What's in a Job?

Reviews / Votes

" What's in a Job? brings together a truly impressive range of scholars with expertise that spans critical political economy and the post-socialist context of Central Asia. It shows in outstanding qualitative detail and richness, based on a hugely impressive wealth of ethnographic research, the lived reality of both urban and rural precarity, and the gendered form this takes across the region. Where much of the post-socialist studies literature portrays this as merely a question of delayed transition away from the legacy of the Soviet Union, this volume instead reveals a regional manifestation of the global trend towards precariousness as it occurs across global capitalism. Scholars of critical political economy, development studies, feminist IPE, and post-socialist studies all need to read this book!" (David Bailey, University of Birmingham, UK)

"This edited book is an urgent contribution that thinks beyond the confines of the 'transition' paradigm, locating postsocialist labour in the global processes of neoliberal capitalism and rethinking precarity as an exception to the norm of secure employment." (Daria Krivonos, University of Helsinki)

"Central Asia is often seen as a place of economic contestation, one wherein processes of globalisation and neoliberalism shape governance and continuously redistribute power. What's in a Job? looks beyond prior work on such issues by investigating and discussing precarity and precarisation in some of the region's key labour markets. For focus and scope, this is pioneering work: Galdini and Pesci have put together an impressive team of contributors, who deploy intriguing (and much-needed) qualitative methods to discuss how the region's labour politics developed across the post-Soviet era." (Luca Anceschi, University of Glasgow)