Production, labour market and working life

Abstract

There is general agreement that the contemporary economy and labour is volatile, unpredictable, fluid, temporary and precarious. In order to describe this overall change, there are manifold notions of labour and production within scholarly discourse. To mention just a few: ‘corrosion of character’, ‘precarity’, eroding ‘work/family balance’, ‘platform economy’, ‘knowing capitalism’, ‘transnationalism’, ‘liquid modernity’. Many scholars hold that on an individual level former social relationships and hierarchies are destabilised, that demarcations of leisure and work are blurred, and that life courses become increasingly unpredictable. While it is correct that the changes that contemporary societies are undergoing are grave, similar transformations of the social and economic landscape have also occurred before in cultural history. Danish ethnology – similar to most Scandinavian and Central European ethnology – has a long tradition of inquiring into society’s basic means of subsistence, i.e. its material and economic conditions, and understands this in relationship to social architecture. Society has been understood as being made up of different groups of citizens whose ways of life are both in contrast to each other as well as connected through ties related to production and labour. Ethnologists have studied 18th and 19th century societies through groups such as tenant farmers, smallholders, artisans, traders, nobility and civil servants in this way. Likewise, in the 20th century, the focus has been placed on self-employed farmers, blueand white-collar workers, stay-at-home housewives, manufacturers and public servants among others. Such groups have been understood