Course Syllabus

Jump to Today

Activities and readings should be done before class each week.

 

Note: We may adapt and adjust the readings and activities along the way. I will send a weekly announcement with the definitive reading assignments and will update this page.

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Introduction

Week 1 – 1/28 :: Keywords and First Thoughts

To get started, we’ll think about the ideas about work that we each bring to the topic. We’ll read selections from Raymond Williams’s brilliant book Keywords in which he traces the etymology of some words that are so common that one rarely thinks about their meanings, but which also hold some fascinating complexities. If you have time, there are lots of other interesting entries in the book.

READ: Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976): “Career” (Pg 52), “Industry” (165), “Labor”(176), “Work”(134). https://canvas.harvard.edu/files/11582866/download?download_frd=1

ACTIVITY: Find an article about the “future of work” written in the last year and published in a reputable magazine or journal. Some places to look include New York Times, Wired Magazine, Harvard Business Review, and the Economist, but feel free to go beyond those. Take some notes on these questions: What is the main idea? What assumptions does the author make? What commitments (political or otherwise) does the author (or the outlet) have? Does this future sound likely? Does it sound preferable? We’ll talk about what you find in class.

Week 2 – 2/4 :: Dissatisifactions of Employment

We’ll skip ahead to the end to read about a small selection of problems with work today. These are all journalistic pieces with all the advantages and disadvantages of that form of writing. As always, take them with a grain of salt and look out for the assumptions and commitments of the writers and outlets. We also have one "meta-level" article to help us work together as a class. There are large number of pieces, but they're mostly pretty short.

Graeber was an anthropologist (he passed away last fall) who wrote extensively on the big picture of political economy. He was an important voice in the Occupy movement and wrote an amazing book called Debt: the First 5,000 Years. I’ve limited myself to only assigning two pieces from him this semester, but his spirit runs through the class. This piece made a bit of a viral splash when it came out. He expanded it into a book that is worth reading, as well.

There are three pieces on the gig economy outlining the overall picture of app-based working conditions, how these conditions have worsened during the pandemic, and a recent setback for labor organizers. Sobering stuff.

Guardian piece gives a peak into the recovered factory movement in Argentina. It’s a movement that shows that completely different modes of organization are not only possible, but exist right now. There is a lot more to the story than this covers, but it is a start. If you want to learn more about the recovered factories, check out the optional articles at the end of this week's list.

There are also two pieces about the labor conditions of "essential workers" during the pandemic and how race and immigration status are used to keep people working in unhealthy conditions. This is also just the tip of the iceberg regarding the dynamics that created this work situation.

The Seeds for Change guide explains the idea of group agreements. We'll be roughly following this procedure to create class agreement and best practices during this week's session. By-the-by, Seeds for Change is a cool organization that helps social movements create and maintain healthy organization structures. If you're looking for guides to creating a high-functioning, non-heirarchical group, there's a ton of useful stuff on their site.

READ:

OPTIONAL:

ACTIVITY: Draw on your experience in previous classes (in-person and online) to think about what has made classes and discussions good or bad. What best practices and group norms would you propose for this class? These can be big ideas (like: listen with respect when people talk) or mechanical (like: in groups larger than 5, mute your microphone when you're not talking). We'll gather everyone's ideas together to create our shared norms.

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Wage Labor

Week 3 – 2/11 :: Time Discipline

Buy and selling labor time is a core element of most work. It’s the material basis for the social arrangement of wage labor. Although now ubiquitous, it is not a natural or even very old arrangement. This week we’ll look at the origins “punching the clock” and the challenges of getting people to come to work all day, every day.

This Thompson article is a classic, which is to say that it's old, but I think it still has a lot to offer. He traces the interaction between clock technology, ideas about time, popular culture, morality, and industry. It's interesting to think about how all of these strands still seem to be at work. Thompson also points to some interesting things here that he and others develop more elsewhere-- like expanding the idea of working class resistance beyond strikes and protest to include attitudes to work, holidays, and other elements of every-day actions and culture. Thompson is remembered for launching what was once called “new labor history,” which was a "history from below" approach to labor history that took seriously the actions and culture of working people. This article also has a certain poetry in its ideas a writing that has made it stick with me.

There are ways that it also shows its age and the limits of Thompson's perspective. There has been work done in the past forty years that updates Thompson's findings-- like more is known about the history of the distribution of clocks and watches. The biggest critiques that jump out to me are in 1) his collapse of everything (and everyone) before the industrial revolution into a single "preindustrial" time-sense; 2) his tendency to take (white, male) England as the center and model of industrialization; 3) his assumption that there is one dominant time-sense at a time (rather than seeing ways that people operate with different ideas in different moments); 4) his relegation of women's housework to the realm of the "pre-industrial". For an extended discussion of some of these limits, see the optional reading.

READ: E. P. Thompson, “TIME, WORK-DISCIPLINE, AND INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM,” Past & Present 38, no. 1 (1967): 56–97, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/38.1.56 or PDF File.

OPTIONAL: Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, “Reworking E. P. Thompson’s `Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’,” Time & Society 5, no. 3 (1996): 275–299, https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X96005003001.

ACTIVITY: Find popular article about one of the following: "Life hacks" for time management, busy-ness epidemic; Amazon fulfillment center worker management. What similarities and differences do you see from the early period that Thompson describes?

 

Week 4 – 2/18 :: Critiques of Capitalist Social Relations

This week you'll pick three of these four strands of major social movements. We could provisionally call them: Marxism/communism, industrial unionism, feminism, and identity politics (intersectional feminist anti-racism). These four strands have often been posed as competing alternatives, but I think it’s more useful to look for what each approach can add to a movement.

Marx probably needs little introduction. His theoretical apparatus has been a key source of tools for critical analysis (many people we’re reading draw on Marx) and his work has been the inspiration for a variety of communist and labor movements. This piece was written as a kind of warm up for Capital and contains his core insights about wage labor in a condensed form.

We also have a few early descriptions of industrial unionism from the International Workers of the World (IWW). IWW was founded in the early 20th century as a revolutionary union that sought to bring together all workers from all industries, skill levels, races, and genders into "one big union" to fundamentally transform the dynamics of industrial capitalism. We're reading an early manifesto, written as an invitation to the constitutional congress for the new union, and two versions of the preamble of the resulting constitution. All three cover similar ground, but each has a few choice phrases that stand out. The IWW represents an important strand of union history that has since been a bit buried by the rise and decline of hierarchical unions more focused on legislation and contracts, but that is still very much active. A lot of organizing in fast food, the gig economy, prisons, of the people experiencing unemployment and homelessness, and around debt resistance is being done either by the IWW or in its spirit.

The Combahee River Collective Statement is an important source for intersectional Black feminism. It talks about “interlocking” oppressions and argues for the importance of identity as a site and source of liberation and might be the first use of the term “identity politics,” Labor isn’t the primary focus but runs throughout the statement.

Kathi Weeks argues for a universal basic income through a devastating critique of wage labor as a wholly insufficient way to reward productivity and allocate income. She draws in the Wages for Housework campaign and a variety of autonomous Marxist critiques. She also offers a vision for how completely society and individual lives could be transformed by relaxing the link between work and income.

PICK 3 TO READ (Feel free to read all four, if you want):

ACTIVITY: Pick one of these critiques and create a concept-map outlining the main ideas. There is a fair amount of complexity in these pieces and it's worth some time to work through them in detail. You'll share your concept map in small groups and with the rest of the class.

Here's a quick guide to making and using concept maps: https://learningcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/using-concept-maps/

You can use whatever technology you are comfortable with. If you don't have a preference, Google Doc's Jamboard (https://jamboard.google.com/) or Google Drawing (https://docs.google.com/drawings) might be the easiest. You can find both on the Google Drive page > +NEW button > More. If you want an open source tool, Inkscape is great (https://inkscape.org/). You could also just draw it on paper and take a photo.

 

Week 5 – 2/25 :: Racialized Workers

Race has always been central to labor and work in the United States. It has been an organizing principle for dividing up work and workers, and racial identity (particularly of white workers) is central to understanding labor history.

W.E.B Du Bois’s Black Recontruction is a classic founding document for understanding the ties between race and class in the US and the role of race and racism in defining (and limiting) the possibilities of working-class liberation. It's also a key document in Black radical historiography. In the part we're reading, Du Bois analyzes the lead up to the Civil War in terms of a racialized labor struggle, which creates many of the dynamics that haunt us today. The rest of the book is well worth reading. Of special note to this class is that in Du Bois telling, the war was won by the North because of a general strike among enslaved people, making the war itself part of a larger labor struggle. This was also one of the first works to critically look at whiteness as a racial category, introducing the idea of the “psychological wage” of whiteness. We aren't reading the section where he uses the term, but the idea is definitely present in the bit we are reading.

The second article is the text of a lecture that introduces the concept of "racial capitalism" and traces the concept's history. The term doesn't come from Du Bois, but is from the same intellectual tradition. It's a useful way to look at how racial divisions in the workforce aren't glitches or holdovers, but are part of how modern capitalism has functioned.

The optional podcast listening follow another thread from Du Bois, critically looking at the history of whiteness. It's from a great series by John Beiwen called "Seeing White," which asks "what's going on with white people?" The whole series is good, but I've pointed out two episodes that most directly touch on labor.

READ:

ACTIVITY: Find an article from the mainstream press about race and labor/working class from the past five years. This (of course) includes but is not limited to the post-2016 cottage industry of analyzing the white working class. How might Du Bois or any of the other folks mentioned in this week's reading/listening interpret the events of the article?

 

Week 6 – 3/4 :: Looking Beyond Wage Labor

Wage labor and production work has long dominated the imaginations of scholars of work. That kind of work, though, only accounts for a small portion of the work that people actually do. On one hand, unfree and unpaid work forms an important foundation for wage labor and capitalist accumulation and must be taken into account to see the whole picture. On the other hand, every day people undertake numerous work-like activities that have little to do with profit or payment.

The Andrea Komlosy reading is a bit dense, but gives a good overview of the variety of ways that non-wage work is incorporated into studies of capitalism.

J.K. Gibson-Graham (a shared pen name for Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson) launched a subfield of economic geography that sought to broaden the scope of what kinds of practices count as “economic.” In the process they found countless examples of non-capitalist modes of activity in everyday life. This article highlights some of that work. It also includes an interesting reflection on how different approaches to scholarship might enable or inhibit different kinds of political activity.

READ:

ACTIVITY: Nothing specific.

 

Week 7 – 3/11 :: Take Back Work

The social relations of wage labor are not permanent or natural. They can and will change. This week we’ll look in two directions for signs of other ways of organizing work.

We’ll read another piece from Gibson-Graham, this time turning the insights from the diverse economies literature into a program and vision for change. This piece points to people already finding new relationships to work and suggests immediate practical interventions.

Cooperation Jackson and the projects in the Solidarity Rising report are movements that are creating new kinds of cooperative organizations and work arrangement that seeks to create economic and political autonomy for lower income communities of color. Both areas of growth are especially exciting because of the interconnected nature of the co-ops that are developing. This is only one example of the thousands of interconnected worker cooperatives that are growing across the world.

 

READ:

  • J K Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy, “Take Back Work: Surviving Well,” in Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities. (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Find on Hollis ; PDF File

Choose one of the following two choices:

  • Ajamu Nangwaya and Cooperation Jackson, "A Long and Strong History with Southern Roots," AND "The Jackson-Kush Plan: The Struggle for Black Self-determination and Economic Democracy," in Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Recovery and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi (Montreal, Quebec: Daraja Press, 2017), Read online ; Find in Hollis.
  • Penn Loh & Sarah Jimenez, "Solidarity Rising in Massachusetts: How Solidarity Economy Movement is Emerging in Lower Income Communities of Color," A Report by the Solidarity Economy Initiative February 2017. Read online ; PDF File

ACTIVITY:

Choose one:

  • Find a co-op (current or historic) that you feel a connection to and see what you can find about their vision, history, and organizational structure. How do they fit into their context? Into their industry? How do they make decisions and distribute risks and rewards?
  • Following Gibson-Graham's (et al) model, create some 24-hour clocks and wellness charts. How would you represent your current life? Your life before the pandemic? Your ideal life? Your could also talk to friends and family (or anyone else) and make clocks and charts based on what they say. Are there changes you would like to make to better match your real clock and chart to your ideal? What would help make the match better?

DUE: Contemporary Document Assignment (3/14 at midnight)

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Management and Bureaucracy

Week 8 – 3/18 :: Scientific Management and the Corporation

This week we're starting our second module, this time looking at the organization and decision-making. In the most organizational contexts, this means management and bureaucracy, which are two more elements of work that are so ubiquitous that they can easily be taken for granted.

To get started, we're reading about the interlinked rise of modern management and modern corporations. These readings help outline the specific circumstances of their origin and the core goals and commitments of the people who created them.

In America by Design, Noble traces the connections between the creation of the engineering profession and the rise of corporate capitalism. He traces the growth of engineering schools, corporate and corporate funded research, and so forth. We're reading the last chapter of the book where he outlines the evolution of management (scientific management, corporate welfare, human engineering, and human relations) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He tells the story of engineers widening their scope to include people and later moving from the drafting rooms and shop floors into the executive roles, then into government, schools, and everywhere else. This is one of the stories that makes the 20th century make a lot more sense to me.

Two more notes on the Noble reading: The chapter is pretty long and he goes into great detail. Try not to get bogged down. The big picture is more important to us than the details. He is pretty good about summarizing each section at the beginning. Second, America by Design is another classic (this time in the history of technology) and like the others we've read has a lot to offer, but also has significant limits to its perspective. The use of "man" to mean people stands out to me. But what is worse is that Lillian Gilbreth is pretty much the only woman in his story, which leaves out a really interesting story of women in the corporate wellbeing offices, which were some of the first professional roles women held in industry. Race is also completely invisible in his telling of the story, which is another area more recent critical histories of management have done better with.

Lipartito's chapter on the utopian origins of corporations is in part a way to  get a handle on the history of corporations (which are not a very old way of organizing business). What I really like about this chapter is that it points to the way that the rise of corporations was not just a matter of economic rationality -- of coming up with the most efficient way to make a profit. They also embody a set of ideals about how to organize people and ultimately the world.

READ:

  • David F. Noble, “A Technology of Social Production: Modern Management and the Expansion of Engineering,” in America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Knopf, 1977); PDF File ; On Hollis.

  • Kenneth Lipartito, “The Utopian Corporation,” in Constructing Corporate America. PDF File ; At Oxford Digital Resources ; On Hollis.

ACTIVITY: Let's imagine a management fairy tale: If you found a magic ring that allowed you to rationalize or reorganize something, what would you sort out and how? You don't need to fix the world, just start with something concrete that effects you directly. Think more about what kind of system you could create, ignoring for the moment the likely complex implications the change would actually entail (hopefully the ring will take care of all that with magic :) ). This is meant to be a silly thought experiment. The goal, though, is to embody, for a moment, the perspective of the engineers and managers we're reading about-- the feeling that any problem can be solved if someone just thinks it through and designs a good system.

 

Week 9 – 3/25 :: What’s Wrong with Bureaucracy

It's easy to find dismissive and negative comments on bureaucracy, but sustained critiques of the limitations and issues with it are much harder to find. This week's readings are two examples of such critiques. Both also address why the problems with bureaucracy are hard to bring into focus.

It's also good to note that both authors are coming from an anti-hierarchical left perspective, though neither writes much explicitly on that background. It's a perspective that sets them in tension, to a certain extent, with other left perspectives (liberal, Marxist). It also means that both are working against some assumptions shared by many perspectives on the right and the left, such as: the identification of state governments with the public interest and corporations with private interests (with many on right and left arguing about which should have more power). Instead, they see the operation of state governments, corporations as all part of the same system and all operating in similar ways.

We read Graeber's bullshit jobs article earlier in the semester and are now returning to him for some related thoughts on structure into which those jobs operate. This is the introduction to a book of essays on bureaucracy. In this chapter he outlines why there is not currently a strong left critique of bureaucracy and explores some observations that such a critique would include. Graeber's writing often had a provisional feel, as if he was going to write up the full theory when he had a chance. Sadly, with his passing, we don't have those full theories. Graeber also writes with an offhanded opinionated style that you might love or hate. But as he says, he's trying to start a conversation.

The Kathy Ferguson chapter is also the introduction to a book on bureaucracy. Usefully, she starts out defining key elements of bureaucracy (drawing on Max Weber). I find this helpful in bringing key features of organizational life into focus. She goes on to pull together feminism (of the 1970s, when she wrote this), radicalism, and Foucault to point the direction for a critique.

If you want to go to the source of analyses of bureaucracy, check out the optional reading from Max Weber. This is one of the first modern analyses of this form of organization and is still an important foundation.

READ:

  • David Graeber, “The Iron Law of Liberalism in the Era of Total Bureaucracy,” in The Utopia of Rules; PDF File ; On Hollis

  • Kathy E. Ferguson, “What does Feminism have to do with Bureaucracy?” in The Feminist Case against Bureaucracy. PDF File ; On Hollis

OPTIONAL:

  • Weber, Max, "Bureaucracy" in Weber, Max. Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society: New translations on Politics, Bureaucracy, and Social Stratification. Edited and Translated by Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters, 2015. PDF File ; On Hollis

 

ACTIVITY: Two things for next week (please do both):

  • We're going to do peer feedback on the contemporary documents in class next week, so please read your partner's piece and jot down some notes about what stood out to you most. I'll send more instructions as a separate announcement.
  • It's time to get started on the speculative project. For next week: Brainstorm 5 "what if" scenarios that you could base your project on and  Think about the format of the item from the future that you would like to create.

Week 10 – 4/1 :: Organization without Bureaucracy

This week we're looking at ways to organize group decision-making and activities that are distinct from the hierarchical bureaucratic norm of most formal organizations. How are these methods different from more familiar methods? What different assumptions do they make about people?

The Bollier and Helfrich chapter looks at some features of peer governance in commons-based organizations. This is part of a larger outline of features of successful commons (historic, traditional, and emerging) which also covers social and economic (which they call "provisioning") aspects of the commons. We're just focusing on the decision-making aspects.

The short blog article by Vu Le is a brief description of one non-profit's experiments with a different decision-making process. I like this article because it shows the possibility (and importance) of changing the power structures within existing organization. I also generally find Vu's blog very funny.

The guide and video from Seeds for Change explain in more practical detail how consensus decision-making can be implemented. I like these guides because they are based on real-world experience using these techniques and are written to be used by real organizations in the real world, rather than being idealized descriptions what might be possible.

READ:

OPTIONAL:

ACTIVITY: Are there any techniques or perspectives from this week that you can imagine using in your activities or that you have used? Either now, in the past, or in the future? Jot down some notes-- we'll share in class.

 

​Global Work

Week 11 – 4/8 :: Neoliberal Globalization vs Global Justice

For this last week of reading, we're looking briefly at the global context of work and labor struggles. One week is not enough for the topic, but we'll at least sketch out the shape of the big issues at play. Of particular note are the ways that the current system of neoliberal globalization is a historically specific development that is created and maintained by specific institutions and agreements, and that there has been, and continues to be, a robust global movement against the system. Often labeled "anti-globalization," as we'll read, "global justice" or "alter-globalization" might be more accurate (and have been used within the movements).

The Clawson chapter is part of a book that argues for a the importance of a revived progressive labor movement that is explicitly linked to other liberation movements. It is a definitely opinionated book that is strongly pro-union, pro-labor, with little sympathy for corporations or "business interests." In this chapter he looks at the the relationship between labor and a specific form of globalization. I find this chapter especially useful in separating globalization in general from the specific pro-corporate system of finance, trade, and labor that has developed since the 1970s. It also usefully highlights forms of international solidarity and resistance that were evolving in the early 2000s. The chapter does show its age, especially in that a lot has happened in the past 20 years. On the other hand, less has changed than one might hope some significant historical moments (Seattle 1999 and the post 9/11 repression) were closer than they are today. 

The article by Caruso starts a bit slow, but picks up as it goes. I think it's a good final assigned reading for the class that harks implicitly back to a lot of what we've been talking about, while also gesturing toward new ways of thinking about people, organizations, and politics that have been emerging around the world. It's mainly about the vision and processes of the World Social Forum, which has been meeting annually since 2001 as an explicit antithesis to the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos. Caruso explains the core vision of the WSF and explores the possibilities and challenges of their open, cosmopolitan, horizontal mode of organizing and interacting. It's a model of coordination that stands in stark contrast to many of the models that we see in the mainstream discourse-- like corporate, state, EU-style federation, even political-party affiliated movements. I also find the Empire and Cosmopolis a useful dichotomy. And, I appreciate that the vision (and the article) is inspiring and hopeful, but does not shy away from acknowledging the very real challenges-- including the challenges of working together within an organization, that the movement faces.

READ:

Dan Clawson, “Neoliberal Globalization,” in The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements, 2003. PDF File ; On Hollis

Giuseppe Caruso, “Open Cosmopolitanism and the World Social Forum: Global Resistance, Emancipation, and the Activists’ Vision of a Better World,” Globalizations 14, no. 4 (2017): 504–518. PDF File ; On Hollis.

ACTIVITY: If we going to have a few more weeks of this class (after a good break :) ), what topics would you want to add to the syllabus? Jot down a few (3?) to talk about in class.

 

Week 12 – 4/15:: WELLNESS DAY – No class, no readings, no activities.

 

Week 13 – 4/22 :: Another World is Possible

ACTIVITY: Share your speculative future project with the class.

DUE: Speculative Future Project 4/21 by midnight

DUE: Peer review for speculative future project 5/6.

DUE: Reflection Paper 5/13 by midnight.

Course Summary:

Date Details Due