Grassroots Economies

Living with Austerity in Southern Europe

Edited by Susana Narotzky

Publication date:

20 October 2020

Length of book:

272 pages

Publisher

Pluto Press

ISBN-13: 9781786805775

The austerity crisis has radically altered the economic landscape of Southern Europe. But alongside the decimation of public services and infrastructure lies the wreckage of a generation’s visions for the future. In Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, there is a new, difficult reality of downward mobility.

Grassroots Economies interrogates the effects of the economic crisis on the livelihood of working people, providing insight into their anxieties. Drawing on a wide range of ethnographic material, it is a distinctive comparative analysis that explores the contradictions of their coping mechanisms and support structures.

With a focus on gender, the book explores values and ideologies, including dispossession and accumulation. Ultimately it demonstrates that everyday interactions on the local scale provide a significant sense of the global.

List of Abbreviations
Series Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Grassroots Economics in Europe - Susana Narotzky
PART I: MAKING A LIVING
2. Bondage Unemployment and Intra-class Tensions in Greek Energy Restructuring - Theodora Vetta
3. Work, Wage and Subsidy: Making a Living Between Regulation and Informalization - Antonio Maria Pusceddu
4. Criminalizing Livelihoods: “Illegal Vegetables” and the Return to the Home - Carmen Leidereiter
5. Austerity, Social Values and Value: The Social Economy and Entrepreneurship in Catalonia - Patricia Homs
PART II: SOCIAL REPRODUCTION
6. Austerity Welfare and the Moral Significance of Needs in Portugal - Patrícia Matos
7. Family, Housing as an Asset, and the Production of Welfare - Jaime Palomera
8. Social Reproduction in Times of Crisis: Inter-Generational Tensions in Southern Europe - Susana Narotzky and Antonio Maria Pusceddu
PART III: EXPERIENCING AND EMBODYING AUSTERITY
9. The Entrepreneur’s Other: Small Entrepreneurial Identity and the Collapse of Life Structures in the “Third Italy” - Giacomo Loperfido
10. The Body Politics of Austerity in Portugal and Spain: Women, Dispossession and Agency - Diana Sarkis and Patricia Matos
11. Austerity from Below: Class, Temporality and Scale in Grassroots Analyses of Crisis - Diana Sarkis and Stamatis Amarianakis
Notes on Contributors
Index

'Grassroots Economies offers an astute and heart-breaking account of the toll decades of austerity politics have taken on southern Europe. Each chapter offers remarkable insights - taken together they present a sober and illuminating portrait of dispossession and loss.'