passing on Feminism: From Consciousness to Reflexivity
As has been widely observed, histories of feminism have often been conceived via notions of generation where feminism is positioned as a kind of familial property, a form of inheritance and legacy which is transmitted through generations. Thus feminism and its history have been imagined as following a familial mode of social reproduction. Despite the dominance of this model, it has nonetheless been subject to critique, not least because of its re…
Introduction: Feminism, Bourdieu and After
How might Bourdieu’s social philosophy and social theory be of use to feminism? And how might it relate to – or possibly even fruitfully reframe – the ongoing problematics and current theoretical issues of feminism? It is very well recognized that Bourdieu’s social theory had relatively little to say about women or gender (although see Bourdieu, 2001) with most of his writings framed preeminently in terms of issues of class. Yet the premise of th…
Reflexivity: Freedom Or Habit of Gender
In this article the increasing significance of Bourdieu's social theory is mapped in recent sociological accounts of gender in late-modern societies. What is highlighted in particular is the influence of Bourdieu's social theory, and especially his arguments regarding critical reflexivity and social transformation, on a specific thesis which is common to a number of contemporary feminist accounts of gender transformations in late modernity. Here …
Social capital: The anatomy of a troubled concept
Within the social sciences the widespread impact of the social capital concept has prompted strong critique on the part of feminists, for it is a concept which appears to reinstate a version of social worlds which for the past thirty years or more feminist social scientists have sought to problematize and move beyond. Yet do these critiques go beyond the social capital paradigm? It is the contention of this article that they do not and in particu…
The New Economy, Property and Personhood
This article focuses on the new economy. While a number of recent analyses have considered how new economic arrangements rework a range of material relations, this article suggests that such considerations have tended to stop short of considering how material relations may be reconstituting vis-à-vis the people who are working in the new economy. This is so, it will be argued, because there is a pervasive assumption of what is termed a social con…
The New Economy, Property and Personhood
Social Capital Put to the Test
This article offers a critical review and mapping of theoretical elaborations of the social capital concept and of some of the key empirical projects which in their various ways have attempted to capture and measure social capital. In so doing, it maps the rise and rise of social capital within the social sciences and beyond. It then considers a range of hypotheses which have attempted to explain the ever increasing prominence and reach of the co…
Introduction: Gender, Living and Labour in the Fourth Shift
Work is being redefined as both literally female and feminized, whether performed by men or women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, explo
From Retroactivation to Futurity: The End of the Sexual Contract
This article investigates the changing relations between gender and labour in contemporary capitalism. It challenges what has become a default although mostly implicit position for understanding this relationship, namely what I shall term, following the work of Carole Pateman (1988 Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract, Cambridge: Polity. [Google Scholar]), a sexual contract position. This position will be shown to cast labour with a particu…
Feminism after measure
This article engages the crisis of measure currently being articulated within social and cultural theory and the associated claim that this crisis should compel an embrace of methods which seek to know the heterogeneous, the multiple, the complex and the vague. Taking the rise of immaterial forms of labour and value as paradigmatic of the crisis of measure, it questions the use of the figure of a domestically labouring woman who lacks ownership o…
Sociological Futures: From Clock Time to Event Time
This article articulates a shift from clock time to event time, a shift which raises particular challenges to dominant sociological strategies in regard to temporality, especially in regard to the future. In particular it raises challenges to the idea that alternative futures may be found by stretching time to the time disenfranchised or by seeking out and uncovering counter hegemonic forms of time. Taking feminist sociological approaches to time…
Introduction: Special Measures
Out of Work or Out of Time? Rethinking Labor after the Financial Crisis
Prior to the recent global crisis a consensus was emerging that post-Fordism had ushered in a new sexual contract, one characterized not by exclusion and containment, but by the prospecting for potential, a prospecting that located women's labor not as a reserve for capital but as a site of vitality and possibility. The global financial crisis and ongoing recession, however, have been positioned as undoing these radical transformations in women's…
Sociology (31 works) · Economics (28 works) · Political science (20 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (19 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (10 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (10 works) · Social science (10 works)