Working-class ecology and union politics: a conceptual topology

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that Environmental Labour Studies may benefit from incorporating the perspective of environmental justice. We offer a theorization of working-class ecology as the place where working-class communities live and work, being typically affected by environmental injustice, and of working-class environmentalism as those forms of activism that link labour and environmental struggles around the primacy of reproduction. The paper’s theoretical section draws on a social ethnography of working-class ecology in the case of Taranto, a mono-industrial town in southern Italy, which is experiencing a severe environmental and public-health crisis. We show how environmental justice activism since the early 2000s has allowed the re-framing of union politics along new ways of politicizing the local economy. We conclude by offering a conceptual topology of working-class ecology, which situates different labour organizations (confederal, social/community, and rank-and-file unions) according to their positioning in respect to environmental justice.     

Using institutional ethnography's ideological circle to portray how textually mediated disability discourse paralysed a Supreme Court of Canada ruling

Persons with disabilities created through texts as damaged goods are being ‘cured’ by workplace accommodation, a textually mediated work process. Prior to 1999, workplace accommodation in the Canadian federal public service signified the adjustments necessary to enable a disabled worker to fit into a workplace designed for able-bodied workers. In 1999, a Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) ruling known as Meiorin turned this accommodation provision on its head. Instead of being focused on individual-level fixes so that a disabled worker could be accommodated in an existing workplace, this legislation required employers to transform their workplaces so as to make them ready to receive as many different types of workers as reasonably possible from the outset. Using Dorothy E. Smith's institutional ethnography, I use my experiences as a disability rights activist employed in the Canadian federal public service to explicate how textually mediated disability discourse paralysed this groundbreaking SCC ruling.     

系统工程思想视角下三产融合振兴民族村落的路径——基于贵州批林村的经验探索

农村三产融合是一个由多种要素组成的系统工程。研究基于对贵州花溪区批林村的田野调查,发现：目前批林村对三产融合进行探索的电农融合、工农融合和文旅融合项目在实施过程中存在一些阻碍,具体包括发展资金较为匮乏,基础设施难以建设;技术渗透能力不强,新型产业难以发展;村落建设人才短缺,项目规划难以推进;三产融合程度较浅,产业增值难以实现;利益联结机制欠缺,农民利益难以保障等。针对批林村现实存在的典型问题,基于系统工程思想的指导,研究为三产融合振兴民族村落构建出以下发展路径：一是完善系统顶层设计,统筹三产融合发展思路;二是精准定位发展要素,抓住三产融合关键环节;三是合理布局结构关系,优化三产融合整体功能;四是创新融合发展方式,实现三产融合系统升级;五是加强后续保障机制,促进三产融合稳步运营。     

环境法执法机制研究

随着我国环境法立法体系的日益完善,加强环境执法已成为当前环境保护领域的焦点和难点问题。本文在分析了环境行政执法存在的问题及完善对策后,提出环境刑事执法的健全应以程序机制的完善为中心,并认为应从扩张民事诉讼主体资格和建立中立环境损害鉴定机构两个角度去完善当前的环境民事执法机制。     

长江经济带软件与信息技术服务业技术创新效率时空演变及影响因素研究

选取长江经济带软件与信息技术服务业相关数据,利用DEA-BCC模型测算软件与信息技术服务业技术创新效率,并借助自然断裂法和Tobit模型分析区域软件业技术创新效率时空演变特征及影响机理。从静态分析结果看,长江经济带软件业技术创新效率在研究期内呈现先升、后降、再升的螺旋上升态势。从动态分析结果看,技术进步是软件业技术创新效率提升的主要原因。软件业技术创新效率在空间分布上有明显的中间凹陷特征,各地区整体技术创新效率明显上升。科技创新水平、产业结构、对外开放水平、信息化水平、人口密度是影响长江经济带软件业技术创新效率的重要因素,且影响程度存在区域差异。     

我国环境公益诉讼制度之构建

在现代社会环境问题日益突出的情况下,为适应保护环境公益的迫切需要,我国有必要构建环境公益诉讼制度。论述了环境公益诉讼的概念、特征及其法理基础,并对构建我国环境公益诉讼制度的范围、原告、举证责任配置和诉讼费用负担等方面提出构想。     

刍议环境权的界定

环境权的合理界定是环境权在法律上创设的前提,目前,学界对环境权的理解存在分歧,这主要体现在环境权的主体、客体和内容三个构成要素上。受现有的社会历史条件限制,环境权的主体只能是人和人的拟制体(即法人、其他组织、社团、国家);环境权的客体可以是物、行为、精神财富和其他权益;环境权的内容则由生态性权利和经济性权利组成。     

Engagement with sustainability at the International Labour Organization and wider implications for collective worker voice

Sustainability objectives have been recognized by the ILO primarily in terms of the impact of environmental protection in the form of “just transition” and “green job” initiatives. Arguably, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) now offer richer scope for ILO engagement with social sustainability. This can be attributed to the prominent recognition of “decent work” in SDG 8 and the need for “responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels” in SDG target 16.7. This article examines how the ILO could further promote collective worker voice in the context of debates over a sustainable “future of work”, particularly considering to whom voice is given and how it is exercised.     

Identity work in female‐led creative businesses

This study explores the identity work carried out by three female owner‐managers in creative industry businesses, identified in Government reports as a discriminatory industrial sector for women in the UK. Through the development of narratives by the owners and other participants, observation of practice and review of online and offline materials, three cases emerged. These showed overlapping, different identities developed and performed through identity work. Each presented rational and logical persona as business leaders despite observation showing extensive use of intuition and gut feeling in both creative and entrepreneurial aspects of the business. Intuition and gut feeling were seen as inappropriate at work as they belonged to the home sphere, emotionally based and therefore automatically unreliable. While occupying male stereotypes and avoiding the female realm of emotion at work, these women expressed femininity through their emphasis on the maternal, ‘being a good mother' as a desired ideal being embedded in work as well as home practice.     

At the intersection of globalization and ‘civilizational originality’: cultural production in Putin’s Russia

ABSTRACT

This special issue originates from a transnational collaboration of scholars in philology, comparative literature, social theory, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, and media studies. The collection strives to advance a research agenda built on the nexus of three intellectual and academic domains: post-Soviet ‘Russian cultural studies’, the research paradigm put forward by Cultural Studies, as well as empirical methods developed in sociology. The collection illustrates the importance of expanding the experience of Cultural Studies beyond its established spheres of national investigation, while it also speaks to the necessity to re-evaluate the hegemony of the English-language academic and cultural production on the global scale. The collection offers insights into the gamut of cultural practices and institutional environments in which Russian cultural production happens today. It shows how cultural industries and institutions in Russia are integrated into the global marketplace and transnational communities, while they also draw on and contribute to local lives and experiences by trying to create an autonomous space for symbolic production at personal and collective levels. Through diverse topics, the issue sheds light on the agency, i.e. practitioners and participants, creators and consumers, of Russian cultural production and the neoliberal practices implemented on creative work and cultural administration in Russia today. The Introduction outlines the development of academic studies on Russian cultural practices since 1991; describes main political developments shaping the cultural field in Putin’s Russia; and, finally, identifies the Cultural Studies debates the editors of the collection find most productive for investigations of Russia, i.e. the instrumentalization of culture and culture as resource. Relocated in an analysis of a post-socialist society, these conceptualisations seem increasingly problematic in a situation where local and federal policies governing cultural and creative work focus simultaneously on marketization and on nationalism as the main tools of legitimizing the federal government.