John Krinsky - Böcker

America's public parks are in a golden age. Hundreds of millions of dollars both public and private fund urban jewels like Manhattan's Central Park. Keeping the polish on landmark parks and in neighborhood playgrounds alike means that the trash must be picked up, benches painted, equipment tested, and leaves raked. Bringing this often-invisible work into view, however, raises profound questions for citizens of cities. In Who Cleans the Park? John Krinsky and Maud Simonet explain that the work of maintaining parks has intersected with broader trends in welfare reform, civic engagement, criminal justice, and the rise of public-private partnerships. Welfare-to-work trainees, volunteers, unionized city workers (sometimes working outside their official job descriptions), staff of nonprofit park "conservancies," and people sentenced to community service are just a few of the groups who routinely maintain parks. With public services no longer being provided primarily by public workers, Krinsky and Simonet argue, the nature of public work must be reevaluated. Based on four years of fieldwork in New York City, Who Cleans the Park? looks at the transformation of public parks from the ground up.Beginning with studying changes in the workplace, progressing through the public-private partnerships that help maintain the parks, and culminating in an investigation of a park's contribution to urban real-estate values, the book unearths a new urban order based on nonprofit partnerships and a rhetoric of responsible citizenship, which at the same time promotes unpaid work, reinforces workers' domination at the workplace, and increases the value of park-side property. Who Cleans the Park? asks difficult questions about who benefits from public work, ultimately forcing us to think anew about the way we govern ourselves, with implications well beyond the five boroughs.

One of former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's proudest accomplishments was his expansion of the Work Experience Program, which uses welfare recipients to do routine work once done by unionized city workers. The fact that WEP workers are denied the legal status of employees and make far less money and enjoy fewer rights than do city workers has sparked fierce opposition. For antipoverty activists, legal advocates, unions, and other critics of the program, this double standard leads to a troubling question: are workfare participants workers or welfare recipients? At times the fight over workfare unfolded as an argument over who had the authority to define these terms, and in "Free Labor", John Krinsky focuses on changes in the language and organization of the political coalitions on both sides of the debate. Krinsky's broadly interdisciplinary analysis draws from interviews, official documents, and media reports to pursue new directions in the study of the cultural and cognitive aspects of political activism. "Free Labor" will instigate a lively dialogue among students of culture, labor and social movements, welfare policy, and urban political economy.

One of former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's proudest accomplishments was his expansion of the Work Experience Program, which uses welfare recipients to do routine work once done by unionized city workers. The fact that WEP workers are denied the legal status of employees and make far less money and enjoy fewer rights than do city workers has sparked fierce opposition. For antipoverty activists, legal advocates, unions, and other critics of the program, this double standard leads to a troubling question: are workfare participants workers or welfare recipients? At times, the fight over workfare unfolded as an argument over who had the authority to define these terms, and in "Free Labor", John Krinsky focuses on changes in the language and organization of the political coalitions on both sides of the debate. Krinsky's broadly interdisciplinary analysis draws from interviews, official documents, and media reports to pursue new directions in the study of the cultural and cognitive aspects of political activism. "Free Labor" will instigate a lively dialogue among students of culture, labor and social movements, welfare policy, and urban political economy.

This book is an urgent and compelling account of the Occupy movements: from the M15 movement in Spain, to the wave of Occupations flooding across cities in American, Europe and Australia, to the harsh reality of evictions as corporations and governments attempted to reassert exclusive control over public space. Across a vast range of international examples over twenty authors analyse, explain and helps us understand the movement. These movements were a novel and noisy intervention into the recent capitalist crisis in developed economies, developing an exceptionally broad identity through a call to arms addressed to ‘the 99%’, and emphasizing the importance of public space in the creation and maintenance of opposition. The novelties of these movements, along with their radical positioning and the urgency of their claims all demand analysis. This book investigates the crucial questions of how and why this form of action spread so rapidly and so widely, how the inclusive discourse of ‘the 99%’ matched up to the reality of the practice. It is vital to understand not just the choice of tactics and the vitality of protest camps in public spaces, but also how the myriad of challenges and problems were negotiated.This book was published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies.

The concept of networks and the techniques of social network analysis have each assumed increasing importance in social science in recent years, not least in relation to the analysis of collective action and particularly social movements. This timely collection offers a fascinating glimpse into the state of the art. Each chapter uses network analysis to tackle a different question regarding the nature and dynamics of social movement activity, and each reflects upon the advantages and limitations of the method for its purposes. The case studies focused upon are drawn from a variety of national contexts, both contemporary and historical, and both the methods used and the uses to which they are put are no less diverse. A must have book for anybody interested in social movement networks and contemporary ways of analysing them.This book was published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies.

This book is an urgent and compelling account of the Occupy movements: from the M15 movement in Spain, to the wave of Occupations flooding across cities in American, Europe and Australia, to the harsh reality of evictions as corporations and governments attempted to reassert exclusive control over public space. Across a vast range of international examples over twenty authors analyse, explain and helps us understand the movement. These movements were a novel and noisy intervention into the recent capitalist crisis in developed economies, developing an exceptionally broad identity through a call to arms addressed to ‘the 99%’, and emphasizing the importance of public space in the creation and maintenance of opposition. The novelties of these movements, along with their radical positioning and the urgency of their claims all demand analysis. This book investigates the crucial questions of how and why this form of action spread so rapidly and so widely, how the inclusive discourse of ‘the 99%’ matched up to the reality of the practice. It is vital to understand not just the choice of tactics and the vitality of protest camps in public spaces, but also how the myriad of challenges and problems were negotiated.This book was published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies.

The concept of networks and the techniques of social network analysis have each assumed increasing importance in social science in recent years, not least in relation to the analysis of collective action and particularly social movements. This timely collection offers a fascinating glimpse into the state of the art. Each chapter uses network analysis to tackle a different question regarding the nature and dynamics of social movement activity, and each reflects upon the advantages and limitations of the method for its purposes. The case studies focused upon are drawn from a variety of national contexts, both contemporary and historical, and both the methods used and the uses to which they are put are no less diverse. A must have book for anybody interested in social movement networks and contemporary ways of analysing them.This book was published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies.