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Indiana University Press - Noelle J. Molé

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167 pages

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Winner, Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize

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Psychological harassment at work, or "mobbing," has become a significant public policy issue in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Mobbing has given rise to specialized counseling clinics, a new field of professional expertise, and new labor laws. For Noelle J. Molé, mobbing is a manifestation of Italy's rapid transition from a highly protectionist to a market-oriented labor regime and a neoliberal state. She analyzes the classification of mobbing as a work-related illness, the deployment of preventive public health programs, the relation of mobbing to gendered work practices, and workers' use of the concept of mobbing to make legal and medical claims, with implications for state policy, labor contracts, and political movements. For many Italian workers, mobbing embodies the social and psychological effects of an economy and a state in transition.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Toward Neoliberalism
2. The Politics of Precariousness
3. Existential Damages
4. Feminizing the Inflexible
5. Living It on the Skin
6. The Sex of Mobbing
7. Project Well-Being

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

HISTORY

Histoire

Medicine

History of Europe

Anthropology

LAW

Western

Europe

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Publié par	Indiana University Press
Date de parution	21 novembre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780253001979
Langue	English

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Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy
NEW ANTHROPOLOGIES OF EUROPE
Daphne Berdahl, Matti Bunzl, and Michael Herzfeld, founding editors
NOELLE J. MOL
Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy
Mobbing, Well-Being, and the Workplace
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
www.iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931
2012 by Noelle J. Mol
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mol , Noelle J.
Labor disorders in neoliberal Italy : mobbing, well-being, and the workplace / Noelle J. Mol .
p. cm. - (New anthropologies of Europe)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35639-0 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-22319-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00197-9 (e-book) 1. Neoliberalism-Italy. 2. Harassment-Italy. 3. Sex discrimination-Italy. 4. Bullying-Italy. I. Title.
HC303.M65 2011
331.13 30945-dc23
2011025280
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
To my mom and sisters, for your integrity, courage, and defiance
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Toward Neoliberalism
2. The Politics of Precariousness
3. Existential Damages
4. Feminizing the Inflexible
5. Living It on the Skin
6. The Sex of Mobbing
7. Project Well-Being
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
For Russian linguist and literary philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, the word lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else s (Bakhtin 1981: 293). Eloquently, he asks us to imagine a single word connected on a great invisible chain to every time it has been spoken before, with its precise inflection and saturated with its historical context. [Any utterance] is but one link in a continuous chain of speech performances (Volo inov 1973: 72). Words, then, belong in part to everyone along the chain; our own sense of what words mean only approximate these visible and invisible past usages.
My ethnography is about a single word: mobbing. I attend to it as a set of practices, images, discourses, fantasies, mechanisms of control, forms of embodied experiences, nodes of affect. Broadly conceived, my task has been to uncover how individuals came to strongly identify with the word mobbing, and how, given certain historical situations, this word became a crucial way for them to make sense of their experience and the world. This is a big story about a little word.
Acknowledgments
Mirroring its object of study, this book is the product of multiple kinds of labor. My mentor, Laura Ahearn, tirelessly listened, read, suggested, clarified, motivated, encouraged, and cheered for me beginning with the first funding proposal for this book. I thank Angelique Haugerud for her energy, enthusiasm, and clever suggestions in our many chats, and Louisa Schein for helping me to push the envelope and for encouraging my thinking to be supple. I am indebted to Don Kulick, who has always made so many ideas, from social theories to academia, amazingly lucid for me.
I have benefited greatly over the years from conversations with many scholars whose insights, even if they were brief critical interventions, provided clarity and illumination. I am grateful to Jane Schneider, Michael Blim, Ethel Brooks, Judith Farquhar, Uli Linke, Vince Parrillo, Ana Ramos-Zayas, David Valentine, Lochlann Jain, Dorothy Hodgson, Fran Mascia-Lees, David Hughes, and Parker Shipton. For chapter 5 in particular, I am indebted to the participants at the Rutgers University Institute for Research on Women s Seminar on Health and Bodies, especially to Ann Jurecic and Ed Cohen. My graduate experience at Rutgers leaned heavily on shared conversations, laughter, and lamentations with Andy Bickford, Kathryn Kluegel, Nia Parson, Rebecca Etz, Dillon Mahoney, Chelsea Booth, Debarati Sen, Sarasij Majumder, Arpita Chakrabarti, Darine Zaatari, Nell Quest, and Emily McDonald. For our especially spirited debates and her friendship, I thank Mona Bhan. I m also indebted to colleagues and friends at Princeton University: Jo o Biehl, Carolyn Rouse, Carol Greenhouse, Rena Lederman, John Borneman, Larry Rosen, Jim Boon, Elizabeth Davis, Kerry Walk, Doug Goldstein, Leo Coleman, Peter Locke, Natasha Zaretsky, and George Laufenberg. For his transformative insight and hyperbolic support, I am grateful to Mark Robinson. And for her exceptional engagement with my work, her spectacular anthropological talents, and her wonderful friendship, I thank Andrea Muehlebach.
I am enormously appreciative of the support I have been given by numerous funding institutions and agencies, including the Council of European Studies, Society for Anthropology of Europe, the Fulbright IIE program, the German Marshall Fund program, the Bevier dissertation fellowship, and special research awards and travel awards from the Rutgers Graduate School in New Brunswick, the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women, and the Rutgers Department of Anthropology.
I have been most fortunate to have had excellent editing and critiques from Donald Donham and Tom Boellstorff. I am also grateful to the editors and staff at Indiana University Press, including Rebecca Tolen, Chandra Mevis, Angela Burton, and Merryl Sloane.
Without the trust and care of a great many friends, colleagues, and participants in Italy, I could not have carried out this project; thanks especially to Grazia, Diego, Barbara, Francesca, Riccardo, Chiara, Margherita, George, Sadi, and William. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to everyone in Italy who entrusted me with their stories, ideas, experiences, and reflections. I am extraordinarily honored and grateful to you for letting me into your worlds. Especially during my years of traveling back and forth to Italy, I was truly fortunate to have the encouragement and generous support of Paride Morello and his family.
The people who surround me every day are nourishing to me in so many ways. Tanya Goldsmith s indefatigable optimism and enduring friendship have been precious gifts in my life. Since our first dialogues in high school, Neha Dixit has played a tremendous role in forming my worldview, pushing my intellectual development, and making my path gentler and warmer in countless ways. My partner, Lane Franklin Liston, has seen me through the tough end stages of this book, and his generosity, positive spirit, wit, and love have made all of my days brighter.
My accomplishments are inseparable from my family. I thank my grandparents Carmel and Vincent Altomare for being lighthouses, beaming and bed-rocked no matter where I am. I have infinite gratitude for my sisters: Marissa, who has been a lifelong navigation system that keeps me in calmer waters; she anticipates my thoughts before I can even fully form them; and Dana, who has abundantly encouraged me and infused joy into things big and small. Finally, I am profoundly grateful to my mother, Maureen Mol , for teaching me how to question social conventions-an invaluable gift and, I ve come to recognize, a truly anthropological blessing.
Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy
Introduction
Mobbing attacks sick workplaces, where people are considered tools and not precious resources.
-Flavia Fiorii (2006)
For some people, everything is mobbing. It s not objective, it s just what they ve lived [ il loro vissuto ].
-Camilla, mobbing clinic volunteer
In a world of turmoil, who doesn t fear precariousness?
-La Stampa (2004a)
She said, Everyone has a cross to bear, Cinzia uttered in a quivering voice. Her remarkably large brown eyes met mine briefly before she resettled her gaze downward, twisting her thumb across her palm. Three of us sat in close proximity around a glossy wooden desk positioned near a window, which offset the cold institutional illumination with sunlight. The view was less than comforting: a large parking lot. After a moment of silence, Cinzia was prompted gently by Fiore, a woman in her fifties with shoulder-length gray hair and clear-framed glasses: What did she mean? Cinzia began to cry and tremble, and then responded, almost exasperated: That I m her cross. That I m difficult.
Likening someone to cross-bearing carries a particular set of meanings in contemporary Catholic Italy. Hardly an innocuous remark, invoking the cross and thus the crucifixion of Jesus implies a burden of immeasurable weight: part duty and hardship, part affliction and suffering. Even colloquially, it connotes a highly undesirable encumbrance. In this context, it had been deployed by Jessica, Cinzia s colleague in the sales branch of one of Italy s largest and oldest textile companies. The two women were at nearly the same level, though Cinzia had more years of accounting experience while Jessica had a predominantly administrative background. Cinzia described Jessica, who had been actively harassing her for four years, as someone who was always first in line, always had her peace flag, and went to many political demonstrations. Fumbling nervously Cinzia added: But that s her pub