Summary: This study of workbloggers in Manchester asserts that contrary to common perceptions that white collar workers are disinterested in social change, workers who blog about their jobs have subversive political potential even while participating in the corporate capitalist system.

Abstract:

Anonymous workbloggers – employees who write online
diaries about their work – are often simultaneously productive workers and savage critics of the organizational cultures in which they toil. This research focuses on a small group of white-collar workers from the Greater Manchester and Lancashire area, who risk their jobs by writing publicly about their office experiences under assumed identities. Countering the notion that resistance to corporate culture leads to ‘confusion and emptiness’ (Willmott, 1993: 538), this study contributes to the recent revival of interest in worker misbehavior and recalcitrance. By focusing on workers as authors, it addresses a shortcoming in the existing critical literature, which treats informal employee resistance as an intellectually and artistically unsophisticated phenomenon. Drawing parallels with the lives and work of authors such as Franz Kafka and T.S. Eliot, it evaluates whether embedded writers, in spite of their ambivalence about the alternative, can constitute an effective counter-hegemonic force.

]]> http://contexts.org/discoveries/2008/01/17/the-revolution-will-be-blogged-from-work/feed/ http://contexts.org/discoveries/2008/01/17/schooling-is-not-a-panacea-in-rural-india/ http://contexts.org/discoveries/2008/01/17/schooling-is-not-a-panacea-in-rural-india/#comments Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:34:54 +0000 meg http://contexts.org/discoveries/2008/01/17/schooling-is-not-a-panacea-in-rural-india/ Article: “Spoiled Sons” and “Sincere Daughters”: Schooling, Security, and Empowerment in Rural West Bengal, India Signs, 2008, vol. 33, no. 2

Summary: This article is an ethnographic study of the effects of schooling in rural West Bengal, India. Beginning with Amartya Sen’s claim that access to schooling, particularly for girl children, will unproblematically increase women’s empowerment and improve gender equality, Dia Da Costa examines how schooling is actually changing gender relations on the ground, including how the effect of schooling is shaped by the expectations of other social institutions like marriage and the family. Da Costa elaborates:

Apart from grounding analyses of schooling enrollment initiatives within familial trajectories and relations, we must also situate them in employment rates for men and women, average marriage ages, divorce rates, trends in violence against women, and displacement from agricultural work. These rates and trends must be viewed as educational issues since the ability to provide for parents, children, and wives is a concrete expected outcome of schooling.

The author concludes that while neither she nor her informants question that schooling and literacy provide benefits, there may also be significant costs in the form of conflicting institutional expectations:

In West Bengal, where concerted efforts in economic redistribution and political decentralization have been made, the alienation, insecurity, and marginalization represented in words of parents and young men and women are haunting. Acquiring schooling is significant for girls, but its associations with empowerment and security must be measured in context. Where there has been little direct redistributive benefit to women and increasing violence against them, for the intervener asking why she cannot be someone’s future, schooling is but one fraction of a necessary institutional response. Lack of redistributive equality, the threat of violence, and marital desertion also mark the ways women construct the meaning and value of their schooling. However, how should young men with their school certificates in hand belong to their families and communities as notional bearers of future security? Young men in rural Bengal have had patriarchal protections of all sorts and live in a state with a pro‐poor government that has been working for the benefit of historically disadvantaged people. Undoubtedly, alienation marks these men’s present experience since for the young man asking why he cannot be someone’s future there is no available institutional response.

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