Luis Enrique Alonso

From consumerism to guilt: Economic crisis and discourses about consumption in Spain

The economic crisis that Spain has been facing since 2008 has produced significant effects in the way citizens are dealing with consumption. Beyond austerity practices and concerns about an uncertain future, there is a rising anxiety about the sustainability of current consumption patterns. Moreover, it is interesting to analyse how consumption evolves in a situation in which the budget is highly constrained. How do people from different social classes perceive consumption under these circumstances? Our contribution deals with those issues using data from a focus groups based research project whose main goal was to map necessities and consumption practices in Spain, trying to assess the impact of the crisis. In this article we will discuss the results focusing on how different groups of interviewees elaborate a discourse about it which ranges from guilt to a strong moral discourse related to the adequate level of consumption. We consider that this paper might provide a deeper knowledge of the relationship between consumption and social class in a context of financial and economic crisis.

El imaginario managerial: El discurso de la fluidez en la sociedad económica

Este articulo intenta describir el denominado imaginario managerial, esto es, el conjunto de imagenes y representaciones miticas presentes en el discurso empresarial sobre las organizaciones. Estos elementos condensan distintas imagenes de la empresa y el trabajo, atribuyendo un sentido a la tarea misma de gestionar. Desde una perspectiva critica, en este trabajo nos centraremos en los libros de gestion empresarial o literatura del management. En esta literatura no solo se recogen de una manera nitida los ejes que articulan el imaginario social de los directivos de las empresas; ademas, examina su transformacion historica, en una transicion desde un capitalismo solido que enfatiza las jerarquias a otro liquido, basado en la fluidez y las redes.

El análisis del discurso : Del postmodernismo a las razones prácticas

This paper sets out to provide a critical analysis of different poststructuralist-discourse schools in terms of their contribution to the shaping of the cultural phenomenon which goes by the name of postmodernity. By examining various fields of work in the field of postmodernity discourse-analysis - and which have been summed up in three tendencies: intertextualist, constructivist and deconstruccionist - the authors attempt to appraise their real potential for contributing to social knowledge, also highlighting the danger of confounding practices of text- and discourse-analysis and interpretation with an alleged postmodern phase of social research. The authors come out in favour of a sociological analysis of these discourses as a form of critical reconstruction, basically linked with the status and historical contextualisation of the enunciation; interpretation based, therefore, on the social force and on the specific communicative spaces which articulate and frame the discourses of the specific actors as significant practices

La sociedad del trabajo: debates actuales. Materiales inestables para lanzar la discusión

Resumen es: En este articulo se realiza una revision general de las aportaciones fundamentales de la sociologia actual en el tema de la crisis de la sociedad del tra...

The Expansion of Temporary Employment in Spain (1984-2010): Neither Socially Fair nor Economically Productive

Since the decade of the 1970s, the growth of non-standard employment (NSE) has become a key issue in Western societies, usually linked to the transition towards a post-industrial economy (Jessop, 1995; Kumar, 1995; Alonso and Martinez Lucio, 2006; Koch, 2006). Many Western countries have undergone major reforms in their labour market legislation, allowing the creation of new forms of employment that would help not only to improve flexibility in human resource management (HRM) but also to find solutions to the persistent problem of unemployment. These new policies have led to a more fragmented landscape in terms of contracts, conditions and arrangements in a process that, in the case of EU countries, has been widely supported by both national and supra-national institutions through various strategies such as flexicurity (Serrano Pascual and Magnusson, 2007). However, the design of non-standard work arrangements and the extent of their use varied notably in different national contexts and were influenced by far from linear trajectories of socio-economic development, which we understand as the results of social struggles in each one of these societies (Crouch, 1993; Ferner and Hyman, 1998; Olsen and Kalleberg, 2004). When considering EU statistics, one immediately notices that part-time jobs are very common in countries such as the Netherlands or, less so, Sweden, while temporary contracts represent approximately 25 per cent of the total labour force in Spain.

Comportamiento proambiental: estudio del comportamiento de queja ciudadana. Implementación de un sistema participativo de gestión ambiental en Madrid

Resumen La presente investigación tiene como objetivos comprender las variables involucradas en el comportamiento de queja ciudadana respecto del estado de la limpieza urbana. Se analizaron 932 fichas de quejas y sugerencias enviadas por los ciudadanos al Ayuntamiento de Madrid. Se buscaba comprobar si esta conducta de queja es un tipo de comportamiento proambiental y/o una expresión de participación ciudadana. La metodología utilizada mezcla técnicas cualitativas (entrevistas y categorización de datos) y cuantitativas. Los resultados permiten elaborar un mapa diagnóstico de los problemas de limpieza en la ciudad. También se describen las características del comportamiento de queja y la conformación de perfiles de comportamiento específicos para cada tipo de problema ambiental identificado. Concretamente se analiza qué mueve a actuar las personas, a qué atribuyen la causa de los problemas, a quiénes creen afectan las consecuencias, así como las soluciones planteadas. Finalmente, se reflexiona sobre el aporte que esta información entrega al estudio del comportamiento proambiental y participativo, así como las ventajas de elaborar programas de gestión ambiental que favorezcan comportamientos sostenibles en instituciones públicas.

El discurso de la privatización y el ataque a la ciudadanía social.

«En la era de las privatizaciones y el mercado libre, el dinero se proponegobernar sin intermediarios, ?Cual es lafrecion que se atribuyeal Estado?. El Estado debe ocuparse de la disciplina de la mano de obra barate, condenada a salarios enanos y a la represion de las peligrosas legiones de brazos que no encuentran ti-abajo: un Estadojuez y gendarme> y poco mas. De los otros servicios publicos ya st encargara el mercado, y de la pobreza, gente pobre, regiones pobres, ya se ocupara Dios, si la policia no alcanZa»

The Deconstruction of Employment and the Crisis of Citizenship in Europe

The social question raised nationally and linked to a distributive, labour-led and egalitarian perspective, which had been key in developing the idea of Europe since the Second World War, has ended up without institutional advocates; meanwhile the dominant economic framework has been structured as a new multinational, dispersed, volatile and reallocated technological and financial network. As a result, there has been a kind of disintegration of the traditional form of labour society, as well as a decline in the set of civil and legal conventions on which European citizenship was constructed. Since the 1990s, the European Union has been acting more as a disciplinary monetary body than as a set of institutions that defend the collective guarantees of a wage-earning society, and in the current European framework social citizenship appears to have retreated in favour of a new kind of liberal citizenship, where the narrative is linked to individual political liberties.

Young Workers in Europe: Perceptions and Discourses on the Labour Market

The situation of young people in Europe and their inclusion in the labour market have become key issues on the European employment agenda. The phenomenon of youth unemployment, vulnerability and precariousness have gained the attention of institutions, politicians and the public opinion since at least the mid-1970s, as young workers became one of the most vulnerable social groups in a context of rising unemployment (despite periods of economic boom). Globalization, information and communications technology and the financialisation of the economy have readjusted the world economy, and these factors have influenced substantially the organization of labour, leading to processes of destandardization and rising dualization in the labour markets (Koch and Fritz 2013). Youth is perceived as a fragile subject in the labour market as the numbers of unemployed in the lower age cohorts have been rising significantly through the last decades disregarding gender or level of education. In the European case, the figures show that unemployment among young people has been quite high during the last decade (Fig. 15.1).

Poder financiero y crisis del empleo

“Cuanto mas se desregulan y flexibilizan las relaciones laborales, con mas rapidez pasamos de una sociedad del trabajo a otra de riesgos incalculables, tanto desde el punto de vista de las vidas de los individuos como del Estado y la politica. En cualquier caso, una tendencia de futuro esta clara: la mayoria de la gente, incluso de los estratos medios, aparentemente prosperos, vera que sus medios de vida y entorno existencial quedaran marcados por una inseguridad endemica. Parte de las clases medias han sido devoradas por la crisis del euro y cada vez hay mas individuos que se ven obligados a actuar como Yo y asociado en el mercado de trabajo”. Ulrich Beck (2012)