Documents found
-
-
527.
-
528.More information
There has been an outburst of scholarship on world and global cities in recent years, though cities under the guise of political entities—that is, municipal urban governments—have not been considered by this literature as having a relevant degree of agency in the process of interconnection that has been named globalisation. While they are both agents and subjects of this process, their part has been neglected or considered under a very limited chronological angle. This article offers an approach to the “municipal web” that has developed between and about municipal urban governments in the modern era. This web includes municipal governments, municipal officials and technicians as well as scholars, experts and lay reformers; intergovernmental organizations, domestic and transnational non governmental organisations as well as sections of national or infra national governments; firms as well as non profit groups. The article pays special attention to those who weaved this web and the material they used, to the items that travelled through this web of municipal interchange. It insists on the importance of studying current interconnections among and about cities in the historical perspective.
-
529.
-
530.More information
This article sets out to analyze the activity of wage workers hired by temporary work agencies, the emblematic figure of the new triangular work relations. These relations clearly illustrate the “connective” context in which workers are trapped simultaneously between several action logics, solicited in numerous ways by their environment, and challenged by differentiated relational frameworks. We analyze the experience of these situations, focusing on work as an activity rather than a social relation. We describe perceived work practices, the experience of temp agency workers based on their own perception of their status and working conditions. The two dimensions of the analysis are : a) the relationship between agency workers and their specific work environment, and b) the logic behind using agencies which is at odds with the actual conditions of the work activity. We show that such activity is precarious and bears little meaning and the use of agencies, whether it is strategic or risky, does not really take into account the activity's characteristics, placing workers in an “opportunistic” relation with their work environment. For them, “real work” resides outside of the “activity”. Our analyses are based on empirical material from forty-two interviews with agency wage earners carried out in 2012 and 2013 in the Québec City and Montreal regions.
Keywords: travail et activité, agences de travail temporaire, logiques de recours aux agences, Québec, labour and activity, temporary work agencies, logic of using agencies, Quebec, trabajo y actividad, agencias de trabajo temporal, lógicas de recurso a las agencias, Quebec