Browsing by Author "Alfonsson, Johan"

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Alienation och Arbete. Unga behovsanställdas villkor i den flexibla kapitalismen
(2020-03-04) Alfonsson, Johan
The aim of this dissertation is to investigate how flexible capitalism, drawing from the case of on-call employees, influences the ability to control life and work and affects relationships with other people, both inside and outside work; and to investigate how this can be understood in terms of alienation. A subsidiary aim that emerges from this investigation is to develop existing alienation theories in a way that enables them to be used to understand human existence under flexible capitalism. Alienation is understood as a process in which something that should be connected has lost its connection: it is a relation of relationlessness. This raises three questions: How can we decide what a relation “ought” to be? What relations are being alienated and what is causing these relations to become relationless? In the thesis I use an immanent perspective to identify the “ought” in the studied context: the capitalist mode of production. For value to exist it is required that man is, as Marx puts it in Capital, “the free proprietor of his own labour-capacity, hence of his own person”. Thus, there is a premise of self-determination in capitalism. A premise which, because of man’s need to create value and the fact that her activity must be subordinated to the value logic, cannot be realized. This applies to everyone in our society, capitalists and labourers alike, and alienates man from her activity, herself, others and her product. This is understood as abstract alienation. On a concrete and specific level the control of how to reach this value-goal and to what extent this affects the individual’s life may differ depending on how value production takes place and the individual’s position in production. I call this concrete alienation and it can be understood as the concrete expression of the abstract alienation. In this way, alienation is neither a purely structural nor a purely subjective phenomenon. It can be both. Following changes in the accumulation regime the concrete alienation has transformed during the last decades, which is expressed in the on-call employees’ situation. Based on an analysis of 17 in-depth interviews I conclude that that their subjective motifs of being in the employment differ and their employment is objectively shaped differently. The objective and subjective dimensions are the basis for understanding on-call employees’ alienation at a concrete level. Drawing from Jaeggi’s qualified subjectivism I argue that since a premise of capitalism is self-determination, the individual must have a say in their situation and experience. If an individual feels that she can’t control her life she is thus alienated from the premise of self-determination. If she feels that she can control her life but this feeling is not realised, meaning that there is no objective possibility to control or steer her life, there is no self-determination and thus alienation persists even though it is not perceived. The result tells us that on-call employment can be used both as a way to increase the freedom and self-determination over one’s life and hinder it, it can instrumentalise life and work in a specific way, and it can hinder the control over social relations, both in and outside of work. As a result, even though they all experience abstract alienation, their level of concrete alienation differs.
”Ny på jobbet varje dag” En studie om behovsanställdas hantering av problem i arbetet och relation till fast anställda
(2012-10-24) Alfonsson, Johan; University of Gothenburg / Department of Sociology and Work Science; Göteborgs universitet / Institutionen för sociologi och arbetsvetenskap
During the past 30 years the proportion of temporary employed has increased in Sweden. This has to do with corporate strivings to have a more numerically flexible labour force. Earlier research shows that it generates negative effects on temporary employees’ work environment and general health. On-call employees are affected the most. The aim of this article is to describe and analyse the social relationship between on-call employees and the permanently employed, how the relationship affects on-call employees’ ability to encounter problems at their workplace, and which strategies are being used to handle the situation. The article uses both an extensive and intensive methodology. The extensive part consists of a statistical analysis of survey data. It turns out that youth, females and manual workers run the greatest risk of being on-call employees. Against this background eight in-depth interviews were conducted. The theoretical approach is Sverre Lysgaard’s theory about the subordinate workers’ collective. The interviews focused on whether on-call employees perceive a workers’ collective and if so how their relationship to the collective is constructed. The interviews show that the respondents perceive a workers’ collective among the permanently employed. However, due to lack of similarity, closeness and identification of shared problems, it is difficult for them to be included in the collective. Instead the permanent employees often view on-call employees as a stigmatized out-group. The latter are thus subject to an undignified treatment and the work they perform is not recognized. They also lack autonomy in the work process and face difficulties in planning their leisure time. In order to deal with these problems on-call employees can use inclusive, control and creation-of-meaning strategies. It is argued that the strategies do not solve the problems, but only make the perception of them less negative.