Reworking modernity : capitalisms and symbolic discontent / Allan Pred and Michael John Watts.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pred, Allan, 1936-2007.

Contributor:

Watts, Michael, 1951-

Series:

Hegemony and experience

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Discontent--Social aspects.

Discontent.

Capitalism.

Civilization, Modern--20th century.

Civilization, Modern.

Physical Description:

xvi, 252 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, [1992]

Summary:

The authors of Reworking Modernity see capitalism in terms of distinctive forms of accumulation and periodic crises or moments of creative destruction. The history of capitalism is expressed both through historically and geographically specific configurations of capital, labor, and the state and through cultural and symbolic systems. Allan Pred and Michael Watts depict people simultaneously struggling over the material and cultural conditions of their existence during periods of momentous change.

The four case studies in this book--a study of a Muslim millenarian movement that arose alongside the Nigerian oil boom of the 1970s, technological change in a West African peasant society, changes in the daily life of the Stockholm working class at the end of the nineteenth century, and a labor/management struggle in an industrial suburb in California--remind us that there are multiple capitalisms and multiple reactions to capitalisms, and demonstrate the shock of modernity and how the resulting struggles affect daily life.

Contents:

List of Figures and Tables ix

Prefatory Articulations xiii

1 Capitalisms, Crises, and Cultures I: Notes toward a Totality of Fragments / Michael Watts 1

2 The Shock of Modernity: Petroleum, Protest, and Fast Capitalism in an Industrializing Society / Michael Watts 21

3 Living under Contract: Work, Production Politics, and the Manufacture of Discontent in a Peasant Society / Michael Watts 65

4 Capitalisms, Crises, and Cultures II: Notes on Local Transformation and Everyday Cultural Struggles / Allan Pred 1 06

5 Languages of Everyday Practice and Resistance: Stockholm at the End of the Nineteenth Century / Allan Pred 118

6 Outside(rs) In and Inside(rs) Out: South Korean Capital Encounters Organized Labor in a California Industrial Subur b / Allan Pred 155

Coda 192

Name Index 249.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [225]-247) and index.

ISBN:

0813518318 :

0813518326

OCLC:

25008586