"Work"

A summary of the Victorian gospel of work and the painting 'work' by Ford Madox Brown.

International Review of Social History, 1989

Journal of Markets and Morality, 2014

British Association for Victorian Studies Postgraduate Pages, 2019

The article looks at the intellectual life of the British Working-class Women in Victorian age. https://victorianist.wordpress.com/2019/10/14/the-labour-of-our-body-and-the-work-of-our-hands-working-class-women-intellectuals-of-victorian-england/

2010

We present this special issue of the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies on work with a certain sense of the topic's cruel irony in a time of widespread unemployment and economic misery. But it is perhaps only during such times that we can begin to examine our relationships with our work and how culture and ideology shape them. Phrases like "the job market" and "unemployment rate" should remind us that Marx's central insight was that capital's reduction of labor to a commodity creates perverse economic, social, and political relationships. Such insight certainly does not depend on the labor theory of value. Even after Keynes, economists still tend to treat labor like a commodity traded at its marginal rate of utility, albeit one with a rather sticky set of prices.

The Workplace in Education Eds. Crowther, Caldwell, Chapman, Lakomski and Ogilvie

Traces the nature and meanings of work throughout history.

Beginning with "The Abolition of Work" (1985), I have been venturing critiques of the institution of work. These are now collected in Instead of Work (Berkeley, CA: LBC Press, 1915). The above title, written in 2015, is the final chapter. I revisit my definitions and discussions of work, play, free time, and leisure, and reply to my critics, such as they are. I also update and/or reconsider some of my previous topics: The Poverty of the Professors (the mediocrity of the large and growing academic literature on the aforementioned topics); Primitive Affluence Vindicated; The Transitional Period; The Work Ethic; Hours of Work; Technology; Health, Safety, and Well-Being (with special attention to the large and growing "precariat" of contingent workers); and finally a short annotated bibliography listing 16 suggested readings. More previously, I have integrated specifics drawn from literary and political utopias.

2003

This thesis explores representations of women working in artistic professions in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Applying an interdisciplinary method that draws on fiction, prose, painting and the periodical press from the years 1848-1888, this thesis aims to expand our understanding of women's relationships to paid work in the Victorian period. Paid work, I argue, was not always represented as a degrading activity for women. Throughout the thesis, I trace the process through which the concept of work for middle-class women was made increasingly acceptable through an association with artistry. One of my central purposes is to show how the supposedly degrading activity of paid work could be transformed into refining experience for women. Looking specifically at sewing, art, writing and acting, I demonstrate how these professions came to be represented as suitable remunerative work for middle-class women. In chapters one and two, I examine the way in which th...

Department of Philosophy of Saint John Vianney College Seminary, 2016

The Case for Work, 2024

The modern work ethic is in crisis. The numerous harms and injustices harboured by current labour markets and work organisations, combined with the threat of mass unemployment entailed in rampant automation, have inspired a strong “post-work” movement in the theoretical humanities and social sciences, echoed by many intellectuals, journalists, artists and progressives. Against this widespread temptation to declare work obsolete, The Case for Work shows that our paltry situation is critical precisely because work matters. It is a mistake to advocate a society beyond work on the basis of its current organisation. In the first part of the book, the arguments feeding into the “case against work” are located in the long history of social and political thought. This comprehensive, genealogical inquiry highlights many conceptual and methodological issues that continue to plague contemporary accounts. The second part of the book makes the “case for work” in a positive way through a dialectical argument. The very feature of work that its critics emphasise, namely that it is a realm of necessity, is precisely what makes it the conduit for freedom and flourishing, provided each member of society is in a position to face this necessity in conditions that are equal and sustainable.