ABSTRACT
These narratives of restructuring are not simply free-floating “texts,” but are profoundly bound together with ongoing (and invariably regressive) programs of political-economic change. Both in fact are thinly veiled justifications for the aggressive enforcement of new regimes of labor discipline. In Burawoy’s terms, they mark the ascendancy of a new system of “hegemonic despotism,” under which the bargaining power of capital, and its ability to extract workplace concessions, is enhanced “by virtue of collective labor’s vulnerability to capitalism’s national and international mobility” (1985:127). At one and the same time, this is a discursive and a material project. Discursively, there is an attempt to rescript the “failures” of extant economic, regulatory and institutional systems, and to envision alternatives to these systems, be these the “new global economy” of free trade and flexible labor markets, or the “workfare state” in which the principles of work, responsibility and active citizenship displace the underclass psychosis of passive “welfare dependency.” Materially, working models of these alternative visions-usually implemented at the local levelmust be cultivated so as to demonstrate that these are “ideas that work” in the context of the broader imperative of levering extra-local regulatory change (see Dehli 1993; Peck 1996).
