CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Kojanic, Ognjen |
|---|---|
| Title | A Lacuna of Normalcy: Exploring the Contingencies of Neoliberalization in the Case of Railway Workers in Zajecar |
| Summary | The aim of this thesis is to offer a reconstruction of macro processes of the changes that the state and the railway company have undergone since the socialist period by uncovering the intimate ways in which the railway workers perceive and relate to these changes. The question I answer is: how do workers navigate and negotiate the changing historical conditions – simultaneously material, social, and ideational – and why is there no visible political struggle against them? The political-economic and governmentality approaches in studying neoliberalism are connected via the notion of the field of force. The cross-conjunctural analysis shows that the contingent dynamics of contestation of and consent to hegemony in the case of railway workers is embedded in the wider constraining effects of global capitalism, national circumstances, and company policies. The perceptions of the changes are a structured outcome within the field of force of neoliberalization with the common discursive framework of the future possibilities. This framework either gets partially accepted or breaks down, but its material and social instantiations circumscribe the possibilities for opposition to include only the discursive critique and exclude more dangerous political articulation. |
| Supervisor | Kalb, Don; Zentai, Violetta |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/kojanic_ognjen.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University