Beyond the “proper job:” Political-economic analysis after the century of labouring man
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Date
2018-04
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Beyond the “Proper Job:” Political-economic Analysis after the Century of Labouring Man
Abstract
This programmatic article proposes an approach to global political-economic inquiry in
the wake of the failure of long-established transition narratives, notably the narrative
centred on a universal trajectory from farm-based and “traditional” livelihoods into the
“proper jobs” of a modern industrial society. The prevalence and persistence of
“informal”, “precarious”, and “non-standard” employment in so many sites around the
world, it suggests, requires a profound analytical decentering of waged and salaried
employment as a presumed norm or telos, and a consequent reorientation of our
empirical research protocols. The authors seek to further such a reorientation by
identifying a set of specific political-economic questions that are in some sense portable,
and can profitably be applied to a diverse range of empirical contexts around the world.
But it is the questions that are shared, not the answers. By generating a matrix of
difference and similarity across cases, the paper points toward a research agenda
capable both of finding answers to concrete questions that arise in specific settings, and
of generating comparative insights and the identification of large-scale patterns.
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Keywords
Livelihoods, Modern industrial society, Informal employment, Proper job, Unemployment
Citation
Ferguson, J., Li, T.M. (2018) 'Beyond the “Proper Job:” Political-economic Analysis after the Century of Labouring Man’, Working Paper 51. PLAAS, UWC: Cape Town.