Join 📚Jof’S Book Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
The sociologist James Coleman notes that people must draw upon a fund of social capital—shared past experiences as well as individual achievements and endowments—to help navigate a loose network. Other sociologists of network mobility emphasize that a person who presents himself or herself to a new employer or work group has to be attractive as well as available; risk involves more than simply opportunity.
The Corrosion of Character
Richard Sennett
Flexibility also means a redistribution of risks away from the state and the economy towards the individual. The jobs on offer become short-term and easily terminable (i.e. ‘renewable’). And finally, flexibility means: ‘Cheer up, your skills and knowledge are obsolete, and no one can say what you must learn in order to be needed in the future.’
The Brave New World of Work
Ulrich Beck
Actual studies of how poor people engage with the cash economy, how- ever, reveal a very different sort of relation between money and social re- lationships, one in which money, meaning, and mutuality are entangled rather than antagonistic. To make sense of this entanglement, we need to rethink the relation between “the cash nexus” and various forms of social connection and mutuality. And this rethinking will entail challenging a whole series of conventional oppositions (interest versus obligation, feel- ing versus calculation, altruism versus selfishness, etc.) that ground the traditional Left’s phobic antipathy (as I am increasingly inclined to call it) toward both cash payments and market exchanges.
Give a Man a Fish
James Ferguson
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