Models matter and have material effects on the lives of people. They emerge and change in historical, social and cultural conjunctures that operate at different scales and promote different subjective experiences and conditions of possibility for action. Industry and Work in Contemporary Capitalism engages critically with models of the economy and blueprints of the future, providing an ethnographically rich account of the enactment of models in specific communities. It also addresses the uses of projections into the future as forms of knowledge that are simultaneously powerful instruments of transformation.

Victoria Goddard is Professor and National Teaching Fellow at the Anthropology Department of Goldsmiths, University of London. She has carried out research on informal sector work, households and small-scale industry in southern Italy and on gender and politics in Argentina. Her publications focus on informal economies and politics, with an emphasis on gender and work.

Susana Narotzky is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Universitat de Barcelona and Fellow at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam. She holds the Fellowship ICREA-Academia awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya for the period 2010-2015. Her research has focused on issues of informal economy and the politics of deregulation. Her project 'Grassroots Economics: Meaning, Project and Practice in the Pursuit of Livelihood' (GRECO) was funded by a European Research Council Advanced Grant 2012.

1. Industry and Work in Contemporary Capitalism: Models, markets and crisis in the global system Part I: Models - What they are and what they do 2. Isomorphism and Local Interests in the Spread of Global Policies: An enquiry into privatization policy adoption using computer modelling and simulation 3. Modelling the Economy with Language 4.Class and Social Order: Political consequences of the move from class to culture Part II: Scale and Disjuncture 5. Steel Industry, Geography, and Regional Development: Evolving and travelling concepts 6. Learning from Minas Gerais: Flows of capital, production and managerial models in the steel industry 7. Continuities and Discontinuities of Economic Models and Workers' Perception of Model Changes in Argentina Part III: Innovation Technologies and Power 8. Global Dynamics, Local Responses to Industrial Innovation and Livelihood Transformations 9. Politics for Industrial Machines: Techno-political transitions in a Spanish steel plant Part IV: Policies and Politics 10. Civil society, Global Governance and the Circulation of Models 11. Spain's Labour Reforms: Temporariness, flexibility, and discipline of the working class 12. Reflections on an industrial policy for a sustainable European steel industry