(DOWNLOAD) "Post-Fordist Heterotopias: Regional, National, And Global Identities in Contemporary Italy." by Annali d'Italianistica " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Post-Fordist Heterotopias: Regional, National, And Global Identities in Contemporary Italy.
- Author : Annali d'Italianistica
- Release Date : January 01, 2006
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 226 KB
Description
The notion that Italy is in some sense a "laboratory" for political, economic, and sociological transformations of global importance has by now been reiterated so often as to have become commonplace. (1) Arguably, it is with regard to the transformations of regional, national, and transnational identities that follow in the wake of today's accelerated economic globalization that the phrase has regained an aptness it seemed for some years to have lost. Sociologists Aldo Bonomi and Marco Revelli have analysed the impact that the integration of European and global markets has had on Italian class composition, the self-conception of the country's workforce, and the political ramifications of both. In doing so, they have developed a conceptual apparatus that lends itself well to a general reflection on questions of place and identity. For Bonomi and Revelli, the new senses of self that have emerged in Italy during the past two decades are intimately related to the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economic regime that is commonly thought to have begun during the late 1970s and early 1980s. (2) Bonomi and Revelli maintain that this transition constitutes the central aspect of that complex set of interrelated economic and political processes for which "globalization" continues to serve as a convenient if somewhat oblique term. They also argue that no account of post-Fordism's sociological consequences can do without an analysis of the concept of place and its relationship to that of identity. This paper will refer only in passing to Revelli, focusing instead on Bonomi. It will begin by sketching the theory of post-Fordism that underpins the latter's sociological analysis, in order to focus on the problems of place and identity as they present themselves on the basis of that theory. This will involve some discussion of Bonomi's concept of identities that are neither global nor local, but "glocal" ("glocale"). The hypothesis that underlies Bonomi's neologism will be elucidated against the background of the analyses of place and identity developed by P. W. Preston and John Agnew. A third section of the paper will discuss Bonomi's account of the political ramifications of present-day Italy's emergent "glocal" identities. Finally, Bonomi's conceptual apparatus will be applied to the specific case of Turin. As we will see, the former "company town" was particularly hard struck by the crisis of Fordist mass production that erupted during the 1980s. The city is currently home to a host of self-employed and part-time workers whose condition corresponds closely to standard accounts of post-Fordist labour. Turin's efforts to attain a prominent position on the economic and cultural scene of a globalized Italy--most recently, by hosting the 2006 Winter Olympics--have also spawned a number of social and political conflicts that resonate interestingly with the questions of place and identity to whose general analysis the authors mentioned have devoted their attention.
 "Post-Fordist Heterotopias: Regional, National, And Global Identities in Contemporary Italy." by Annali d'Italianistica " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}