David Farrugia

Steven Threadgold

Julia Coffey

Megan Sharp

Lena Molnar

Vibes as value explores the relationship between subjectivity, labour and value in the hospitality industry, and thereby how youth, gender, sexuality, race and social class are embodied and made productive in the service economy. It shows that the key product of hospitality labour is ‘vibes’, or moments of enjoyment and relationality co-produced through exploitative relationships amongst workers and consumers. In the process, the book theorises hospitality as a form of affective labour organised through the normative and structural relations of precarious service work. It shows how identity construction produces value within the highly unequal social terrain of the service economy, and how hospitality labour enacts hierarchies of value extending far beyond the limits of the industry itself.

Young workers and affective labour in the service economy

Vibes as value

Drawing on empirical research, this book provides an innovative exploration of youth and work, showing how youth identities are connected with the dynamics of labour and value in contemporary capitalism.

Youth, Work and the Post-Fordist Self

Contemporary young people are situated within a complex and disorienting set of social changes that are reshaping how youth is constructed, governed and experienced across the globe. Historically, it has been taken for granted that youth primarily concerns time, especially with regards to personal and social development. In Spaces of Youth, Farrugia shows that the concept of developmental time has become a regulatory framework that is used to govern aspects of globalisation, including the formation of labour forces and the boundaries of liberal citizenship regimes. Interrogating this context, this volume explores the changes in the social organisation of youth within the spatial dimensions of work, citizenship and popular culture in a global context. Thus, Farrugia establishes a new interdisciplinary research agenda into youth and spatiality, including young people from across the global north and the global south, and which situates young people within the key dynamics of contemporary globalisation in its economic, political and cultural dimensions. An enlightening and timely volume, Spaces of Youth is an important resource for post-graduate and post-doctoral researchers across all social scientific disciplines interested in space, youth, globalisation, work, citizenship and culture.

David Farrugia

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