Ursula Huws
Biographic Data
| ID | 280089 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ursula Huws |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ursula |
| FAMILY NAME | Huws |
| SIGNATURE | HUWS U |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Hertfordshire |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0774-1023 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 76 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Algorithmic violence
This article draws together insights from several diverse bodies of literature from fields including political economy, organisational and management studies, sociology and psychology to develop a conceptual framework for understanding the phenomenon of bullying in academia. Situated in the current context of organisational restructuring, it goes beyond the conventional notion of the ‘bully’ as an exceptional individual. Central to the article is…
Cosa è successo nel mercato del lavoro? Piattaforme digitali e politiche pubbliche
Questo articolo esamina la rottura del modello occupazionale che sosteneva il sistema di Welfare della seconda metà del XX secolo. Il focus del capitolo è il lento ma al contempo progressivo smantellamento delle tutele del lavoro avvenuto negli ultimi decenni, smantellamento che nell'ipotesi qui proposta ha svolto anche un ruolo cruciale nel facilitare la nascita delle piattaforme digitali. Così, se da un lato la perdita delle tutele può essere c…
‘Alongside but not in front’
This article starts by summarising the history of socially-engaged research on disadvantaged groups, pointing out that many of the social research methods currently in use in the field originated outside the academy, carried out by protagonists with a mission to draw attention to injustices and bring about social change. It then discusses the often-problematic relationship between researchers and the people whose working lives they research, espe…
Assessing bias in online surveys using alternative survey modes
Due to concerns that respondents to online surveys are different from populations of interest, parallel offline surveys can be undertaken and results compared. In this article we create a set of principles to compare results from online surveys with those from surveys using other survey modes. Rather than just comparing estimates and confidence intervals from the different modes, these principles consider biases that each survey mode introduces a…
Digitalisation, labour and the pandemic
Introducing this issue, this paper reflects on the role of peer-reviewed research in documenting and analysing the restructuring of labour under rapidly changing global conditions. It summarises the contents of the issue, placing it in the context not only of the 2020-2021 global COVID-19 pandemic, but also in relation to past theoretical debates in the pages of this journal about the dynamics of platform capitalism
Reinventing the Welfare State
Taming Platform Capitalism
This panel brings together scholars whose work seeks to tame platform capitalism understanding how the lives of platform workers are affected by digital platforms. Research on platform labor has been mostly done in the global north, as well as in relation to global platforms like Uber or Amazon (Rosenblat 2019; Scholz 2016). Thus, the panelists, moreover, explore how the lives of platform workers can be improved within the global platform economy…
Reinventing the Welfare State
Labour in Contemporary Capitalism
This book brings together the results of decades of prescient research on labour market transformation to provide an authoritative overview of the impacts of technological, economic, social and political change on working life in the 21st century, providing a valuable tool for future research
Labour in Contemporary Capitalism
The Hassle of Housework
This article revisits materialist second-wave feminist debates about domestic labour in the context of digitalisation. Using a differentiated typology of labour, it looks at how the tasks involved in housework have undergone dramatic changes through commodification, decommodification and recommodification without fundamentally altering the gender division of labour in social reproduction, drawing on recent research on the use of online platforms …
Eating us out of house and home
Online, on call
This article questions whether the dominant policy discourse, in which a normative model of standard employment is counterposed to ‘non‐standard’ or ‘atypical’ employment, enables us to capture the diversity of fluid labour markets in which work is dynamically reshaped in an interaction between different kinds of employment status and work organisation. Drawing on surveys in the UK , Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands that investigate work manag…
Logged labour
This essay argues that, during the period following the financial crisis of 2007–8, several different trends, already visible in earlier periods, have converged to create a new pattern of work organisation, a pattern which is now approaching critical mass. Across all sectors of the economy, primary, secondary or tertiary, whether previously classified as public or private, formal or informal, manual or white-collar, high-skilled or low-skilled, t…
Saints and sinners
This article looks at the messages given by factual TV programmes to audiences about work, and, in particular, the models of working behaviour that have been presented to them during the period following the 2007–2008 financial crisis. It focuses particularly, but not exclusively, on daytime TV, which has an audience made up disproportionately of people who have low incomes and are poorly educated: an audience that, it can be argued, is not only …
ICapitalism and the Cybertariat
We have now entered a period...when new waves of commodification set in motion in earlier periods are reaching maturity. The new commodities have been generated by drawing into the market even more aspects of life that were previously outside the money economy, or at least that part of it that generates a profit for capitalists. Several such fields of accumulation have now emerged, each with a different method of commodity genesis, forming the ba…
When Adam Blogs
Taking as its starting point the current resurgence of interest in Utopian alternatives to capitalist forms of production, including those based on cultural co-production, this chapter takes a critical look at Utopias, from Thomas More to the present day, which propose idealized future societies in which people are emancipated from exploitative labour relations. It examines the ways in which these Utopias have envisaged cultural labour - whether …
The containment of labour in accelerated global supply chains
This article presents a case study of the sale of two of the three piers at the formerly state-owned container port of Piraeus, in Greece to a Chinese company, COSCO, formng a crucial hub in the transit of goods to European markets, and examines the impacts on labour. It places this study in the context of the global consolidation, restructuring and acceleration of supply chains as well as in the specific context of privatisation of infrastructur…
Labour in the circuits of global markets
This article introduces the contents of this volume, reflecting on the commonalities and complementaries between articles
Vida, Trabalho E Valor No Século Xxi
Costuma-se argumentar que a teoria do valor-trabalho de Marx não mais se aplica ao mundo contemporâneo, em que partes crescentes da população estão envolvidas em trabalho "imaterial" ou trabalho "digital". Este ensaio argumenta que essa teoria ainda é relevante, mas que, a fim de entender como ela pode ser aplicada ao trabalho imaterial e ao trabalho de modo mais geral, é necessário analisar criticamente os três principais componentes da teoria: …
Working online, living offline
This paper begins by tracing changes in employment patterns since the middle of the 20th Century, arguing that the mid 2000s marked the beginning of a fourth distinctive phase, the earlier ones having begun, respectively, after the end of World War II, after the 1973 oil crisis, and after the end of the Cold War, around 1990. In this new phase, dubbed here the ‘Internet Age’, various tendencies with their origins in earlier periods have reached c…
La crise comme aubaine sans précédent pour le capitalisme
La posie est une arme charge de futur
The reproduction of difference
This article starts by outlining the complex relationship between the gender division of labour in the household and the division of labour in waged work, taking account of the social, technical and spatial dimensions of this global division of labour and showing how this contradictary inter-relationship affects both the different value of men's and women's labour and the different positions that women and men occupy in the labour market. Whilst …
Bridges and barriers
This article starts by discussing the global division of labour. To what extent can its spatial patterns be explained by simple economic logic and to what extent is it shaped by specific features of national and local environments and corporate strategies? What factors enable restructuring, and what are the barriers to the mobility both of capital and of labour? It then introduces the articles in this issue, which display the complexity of global…
Passing the buck
This article starts by looking critically at the contested concept of work flexibility, tracing the ambiguities inherent in it to the contradictions embodied in the ‘special deals’ struck between capital and labour in the third quarter of the 20th century. It then goes on to discuss the new forms of employment casualisation – and resulting precariousness – that have arisen since that period within the ‘formal’ economy, arising from the processes …
The Hassle of Housework
This article revisits materialist second-wave feminist debates about domestic labour in the context of digitalisation. Using a differentiated typology of labour, it looks at how the tasks involved in housework have undergone dramatic changes through commodification, decommodification and recommodification without fundamentally altering the gender division of labour in social reproduction, drawing on recent research on the use of online platforms …
Online, on call
This article questions whether the dominant policy discourse, in which a normative model of standard employment is counterposed to ‘non‐standard’ or ‘atypical’ employment, enables us to capture the diversity of fluid labour markets in which work is dynamically reshaped in an interaction between different kinds of employment status and work organisation. Drawing on surveys in the UK , Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands that investigate work manag…
Telework
Vida, Trabalho E Valor No Século Xxi
Costuma-se argumentar que a teoria do valor-trabalho de Marx não mais se aplica ao mundo contemporâneo, em que partes crescentes da população estão envolvidas em trabalho "imaterial" ou trabalho "digital". Este ensaio argumenta que essa teoria ainda é relevante, mas que, a fim de entender como ela pode ser aplicada ao trabalho imaterial e ao trabalho de modo mais geral, é necessário analisar criticamente os três principais componentes da teoria: …
Saints and sinners
This article looks at the messages given by factual TV programmes to audiences about work, and, in particular, the models of working behaviour that have been presented to them during the period following the 2007–2008 financial crisis. It focuses particularly, but not exclusively, on daytime TV, which has an audience made up disproportionately of people who have low incomes and are poorly educated: an audience that, it can be argued, is not only …
What Will We Do
Faced with the difficulty of “placing” a stranger, the most common opening gambit is to ask, “What do you do?” Except perhaps in a few small hunter-gatherer tribes, a person’s occupation is one of the most important delineators of social identity. In many European cultures this is reflected in family names. People called Schmidt, Smith, Herrero, or Lefebvre, for instance, had ancestors who were iron workers. Wainwrights and Wagners are descended …
Eating us out of house and home
ICapitalism and the Cybertariat
We have now entered a period...when new waves of commodification set in motion in earlier periods are reaching maturity. The new commodities have been generated by drawing into the market even more aspects of life that were previously outside the money economy, or at least that part of it that generates a profit for capitalists. Several such fields of accumulation have now emerged, each with a different method of commodity genesis, forming the ba…
When Adam Blogs
Taking as its starting point the current resurgence of interest in Utopian alternatives to capitalist forms of production, including those based on cultural co-production, this chapter takes a critical look at Utopias, from Thomas More to the present day, which propose idealized future societies in which people are emancipated from exploitative labour relations. It examines the ways in which these Utopias have envisaged cultural labour - whether …
Fixed, Footloose, or Fractured
The combination of technological change and globalization is bringing about fundamental changes in who does what work where, when, and how. This has implications which are profoundly contradictory for the nature of jobs, for the people who carry them out, and hence for the nature of citiesThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this arti…
Nature, Technology and Art
The three-way relationship between nature, technology and the human subject has been a problematic and shifting one in the history of Western art and thought. In this article, the author begins by summarizing this history, pointing to the inadequacy of most theoretical accounts in the face of the growing interpenetration of the “natural” by the “technological” resulting from such developments as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. Th…
Telework
Bad attitude
Bad Attitude: The Processed World Anthology, edited by Chris Carlsson with Mark Leger, London/New York: Verso, 1990, 286 pages, £11.95
Teleworking and gender
Nature, Technology and Art
The three-way relationship between nature, technology and the human subject has been a problematic and shifting one in the history of Western art and thought. In this article, the author begins by summarizing this history, pointing to the inadequacy of most theoretical accounts in the face of the growing interpenetration of the “natural” by the “technological” resulting from such developments as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. Th…
Global Corporate Power
Exploring the diverse ways that corporations affect the practices and structures of the global political economy, this innovative work addresses three fundamental questions: How can the corporation be most usefully conceptualized within the field of IPE? Does global governance succeed in constraining the power of multinational corporations? To what extent has the movement for corporate social responsibility been fruitful? The authors' rich, detai…
Fixed, Footloose, or Fractured
The combination of technological change and globalization is bringing about fundamental changes in who does what work where, when, and how. This has implications which are profoundly contradictory for the nature of jobs, for the people who carry them out, and hence for the nature of citiesThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this arti…
What Will We Do
Faced with the difficulty of “placing” a stranger, the most common opening gambit is to ask, “What do you do?” Except perhaps in a few small hunter-gatherer tribes, a person’s occupation is one of the most important delineators of social identity. In many European cultures this is reflected in family names. People called Schmidt, Smith, Herrero, or Lefebvre, for instance, had ancestors who were iron workers. Wainwrights and Wagners are descended …
Defragmenting
This paper provides a short introduction to this volume
The spark in the engine
Introducing this volume, this paper summarises the contents and offers an analysis of the place of creative work in a global economy, focusing in particular on the restructuring of global value chains and the commodification of knowledge in a process which simultaneously opens up the possibility for new creative tasks for some workers whilst deskilling others. It concludes with a discussion of the contradictions that this presents for creative wo…
The emergence of Emergence
This paper anatomises a pioneering international research project on the global relocation of telemediated employment. It outlines the intellectual origins of the project in the literature on globalisation, the knowledge society, teleworking and other related bodies of work and discusses the limits of the empirical information available up to 2000, when the project was launched. It then summarises the conceptual and methodological framework devel…
The new gold rush
This article describes the growth of the new ‘public services industry’ and outlines the way in which government-provided services can be transformed into commodities and opened up as new fields of activity for private companies. Pointing out that many of these companies have become major transnational enterprises, it then goes on to introduce the other articles in this collection, which focus on the commodification, corporatisation and privatisa…
Break or weld? trade union responses to global value chain restructuring
This paper provides a short introduction to this volume, sketching out some of the main dilemmas confronting trade unions in the context of global value chain restructuring, discussing some of the alternative strategies currently being adopted around the world and summarising the contributions to this volume
Working at the interface
Introducing this volume, this paper describes the contradictory nature of many aspects of call-centre work, drawing on the results of the EC-funded STILE project to demonstrate the difficulties of classifying call-centre workers. The lack of a clear objective ‘place’ in the technical division of labour and the social order for this transient and poorly-defined workforce is mirrored by a subjective failure, on the part of call-centre workers, to i…
Between a rock and a hard place
Introducing this volume, this article discusses how employment practices are shaped in a global economy, asking to what extent national policies and institutions still play a role and the importance of other social, economic, political and cultural factors in determining how work is organised and the pay, conditions and job security of workers. Whilst it is clear that there are general tendencies of erosion of labour standards, fragmentation of l…
Passing the buck
This article starts by looking critically at the contested concept of work flexibility, tracing the ambiguities inherent in it to the contradictions embodied in the ‘special deals’ struck between capital and labour in the third quarter of the 20th century. It then goes on to discuss the new forms of employment casualisation – and resulting precariousness – that have arisen since that period within the ‘formal’ economy, arising from the processes …
Mundo material
Uma nova ortodoxia está se constituindo, que toma como certo que o "conhecimento" é a única fonte de valor, que o trabalho é uma eventualidade e não é localizável, que a globalização é um processo inexorável e inevitável e que, por, consequência, a resistência é vã e qualquer reivindicação advinda de um corpo físico aqui-e-agora está irremediavelmente fora de moda. As implicações deste "senso comum" são imensas, pois podem moldar assuntos tão div…
The reproduction of difference
This article starts by outlining the complex relationship between the gender division of labour in the household and the division of labour in waged work, taking account of the social, technical and spatial dimensions of this global division of labour and showing how this contradictary inter-relationship affects both the different value of men's and women's labour and the different positions that women and men occupy in the labour market. Whilst …
Bridges and barriers
This article starts by discussing the global division of labour. To what extent can its spatial patterns be explained by simple economic logic and to what extent is it shaped by specific features of national and local environments and corporate strategies? What factors enable restructuring, and what are the barriers to the mobility both of capital and of labour? It then introduces the articles in this issue, which display the complexity of global…
Working online, living offline
This paper begins by tracing changes in employment patterns since the middle of the 20th Century, arguing that the mid 2000s marked the beginning of a fourth distinctive phase, the earlier ones having begun, respectively, after the end of World War II, after the 1973 oil crisis, and after the end of the Cold War, around 1990. In this new phase, dubbed here the ‘Internet Age’, various tendencies with their origins in earlier periods have reached c…
La crise comme aubaine sans précédent pour le capitalisme
La posie est une arme charge de futur
The containment of labour in accelerated global supply chains
This article presents a case study of the sale of two of the three piers at the formerly state-owned container port of Piraeus, in Greece to a Chinese company, COSCO, formng a crucial hub in the transit of goods to European markets, and examines the impacts on labour. It places this study in the context of the global consolidation, restructuring and acceleration of supply chains as well as in the specific context of privatisation of infrastructur…
Labour in the circuits of global markets
This article introduces the contents of this volume, reflecting on the commonalities and complementaries between articles
Vida, Trabalho E Valor No Século Xxi
Costuma-se argumentar que a teoria do valor-trabalho de Marx não mais se aplica ao mundo contemporâneo, em que partes crescentes da população estão envolvidas em trabalho "imaterial" ou trabalho "digital". Este ensaio argumenta que essa teoria ainda é relevante, mas que, a fim de entender como ela pode ser aplicada ao trabalho imaterial e ao trabalho de modo mais geral, é necessário analisar criticamente os três principais componentes da teoria: …
Saints and sinners
This article looks at the messages given by factual TV programmes to audiences about work, and, in particular, the models of working behaviour that have been presented to them during the period following the 2007–2008 financial crisis. It focuses particularly, but not exclusively, on daytime TV, which has an audience made up disproportionately of people who have low incomes and are poorly educated: an audience that, it can be argued, is not only …
ICapitalism and the Cybertariat
We have now entered a period...when new waves of commodification set in motion in earlier periods are reaching maturity. The new commodities have been generated by drawing into the market even more aspects of life that were previously outside the money economy, or at least that part of it that generates a profit for capitalists. Several such fields of accumulation have now emerged, each with a different method of commodity genesis, forming the ba…
Economics (24 works) · Political science (24 works) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Engineering (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (12 works) · Business (11 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (11 works)