In Chapter 6, I claim that sensuous material objects from socialism constitute important starting points for rearticulating the notion of materiality in queer theory. I read Marxist films in conversation with the work of José Esteban Muñoz and Fred Moten’s, and the purpose of this conversation is to investigate the role of objects that were imagined to abolish the domination of private property. In a queer of color analysis, practices such as counterfetishes are “potentialities” that have the goal of generating a new utopian imagination. To underscore a historical process of abandoning a Marxist materialist epistemology, I concentrate my analysis on the role of counterfetishes in the Romanian socialist film The Cruise.

This chapter begins by highlighting that incomes from work, of course, differ widely in France, particularly for those who experience periods of unemployment. This provides an initial occasion to underscore the existence of poverty in France, together with the social protection measures which seek to alleviate it. A link is then made to research into the sociology of work and its meanings, and this in particular to tackle an enigma arising from comparative research which shows that many French workers are highly engaged in their work, but also that many are deeply dissatisfied with its conditions and practices. This point is developed using data on the relationship between managers and workers, which shows that hierarchical practices continue to predominate in France’s companies and administrations. The argument developed here is that the reproduction of this top-down form of social relations is perpetuated in part by the route to being a manager continuing to be dominated by educational success rather than through achievements at the workplace. Such forms of hierarchy are also reproduced because of the way trade unions and peak-business organizations are structured in this country. Consequently, trade unions are rarely set up to be systematic forces for change in workplace conditions. Meanwhile, business associations are structured in such a way that any move to attenuate hierarchical relations within companies will seldom stem from this source. The overall result is stalemate – which also explains why, periodically, French workplaces tend to ‘explode’ into arenas of angry and often violent protest.

Chapter 4 traces the transformation of Royal Dutch Shell’s expatriate at the turn of the twenty-first century. In the mid-1990s, in the context of a broader corporate restructure and in response to gendered challenges to its management model, Shell enacted a neoliberal reform of its system of expatriation and introduced a diversity agenda. It transformed its expatriates from loyal ‘Shell families’ that migrated within the ‘Shell world’ into individualised and flexible mobile workers circulating within a global labour market. This reform, however, did not change the patriarchal constitution of the Shell expatriate, or decolonise this managerial institution. Meanwhile, a group of ‘Shell wives’ founded the Shell Ladies’ Project to collect their own memories and position themselves as expatriates in their own right. The Shell Ladies’ Project and its subsequent development into an independent archive of expatriate social history mirrors organisational and societal trends in the gradual transmutation of women’s identity, from the company-rooted ‘Shell wife’ into the ‘global expat’ at the heart of globalisation. Chapter 4 thus traces, through the transforming Shell expatriate, the fashioning of neoliberal forms of elite migration and its ideological ideal-type: the transnational professional, commanding a global consciousness and skill set, moving self-directed and flexibly, at home in the world.

This chapter explores the way in which Research Ethics Committees (RECs) use written materials – application forms, information sheets, and consent forms – to assess researchers’ trustworthiness. Historically, drawing on material from a range of sources, it highlights the way in which REC application forms have developed over the years and the social and political pressures that have shaped the form they take. A crucial aspect of this will be the role of RECs in changing standards around informed consent, from witnessed verbal consent (the gold standard promoted by the Medical Research Council in the mid-1960s) to written informed consent, which became a requirement less than a decade later. Ethnographically, this chapter explores how RECs use certain aspects of application forms as ‘trust warrants’, attesting to researchers’ trustworthiness and competence. These include specific forms of terminology – for example, converting the US term ‘research subject’ into the UK REC-approved ‘research participant’ – willingness to expend resources to improve information – for example, translating information sheets into different languages to allow wider recruitment into research – and the way in which potential threats to NHS resources (particularly in the case of commercially sponsored research) are mitigated.