No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

My study had two aims: first, to find out the extent to which claims about new media work that result from research in the West apply in the Nigerian context; and second, to investigate how new media workers in Nigeria negotiate the specificities of their cultural context. Its purpose was therefore to examine the experiences of new media workers in Nigeria, how these diverge from claims made around such work in Western-based literature and what these experiences suggest about new media and creative labour in Nigeria. To fulfill these aims, I conducted field research in Lagos, Nigeria through two focus group sessions with eight managers and owners of new media companies, interviews with thirty-five new media workers, and participant observation at a Lagos-based new media company. The study came up with two main findings. First, that the specific features of new media work in Nigeria are manifestations of broader themes which define the cultural context or ̳way of life‘ of people in Nigeria. Therefore, adverse conditions like software piracy, infrastructural breakdown and ethnic differentiation in new media work can be understood as manifestations of broader features of the Nigerian cultural context, namely, precariousness, entrepreneurialism and social networking. Second, that new media workers‘ negotiation of these conditions produce outcomes that have positive, instrumental and emancipatory dimensions. Specifically, I showed how software piracy contributes to the sustenance of a moral economy, how the negotiation of infrastructural breakdown manifests an entrepreneurialism of improvisation and how the mobilization of ethnicity leads to the formation of associative ties. Overall, my study foregrounds the relevance of cultural context in discourses about new media and, more generally, creative work in the cultural industries and, in so doing, offers a different perspective to analyses about such work in developing contexts of the Global South.

This current study explores the everyday lives of male and female domestic workers in Lagos, Nigeria. Drawing on narrative interviews with 63 domestic workers, in-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 employers and fiction-based research, it aims to understand the terrains of struggle and negotiation in the places people work, live and move through on a daily basis. This thesis is also concerned with the ways in which intersecting identities of gender, age, social class and ethnicity shape the experiences of workers. To do this, a framework of everyday life is used, drawing on the work of Susie Scott (2009) that consists of rituals and routines (specific practices), social order (rules that organise these practices) and challenging the taken-for-granted (norm-breaking acts). The three empirical chapters are explored in terms of these three themes. The first one explores how female live-in domestic workers’ everyday experiences of control and resistance are shaped by discourses around perceptions of their sexual availability - which is heavily impacted by the fact that they work and reside within the private space of the home. This is followed by discussions on how female live-outs who are mothers challenge the notion that paid domestic workers should only have obligations to the employing household and not to their own households, but what living out then means for these women – long daily commutes and balancing their paid domestic work with their unpaid domestic responsibilities. The final Chapter analyses how male domestic workers challenge the construction of their masculinity by employers as simultaneously safe and dangerous. Combined, they enable me to make sense of everyday life in paid domestic work and why it is important to do so.

This thesis examines navvy communities and families at the very end of the nineteenth century against the backdrop of the construction of a specific railway line running through the centre of England: the Great Central Railway London Extension. Although navvies have been subjected to a number of previous studies, this thesis seeks to situate their experiences within the context of late nineteenth century working-class society. It analyses the concept of community in relation to the mainly itinerant workers and their dependents, and explores the role of difference in terms of lifestyle and culture, together with shared experiences, and how these may have helped to define identity. Navvies were still considered by many contemporaries to be somewhat disreputable, isolated and neglected, and thus, at the margins of society. This notion is assessed by reference to their encounters with the various agencies of the Victorian state and voluntary and religious sectors including the police and judiciary, the poor law, the education system, health services and Christian home missionary endeavour. A central theme of the thesis is the importance attached to perceptions of the navvy community. Attention is devoted to the manner in which such perceptions were created, and in particular on the role of literary representations of the navvy. These perceptions often shaped the initial response of local residents to the influx of the workforce, but they were challenged and frequently amended as a result of direct contact. An argument is also advanced that a crucial pointer to the way in which the incomers were regarded and treated was the degree to which they conformed to accepted social norms, not least being that related to respectability.

This thesis collects, transcribes, and, with reference to household documents and contemporary literature, annotates and interprets the surviving correspondence of a constellation of seven upper servants who at various points in the second half of the sixteenth century were stationed at or moved between several country houses and estates of which Bess of Hardwick was mistress. The thesis finds that the extant correspondence of Bess’s servants falls into two categories: (1) letters of management exchanged between Bess and five of her household and estate officers (Francis Whitfield, James Crompe, William Marchington, and Edward Foxe at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire and nearby estates in the 1550s-1560s, and Nicholas Kynnersley at Wingfield Manor, Derbyshire in the late 1580s) and (2) letters seeking practical and political patronage, written in the early 1580s by two of Bess’s gentle-born personal attendants, William Marmyon and Frances Battell, to contacts outside Bess’s itinerant (and at that time politically vulnerable) household. Close literary, linguistic (historical pragmatic), and material readings reveal that all these letters adapt and surpass conventional expressions as they engage in practical problem-solving, complex interpersonal exchanges, and domestic politics. The thesis argues that the manuscript letters materialise dynamic verbal performances of their writers’ specific social roles and relationships — the mistress-servant relationship foremost among them. Each writer simultaneously registers and renegotiates his or her own experience of the mistress-servant relationship through the combination of diverse epistolary features, which include verbal etiquette and page layout, degrees of directness or circumlocution, complexity of syntax, tone, use of emotive language, discourses of pleasure and displeasure, personalised content (which ranges from in-jokes to empathy to distinctive pen flourishes), and explicit expressions of authority or loyalty, as well as job-specific terminology and subject matter. Frequency of correspondence, modes of delivery, and the afterlives of letters are shown to carry further social significance. The correspondence of Bess of Hardwick’s servants acts as a touchstone for the complex role of letter-writing in the formation of social selves and the performance of domestic duties in sixteenth-century England. By accurately transcribing these letters, interpreting them using a unique combination of literary, linguistic, and visual analysis, and reconstructing from these letters and additional archival sources the careers of several servants of one mistress, this thesis opens up new material, perspectives, questions, and methods for early modern cultural studies.

This thesis is about a workforce in the midst of regional economic fragmentation. It is an ethnographic study of a commercial farm on South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe, where farmer-landowners are white Afrikaners, and workers black and overwhelmingly Zimbabwean. Fleeing the hyperinflation and violent state oppression of the ‘Zimbabwean crisis’, farm workers encounter South Africa’s neoliberal restructuring, contraction of labour-intensive industry, and land reform. Economic informalisation in both countries – a shift to short-term strategies of ‘making do’ – seems to hail the disappearance of southern Africa’s longer-term patterns of racialised migrant labour systems. This thesis, however, argues for a labour relations or ‘productivist’ perspective on current trends. Agricultural workforces on the Zimbabwean-South African border, with their established forms of everyday organisation and on-site residence, profoundly shape the local setting. Their highly structured arrangements bear the mark of the region’s labour history, yet also reflect the forms of fragmentation currently characterising southern Africa. The thesis begins by exploring white border farmers’ self-understandings through their notions of success. It then offers a wider historical account of the border’s settler capitalists, their struggles for control of land and labour, and the role played by their enterprises as hubs of settlement. Focusing on one border farm today, the study turns to the black workforce itself. It investigates how permanent workers consolidate their powerful positions in diverse areas of life, blurring spheres of work and non-work; how seasonal workers, many displaced from Zimbabwe, with diverse socio-economic backgrounds, engage with the hierarchies built around their permanent counterparts; and how, in the midst of all this, senior black workers struggle over status by means of contrasting models of authority, pitting established paternalism against idioms of corporate management. Together, these perspectives reveal how a workforce’s internal arrangements both reflect and refract the wider dynamics of the border and of Zimbabwean displacement. The thesis finally develops this central theme by addressing the position of farm work in a wider economy of trade and services on the farms and across the border. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on one border farm, and in the border area more generally (November 2006-April 2008), and supported by archival research, this thesis contributes to the anthropology of work. It shows how workplace dynamics act as a prism, refracting the meanings of work, movement and upheaval in an era of informalisation, and embed displaced migrant workers in dense webs of dependence and obligation.

No description available.

This is a study into the impact of precarious work, defined as low-skill and low-pay jobs, on workers in the South West of Britain. In it, I investigate the experiences of three broad groups of precarious workers: migrants, care assistants (adult and nursery) and employees working for ‘Cleanwell’, an international provider of cleaning and catering services. My approach identifies and occupies the central ground between two opposing perspectives. Along with Guy Standing (2014; 2011), I acknowledge the existence of employment structures which can be objectively described as lacking the security of meaningful pay, tenure, access to training and progression. However, I reject the reductive structural determinism, from structures of work towards working experiences, which he implies. With Kevin Doogan (2015; 2013), I recognise the opposing, ‘rising security’ argument which cautions against homogenous classifications of precarious workers. Nevertheless, I view it as incomplete, challenging only the extent of precarity conditions but not the inherently negative experiences associated with them. In my investigation, I distinguish between ‘precarity’, as the terms and conditions of low-pay and low-skill work and ‘precariousness’, conceptualised as the corresponding worker experiences. Grounding my study in a phenomenological paradigm of enquiry and adopting a ‘meaning condensation’ method of analysis (Kvale, 1996), I seek to understand whether workers can re-construct the negative impact of precarious contexts. As a result, I present precariousness as essentially relational and not absolute. Furthermore, the re-construction of the precarious experience draws on the support of social groups and can lead to fulfilling professional identities. Lastly, precariousness can be a pedagogic experience, both positive and developmental, through which workers can follow the example set by parents and grandparents, as well as serving as role-models themselves. In the study, I challenge assumptions that precarious work has a predominantly negative impact on workers, yet caution against arguments for worker collectivisation and resistance. I argue that precariousness is a phenomenon neither fully determined by low-skill, low-pay contexts, nor simply a psychological state manifested in isolation from precarious work. Rather, it is the phenomenological ‘intending’ (Sokolowski, 2000) of precarious structures, that is, the conscious engagement of precarious workers with low-pay and low-skill work through a range of attitudes, beliefs, views and opinions. Defining it in such a way is a departure from conventional approaches and through it, I show that precariousness offers a wider range of, both positive and negative experiences. It is a means through which even the employment context of precarious work can be re-constructed by individual workers who do not have allegiance to a precariat class, whether actual, or ‘in-the-making’ (Standing, 2011).