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This article explores the role that compassion plays in the building of a post‐Fordist laboring public in Italy. By exploring how the state has made compassion productive through new regimes of voluntary labor, this piece shows that compassion operates not as a mitigating force against, but as a vehicle for the production and maintenance of a new exclusionary order precisely because it allows for the emergence of a fantasy of spontaneously available public emotion. Affective labor is a desired form of activity for marginalized members of Italian society because it allows them to approximate the form of social belonging that was centrally institutionalized and cultivated within Fordist societies—that of the capacity to belong to and be publicly recognized by the world through waged work. Fordism thus appears not as an era past, but as an object of desire and mourning that still retains much social force as people attempt to recapture or at least approximate Fordist forms and feelings of stability and belonging.

Muskian futurism refers to a crosspollination of political perceptions, ideas and beliefs centred around the public persona of Elon Musk. In this paper, we explore these strands of thought – contemporary futurism, cyber-libertarianism, neo-reaction, white supremacism and personal self-interest – to situate Muskian futurism as a grouping of overlapping ideologies with a shared diagnosis of the world that runs parallel with other groups of similar influence over the second Trump administration. It is argued that this agglomeration of (pseudo)intellectual strands is distinct from nationalism due to its technological solutionism and indifference to Musk’s shameless pursuit of self-interest. Nonetheless, Muskian futurism represents a dangerous technocratic accelerationism committed to the absolute undermining of democratic institutions capable of enduring without Musk’s prominence.

The rise of digital platforms has in recent years redefined contemporary capitalism—provoking discussions on whether platformization should be understood as bringing an altogether new form of capitalism, or as merely a continuation and intensification of existing neoliberal trends. This paper draws on regulation theory to examine social regulation in digital capitalism, arguing for understanding digital capitalism as continuities of existing capitalist trends coming to produce discontinuities. The paper makes three main arguments. First, it situates digital capitalism as a continuation of longer running post-Fordist trends of financialization, digitalization, and privatization—converging in the emergence of digital proprietary markets, owned and regulated by transnational platform companies. Second, as the platform model is founded on monopolizing regulation, platforms come into direct competition with states and public institutions, which they pursue through a set of distinct technopolitical strategies to claim power to govern—resulting in a geographically variegated process of institutional transformation. Third, while the digital proprietary markets are continuities of existing trends, they bring new pressures and affordances, thus producing discontinuities in social regulation. We examine such discontinuities in relation to three aspects of social regulation: (a) from neoliberalism to techno-feudalism; (b) from Taylorist hierarchies toward algorithmic herds and technoliberal subjectivity; and (c) from postmodernity toward an automated consumer culture.

Why do workers participate in their own exploitation? This article moves beyond the situational production of consent that has dominated studies of the labor process and outlines the relational production of labor's surplus value. Using a case of unpaid women who perform valuable work for VIP nightclubs, I present ethnographic data on the VIP party circuit from New York, the Hamptons, Miami, and Cannes, as well as 84 interviews with party organizers and guests. Party promoters, mostly male brokers, appropriate surplus value from women in four stages: recruitment, mobilization, performance, and control. Relational work between promoters and women, cemented by gifts and strategic intimacies, frames women's labor as leisure and friendship, and boundary work legitimizes women's work as distinct from sexual labor. When boundaries, media, and meanings of relationships do not appropriately align, as in relational mismatches, women experience the VIP party less as leisure and more as work, and they are less likely to participate. My findings embed the labor process in a relational infrastructure and hold insights for explaining why people work for free in culture and technology sectors of the post-Fordist economy.

Abstract The Special Forum establishes as an integral part of “critical global studies” the effort to interrogate how plural poetic and aesthetic registers enable distinct analyses of the establishment, harms and survivances of “the international” and “the global.” The authors’ reconstructive moves refuse the occlusion of histories of colonialism and slavery, surfacing as central to precarity their practices of extraction, land dispossession, and dehumanization, that Eurocentric accounts of precarity as a contemporary sociological problem of post-Fordist political economy occlude. At the same time, the contributors centre the practices of endurance, survival and evasion of precarious populations. Supplementing, and at times destabilizing, social scientific modes of analysis, aesthetic-poetic registers centre the genres, practices and artistic production generated in the midst of precarity. The complex analytics that aesthetics and poetics offer the examination of precarity resist the abstraction, abjection, and universalization of precarious life and its obverse, the entrenchment as normative of Euro-Western, liberal subjectivities. In this way, the approaches espoused in this Special Forum pluralize the modes of seeing, sensing, and knowing precarity, through a poetic-aesthetic sensibility that attends to the specificity of precarious lives as lived.

In the post-Fordist economy, culture has become an important resource for cities to compete at the regional and international levels. Thus, local elites have used culture as an instrument of urban regeneration and these processes increasingly seek to promote urban branding. Moreover, culture is seen as a way to generate narratives that help cities avoid the perception of standardisation, characterise cities as a unique urban space and create authenticity, which are necessary elements if a city is to be globally competitive. The case of central Barcelona and, specifically, the Raval district is exemplary and singular: the joint action of the cultural institutions and representatives of the cultural sector based in the neighbourhood have turned the Raval into an brand space of 'authentic Barcelona' that makes the official, tourist-frequented Barcelona more rich and complex.

This article develops research on youth and ‘career’ beyond a focus on attitudes towards employment flexibility and towards an examination of the ideological role of work in the formation of youth identities. The article draws on a programme of research on the formation of young people’s working identities, and presents interview data in which young people discuss the meaning of ‘career’ and the significance of work in general. These data show that across divergent aspirations and family histories of employment, young people define ‘career’ in terms of the promise of self-actualisation through labour, and thereby position work as the key site for self-expression and the cultivation of personal uniqueness. This article therefore suggests that the notion of ‘career’ is a way that the ‘post-Fordist work ethic’ is articulated on the level of youth identities, elevating self-realisation through labour as the goal of successful labour market engagement for youth.

Since 2001 there has been an increase in the use of reserve forces in conflicts sparking a number of organizational transformations when it comes to reserves. In Britain, the Future Reserves 2020 (FR2020) transformation was a cornerstone of recent defence policy. Yet, the scholarly work on military innovations has ignored reserve forces. This article examines why and how the recent attempt to transform the British Army Reserve was undertaken, and analyses its outcome. In doing so, this article contributes a major new case-study to the literature focused on civilian-directed peacetime innovation and the impact of intra-party and intraservice politics upon it. Firstly, we originally examine how intra-party political motivations were the primary initiator of the innovation. Secondly, contrary to previous intra-service rivalry explanations, we argue that our case is a compelling example of intra-service rivalry between components rather than branches, and over manpower and organizational structure rather than technology and visions of victory. Finally, addressing the lack of theory in innovation studies, we show how the transformation followed post-Fordist principles to address its political, ideological and financial drivers. We conclude that numerous innovation processes can be operant at different times, and that FR2020 has been frustrated by the interaction between these processes.

Recent legislation in the Netherlands takes conditional welfare to a new level. Local welfare offices can now give benefit sanctions to welfare clients that ‘obstruct employment’ by their appearance. Through a qualitative and ethnographic study of aesthetic evaluation practices in Dutch welfare offices it is argued that: (1) an everyday aesthetic labour is pivotal in post-Fordist labour markets; (2) in times of precarization, this is so for unemployed as well as formally employed populations; (3) welfare clients are expected to give an aesthetic performance of work-readiness and adaptability; and (4) case managers use aesthetics as a pedagogy to achieve this readiness and adaptability. Aesthetic labour, it is then argued, is best conceptualized as a continuous, everyday, backstage labour for labour: a daily calibration for work contexts in flux.

Economic restructuring of the 21st century is changing the production methods and location requirements of most industries. Mass production on the outskirts of cities, as was common in 20th century Fordism, is largely being replaced by an economic model characterised by a multitude of networked small and medium-sized production sites as well as logistics facilities. In this article, we want to examine if this also creates the opportunity to combine some of the smaller industrial areas with the city as a whole and to initiate a transformation of these areas in favour of redensification and mixed use. Examining the case of Kassel, Germany, we take a closer look at the transformation processes from Fordism to post-Fordism and the possibilities for a smarter land use. In this largely industrially shaped region, younger companies such as the solar panel producer SMA are using new approaches in terms of urban planning and land use by building their low emission-factories on greyfields in an urban environment rather than on suburban greenfields. In our article, we survey selected industrial areas in Kassel and discuss their recent change as part of a broader development from Fordism to post-Fordism. Firstly, the study contains a theoretical discussion of commercial and industrial land-use patterns in both socio-economic models. Subsequently, an on-site analysis is carried out to determine the extent to which both economic models have influenced the use and shape of industrial areas in Kassel. Based on this analysis, we finally show criteria for how urban planning can help to ensure that this change is combined with an improvement in the spatial and design quality of the industrial areas and is meaningfully integrated into the sustainable development of the city region.