Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa

Bridget Kenny is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She works on labour, gender and consumption with a specific focus on service work, precarious employment, and political subjectivity.

“Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa offers searing insight into the contested world of retail work and labour politics over the past century in South Africa. … Given the book’s ambitious historical scope and research agenda, its contributions are manifold. … As we confront the sobering realities of our present, Kenny’s book leaves us with a key question about the stakes and the political horizons of labour politics forged during previous eras of struggle.” (Jennifer Jihye Chun, Global Labour Journal, Vol. 9 (03), September, 2018)

• Chapter 1. Introduction: Precarity in Store.- Chapter 2. Servicing a Nation: White Women Shop Assistants and the Fantasy of Belonging.- Chapter 3. Rupturing Relations: Abasebenzi as Collective Political Subject.- Chapter 4. Regulating Retail: The Category “Employee” and its Divisions.- Chapter 5. Signifying Belonging: Restructuring and Workplace Relations.- Chapter 6. “Tools Down, Everybody out to the Canteen!”: Wildcats and Go-slows, Political Subjects Reconfigured.- Chapter 7. “To Sit at Home and Do Nothing”: Gender and the Constitutive Meaning of Work.- Chapter 8. Consuming Politics: Wal-Mart, the New Terrain of Belonging and the Endurance of Abasebenzi.