Gaming the System: Tactical Workarounds and the Production of Antagonistic Subjectivities among Migrant Platform Workers in Italy

Our article explores how migrant food delivery couriers work around platform algorithmic control to argue that gaming the system is a form of everyday resistance. Drawing on data collected in Turin, Italy, between August 2020 and June 2021, we examine how, on the one hand, through gamification, food delivery platforms construct the couriers as entrepreneurial and productive subjects; on the other hand, we show that the disarticulation and repurposing of these management mechanisms both address survival needs and signal a still fledgling, but potentially vibrant, space of labour activism. By conceptualising gamification as another weapon in capital's arsenal to control labour, we acknowledge the entanglement of workers’ agency and subjectivity. We thus bring a two-fold contribution to radical geography: we link gamification to the “production of subjectivity”, drawing on the Italian Operaista intellectual tradition; and we posit the subversive and generative potential of migrant couriers’ everyday geographies.     

Poverty in Transit: Uber,Taxi Coops,and the Struggle over Philadelphia's Transportation Economy

This article examines how ride‐hailing companies like Uber have disrupted not only the mainstream taxi industry but also progressive efforts to remedy that industry's shortcomings. The article focuses on Alliance Taxi Cooperative (ATC), a failed taxi worker cooperative in Philadelphia. ATC was deeply committed to economic democracy, living wages, and outreach to underserved communities. Its ambitions were nevertheless thwarted by regulatory obstruction and market disruptions caused by Uber. Drawing on relational poverty theory and literature on solidarity economy and platform capitalism, I suggest that ATC's story offers more than a cautionary tale about the pitfalls facing small taxi start‐ups. It also illuminates a great deal about the exploitative conditions and discriminatory geographies of the taxi and ride‐hailing industry, the biases of regulatory agencies, and the complicated ways that platform capitalism is refiguring class dynamics.     

Platforms,Markets, and Contingent Calculation: The Flexible Arrangement of the Delivered Meal

UK online food delivery company Deliveroo has a platform that automates the coordination of meal delivery, creating a market for the delivered meal. This market indicates the necessity to examine the social arrangements produced through the platform beyond the labour of the delivery worker. Markets comprise heterogeneous actors that require their coordination to be calculated. Deliveroo, though, offers two competing views of markets. First, as interfaces in which supply and demand are represented as autonomous blocs that are articulated through the goods of the delivered meal whose constitution, including the labour of delivery, is black-boxed. Second, as agencement—formatting collective arrangements—in which the goods of the delivered meal are contingently calculated as a flexible arrangement of riders, restaurants and customers whereby these actors have differing degrees of choice concerning their participation, and through which new service performances are emerging in the necessity for their contingent interaction.     

Social Reproduction of Post-Soviet Migrant Labour: Braiding the International Political Economy

In this article, we analyse the social reproduction of post-Soviet migrant labour. Our inquiry builds on artwork by Olga Jitlina and Anna Tereshkina and by Mahpora Kiromova dealing with the effects of migration on family relations in Central Asia and the South Caucasus. We have braided the artwork with strands of social reproduction theory to examine the transnational household as a set of relationships that enables post-Soviet and global capitalism to draw value out of unwaged work and to reproduce the differentiated (i.e. gendered and racialised) labour force. Our focus is on the tropes of family, weddings, love, and violence. The analysis of these tropes draws attention to the intersecting effects of globalised capitalism, local structures of value, the state, and patriarchy in post-Soviet political economy. Through them we detail the fundamental co-constitution of production and social reproduction, but also show that practices of social reproduction can be reservoirs of resistance and potential change.     

两德经济发展的成败摭议

东德是由于经济的失败才最终不得不自愿被西德接管,这个失败虽然系多种因素导致,但根本还在于经济体制。可是,计划体制本身还不是最终根源所在,问题的关键在于脱离经济规律地计划和将经济问题政治化。西德市场经济体制中也有不少计划经济的成分,但由于按照经济规律办事,没有过度将经济问题政治化,因而表现出坚强的生命力。     

War as Feminized Labour in the Global Political Economy of Neoimperialism

ABSTRACT

This article examines the structures of international relations that facilitate political violence in postcolonial states. It explores the intersections of patriarchy and imperialism in the contemporary political economy to understand how armed conflict and political violence in postcolonial states form an integral element of the global economy of accumulation in deeply gendered ways. By focusing on the structural level of analysis, this article argues that the siting of armed conflict in postcolonial contexts serves to maintain neo-colonial relations of exploitation between the West and non-West, and is made both possible and effective through the gendering of political identities and types of work performed in the global economy. I argue here that armed conflict is a form of feminized labour in the global economy. Despite the fact that performing violence is a physically masculine form of labour, the outsourcing of armed conflict as labour in the political economy is ‘feminized’ in that it represents the flexibilization of labour and informalization of market participation. So while at the same time that this work is fulfilling hegemonic ideals of militarized masculinity within the domestic context, at the international level it actually demonstrates the ‘weakness’ or ‘otherness’ of the ‘failed’/feminized state in which this violence occurs, and legitimizes and hence re-entrenches the hegemonic relations between the core and periphery on the basis of problematizing the ‘weak’ state’s masculinity. It is through the discursive construction of the non-Western world as the site of contemporary political violence that mainstream international relations reproduces an orientalist approach to both understanding and addressing the ‘war puzzle’.     

Envisioning Capitalism: Geography and the Renewal of Marxian Political Economy

This paper offers a reinterpretation of what critical theorist Moishe Postone calls 'the fundamental core of capitalism'. In so doing, it seeks to lay a set of theoretical foundations for a renewed Marxian political economy in geography, at a time when Marxism has been eclipsed as a leading critical paradigm within the discipline. The argument works on two fronts simultaneously. On the one hand, the ongoing hegemony of economic and political neo-conservatism is occluding the violent realities of a capitalist world economy behind the anodyne logics of free-market theory. These realities suggest the continued relevance of, and need for, a strong Marxian critique of political economy. But on the other hand, Marxism has been reprimanded by its erstwhile allies on the Left of geography for being too 'modern' and too capital- and class-centred. In light of this double challenge, the paper seeks to develop a 'both/and' Marxism for geography that can chart a third way between the antinomies of modern and after-modern modes of theorizing capitalism and class. A project of 'envisioning capitalism' is suggested on this basis, which combines the 'power' of modern theory with the epistemological reflexivity of after-modern theory. At the same time, capitalism and class are rethought at an ontological level and shown still to be essential features of the fin-de-millennium world, but far less closed and hegemonic than is suggested by modern modes of Marxism. Finally, a return to a class politics of redistribution is suggested, but in a way that draws in more recent Left geographical concerns with identity, difference and recognition.     

Violent Inaction: The Necropolitical Experience of Refugees in Europe

A significant outcome of the global crisis for refugees has been the abandonment of forced migrants to live in makeshift camps inside the EU. This paper details how state authorities have prevented refugees from surviving with formal provision, leading directly to thousands having to live in hazardous spaces such as the informal camp in Calais, the site of this study. We then explore the violent consequences of this abandonment. By bringing together thus far poorly integrated literatures on bio/necropolitics (Michel Foucault; Achille Mbembe) and structural violence (Johan Galtung), we retheorize the connections between deliberate political indifference towards refugees and the physiological violence they suffer. In framing the management of refugees as a series of violent inactions, we demonstrate how the biopolitics of migrant control has given way to necropolitical brutality. Advancing geographies of violence and migration, the paper argues that political inaction, as well as action, can be used as a means of control.     

情报信息工作在知识经济中的地位与重要性

保证质量、提高效率是情报信息工作的准则,随着知识经济的来临,情报信息工作者应及时调整充实自身的知识结构,迎接新的挑战。     

Sami Tourism and the Signposting of Spirituality. The Case of Sami Tour: a Spiritual Entrepreneur in the Contemporary Experience Economy

Abstract

The tourism industry provides an important insight into cultural heritage production and marketing. Therefore, it is also important to look at what elements and components are selected to represent a chosen culture in the context of tourism, where some cultural elements are placed at the forefront while others are silenced. There is an increasing tendency to highlight religious symbols and conceptions in the marketing of a tourist destination and many major tourist sites have developed largely as a result of their connections to sacred people, places and events. One of these sites is analysed, namely the location Sápmi as it is marketed on the tourism web portal www.samitour.no, where New Age spirituality in conjunction with local indigenous traditions are highlighted to promote Sápmi as a tourist site. The focus is on the signposting of religious symbols as a resource in a tourism context and the challenges connected with the merger of spiritual and commercial values.     

The Challenges of Managing an Archaeological Heritage Site in a Declining Economy: The Case of Khami World Heritage Site in Zimbabwe

Abstract

This paper explores the case of the Khami archaeological site, whose degradation by the local communities in recent years was as a result of socio-economic problems caused by the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy combined with the inability of the Zimbabwean government to support the site. We argue that the negative attitude by the local communities towards the management of cultural heritage sites is embedded in the colonial history of the country, and has been driven by the socio-economic difficulties emanating from the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy in recent years. We begin by explaining the history of Khami, its architecture, and the local communities residing around it. We then show and assert that the subsequent degradation of Khami and the landscape around it by the local communities is linked to the socio-economic problems of the country and poverty, which emanated from the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy. In the end, we contend that the economic constraints are part of the reasons why the local communities have from time to time failed to respect the importance of protecting cultural heritage sites in the country.     

The Discursive Violence of Postcolonial Asylum in the Irish Republic

ABSTRACT

This paper situates postcolonial asylum as a dominant global encounter between the West and the Rest. Rather than a humanitarian gift, the paper argues that discursive violence of asylum regimes forces the materialization of identities, spaces and structural conditions that encamp and re-colonise asylum-seeking bodies. It first examines the global instrumentalization of images and bodies of Third World women in refugee representations to act as a humanitarian alibi that re-signifies the white saviour discourse. Moving to the Irish context where childbearing bodies of African women were targeted in a political campaign that ended birthright Citizenship for children of non-EU parents in 2004, it examines the performativity and affective entanglements of visual representations of ‘Third World Women’ and illustrates how NGO policies and projects force performances of black female bodies that exploit their representational and affective labour. Meanwhile, the material labour—of waiting— is appropriated from bodies detained in Direct Provision (a form of open asylum detention) by the asylum industry. The paper argues that postcolonial asylum is non-performative of the promise it makes, but a colonial continuity that serves a number of uses for white Western states and preserves a humanitarian face while detracting critical attention from the root causes of forced displacement from the South—necropolitics in the South.     

我国个体和私营经济法律地位的历史演变

党和国家对个体私营经济法律地位的认识及保护,有一个不断发展并逐渐深化的过程。在经历了1949～1954年有限发展、1956～1978年几乎绝迹的时期后,自改革开放以来,我国经济体制发生了很大变化,个体和私营经济相应地也迎来了1978～1992年大力发展的时期和1992～2003年蓬勃发展的时期,其法律地位也发生了巨大的变化。     

Labour Migration, Neoliberalism and Ethno-politics in the New Europe: The Latvian Case

Abstract:  The accession of the new European Union (EU) member states of Eastern Europe has highlighted ambivalence towards migration within the older member states. That same ambivalence has been less frequently discussed in the new. The former Soviet republic of Latvia serves as a case study of a new member state facing intensified pressure to accept inward migration to meet labour shortages, in part, a consequence of EU accession. Confounding appropriate political and policy responses is the sensitive issue of "ethnic balance", a troubled "legacy" of Latvian history. This has been characterised as comprising a "regime of discrimination" against the Russian-speaking minority. In the context of changes in the global migratory landscape, the potential for a renewed of regime of discrimination is emerging, based on an ethno-politics that has wider European resonance.     

邓小平旅游经济思想与当代中国旅游经济的发展

邓小平的旅游经济思想 ,立足于我国社会主义初级阶段旅游业初创时期的实际 ,科学地回答和解决了当代中国为什么发展旅游业和怎样发展旅游业的重大理论问题 ,体现了他对旅游经济规律的深入理解和正确把握 ,为我国旅游业的崛起和腾飞奠定了政策框架的根基 ,是推动我国旅游业发展的强大思想理论武器 ,促进了旅游生产力的全面增长和旅游经济的全面发展 ;邓小平旅游经济思想 ,是邓小平经济理论宝库中极具特色的篇章 ,学习、研究和实践邓小平旅游经济思想 ,对推动中国旅游经济的发展具有重要的理论意义和实践意义     

论中国社会主义市场经济发展的六个阶段

社会主义市场经济在中国相继经历了萌芽、受挫、恢复探索、理论形成、体制建立、完善成熟等六个发展阶段。中国共产党在1956年完成三大改造之后就开始了这一探索过程,毛泽东等第一代领导集体对社会主义市场经济的探索是中国社会主义市场经济的萌芽阶段,所取得的成果是邓小平经济理论的源头和起点;从“计划经济为主,市场调节为辅”到尝试“计划与市场内在统一”的社会主义有计划商品经济体制,再到建立适应社会主义有计划商品经济发展的、计划经济和市场调节相结合直到社会主义市场经济的经济体制和运行机制,中国共产党对社会主义市场经济的认识日益深化,我国经济体制改革在理论和实践上取得重大突破和进展。中国社会主义市场经济的发展过程,说明了市场经济是人类文明的重要成果,是经济发展不可逾越的客观规律。     

Framing Food Policy: The Case of Raw Milk

Policies governing the sale of raw milk—making the sales of raw milk more permissive—are gaining traction on the legislative agendas of dozens of states. This paper examines one contributor to this movement on the policy agenda: the role of competitive framing. By combining theoretical approaches from policy studies and political psychology theories of competitive framing, we offer evidence supporting the recent relative success of raw milk activists in several state legislatures. Using an Internet survey‐based experiment with a sample size of 1,630 respondents from seven Midwestern states, we show that a frame emphasizing consumer choice and food freedom is more effective than the frame that dominates among the policy establishment, that emphasizing public health risks. This is true in both one‐sided and competitive framing contexts. We further show that those previously aware of this issue were less influenced by the public health frame than those naïve to the issue. Our results suggest that the pro‐raw milk movement may be making strides on the state policy agenda because their frames are more resonant among the public. We also highlight the advantages gained from considering psychological and policy processes simultaneously to understand policy change.     

Women's and Men's Work: The Production and Marketing of Fresh Food and Export Crops in Papua New Guinea

Fresh food markets have been a fixture of the social and economic landscape of urban and rural PNG since colonial times. They were often the first points of engagement with the market economy, especially for women, who as small‐scale producers, sold surplus produce from their food gardens located on communally‐owned land. Although local food markets have remained an important livelihood for women, the later adoption and expansion of perennial export cash crops like coffee and cocoa overshadowed food production for local markets as men dominated export crop production on land alienated from communal ownership for decades or permanently. New forms of social relations of production and more exclusive forms of land tenure emerged to accommodate export crop production that were very different from those governing the production and marketing of fresh food. Market values and a trend towards individualisation of production with less capacity to mobilise labour through reciprocal labour exchange networks have characterised export crop production. With the income benefits captured largely by men, women began redirecting their labour to fresh food production where they were able to exercise more control of production and income while still mobilising labour through indigenous labour exchange arrangements. Attempts by men to appropriate the income of women and sons’ labour in export cropping were greater during flush periods when income levels were high, and they were less likely to attempt to appropriate this income in low crop periods when incomes were lower. However, with the recent emergence of female entrepreneurers earning relatively large sums of money in large‐scale, profit‐driven vegetable production, the moral frameworks governing food production are coming to resemble those governing export crops, and making labour more difficult to mobilise. Despite women being key players in these changes, we argue there is an emerging risk that men will attempt to assert control over this income or move into vegetable production themselves and possibly marginalise women in the process.