Dis-Assembly Lines: gestures,situations, and surveillances

In “Americanism and Fordism,” Antonio Gramsci offers a brief meditation on the gestural performances of assembly-line workers who, rather than become subordinate to the disciplinary flow of the machine, cultivate perfectly timed gestures that allow workers to hide in plain sight: or, in other words, to inhabit the scene of management otherwise. Rather than extend Gramsci's investment in virtuosic, masterful performances of gesture, this article considers the potentiality of gesture through Lucille Ball's and Tehching Hsieh's performances of bad timing. As different as these performances are in terms of genre and historical situation, each uses gesture as a technique to performatively divide the labor process, producing fleeting temporalities of waste within rhythms marshaled toward production and accumulation. While it tracks the effects of these itinerant gestures, this article reconsiders the oppositions between productive and reproductive work, rationality and emotionality, and work and home that sustain Gramsci's theory, as well as how the collapse of such oppositions introduces alternative historical and artistic trajectories into theories of precariousness.     

Make or buy on the Russian railway? Coase,Williamson, and Tsar Nicholas II

There is a growing consensus among economists that the most procompetitive strategy for restructuring public utility enterprises includes complete vertical separation of the network or grid portion of a sector from other parts of the sector where competition is to be created. Although exceptions to this rule are readily granted, it is generally considered that any alternative strategy may pay a high cost in terms of discriminatory access to the grid by non-integrated entrants into the new competitive sector. This consensus is somewhat surprising in light of the simultaneous growth of transactions cost economics, with its emphasis on the benefits of close vertical relationships—including vertical integration—in the face of complexity, unforeseeable contingencies, and problems with contract law enforcement. These issues are considered in the context of a Russian railways restructuring plan which may, or may not, involve complete vertical separation.

COMPETITION IN FREIGHT RAILWAYS: "ABOVE-THE-RAIL" OPERATORS IN CENTRAL EUROPE AND RUSSIA

The railways of Russia and the Central and Eastern Europeancountries are in the process of restructuring. In most cases,the "vertical separation" reform model is being pursued, andreformers are seeking to introduce competition among freighttrain operators through the provision of "open access" to themonopoly infrastructure. This paper shows that, in two countries,Poland and Romania, a good deal of competition has been createdby the entry of new freight operators, many of them either largeshippers integrating upstream or former freight forwarders.However, in other countries, the incumbent freight operatorsretain virtually 100 percent of the market. In particular, Russiahas taken only the very first steps toward creating competitionin this sector, and new freight train operators face significantbarriers to competing with the incumbent.     

Evaluation of prison systems

Models are developed for the flow of prisoners through a state prison system. These models are used to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative correctional programs. Results based on the Georgia prison system are presented.     

Rent-seeking and market structure: Comment

If the firms in an industry are to be successful in raising money to influence government, two conditions must be met: (1) there must be sufficient rents available from government decisions regarding that industry to make such expenditures worthwhile, and (2) the industry must be sufficiently concentrated to avoid a free-rider problem in fund-raising. This argument, though seemingly intuitively appealing, has been under recent empirical attack; this paper seeks to restore the parapets.     

The Changing Impact of Electoral Structure on Black Representation in the South, 1970–1996

For many years voting rights litigation has focused on eliminationof at-large elections and the creation of ``majority-minority''districts – election districts where a majority of the electorateare racial/ethnic minorities. Numerous studies have analyzed theimpact of district elections on minority representation,particularly the election of blacks in the South. Most of thesestudies have focused on a single time period, comparing the ratioof black representatives to black population across cities withdifferent electoral schemes. The present study combines data fromsix different data sets to produce a panel of data covering fivedistinct time periods over a 26 year span. Cross-sectionalestimates of the effect of district elections in each time periodare compared to determine how the efficacy of district electionshas changed over time. To control for possible selection bias,inter-temporal models of the impact of changes in electionstructure on changes in representation are also estimated.