Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
114
urban planning, migration, religion and
public culture.
Ester Gallo
Gediz University, Turkey
Manos Spyridakis
(2013).
The liminal
worker. An ethnography of work,
unemployment and precariousness in
contemporary Greece.
Farnham: Ashgate.
This monograph deals with the lived
experience of labour, employment, as well
as job insecurity and precariousness
through an anthropological perspective.
Manos Spyridakis introduces the notion of
‘liminality’ in order to describe and
interpret the current regime of labour
relations in the context of ‘late modernity
or postmodernity’ as he characteristically
puts it. The new type of labour relations
relate to the transition from an ‘affluent
society’ to another, post-Keynesian one,
whose dominant features are the constantly
increasing insecurity, precariousness and
dispossession. To support empirically his
argument, the author uses ethnographic
case material
from three
Greek
workplaces: the Keranis tobacco industry
(Chapter 3), the shipbuilding zone of
Perama (Chapter 4) and the banking sector
(Chapter 5).
In the first two sections of his study,
Spyridakis explains how the classical
concept of liminality, as suggested by
Victor Turner, may become an extremely
useful tool in understanding contemporary
labour relations. In the post-industrial
society, precariousness is based primarily
on a gradual deterioration of labour
relations, leading an important portion of
‘white
collars’
employees
to
proletarianization. This process is realized
through flexibility and ‘flexicurity’
policies; both redefine labour conditions
and division by creating liminal
employees, forced to experience a median
between a ‘before’ and an uncertain ‘after’,
going into somewhat uncertain, nomadic
and precarious employment conditions
altering their status and their social and
work identity.
By placing the above process in the
wider context of neoliberalism’s political
economy, Spyridakis poses as central
query the renegotiation of the relationship
between free market and the concept of
rational choice in the field of labour.
Moreover, he argues that social
reproduction does not follow only
economic specific rules but also a variety
of incentives which lead to a variety of
social practices. In this way through
ethnographic examples he attempts to
demonstrate that workers adopt attitudes
and behaviours that constitute social
phenomena mediated, as identified by
Marcel Mauss, by specific social, political,
economic and cultural dimensions.
Spyridakis therefore engages in reviewing
the notion of ‘rational person’ claiming it
to be a social construction based on
formalist type abstractions and stereotyped
patterns of behaviour.
The
Keranis
and
Perama
ethnographies, which have informed other
studies by Spyridakis, are used to
understand how people manage the loss of
employment and precarious labour
relations through the activation of social
networks and the pursuit of their own
social reproduction. In the case of the
Keranis tobacco industry both the
organizational culture of the company and
the informal social relationships within the
workplace were functioning as the broader
