Research recognizes both a tension between standardized work and employee participation as well as the fact that management and labor negotiate both formally and informally over the reorganization of work. Through a comparison of the lean production systems being implemented at three General Motors assembly plants, this article demonstrates the tension...

This article reports on an ethnographic study of the process by which a young man became a drug dealer in a in a small northeastern US city. Drug dealing was the principal occupation in his predominantly black neighborhood. This process is treated as an initiation into a criminal career that involved not only the mastery of specific steps of drug dealing...

The current special issue examines the range and strength of analysing contemporary transformations and struggles through the lens of ‘precarity’. Rather than defining a single precariat, the interest is in exploring ‘varieties of precarity’. These take different forms in different parts of the world, on different scales and in different socio-economic...

The article focuses on the relationship between capitalism and religion through an allegorical double reading of social theory and fiction. Theoretically it discusses capitalism as religion. Empirically it analyses Michel Houellebecq’s recent novel The Map and the Territory. Houellebecq’s is a late modern world in which capital tends to replace, like...