Gifts of Labour
Steel Production and Technological Imagination in an Area of Urban Deprivation, Sheffield, UK
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2360659 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Mao Mollona (GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE, LONDON,, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 177-198 |
| Publication date | 2005-06-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Critique of Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0308-275X • E-ISSN: 1460-3721 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0308275x05052022 |
| OpenAlex | W2038505168 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
| References cited | 23 |
The article focuses on how the workers of a small tool factory located in Endcliffe - an area of urban deprivation in Sheffield, UK - conceptualize, experience, and talk about the value of their labour and how changes in the wider politico-economic environment affect their notion of labour value. The article combines a Marxist analysis of the capitalist labour process with an anthropological focus on the ideology of gift and commodity exchange, and explores the cultural specificity of processes of labour commodification. It argues that the combined effect of state neoliberal policies and extensive subcontracting by local steel corporations in Sheffield have turned small factories into hybrids between economic and welfare institutions, with mixed commodified and non-commodified labour on the same shopfloor. In challenging much of the recent anthropological literature on alienation, the article claims that alienation is the consequence of the workers' (con)fusion of the ideology of labour as a free gift and the ideology of labour as a purely utilitarian activity, rather than of their sharp separation
Alienation · Capitalism · Commodification · Commodity · Economics · Ideology · Labor theory of value · Labour economics · Market economy · Marxist philosophy · Neoliberalism (international relations · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Surplus value · Value (mathematics · Employment and Welfare Studies · Labor Movements and Unions · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy
The production of inequality
The symbolism of money in Imerina
Entangled Objects
The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology
Making of the English Working Class
Anthropology, art, and aesthetics
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Outline of a Theory of Practice
Ritual, History and Power
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Key Debates in Anthropology
The Gender of the Gift
The Perception of the Environment
Emerging Alienation in Production
From Craft to Industry
The Gift, the Indian Gift and the 'Indian Gift
Fetishised Objects and Humanised Nature
The Production of Inequality
Subcontracting in Steel
Of Cabbages and Kin
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2010 - 2024 (15) |
| Highly cited | No |