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Based on a long-term study of the everyday postsocialist politics of labour in the wider context of intense socio-economic transformation in Bulgaria, this book tells the story of the flexibilization of production, the precaritization of work, shifting managerial practices, and ways in which people with different employment statuses live and work together. The ethnography starts with the rapidly moving conveyor belt of a glass factory, where a variety of global and local forces and workers’ divisions meet, and analyses how inequalities are reproduced both at the production site and back home.
“The work is firmly grounded in the findings generated through original and thorough ethnographic research, and it is through these findings that the author contributes significantly to important and ongoing debates in academia and beyond.” • Victoria Goddard, University of London
“This book is an outstanding example of how an anthropologist’s unique knowledge can change our understanding of global transformations.” • Detelina Tocheva, PSL Research University Paris
List of Illustrations
Notes on Translation and Transliteration
Introduction: ‘We Are Like Broken Glass’
Chapter 1. Multiple Temporalities and Shifting Ideologies in Mladost
Chapter 2. Global Inequalities in Close Proximity: Workers’ Divisions, ‘The Market’, Managers and Clients around the Conveyor Belt
Chapter 3. Homework: Gender, Household, and Intimate Relationships across and beyond the Production Line
Chapter 4. The Rigidities and Elasticities of Flexibility
Chapter 5. Smoking and Idle Chimneys: Multiple Temporalities, (in)Visible Labour and Workers’ Identifications in Dilapidating Industrial Spaces
Chapter 6. Change, Continuity and Crisis
Conclusion
References
Index