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The article reviews the book, "Organization Change: Theory and Practice, 5th edition," by Warner W. Burke.

Canadian theatre designers share many similarities with other freelance, creative workers in Canada. The conditions of precarity that define their working relationships are similar to those that affect workers in other sectors, such as film, music, television, and visual arts. This thesis begins by examining the existing literatures and research concerning creative and precarious work, primarily in Canada, but also internationally. Drawing on in-depth interviews of 55 designers from within the relatively small community of Canadian theatre designers, approximately 500-700 workers, I examine the working conditions that designers find challenging and seek suggestions for how they can be improved. Additionally, I explore the different models that designers have used to organize in Canada, Quebec, and the United States. By comparing these models with the interviews from designers, I conclude that the best way for Canadian designers to improve their working conditions is to build a closer relationship with IATSE [International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees], the union that represents stagehands and technicians. Finally, I identify some questions for further exploration, including the tension between artistic and worker identities, while also touching on the present circumstances of the Covid-19 crisis and the current conversations concerning racism and white supremacy within Canadian society.

The article reviews the book, "Radical Housewives: Price Wars & Food Politics in Mid-Twentieth Century Canada," by Julie Guard.

Cet article propose un cadre théorique pluraliste d’analyse de l’économie morale des rémunérations afin d’examiner les jugements de justice salariale que portent les enseignants québécois et français. La question générale de recherche est la suivante : Quelles sont les rhétoriques mobilisées pour justifier des avantages salariaux et pour dénoncer des injustices? Théoriquement, nous proposons un cadre d’analyse selon lequel les acteurs construisent des rhétoriques de justice en combinant quatre normes particulières (droits, besoins, investissements et marché) à deux principes premiers (égalité et différenciation). Notre cadre permet d’abord de tenir compte de la hiérarchisation des normes, des plus égalisatrices aux plus différenciatrices. De plus, notre cadre systématise l’idée de malléabilité instrumentale des normes, les normes de droits et de besoins pouvant être perverties dans une orientation différenciatrice et la norme du marché subvertie dans une orientation égalisatrice. Méthodologiquement, nous analysons des témoignages électroniques d’enseignants de la France et du Québec, du niveau primaire à l’enseignement supérieur. L’intérêt heuristique du corpus tient, d’une part, au fait qu’elle permet d’inclure des salariés dont les régimes de rémunération sont inégaux et, d’autre part, à la comparaison des deux contextes nationaux. Nous explorons tant les thèmes de justifications salariales que les champs sémantiques des justifications et des dénonciations. L’analyse nous conduit à confirmer la mobilisation par les enseignants d’une pluralité de rhétoriques de perception de l’injustice. Nous dégageons un continuum hiérarchisé de logiques de perceptions de l’injustice : les enseignants ont d’autant plus tendance à mobiliser des normes différenciatrices qu’ils sont élevés dans la hiérarchie salariale statutaire. L’analyse empirique permet également de dégager l’existence de rhétoriques spécifiques aux deux espaces nationaux étudiés. Ces dernières correspondent à des usages subversifs du marché ou pervertis des principes de droits ou de besoins. Enfin, nous montrons que les enseignants les plus privilégiés pervertissent les normes du droit et du besoin pour préserver leurs avantages.

The article reviews the book, "American Labour’s Cold War Abroad: From Deep Freeze to Détente, 1945-1970," by Anthony Carew.

The article reviews the book, "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory," by David Graeber.

The article reviews the book, "Capitalism in America: A History," by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge .

The article reviews the book, "The Dark Side of Management: A Secret History of Management Theory," by Gerald Hanlon.

The article reviews the book, " The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets," by Thomas Philippon.

The article reviews the book, "The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing," by Merve Emre.

The article reviews the book, "Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism," by Andrew Feffer.

To critically engage with the political economy of platformization, this article builds on the concepts of platform capitalism and platform imperialism to situate platforms within wider historical, economic, and spatial trajectories. To investigate if platformization leads to the geographical redistribution of capital and power, we draw on the Canadian instance of Apple’s iOS App Store as a case study. App stores are situated in a complex ecosystem of markets, infrastructures, and governance models that the disparate fields of business studies, critical political economy of communications, and platform studies have begun to catalog. Through a combination of financial and institutional analysis, we ask if Canadian game app developers are effective in generating revenue within their own national App Store. Given Canada’s vibrant game industry one would expect Canadian developers to have a sizable economic footprint in the burgeoning app economy. Our results, however, point toward the US digital dominance and, therefore, we suggest the notion of app imperialism to signal the continuation, if not reinforcement of existing instances of economic inequalities and imperialism.

This article analyses past and future work at the International Labour Organization (‘ILO’) with reference to the transformational analysis offered by Karl Polanyi, examining how constitutional statements made through ILO Declarations reflect countermovement to market dominance. These policy shifts at the ILO are also analysed in relation to the three pillars of sustainability (environmental, economic and social), which arguably map onto Polanyi’s three fictitious commodities (with a focus on labour as emblematic of social concerns). It is argued that the emphasis on social justice and sustainability in the 2019 ILO Global Commission Report, including the proposal for a Universal Labour Guarantee, provides significant resistance to the economic orthodoxy regarding the future of work promoted by the World Bank Group and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (‘OECD’). However, this narrative of ILO countermovement also exposes a lack of balanced regulation which requires more inclusive voice on the global stage.

This dissertation examines Canada’s program to employ prisoners of war (POWs) in Canada during the Second World War as a means of understanding how labour projects and the communities and natural environment in which they occurred shaped the POWs’ wartime experiences. The use of POW labourers, including civilian internees, enemy merchant seamen, and combatant prisoners, occurred in response to a nationwide labour shortage. Between May 1943 and November 1946, there were almost 300 small, isolated labour projects across the country employing, at its peak, over 14,000 POWs. Most prisoners were employed in either logging or agriculture, work that not only provided them with relative freedom, but offered prisoners unprecedented contact with Canada and its people. Work would therefore not only boost production but, it was hoped, instil POWs with Canadian mores and values through interaction with guards, civilians, and the natural environment. Rather than attempt a narrative encompassing almost 300 labour projects, this dissertation examines POW labour through a series of five case studies. The first examines prisoners cutting fuelwood in Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park while the second and third examine POWs cutting pulpwood in Northwestern Ontario for the Ontario-Minnesota Pulp & Paper Co. and Abitibi Power & Paper Co., respectively. The fourth case study examines POWs employed by Donnell & Mudge in its tannery in New Toronto, Ontario and the fifth examines the practice of employing POWs in farm work in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. Through these case studies, this dissertation examines how how internment officials employed remote parts of Canada as a physical boundary to prevent escape attempts, while also using it as a space to provide POWs with relative freedom as an inducement to work, and how work challenged definitions of who or what was the “enemy”. With significantly more freedom than the typical internee, POWs interacted with civilians and guards on a more familiar level, resulting in illicit fraternizations and relationships between POWs and Canadians. Although such fraternization also triggered considerable protest, these interactions reveal a great deal regarding POWs’ opinions of and attitudes towards Canada and its people as well as Canadian attitudes towards POWs.

The article reviews the book, "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties," by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener.

The article reviews the book, "Les nouvelles sociologies du travail. Introduction à la sociologie de l’activité," par Pascal Ughetto.

Dans la tourmente d’une récente intervention législative au Québec qui restreint le port de signes religieux pour certains agents et agentes de l’État occupant une fonction d’autorité, une volonté d’étendre cette nouvelle conception de la neutralité au sein d’espaces privés, comme l’entreprise, pourrait émerger. La validité d’une politique interdisant le port de signes religieux en milieu de travail doit, toutefois, être analysée à l’aune de la liberté de religion et du droit à l’égalité des travailleurs, ce qui sollicitera inévitablement l’interprétation du juge. À cet égard, la France dispose de précédents très précis sur cette question, alors que le Québec fait l’objet d’une riche jurisprudence en matière d’accommodement raisonnable pour motifs religieux, qui permet aussi d’y répondre. Or, en présence d’une problématique identique dans l’entreprise, qui mobilise de surcroît les mêmes droits fondamentaux des travailleurs, un regard croisé entre la France et le Québec révèle les chemins diamétralement opposés empruntés par les juges de chacun de ces espaces nationaux. Ces divergences s’observent aussi bien à l’occasion du contrôle de la légitimité de l’interdiction de signes religieux adoptée par l’employeur qu’au moment de circonscrire les mesures qu’il devra prendre afin d’éviter le congédiement du salarié. Plus encore, le fardeau financier que l’entreprise aura à supporter, au terme de cet exercice, se situe aux antipodes. Dans l’ensemble, cette analyse comparative met en évidence l’impact décisif du travail interprétatif du juge sur la protection de l’emploi, en ne manquant pas de discuter des possibilités que la logique française se transporte en droit québécois.

The article reviews the book, "Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy," by Alvin Finkel.

The article reviews the book, "The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age," by Zachary J. Violette.

The article reviews the book, "Uberland: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Rules of Work," by Alex Rosenblat.