Jane L. Collins

Permanent labor contracts in agriculture: Flexibility and subordination in a new export crop

Accounts of late-twentieth-century capitalist restructuring have emphasized the decline of “permanent” work contracts and the growth of more “flexible” ways of employing labor. Most of these accounts have argued that, under conditions of global competition, firms seek to reduce the cost of wages and benefits by hiring more temporary workers. Such accounts assume permanent labor contracts to be a norm that is violated only when economic systems come under pressure. This essay adopts a different perspective, suggesting that, in fact, permanent labor contracts have been normative only in certain historical situations (such as the twentieth century United States). In a global and trans-historical context, these contracts have been introduced under specific conditions to solve particular kinds of problems. Thus, this study attempts to shift the question from “why is permanent work declining?” to “where and why do permanent work contracts emerge?”

Farm size and non traditional exports: Determinants of participation in world markets

Abstract This paper examines irrigated grape production by small and large farms in the Sao Francisco Valley (Bahia/Pernambuco) of Northeastern Brazil. It argues that while small farms have lower costs in producing these nontraditional export crops, they are vulnerable because they do not have secure access to postharvest transport and marketing services. The paper also argues that large grape firms have been able to maintain a dominant presence in export grape production because of the presence of a large supply of labor (largely female) and because of weak labor legislation which allows them to reduce the cost of labor in various ways.

REDEFINING THE BOUNDARIES OF WORK: APPAREL WORKERS AND COMMUNITY UNIONISM IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

This article focuses on new forms of community unionism that are being developed by apparel workers. Based on ethnographic research in Mexico and the United States, it argues that because so many apparel workers are women, because women have been excluded from unions in many contexts, because the relationship of apparel workers to their employers is “flexible” and unstable, and because the high turnover rates associated with low wages and poor working conditions erode long-term relations among workers themselves, workers find it easier to organize outside the factory than within it. Challenging traditional definitions of what kinds of issues labor activism should address, women working in the apparel sector have invented radical new agendas for social change that confront the state as well as industry, attend to the social reproduction of their communities as well as the wage, and call on employers to recognize that workers have gendered and fallible bodies. The author thanks the National Science Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Graduate School for providing support for this project; Greta Krippner and Molly McGrath for their ethnographic work in Mexico; and Micaela di Leonardo, Caitrin Lynch, and Gay Seidman for helpful comments on this article.

Flexible Specialization and the Garment Industry

This paper takes issue with accounts that argue that flexible specialization is the appropriate industrial paradigm for the high-end, fashion segment of the apparel industry. Many accounts have argued that apparel factories using mass-production face three obstacles in this segment of the industry: they cannot produce goods quickly enough, they cannot change styles fast enough, and they cannot meet quality standards. Evidence from two case studies and a review of the industry press reveals that large firms in the 1990s have been able to meet these challenges using mass production methods. Quality challenges have been met by the implementation of hyper-Taylorist labor practices such as “statistical process control.”

Development Theory and the Politics of Location: An Example from North Eastern Brazil

This contribution contrasts the ways that two distinct intellectual traditions conceptualise the role of global forces in local environments. It briefly traces the history of both ‘grassroots’ or populist development and a ‘politics of location‘ and examines their application to a single ‘development’ context: the introduction of large-scale irrigation to drought-stricken regions of north-eastern Brazil. The two approaches produce radically different accounts of development processes in the newly irrigated regions. While grassroots approaches emphasise the incursion of new global forces into local communities, approaches derived from a politics of location emphasise existing local inequalities and the ways they are altered by new investments and forms of production. The study argues that populist approaches to development ignore the ways that global forces have long shaped daily life in most parts of the world, and that they rely on a static and impoverished notion of local culture. It advocates a politics of location that analyses local practices and meanings in terms of their relation to power.

The hijacking of a new corporate form? Benefit corporations and corporate personhood

Abstract Benefit corporations are a new type of corporate entity developed to remedy antisocial corporate behaviour by enabling mission-driven investors, managers and entrepreneurs to prioritize social values and contest the idea that profits are the only and best measure of corporate performance. To resocialize the corporate entity, the benefit corporation movement built enabling discourses and evaluation practices into the dominant model of corporate governance, shareholder value ideology. These discourses and practices expand both the purpose of the corporate entity and shareholders’ power to enforce that purpose. However, this paper argues that the effort to ‘re-embed’ the corporate entity by making it subject to non-economic claims expands the scope of corporate personhood and that doing so within extant power relations of the firm opens the door to alternative projects that undermine the benefit corporation movements goal of fostering corporate social responsibility.

What Difference Does Financial Expansion Make? A Response to Gavin Smith's Paper: “Selective Hegemony and Beyond, Populations with ‘No Productive Function: A Framework for Inquiry”

Gavin Smith’s thoughtful article intervenes in a burgeoning literature on attenuated citizenship and political exclusion to ask “what does all of this have to do with capitalism?” He argues that recent work on this topic, most of it influenced by Michel Foucault’s opus, has focused on the state to the exclusion of the economy, making its analysis tidy by erasing “the frenetic imperatives inherent in the production of capital.” To remedy this elision, Smith offers a comprehensive account of how the shift from a production-driven economy regulated by Keynesian policies to a finance-driven economy regulated by neoliberal policies has fostered the gaps and unevenness in political rights that many anthropologists and others have observed. From Julia Kristeva (1982) and Judith Butler (1993) to Carl Schmitt (1987) and Giorgio Agamben (2005), the concept of abjection has troubled and fascinated philosophers. These authors and others question how some individuals or groups fall through the cracks of a seemingly all-encompassing liberalism and sometimes even come to form the constitutive outside of the liberal community. Social scientists have tackled this question in a more empirical way. In the United States context, Rogers Smith (1997) and Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2002) have explored the tensions between universalism and exclusion that have racked the American republic from its slave-owning origins to the present day. Anthropologists have intervened in these debates as well, and Smith’s article begins by critiquing two recent anthropological interventions: Aihwa Ong’s (2006) Neoliberalism as Exception and Partha Chatterjee’s (2004) Politics of the Governed (as well as his more recent “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India”[2008]). For Smith, the unevenness within citizenship that these authors describe

Historical Anthropology of the Family

Foreword Introduction Part I. The Area of Kinship: 1. The domestic group 2. Kinship and kinship groups 3. Kin relationships in urban society Part II. The making of the domestic group: 4. The historical sociology of marriage 5. Marriage and divorce in contemporary society 6. The child and the family Part III. Domestic Roles and Activities: 7. Roles within the couple in the nineteenth century 8. Roles within the present-day couple 9. The domestic group and economic roles 10. Family and society Notes Index.