Kuba Szreder, "The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and Working in a Precarious Art World" (Manchester UP, 2021)

New Books in Sociology · Jul 1, 2022 · 1h 14m

Labour has taken an about-turn. From Adam Smith’s proposal for specialisation which saw the factory line reorganised so that each worker needed to understand only a small aspect of the production process, many industries now rely on access to specialised skills and resources that are commanded at-hoc in discrete, time- and output-bound chunks. This is the logic of projects. The workforce no longer dedicates itself to the making of a singular commodity, as it was the case with Smith, but bids for discrete pieces of work when those are in demand. In some industries, for example, in the art…