Dipartimento di Scienze Economico-Sociali e Matematico-Statistiche

ABSTRACT An important aspect, observed in the last decade with the diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies, is the adoption by many firms of new organizational practices (for instance job rotation, work teams, quality norms), characterized by a tendency towards multi-tasking. This phenomenon initially appeared in the United States, and then has expanded over to Europe. As a consequence, a consistent literature has studied the effects of these organizational changes, both on firms performance on the one hand and on working conditions (in particular occupational health and safety) on the other hand. With reference to the first aspect, most of these works show a positive impact of new work practices on productivity, and an effect represented by upskilling of workers. With reference to the second aspect, the available studies (see for instance Fairris and Brenner, 2001, Askenazy, 2001, Ramaciotti and Perriard, 1999, Askenazy, Caroli and Marcus, 2002) lead to conflicting conclusions, since some of them evidence a positive relation between new organizational practices and workers well-being (for instance quality norms reduce failures, improving occupational safety, and job rotation makes work more interesting), while others evidence opposite results (new work practices increase the pressure on workers for performance, raising the risk of injuries as well as mental strain). It is therefore crucial to clarify these aspects, since the working conditions in the new economy are a key element that must be taken into account in the evaluation of the performance and of the long-run viability of the new productive paradigms. In particular, if the new work practices increase the risk of work injuries or illnesses we would have increase of absenteeism and of social conflicts and decrease of workers' satisfaction and of labor productivity, and this would affect the future development of the "new economy". In such a context, this paper considers a theoretical model that tries to study some effects of multi-tasking in an economy in which individuals devote time both to production and to human capital accumulation, and in which they are involved in many tasks. In this model, the presence of multi-tasking gives rise to coordination costs for the firms (an increase in the number of tasks per worker increases output but it also reduces profits through an increase in coordination costs, due to interactions among tasks) and to disutility for the individuals (an increase in the number of tasks per worker increases work rhythms, and in this way it induces disutility). The paper considers both the decentralized economy (in which households and firms solve separately their optimization problems) and the centralized economy (in which a

The opening of a post-genomic age and the possibility of patenting life itself have changed the relationship between biopolitics and capitalism and contributed to the emergence of a new phase of capitalist accumulation, currently known as biocapitalism, the full integration of life and capital into complex architectures of control and ownership. In this paper, we combine Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of the threshold and bios/zoē with Nicole Shukin’s idea of rendering to address the connection between life and death in biocapitalism, through a specific focus on the commercialisation of the semen of the Piedmontese bulls. We show how death, rather than merely life, is productive in biocapitalism. Further, in proposing an analysis of some of the ways in which, social and biological, animal life gets incorporated (i.e. owned and sold), we contribute to recent debates in geography on more-than-human understanding of capital accumulation.