Book description
Psychological harassment at work, or "mobbing," has become
a significant public policy issue in Italy and elsewhere in Europe.
Mobbing has given rise to specialized counseling clinics, a new field
of professional expertise, and new labor laws. For Noelle J. Molé,
mobbing is a manifestation of Italy's rapid transition from a highly
protectionist to a market-oriented labor regime and a neoliberal
state. She analyzes the classification of mobbing as a work-related
illness, the deployment of preventive public health programs, the
relation of mobbing to gendered work practices, and workers' use of
the concept of mobbing to make legal and medical claims, with
implications for state policy, labor contracts, and political
movements. For many Italian workers, mobbing embodies the social and
psychological effects of an economy and a state in transition.
"An important and path-breaking work... provocative and
nuanced, theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically rich."
-David G. Horn, Ohio State University
Noelle J. Molé is a political and medical anthropologist. She
teaches in the Writing Program and Department of Anthropology at
Princeton University.
