B Kenny
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 54025 |
|---|---|
| NOME | B Kenny |
| PRENOMES | B |
| SOBRENOME | Kenny |
| ASSINATURA | KENNY B |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of the Witwatersrand |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6255-4971 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 15 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 13 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 15 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2002 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
South African e-commerce logistics
Based on industry reports and interviews with warehouse workers and unions, this article examines how the global patterns of e-commerce logistics are integrated with and constituted through concrete relations of racialised labour processes in South Africa. It analyses the specificity of the growth of capital investment, the expansion of consumer markets, new state interests and the new use of digital technology in the labour process of e-commerce…
Workers Reconstituting the Factory
This comment on Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory discusses how the book offers four interrelated theoretical contributions to the study of labour in the digital economy – redefining the factory, specifying digital Taylorism, materializing its infrastructure, and mapping class relations – through four sites of investigation. The piece discusses the implications of the resulting multiplication of labour and labour relations for reconfigured c…
“A Loot-a continua”? Inequality, humour, and broken aspirations in South African consumer culture
This paper critically analyses purposively chosen case studies from media coverage of the lootings in South Africa in July 2021. Our goals are to help make sense of a collectively traumatic event and to move beyond theories of looting as “deviant” consumption. We explain the context of the lootings, offering a long-view of crises building up to an intense eruption of social unrest during the pandemic. Then, we analyse four selected looting storie…
Special Section on Productive Hierarchies in Global Perspectives
From the nineteenth century, when the new social question of women's factory labor came to preoccupy the (middle-class) public imagination, to the present times of globalized labor chains, discourses on gendered labor have been at once fluid and constitutive of labor hierarchies. These discourses and social relations affirm their centrality within processes of industrialization and workplace restructuring as well as in development policy, urban f…
The “Shop Girl” and White Nationalism
Based on media stories and union campaigns, this paper tracks the discourses from the 1930s to the 1970s around the ‘shop girl’ in Johannesburg. It argues that the shop girl was a figure of white femininity that complicates the now extensive literature on white women in South Africa through its reproduction of the enduring tension of class difference. Through archival research and interviews, the paper shows how the ‘shop girl’ contributed to an …
Making (and enduring) feminist relations
This essay reviews Srila Roy's (2022) Changing the Subject. It notes the multiple dimensions along which she articulates feminist and queer politics in two organizations in West Bengal, India, including scale, space, and generation. Feminism and queer politics are co-constituted from the Global South, across rural and urban relations, and through older and younger generations of activism. By examining two sites of the constitution of feminist and…
Reproducing “racial capitalism” through retailing in South Africa
Using Stuart Hall's concept of articulation and the concrete with Bridget O'Laughlin's reminder of a focus on the struggles of living labour, this paper theorizes racial capitalism in South Africa from the concrete relations of retail labour in Johannesburg. The paper examines ways in which white working class women constituted retailing, struggling for their own claims in relation to gendered family and workplace orders, which in turn conditione…
Trading Time
This is a historical piece that traces debates and struggles over store trading times (which determined working time) from the 1960s to the 1980s in Johannesburg, South Africa, to explore the connection of working time debates to the precarianisation of retail labour in South Africa over the ensuing decades. Debates about trading time and working time, and how unions engaged therein, were fundamentally linked with changes to the labour market of …
Servicing “intimate publics”
Based on archival and interview research in the US and South Africa, this paper examines two moments of public debate around access to the space of department stores in Johannesburg and in Baltimore in the 1960s. In Baltimore, African American students organized a sit-in protest at lunch counters and restaurants of major department stores to contest not being served. In Johannesburg, the National Union of Distributive Workers (NUDW), campaigned a…
To protect white men
‘Job reservation’ bolstered apartheid state power in South Africa through affirming the status and class position of whites. Under Section 77 of the 1956 Industrial Conciliation Act, an industrial tribunal could be set up to investigate whether a particular occupation might be reserved by race. This article examines the debates surrounding the investigation into an unusual job category – that of the passenger lift attendant within the service sec…
The South African labour movement
This paper reviews the state of the South African labour movement. It discusses trade unions within the context of national political dynamics, including the Tripartite Alliance and neoliberalism, as well as growing precarianization of work within South Africa. It examines splits within the major federation and explores debates around union renewal and new worker organizations. It argues that the political terrain is fragmented and shifting, but …
The Regime of Contract in South African Retailing
This article examines the history of precarious labor within the retail sector in South Africa since the early decades of the twentieth century. It argues that a “regime of contract” characterized through a bifurcated legal apparatus for black and white workers and skill segmentation naturalized by race and gender can be used to track the continuities as well as explain the changes within forms of precarious labor in the present. The history of s…
Walmart in South Africa
In 2011 Walmart's bid to buy a controlling stake in South Africa's Massmart Holdings, Inc. went before the country's Competition Commission and Competition Tribunal, both of which would determine whether to grant the merger outright or to place conditions on it. Massmart Holdings comprises a number of branded subsidiaries in the South African market, including Walmart-style general merchandise dealers, electronics retailers, do-it-yourself buildi…
Milking the region? South African capital and Zambia’s dairy industry
From Workshop to Wasteland
In 1999 the South African government passed the Municipal Structures Act which established the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Council and merged the East Rand towns of Alberton, Germiston, Brakpan, Benoni, Kempton Park, Springs, and Nigel under a common municipal authority. The new demarcation created a unified administrative structure for this region of approximately 2.5 million people living east of Johannesburg. It gave formal expression to long-stan…
From Workshop to Wasteland
In 1999 the South African government passed the Municipal Structures Act which established the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Council and merged the East Rand towns of Alberton, Germiston, Brakpan, Benoni, Kempton Park, Springs, and Nigel under a common municipal authority. The new demarcation created a unified administrative structure for this region of approximately 2.5 million people living east of Johannesburg. It gave formal expression to long-stan…
The Regime of Contract in South African Retailing
This article examines the history of precarious labor within the retail sector in South Africa since the early decades of the twentieth century. It argues that a “regime of contract” characterized through a bifurcated legal apparatus for black and white workers and skill segmentation naturalized by race and gender can be used to track the continuities as well as explain the changes within forms of precarious labor in the present. The history of s…
Trading Time
This is a historical piece that traces debates and struggles over store trading times (which determined working time) from the 1960s to the 1980s in Johannesburg, South Africa, to explore the connection of working time debates to the precarianisation of retail labour in South Africa over the ensuing decades. Debates about trading time and working time, and how unions engaged therein, were fundamentally linked with changes to the labour market of …
The South African labour movement
This paper reviews the state of the South African labour movement. It discusses trade unions within the context of national political dynamics, including the Tripartite Alliance and neoliberalism, as well as growing precarianization of work within South Africa. It examines splits within the major federation and explores debates around union renewal and new worker organizations. It argues that the political terrain is fragmented and shifting, but …
To protect white men
‘Job reservation’ bolstered apartheid state power in South Africa through affirming the status and class position of whites. Under Section 77 of the 1956 Industrial Conciliation Act, an industrial tribunal could be set up to investigate whether a particular occupation might be reserved by race. This article examines the debates surrounding the investigation into an unusual job category – that of the passenger lift attendant within the service sec…
From Workshop to Wasteland
In 1999 the South African government passed the Municipal Structures Act which established the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Council and merged the East Rand towns of Alberton, Germiston, Brakpan, Benoni, Kempton Park, Springs, and Nigel under a common municipal authority. The new demarcation created a unified administrative structure for this region of approximately 2.5 million people living east of Johannesburg. It gave formal expression to long-stan…
Milking the region? South African capital and Zambia’s dairy industry
Walmart in South Africa
In 2011 Walmart's bid to buy a controlling stake in South Africa's Massmart Holdings, Inc. went before the country's Competition Commission and Competition Tribunal, both of which would determine whether to grant the merger outright or to place conditions on it. Massmart Holdings comprises a number of branded subsidiaries in the South African market, including Walmart-style general merchandise dealers, electronics retailers, do-it-yourself buildi…
The Regime of Contract in South African Retailing
This article examines the history of precarious labor within the retail sector in South Africa since the early decades of the twentieth century. It argues that a “regime of contract” characterized through a bifurcated legal apparatus for black and white workers and skill segmentation naturalized by race and gender can be used to track the continuities as well as explain the changes within forms of precarious labor in the present. The history of s…
Servicing “intimate publics”
Based on archival and interview research in the US and South Africa, this paper examines two moments of public debate around access to the space of department stores in Johannesburg and in Baltimore in the 1960s. In Baltimore, African American students organized a sit-in protest at lunch counters and restaurants of major department stores to contest not being served. In Johannesburg, the National Union of Distributive Workers (NUDW), campaigned a…
To protect white men
‘Job reservation’ bolstered apartheid state power in South Africa through affirming the status and class position of whites. Under Section 77 of the 1956 Industrial Conciliation Act, an industrial tribunal could be set up to investigate whether a particular occupation might be reserved by race. This article examines the debates surrounding the investigation into an unusual job category – that of the passenger lift attendant within the service sec…
The South African labour movement
This paper reviews the state of the South African labour movement. It discusses trade unions within the context of national political dynamics, including the Tripartite Alliance and neoliberalism, as well as growing precarianization of work within South Africa. It examines splits within the major federation and explores debates around union renewal and new worker organizations. It argues that the political terrain is fragmented and shifting, but …
Trading Time
This is a historical piece that traces debates and struggles over store trading times (which determined working time) from the 1960s to the 1980s in Johannesburg, South Africa, to explore the connection of working time debates to the precarianisation of retail labour in South Africa over the ensuing decades. Debates about trading time and working time, and how unions engaged therein, were fundamentally linked with changes to the labour market of …
Reproducing “racial capitalism” through retailing in South Africa
Using Stuart Hall's concept of articulation and the concrete with Bridget O'Laughlin's reminder of a focus on the struggles of living labour, this paper theorizes racial capitalism in South Africa from the concrete relations of retail labour in Johannesburg. The paper examines ways in which white working class women constituted retailing, struggling for their own claims in relation to gendered family and workplace orders, which in turn conditione…
“A Loot-a continua”? Inequality, humour, and broken aspirations in South African consumer culture
This paper critically analyses purposively chosen case studies from media coverage of the lootings in South Africa in July 2021. Our goals are to help make sense of a collectively traumatic event and to move beyond theories of looting as “deviant” consumption. We explain the context of the lootings, offering a long-view of crises building up to an intense eruption of social unrest during the pandemic. Then, we analyse four selected looting storie…
Special Section on Productive Hierarchies in Global Perspectives
From the nineteenth century, when the new social question of women's factory labor came to preoccupy the (middle-class) public imagination, to the present times of globalized labor chains, discourses on gendered labor have been at once fluid and constitutive of labor hierarchies. These discourses and social relations affirm their centrality within processes of industrialization and workplace restructuring as well as in development policy, urban f…
The “Shop Girl” and White Nationalism
Based on media stories and union campaigns, this paper tracks the discourses from the 1930s to the 1970s around the ‘shop girl’ in Johannesburg. It argues that the shop girl was a figure of white femininity that complicates the now extensive literature on white women in South Africa through its reproduction of the enduring tension of class difference. Through archival research and interviews, the paper shows how the ‘shop girl’ contributed to an …
Making (and enduring) feminist relations
This essay reviews Srila Roy's (2022) Changing the Subject. It notes the multiple dimensions along which she articulates feminist and queer politics in two organizations in West Bengal, India, including scale, space, and generation. Feminism and queer politics are co-constituted from the Global South, across rural and urban relations, and through older and younger generations of activism. By examining two sites of the constitution of feminist and…
Workers Reconstituting the Factory
This comment on Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory discusses how the book offers four interrelated theoretical contributions to the study of labour in the digital economy – redefining the factory, specifying digital Taylorism, materializing its infrastructure, and mapping class relations – through four sites of investigation. The piece discusses the implications of the resulting multiplication of labour and labour relations for reconfigured c…
South African e-commerce logistics
Based on industry reports and interviews with warehouse workers and unions, this article examines how the global patterns of e-commerce logistics are integrated with and constituted through concrete relations of racialised labour processes in South Africa. It analyses the specificity of the growth of capital investment, the expansion of consumer markets, new state interests and the new use of digital technology in the labour process of e-commerce…
Political science (13 obras) · Law (10 obras) · Sociology (10 obras) · Politics (9 obras) · Gender Studies (8 obras) · Economics (6 obras) · Gender Studies (6 obras) · Labor Movements and Unions (6 obras) · Law (6 obras) · South African History and Culture (6 obras)