“How, Fevre asks in his brilliant new book, can we critique Max Weber’s “iron cage” of economic rationality  if we’re looking at the world from inside it? The great intellectuals of the past  – Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Cooley and more recently Polyani –were deeply troubled by a growing market mentality that we now so tepidly accept as “inevitable.” I won’t spoil the story but Fevre puts his finger on the moment when things went off track, and sets us back on track so we can take an honest look at our lives today.  This is an enormously important challenge to our basic thinking about the most important organizing force in the world today: the market. A must read.” ;  Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of The Commercialization of Intimate Life, and co-editor of Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy  

Labour

Labour

Whereas Chapter 2 was concerned with the proportion of our lives which is spent in income-earning work, this chapter is about how hard we labour when we are at work or, to be both more general and precise, how much of ourselves we put into our work. You would not necessarily conclude this from reading economic sociology, but this issue is a profoundly moral one and the first task of this chapter is to illustrate this point with an example. It therefore begins by referring to one of the enduring preoccupations of the sociology of economic behaviour: the way people organize themselves into informal groups and then put limits on the amount of work they do. The most famous example of this preoccupation, the ...

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