The Cultural Value of Work
Livelihoods and Migration in the World's Economies

Focusing on migrant workers, this book explores the different forms work takes, in the context of economic precarity and fragmentation.

David Griffith (Author)

9781009100281, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 July 2022

275 pages
23.5 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.53 kg

Traditional wage labor has experienced a significant decline in industrialized countries over the past few decades. The spread of temporary work, the proliferation of subcontracting arrangements, the use of artificial intelligence (AI), the shipment of manufacturing jobs overseas, and the employment of foreign contract workers are among the key factors driving this decline. The result is a rise of labor insecurity and fragmentation among increasingly diverse forms of flexible labor arrangements. This book examines this important transformation by considering the impact of foreign contract labor on temporary migrant workers in their places of employment and home communities. It assesses work as a source of value in capitalist, reproductive, domestic, and cultural economics, and argues for a new, work-centric field of economics. Rich in examples, it is a sophisticated anthropological appreciation of the many forms that work can take and what these forms mean for the creation of value in people's lives.

Introduction: the cultural value of work
Part I. Labor in Ethnohistorical Settings
1. It isn't Santa Claus coming to town: European expansion into Arctic environments
2. Dispossession and conscription: Euro-American use of Native American labor
3. Labor for forests: European expansion through naval stores
Part II. Values of Forms of Labour
4. The value of reproductive labor
5. Domestic economic labour, part I
6. Domestic economic labor, Part II
7. Cultural labor in migration economies
Part III. Labor in Economic and Anthropological Theory
8. Labor, value, culture
9. An anthropology of economics
Appendix A: a note on the qualifications of the author.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Economics [KC], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Anthropology [JHM], Sociology & anthropology [JH]