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- Convenors:
-
Monica Heintz
(University of Paris Nanterre)
Cristiana Bastos (Universidade de Lisboa)
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- Formats:
- Plenaries
- Start time:
- 23 July, 2020 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
From astrology to scientific forecasting, numerous tools have been developed since Antiquity for 'guessing' the future: predicting, previsioning, projecting, imagining. We welcome young scholars’ ethnographies addressing the tools and actors emerging in work environments to predict the future of labour and consumption and their role in the production of inequalities.
Long Abstract:
If state socialist or post-war economies anticipated the future through planning, current flexible capitalism boasts about the instant readjustment of economic offer to the changing needs of consumers, themselves loosely and unequally defined. Thus societal progress and the digital revolution are invoked to explain why jobs that would be in demand in the near future have not yet been invented- leaving future employees, schools, universities and other categories ‘in demand’ in the uncertainty of their future adequacy to an ever evolving economic system. In this context, new actors have emerged that forecast, anticipate, and finally influence the undetermined future: from trend makers and media influencers to algorithms, from independent consultants and scenario writers to enterprises’ strategic planners and data analysers. Anthropology can use its careful and self-reflective ethnographic method to understand major societal trends from the observation of these actors and their instruments. Is their weight in the decision-making and interference in the future development of economy another form of planning, a way of taming the future? Or is their work merely inspirational to the economy as science and science fiction could be? What are the new inequalities that emerge from the economic presence of such anticipators and trend makers of a global future? In this plenary we call for young scholars’ recent ethnographies of these economic settings and actors whose explicit role is that of previsioning the future and engage them in a reflexion on the link between management of the future and production of new inequalities.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Meryem Laghmari (University of Paris Nanterre)
Paper short abstract:
This ethnography analyzes the impact of contemporary issues such as sustainability on a Parisian trend forecasting agency that anticipates societal trends. Their foresight surveys are hindered today by their own working conditions as the uncertainty of the future pushes them into economic precarity.
Paper long abstract:
In view of the social and environmental crisis that fashion industry has faced in the past few years, the sustainability shift appears inevitable. Pushed by the digital revolution, this transition upsets the foundations of market capitalism and leads to a readjustment of the value chain and a redefinition of its industry's jobs.
My research deals with the impact of the shift towards a sustainable fashion industry on a Parisian Trend forecasting agency whose work is to anticipate major societal trends. Its employees, who are as much foresight analysts as strategic planners and stylists, transmit their socio-cultural analyses, two years in advance, to their client companies in the form of a "trend book" or by providing consulting services. These tools shape "socio-aesthetic" concepts likely to meet the needs of consumers.
In this paper I analyse how this transition forces employees to rethink fashion according to the dilemma opposing the desirable and the sustainable in the process of trends creation. Then, given the current capitalist logic which imposes "tight flow" conditions and high profitability in the short term, I show the difficulties they have in envisaging their profession and their own company in the long run. The ethnography highlights the cognitive dissonance between the sustainable discourse of their trend books and the economic reality they are facing such as salary, management, organization and gender inequalities.
However, they are considered to be inspirational actors for their ability to propose optimistic scenarios to their clients, but this image actually differs from their economical reality.
Mohammad Tareq Hasan (University of Dhaka)
Paper short abstract:
The ethical codes of labour practices imposed around the world are aimed to reshape the organisation of production. This paper explains the ambivalent local experiences of global solutions, i.e., auditing, CSR, and labour law focusing on the crises management of garment factories of Bangladesh.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2012, garment factories in Bangladesh have been undergoing transformations with the implementation of factory compliance principles that aim to ensure better working conditions for the workers. The backdrop for such implementation of 'changes' to the production regime, is the scale and severity of accidents in the factories that have killed thousands of workers. Increasingly, the ethical codes of labour practices imposed around the world by global buyers are shaping the organisation of production and the regimes of labour deployment. For the garment factories in Gazipur, Dhaka, these requirements took the form of independent company codes of conduct, which were private company initiatives that allowed buyers to select factories based on their relative compliance regulations. The emphases on the auditing of the factories and on so-called Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices converged in the production regime as well as governance. Aimed to create good economic practices auditing, CSR practices, and labour law are represented as the radical reorientation of businesses in promotion of an era of 'humane capitalism'. In this paper, I will argue, firstly, that the auditing culture is a bureaucratic process that only helps in the accumulation of capital for the owners and producers, and, secondly, that it promises a kind of rhetoric of long-term growth and prosperity through which the current crisis came about. Based on ethnographic findings, I will illustrate that all of the policies that are part of the global governance create conditions for accumulation and add an extra layer of dispossession against the workers.
Ragnhild Freng Dale (Western Norway Research Institute)
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to explicate how petroleum continues to be seen as a resource of the future, in the interplay between global policies and predictions, national and company priorities and prospecting, and local expectations in parts of the Norwegian Arctic.
Paper long abstract:
Despite the Paris agreement's requirement of a dramatic reduction in fossil fuel emissions to stay within 2 degrees of global warming, the predictions of future energy demand by the International Energy Agency predict a rise in fossil fuels that majorly exceeds this target. Though such forecasts are global, the decision to drill or not to drill is made by nations and by companies according to the political, economic and geological possibilities of specific countries and seabeds.
This paper proposes to examine the workings of the prospective and imagined petroleum resources in the Norwegian Arctic, and how both the government and petroleum companies plan and prioritize continued investments in the era of climate change. With a fortune largely built on the production of oil and gas, petroleum keeps a powerful hold on imagined futures for Norway as a whole and for local communities. Though resources are elusive until a firm decision to extract it is made, such decisions have profound and uneven impacts long before they materialize or fail to materialize. The process from prospection to extraction involves a myriad of actors and practices, from governmental strategies and seismic surveying, to industry priorities and civil society expectations. Anthropology can make a powerful contribution to our understanding of these social and material relations, not only of how petroleum-dependent societies 'live in denial' (Norgaard 2009), but also how petroleum companies think and how local communities come to live with the outcomes, whether or not specific resources materialize.