Precarity unbound

Alternatives

Volumn 32, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 319-340

  Ettlinger, Nancy ^a  

^a OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Governmentality; Human condition; Precarity; Resistance; Scale; War on terror

Indexed keywords

EID: 36849009212     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540703200303     Document Type: Review

References (77)

1. Mauritzio Lazzarato, "Immaterial Labor," in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 133-150;
2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000);
3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin, 2004).
4. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (New York: Verso, 2004).
5. Judith Butler is well known for her work on deconstructing boundaries and categories as in, for example, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Roudedge, 1990), though her recent book (Buder, Precarious Life, note 2) implicitly commits some of the errors she has critiqued (notably bounding precarity), while at the same time offering trenchant analysis together with an inspiring normative argument.
6. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, translated by C. Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
7. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in James D. Faubion, ed., Power/Michel Foucault (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 201-222; Nikolas
8. Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
9. Buder, Precarious Life, note 2.
10. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, note 1.
11. For definitional discussions of terrorism see Eqbal Ahmad, Terrorism (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001);
12. D. Mustafa, "Terrorism and Hazards Research: An Agenda for an Oppositional Engagement," in B. Wisner and M. Fordham, eds., Radix: Radical Interpretations of Disaster http://online.northumbria.ac.uk/ geography_research/radix/wtc7.html, (2002).
13. From this perspective, processes operating in different places are connected. However, the fluidity of connections across space is far from the placeless landscape of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998).
14. Rather, places are crucial anchors of relations that become reconfigured as they extend across space and time; see Doreen Massey, For Space (Thousand Oaks, CaL: Sage, 2005).
15. Japan's role in the international division of labor is contested. Whereas the neoliberal "flying geese" model depicts Japan as a facilitor in industrial learning through direct foreign investment, in practice Japan developed an international spatial division of labor whereby lowest-skilled production was located in cheapest labor locations following a Taylorist model; see R. Hayter and D. W. Edginton, "Flying Geese in Asia: The Impacts of Japanese MNCs as a Source of Industrial Learning," Tijdschrift voor Economishe en Sociale Geografie (Journal of Economic and Social Geography) 95 (February 2004): 3-26.
16. Taylorist production refers to a style of management that entails rigid divisions of labor relative to skills or lack thereof that are required for various tasks; see Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper Brothers, 1911).
17. The need to regulate a balanced relation between production and consumption in specific regions became unnecessary as mass markets became globalized; in other words, the need to protect wages in a production region via collective bargaining in order to facilitate local mass consumption was not required.
18. Another type of path to industrialization is the subcontracting model in East Asia (as in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea) and South Asia (India); see, for example, Gary Gereffi and Donald L. Wyman, eds., Manufacturing Miracles (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).
19. Nancy Ettlinger, "Labor Market and Industrial Change: The Competitive Advantage and Challenge of Harnessing Diversity," Competition and Changel 4 (January 2000): 171-210.
20. Ibid.
21. Christopher Pierson and Francis G. Casdes, eds., The Welfare State (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000); Paul Pierson, ed., The New Politics of the Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
22. The postmodern contention of fundamentally new conditions is contested. For example, rather than framing realities in terms of post-welfare states, many scholars engage in discussions of a restructured welfare state; see Pierson, ibid. Others deny fundamental changes; see V. Navarro, J. Schmitt, and J. Astudillo, "Is Globalization Undermining the Welfare State?" Cambridge Journal of Economics 28 (January 2004): 133-152.
23. Michel Aglietta, Accumulation et Régulation du Capitalisme en Longue Periods, thesis, Paris 1, 1974, cited in Robert Boyer, "Technical Change and
24. the Theory of 'Régulation,'" in G. Dosi, C. Freeman, R. Nelson, G. Silverberg, and L. Soete, eds., Technical Change and Economic Theory (New York: Pinter, 1988).
25. See also Robert Brenner and Mark Glick, "The Regulation Approach: Theory and History," New Left Review 188 (July/August 1991): 47-119.
26. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1991).
27. See Hardt and Negri, Empire, note 1.
28. Butler gives attention to this issue in Precarious Life, note 2.
29. On organizational diversity, see G. Grabher and B. Stark, "Organizing Diversity: Evolutionary Theory, Network Analysis and Postsocialism," Regional Studies 31 (July 1997): 533-544.
30. This perspective links Bourdieu's examination of the production of cultural tastes and values with Lefebvre's approach to the production of space; as such there is a geography of tastes and values, which are specific to particular contexts. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991).
31. William E. Connolly, Identity|Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
32. Michel Foucault, "So Is It Important to Think?" in Faubion, note 5, pp. 454-458.
33. Whereas actor network theory, for example, focuses on fluidity of networks and social relations, it tends, however, to elide singular contexts of individuals. I advocate an epistemological fluidity that considers both individual contexts and actor relations, and moves between the two; see N. Ettlinger, "Cultural Economic Geography and a Relational and Microspace Approach to Trusts, Rationalities, Networks, and Change in Collaborative Workplaces," Journal of Economic Geography 3 (April 2003): 145-171.
34. Most studies deal with oppositional consciousness among groups that are already established; see C. Sandoval, "U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World," Genders 10 (January 1991): 1-24;
35. Jane Mansbridge and A. Morris, eds., Oppositional Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
36. For consideration of the formation of oppositional consciousness in individuals prior to the existence of groups that share an oppositional consciousness, see N. Ettlinger, "Toward a Critical Theory of Untidy Geographies: The Spatiality of Emotions in Consumption and Production," Feminist Economics 10 (November 2004): 21-54.
37. See Ettlinger, "Toward a Critical Theory," ibid.
38. Ibid. On the interdependence of the economic, social, and cultural see Roger Lee, "Economic Geographies: Representations and Interpretations, " in R. Lee and J. Wills, eds., Geographies of Economies (New York: Arnold, 1997), pp. xi-xiv;
39. R. Lee, "The Ordinary Economy: Tangled Up in Values and Geography," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 31 (December 2006): 413-432.
40. Ettlinger, "Cultural Economic Geography," note 26.
41. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CaL: Stanford University Press, 1957).
42. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991).
43. Michel Foucault, "Security, Territory, Population," in Paul Rabinow, ed., Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth/ Michel Foucault (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 67-71.
44. Thus, it matters to which group one belongs, because groups widi less power are constrained by diose widi more power; moreover, norms are context specific and thus vary across groups, as do the rules and consequences for anomalous behavior.
45. Michel Callon, "An Essay on Framing and Overflowing: Economic Externalities Revisited by Sociology," in Michael Callon, ed., The Laws of the Markets (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 244-269.
46. George W. Bush formally discussed Al-Qaeda in terms of "shadowy networks" in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: The White House, 2002).
47. Chris H. Gray, Postmodern War (New York: Guilford, 1997).
48. James Der Derian, Virtuous War (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2001).
49. N. Etdinger and F. Bosco, Thinking Through Networks and Their Spatiality: A Critique of the US (Public) War on Terrorism and its Geographic Discourse," Antipode 36 (Spring 2002): 249-271.
50. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, note 1, p. 14.
51. Michael Klare, "The Rise and Fall of the "Rogue Doctrine": The Pentagon's Quest for a Post-Cold War Military Strategy," Middle East Report 208 (1998): 12-15, 47.
52. Robert Taber's Vietnam-era analysis of why guerrilla warfare cannot be engaged militarily pertains direcdy to current problems in Iraq; see Robert Taber, The War of the Flea (New York: The Citadel Press, 1969).
53. Frondine, "Al Qaeda's New Front," http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ pages/frondine/shows/front/ (2005).
54. Etdinger and Bosco, note 38; see also C. J. Chivers, "Dutch Soldiers Stress Restraint in Afghanistan: Taking on Taliban by Helping Villagers," New York Times CLVI (6 April 2007): A1, A12.
55. N. Etdinger, "Unchaining the Micro," SECONS (Sodo-Economics of Space), http://www.giub.uni-bonn.de/grabher/ (2007).
56. Buder, Precarious Life, note 2.
57. Foucault, "Governmentality," note 5.
58. The postcolonial literature offers vivid examples of such subjugation; see, for example, Artur Escobar, Encountering Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995);
59. Timothy Mitchell, The Rule of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
60. Foucault, "Governmentality," note 5.
61. See discussion of governmentality and resistance in Etdinger, "Unchaining the Micro," note 44.
62. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, note 1.
63. For example, see N. Argent, "The Neoliberal Seduction: Governing-At-A-Distance, Community Development and the Battle Over Financial Services Provision in Australia," Geographical Research 43 (March 2005): 29-39;
64. N. Clarke, C. Barnett, P. Cloke, and A. Malpass, "Globalising the Consumer: Doing Politics in an Ethical Register," Political Geography 26 (March 2007);
65. D. Cooper, "Active Citizenship and the Governmentality of Local Lesbian and Gay Politics," Political Geography 25 (November 2006): 921-943;
66. Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999).
67. See, for example, Buder, Precarious Life, note 2; Connolly, note 24; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 2001);
68. Iris M. Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
69. Young, ibid.
70. Information dissemination channels via the media are often crucial toward rendering power brokers accountable and bringing pressure to bear on their decisionmaking; see J. Rothenberg-Aalami, "Coming Full Circle? Forging Missing Links Along Nike's Integrated Production Networks," Global Networks 4 (October 2004): 335-354.
71. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, note 1.
72. The perceived novelty of so-called "new" citizenship more likely pertains to the relatively recent emergence of the study of this approach to citizenship than to actual practices. Similar skepticism has been directed to socalled "new" social movements; see, for example, David Ptotke, "What's So New About Social Movements?" in Stanford M. Lyman, ed., Social Movements: Critiques, Concepts, Case Studies (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 113-136.
73. For an insightful discussion of new approaches to citizenship in the context of cooperative politics and the contrast between cooperative and conflictive approaches to social transformation, see Evalina Dagnino, "The Cultural Politics of Citizenship, Democracy, and the State," in Sonia E. Alvarez, Evalino Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds., Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998), pp. 33-63.
74. See, for example, Sonia E. Alvarez, "Latin American Feminisms "Go Global": Trends of the 1990s and Challenges of the New Millenium," in Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar, ibid., pp. 293-324.
75. Ettlinger, "Cultural Economic Geography," note 26.
76. On "strategic bridges," see Ronald S. Burt, Structural Holes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
77. Nancy Ettlinger, "Bringing Democracy Home: Post-Katrina New Orleans," Antipode 39 (February 2007): 8-16.