The new ‘hidden abode’: reflections on value and labour in the new economy

In a pivotal section of Capital, volume 1, Marx (1976 : 279) notes that, in order to understand the capitalist production of value, we must descend into the ‘hidden abode of production’: the site of the labour process conducted within an employment relationship. In this paper we argue that by remaining wedded to an analysis of labour that is confined to the employment relationship, Labour Process Theory (LPT) has missed a fundamental shift in the location of value production in contemporary capitalism. We examine this shift through the work of Autonomist Marxists like Hardt and Negri, Lazaratto and Arvidsson, who offer theoretical leverage to prize open a new ‘hidden abode’ outside employment, for example in the ‘production of organization’ and in consumption. Although they can open up this new ‘hidden abode’, without LPT's fine‐grained analysis of control/resistance, indeterminacy and structured antagonism, these theorists risk succumbing to empirically naive claims about the ‘new economy’. Through developing an expanded conception of a ‘new hidden abode’ of production, the paper demarcates an analytical space in which both LPT and Autonomist Marxism can expand and develop their understanding of labour and value production in today's economy.     

Workers with disabilities and the challenges of emotional labour

This paper explores the implications of emotional labour for workers with disabilities, drawing on qualitative data from interviews with 59 respondents who had disabilities and who worked in service sector occupations. The analysis illustrates that employer demands for emotional labour may prove difficult for workers with a range of disabilities, including psychiatric diagnoses, learning difficulties and physical impairments. Analysis also points to the ways in which the non‐accommodating nature of many workplaces often forces workers with disabilities to engage in ‘extra’ emotion work in the interests of fitting in and concealing/ downplaying their impairments.     

New tech,old exploitation: Gig economy,algorithmic control and migrant labour

Digital platforms are the newest technological wave that is reshaping and reconfiguring the economic and labour landscape. Digital platforms often known as the gig economy are increasingly adopting app-based models to connect consumers with workers to complete their on-demand tasks. However, on-demand platforms continue to rely on the unequal division of labour and the precarious nature of the work to create labour markets that can respond accordingly to the increase in service provision. This review highlights two main themes that have emerged within the on-demand gig economy in the current literature—mythical autonomy and algorithmic control and misclassification of labour and the complexity of migrant workers in navigating this space. Finally, this review calls for further research into the inside/outside dichotomy of migrant labour within the gig economy and their experiences of labour exploitation through app-based digital platforms.     

‘Writing’ aesth‐ethics on the child's body: Developing maternal subjectivities through clothing our children

What could we learn from the ‘aesth‐ethic’ practices of clothing children? The dual focus of this article is to analyse the everyday clothing of children as well as the development of maternal subjectivities as relevant to discussions of aesthetic labour in the field of organization studies. Drawing upon the literatures on aesthetic labour and maternal subjectivities in the field of organization studies, we develop a fine‐grained understanding of the relatively intense and effortful maternal labours that clothing our children encapsulates. Methodologically, we use autoethnographic diary notes combined with feminist ‘memory work’ to analyse clothing as an affectual form of storytelling or ‘writing’ on the child's body that (re)produces certain sociocultural understandings about mothering, sustainability and childhood(s) in a Nordic context embraced by western consumerism. By considering the limitations of the approach taken to drawing wider conclusions about motherhoods, identity construction and clothing, this article advances our understanding of the development of particular middle‐class maternal subjectivities seeking to problematize mass consumerism through childrenswear, and how idea(l)s concerning gender and childhood(s) are being (re)produced in and through clothing.     

Doing gender in public services: Affective labour of employment agents

The restructuring of state bureaucracies into service organizations and the new welfare state paradigm of activation have changed the work requirements of front‐line workers in public employment agencies across Europe. Public employment agents are less engaged in bureaucratic labour, but have to perform service work. They use affective means to motivate and to monitor and sanction jobseekers. This article provides evidence that these transformations in Austria, Germany and Switzerland did not suspend the gendering of public service work. We discovered four typical modes of affectively enacting the state: both male and female employment agents follow feminized service work patterns or masculinized entrepreneurial norms. To prevent a possible loss of their professional status, some employment agents reinterpret affective labour as professional service work that demands high expertise. Others resist the activation paradigm by performing traditionally feminized care work or by still adhering to affect‐neutral male bureaucratic work.     

Working at the edge: Emotional labour in the spectre of violence

Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with police officers, door(wo)men and prison officers we present intimate, emotional and sometimes harrowing accounts of both the physical and emotional pain routinely endured by those employed as agents of social control. This article positions labour undertaken in such contexts as ‘edgework'; exploring how the boundary, or ‘edge', between safety and danger is negotiated and managed ‘in the moment' through embodied performances of empathetic and antipathetic emotional labour and emotional neutrality. Placing the concepts of edgework and emotional labour in dialogue, we open up a space in which to explore gendered conceptualizations of emotional labour and offer a more feminist appreciation of edgework that moves us beyond narrow concerns with pleasure, to account for embodied experience and emotional performance. In so doing, this article offers a unique insight into the emotional labour repertoires of both men and women who work in the spectre of violence.     

More‐than‐human emotions: Multispecies emotional labour in the tourism industry

The concept of emotional labour has been subject to critique, evaluation, development and extension over the last 35 years, but it remains firmly anthropocentric. This article begins to address this shortcoming by illustrating some of the productive potential of extending the concept of emotional labour to include more‐than‐human and multispecies perspectives. Organizations are not solely human phenomena, but research usually fails to consider the role of non‐humans in work in contemporary capitalism. Using the example of trail horses in tourism, I argue that some non‐human animals should be considered workers, and that they do perform emotional labour in service to commercial organizations. More‐than‐human and multispecies perspectives capture some of the complexities of everyday organizational practices, and can inform feminist research attuned to the experiences of marginalized others, human and non‐human.     

Photographs of young generations on the Dutch labour market

In the light of the decline of “standard” employment relationships in many countries and its particular effect on young people, this article provides a detailed analysis of the labour market trajectories of early-career workers in the Netherlands between 1985 and 2014, adopting the approach of the sequence analysis of life-course events. Using two indicators for instability (entropy and turbulence), the authors find that cohorts that entered the labour market after 2000, and particularly in 2008, experience greater employment status instability despite the flexicurity policies applied. Transitions into stable employment are the exception rather than the rule.     

US labour unions and green transitions: depth,breadth, and worker agency

ABSTRACT

The goal of this article is to interpret and analyse two ambitious and prominent cases of labour environmentalism in the USA – the par excellence example of liberal capitalism. In order to capture the nuances, contradictions, and varieties of labour environmentalism, I employ an analytical scheme based on three dimensions. The first dimension (depth) explores the social and environmental commitments manifested in these cases, the second dimension (breadth) explores their spatiality, and the third dimension (agency) explores the degree to which these initiatives reflect a proactive as opposed to a reactive labour environmentalism.     

The imprudence of labour market flexibilization in a fiscally austere world

This article assesses the effects of combining fiscal austerity with policies aimed at reducing labour costs and, in doing so, sheds new light on current policy debates. Taking a global perspective, the authors explore the aggregation problem by proposing a stylized analytical macro‐model with explicit distribution dynamics. In this framework, flexibilization policies that suppress the labour share trigger global feedbacks that result in a downward spiral, with contraction even in export‐led economies. The initial gains of more competitive economies are shown to be ephemeral. In the long term, the world economy is essentially wage‐led and responds positively to coordinated Keynesian stimuli.     

Centring labour in financialization

ABSTRACT

This article draws on an engagement with Marx’s notes on money and finance to reconsider the relationships between labour, working classes, and financial accumulation. In recent years, these dynamics have often been understood through the lens of ‘financialization’ – referring to a trend towards the growing prominence of financial sector profits, logics, and power at the expense of productive activity. This lens has tended to produce analyses of labour and finance that are (1) unidirectional and (2) that often lump a wide range of developments under a single heading without considering how these trends might intersect in potentially contradictory ways. Marx offers a useful alternative insofar as his approach to money and finance centres on a continual and fraught dynamic between the ‘abstract’ social labour embodied in money and the ‘concrete’ labour performed in particular places at particular times. This argument is illustrated through brief vignettes from South Africa.     

Toward managed flexibility: The revival of labour inspection in the Latin world

Examining the role of labour inspection in the context of the revival of labour market regulation, the authors distinguish between the Latin model, where inspectors have authority to tailor enforcement to firms' exigencies, and the less flexible United States approach. The Latin model can reconcile regulation with economic flexibility and transform inspectors into the shock troops of a campaign for decent work. But its vulnerability to arbitrary behaviour on their part needs to be addressed through: management of organizational cultures; exposure and sys‐tematization of the tacit knowledge underpinning inspectors' judgements; and research into the relationship between labour standards and business practices.     

Redistribution and labour supply

This paper explores the effect of personal income taxes on redistribution when labour supply reactions are taken into consideration. The results indicate that the classical non-behavioural results on redistribution are not necessarily satisfied in a more general behavioural framework. In this respect, it is shown that the relevant transition to measure redistribution is not the transition from the initial post-tax to the final post-tax income distribution, but rather from the more precise initial pre-tax to the final post-tax income distribution. In addition, the necessary and sufficient conditions to ensure redistribution in this wider setting are postulated, which helps determine the behavioural bias under alternative tax and labour supply models. This shows that the functional specification of labour supply may also affect the results.     

Influencing international child labour policy: The potential and limits of children-centred research

How did research with working children influence child labour policy in the late 1990s and early 2000s? What were the constraints to research findings exerting greater influence over international policy? This paper explores these questions against the backdrop of studies with working children in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1994, 1995 and 1999. It is suggested that rights-based, children-centred research is a potential means of gaining insights into the lives of working children. As such, research has a role to play in informing policy. An analysis of international debates during the 1990s indicates that the findings of research with children did exert some influence over international child labour policy in the 1990s, but there were limits to the extent of that influence. In seeking to explain these limits, this article explores the tension between research that recognises and reports children's agency and the structural constraints that militate against children's views, experiences and priorities being translated into policy.     

Labour geographies of the platform economy: Understanding collective organizing strategies in the context of digitally mediated work

The article examines the geographies of collective labour struggle in the platform economy. It distinguishes between the unique spatial features associated with place-based work and crowdwork to examine the divergent collective organizing strategies developed therein. Taking works councils, collective bargaining and multi-enterprise agreements as three examples of social dialogue, the article considers why different types of platform workers gravitate towards particular strategies, analyses the regulatory frameworks within which these workers' collective struggles are bound, and assesses the propensity for these expressions of solidarity to improve the terms and conditions of platform work.     

Attenuating focalism in affective forecasts of the commuting experience: Implications for economic decisions and policy making

Focalism is a cognitive bias that overweights the contribution of certain attributes to the consumption experience. This paper proposes that focalism afflicts choice of transport mode for commuting. A field study and two experiments provide evidence that commuting by bus is estimated to be less enjoyable than it is experienced to be and that driving to work is estimated to be more enjoyable than it is experienced to be. To the extent that commuting behavior is informed by subjective expected utility, commuters will inflict unanticipated costs on themselves and on society. Transport mode choice has external and dynamic consequences. Focalism in this domain implies welfare distortions that are worthy of policymakers’ attention. This paper develops a novel debiasing technique, Affective Averaging, that reveals and attenuates focalism in affective forecasts of commuting.     

The labour market flexibility debate in India: Re‐examining the case for signing voluntary contracts

A major focus of India's ongoing policy debate over labour market flexibilization has been the statutory requirement that firms employing 100 or more workers cannot dismiss employees without prior government permission. The case for repealing that requirement (or greatly increasing the workforce threshold) is notably underpinned by Basu, Fields and Debgupta (2009). Here, the author challenges their particular theoretical argument for hiring and firing at will based on the voluntary signing of contracts, demonstrating that their general policy conclusion is logically unsustainable even within the framework of that model. The case for labour market flexibilization through voluntary contracting thus remains unfounded.     

Off-farm labour decision of Canadian farm operators: Urbanization effects and rural labour market linkages

Understanding the factors affecting off-farm labour decisions of census-farm operators has significant implications for rural development and farm income support policy. We examine the off-farm labour decisions of Canadian farm operators using micro-level data from the 2001 Census of Agriculture combined with community level data from the 2001 Census of Population. While confirming some of the findings of previous research with respect to the effects of human capital and farm characteristics on off-farm work participation, this study shows the differential impact of those variables for operators of smaller and larger holdings. Family, community and regional characteristics appear more relevant in determining the joint decision to work off-farm and operate a smaller holding, compared to the decision to work off-farm and operate a larger farm. Results suggest that, once other factors are accounted for, proximity to urban centres does not have a positive effect on the joint decisions to participate in off-farm work and to operate a holding. This joint decision, in fact, is more related to the dynamics of the local labour market. A major implication of these findings is that while urban centers might represent an engine of growth for overall rural income through employment opportunities for the non-farm workforce, the non-farm income of farm operators is more likely to be affected by policy initiatives that address directly the dynamics of labour markets in the community where the operator lives.