The ABC of the projectariat contributes new thinking on and practical responses to the widespread problem of precarious labour in the field of contemporary art. It works as both a critical analysis and a practical handbook, speaking to and about the vast cohort of artistic freelancers worldwide. In an accessible ABC format, the book strikes a unique balance between the practical and the theoretical: the analysis is backed up by lived experience, the arguments are rooted in concrete examples and there are suggestions for constructive action. Roughly half of the entries expose the structural underpinnings of projects and circulation, isolating traits such as opportunism, neoliberalism, inequality, fear and cynicism at the root of the condition of the projectariat. This discussion is paired with a practical account of different modes of action, such as art strikes, productive withdrawals, political struggles and better social time machines. Just as proletarians had nothing to lose but their chains, the projectarians have nothing to miss but their deadlines.

The Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy offers international perspectives on a wide range of issues in cultural management and cultural policy research and practice. The social situatedness of art and the interplay between artists, non-artists, institutions, and policy makers have changed in the past decades. Democracies are at risk and the geopolitical world order has changed. The global climate emergency and the rise of autocratic governments are just two forces posing new contexts and threatening possibilities for socially engaged art. At the same time, artists and curators are suspected of belonging to a new professional managerial class that entangles them in a neoliberal economic system. Can socially engaged art catalyze progressive civic consciousness? Can art address big questions of social justice? This issue provides some answers to these questions.

Responding to a question of immense interdisciplinary interest, this book investigates the construction of value in the curation of film festivals and production of cultural events undertaken by nonprofit arts organizations around the world. Combining their expertise in economics and sociology, the authors outline a theoretically and methodologically cohesive approach that puts the valuation of cinema right into the middle of global value chain research. It challenges the ways in which the interdisciplinary pursuit of cultural economics has approached cultural value, presenting a thorough analytic inquiry into who produces the value and who seeks rent in the value chain. While offering a fresh approach to cinema and media economics, the book highlights the significant way of nonprofit actor incorporation into value chains and value networks.

Culture is at the heart to what it means to be human. But twenty-five years ago, the British government rebranded art and culture as ‘creative industries’, valued for their economic contribution, and set out to launch the UK as the creative workshop of a globalised world. Where does that leave art and culture now? Facing exhausted workers and a lack of funding and vision, culture finds itself in the grip of accountancy firms, creativity gurus and Ted Talkers. At a time of sweeping geo-political turmoil, culture has been de-politicised, its radical energies reduced to factors of industrial production. This book is about what happens when an essential part of our democratic citizenship, fundamental to our human rights, is reduced to an industry. Culture is not an industry argues that art and culture need to renew their social contract and re-align with the radical agenda for a more equitable future. Bold and uncompromising, the book offers a powerful vision for change.

This contributed volume considers the emergence of coworking as centered in labor issues. More specifically, its chapters consider it as a coping mechanism in the worldwide rise of independent modes of work (i.e., self-employment) that leaves more and more workers exposed to precarity as they must organize and manage their own labor. Grounded in this perspective, this volume aims to understand the transformative social and political potentials emerging through coworking as a social and spatial practice. There is a distinct lack of discussion within coworking research on the emancipatory potentials of coworking—and if it is discussed, more cautionary views prevail, highlighting the ambivalence of coworking spaces both as a space of alternative economic practices and as integrated into market economies. The aims of this collection are twofold: First, it aims to make visible the plurality of existing practices around shared resources in coworking and the assemblages of human and non-human actors as agents of change associated with coworking and the re-organization of work and labor power. And second, it aims to develop a more emancipatory narrative for coworking and the role of coworking spaces for workers but also the different spatial contexts in which these spaces are situated. A narrative that does not emphasize entrepreneurship or coworking as the epitome of the ‘neoliberal entrepreneurial self’ as in the dominant interpretations in the current research, but rather one that centers coworking in the creation of meaningful, careful social relationships, supporting empathy and an ethics that recognizes mutual interdependencies and builds a foundation for social change. So, it is about alternative narratives, emancipation politics and the wider social role that coworking spaces might play in neighborhoods, cities or beyond because they are crucial contexts for the formation and maintenance of social relations. With this specific direction, this collection aims to bring coworking research into a fruitful dialog with other research fields-such as sociology of work, feminist perspectives on care, alternative and diverse economies, "post-capitalist" transformation, critical geography, positioning coworking within a range of progressive alternatives in the articulation of economic and social relationships.

An indispensable and exemplary reference work, this Encyclopedia adeptly navigates the multidisciplinary field of critical political science, providing a comprehensive overview of the methods, approaches, concepts, scholars and journals that have come to influence the disciplineÕs development over the last six decades.

This book explores the key conceptual features of the development of the Sociology of Work (SoW) in Europe since 1945, using eleven country case studies. An original contribution to our understanding of the trajectory of the SoW, the chapters map the current state of the theoretical background of the sub-discipline's development to broader socio-political and economic changes, traced across a heterogeneous set of national contexts. Different definitions of the SoW in each country often reflect variations in the focus of analysis, and these chapters link the subject definition and focus to other social science disciplines, the state, as well as social class interests and ideologies. The book contends that the ways in which the sub-discipline makes sense of changes in work is itself a response to the type of society in which the sub-discipline is practiced, whether in the post-war social democratic West, the Soviet East, or today's societies, dominated by variant forms of neo-liberalism. It will be of use to scholars and students interested in the transnational history of the discipline of sociology, with a specific focus on the nexus between the sociology of labour, ideology, economics and politics.