Politics of waiting : workfare, post-soviet austerity and the ethics of freedom / Liene Ozoliņa.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ozoliņa, Liene, author.

Contributor:

Manchester University Press, publisher.

Series:

Political ethnography (Manchester University Press)

Political ethnography

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Unemployed--Services for--Latvia.

Unemployed.

Welfare recipients--Employment--Latvia.

Welfare recipients.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 150 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2019.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

While the global political economy is usually imagined through metaphors of acceleration and speed, this book reveals waiting as the shadow temporality of the contemporary logics of governance. The ethnographic site for this analysis is a state-run unemployment office in Latvia, serving as a vantage point from which to observe how welfare programmes use acceleration and waiting as forms of control as well as to compare Western and post-Soviet welfare policy designs. The book is therefore a timely sociological critique of the forms of statecraft that have emerged in the aftermath of neoliberalism. The key audiences for this book are students and scholars of sociology, anthropology, social policy, and social and political theory, as well as policymakers and activists with an interest in welfare reforms and comparisons between Western and post-Soviet welfare designs.

Contents:

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Waiting as an organising logic

2. Temporalities of austerity

3. The anxious subject

4. The will to live

5. Spaces of the expelled

Epilogue: Waiting for freedom

References

Index.

Notes:

MUP 2020 titles.

Made available via: manchesterhive.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (viewed on March 26, 2026).

ISBN:

9781526126269

1526126265

OCLC:

1149150222