Social research study of short term employment of the peripheral worker (incl. The woman worker, Black workers, young workers, older workers, etc.), in the USA - covers historical aspects of sociological aspects of peripheral labour force, hours of work of full time employment and part time employment, temporary employment, disguised unemployment, labour demand and supply of such peripheral workers, employment policy, etc. Statistical tables.
This paper uses data from a 2002 survey of project managers in a large, U.S.-based financial services institution to compare how contractors and regular employees were assigned to work within an information technology department. The author uses these data to test standard core-periphery arguments about the use of contingent workers, as well as accounts of contingent work that emphasize the interests of frontline managers. He finds that contractors and employees were used very similarly in most respects, although there were some differences. Contractors were less likely to be used in roles that were more critical to the firm, but more likely to be used when frontline managers' interests could conflict with the organization's. Contractors were also less likely to be given positions requiring knowledge of the business. No evidence is found, however, that other kinds of firm-specific skills affected how contractors were used.
Island Southeast Asia was once a thriving region, and its products found eager consumers from China to Europe. Today, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia are primarily exporters of their surplus of cheap labor, with more than ten million emigrants from the region working all over the world. How did a prosperous region become a peripheral one? In The Making of a Periphery, Ulbe Bosma draws on new archival sources from the colonial period to the present to demonstrate how high demographic growth and a long history of bonded labor relegated Southeast Asia to the margins of the global economy. Bosma finds that the region’s contact with colonial trading powers during the early nineteenth century led to improved health care and longer life spans as the Spanish and Dutch colonial governments began to vaccinate their subjects against smallpox. The resulting abundance of workers ushered in extensive migration toward emerging labor-intensive plantation and mining belts. European powers exploited existing patron-client labor systems with the intermediation of indigenous elites and non-European agents to develop extractive industries and plantation agriculture. Bosma shows that these trends shaped the postcolonial era as these migration networks expanded far beyond the region. A wide-ranging comparative study of colonial commodity production and labor regimes, The Making of a Periphery is of major significance to international economic history, colonial and postcolonial history, and Southeast Asian history.
This book shows how Latin American writers and artists in the crisis-decades of the 1920s and 1930s used modernist techniques to explore national issues in relation to global capitalism. Drawing on a rich interdisciplinary archive of novels, poetry, essays, photography, and architecture, it includes chapters on major figures and the transformations that marked Latin American cities at the beginning of the twentieth century: the poet Manuel Maples Arce and Mexico City; the essayist José Carlos Mariátegui and Lima; the novelist Roberto Arlt and Buenos Aires; the novelist Patrícia Galvão and São Paulo. Tavid Mulder argues that the Latin American city should be understood as a peripheral metropolis: a social space that is simultaneously peripheral relative to the center of the world economy and a metropolis in relation to the region’s vast, underdeveloped hinterlands. Conceiving of modernist techniques as ways of understanding how the dualisms of Latin American societies—urban and rural, wealth and poverty, cosmopolitan and national—are bound together by the internal contradictions of capitalism, this volume insists on the ability of literary and artistic works to grasp the process through which untenable situations of crisis are not overcome but stabilized in the periphery. It thereby sheds light on issues in Latin America that have become increasingly urgent in the twenty-first century: inequality, indigenous migration, surplus populations, and anomie.
