Suchergebnisse

The main objective of this article is to show how organisations can be understood as producers of consumers and that the sphere of consumption should, therefore, become an integral part of the field of Organisation Studies. In order to achieve this objective, we have adopted a Marxist dialectical approach to the centrality of consumption in the value realisation process of capital, within a historical reconstitution of the production of the consumer, and we offer two empirical illustrations of contemporary transformations involving the spheres of consumption and work in the context of for-profit and non-profit organisations. We analyse how the restructuring of production that started in the 1980s altered organisational practices and forms: consumer management began to inform production; the boundaries between work and consumption became blurred, and the logic of value started permeating even non-profit organisations. In this new scenario, the sphere of consumption itself is modified and comes to be understood in terms of new categories, such as prosumption. We conclude by discussing how insights from our analysis will contribute to the field of Organisation Studies so as to build a bridge between work and consumption, and to take into consideration the complex web within which work management, consumer management and organisational forms overlap in the value realisation process.

This article examines how financial platforms address the value realization crisis within contemporary capitalism in "the periphery of the periphery." Drawing from Marxist political economy, particularly in the context of its interpretation in peripheral spaces, we empirically studied the introduction of a digital microcredit platform in the living and working space-time of informal workers in Brazil's periphery. Expanding on the household financialization literature, we scrutinize how this organization extracts value directly from living labor. Through dialectical analysis, we investigate how informal workers fearfully adhere to microcredit while cultivating invisibility practices, constituting forms of resistance against the advance of the microcredit platform. These workers' labor-life narratives illustrate how credit adherence, while alluring, poses a threat to transform their lives, not only by leading to indebtedness but also by exposing the survival practices that enable their precarious existence on the fringes of the system, which we term "survival struggles." These struggles manifest in the blurred boundaries between the center and the periphery, as well as between production and reproduction, creating an intersection between the concepts of survival and boundary struggles.