The high-quality academic books, upper-level student texts and journal articles on our Business, Management and Economics list offer fresh perspectives on the economy, the future of work and organisations, and the relationship between business and addressing global social challenges.
The list is home to a number of series including Organizations and Activism and Feminist Perspectives on Work and Organization, all of which are edited by leading scholars from the field, along with our journals in the area: Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice, Work in the Global Economy and Global Political Economy.
Business, Management and Economics
This article sets out to explore whether the amendment to the ILO’s 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work which, in June 2022, added a ‘safe and healthy work environment’ to the principles and rights already included, might help to address conditions leading to the disproportionate burden of work-related death, injury and disease estimated to occur in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). It does so by drawing on the findings of an extensive review of the literature to examine evidence for the influence and operation of (a) global and national regulatory standards and interventions; and (b) private standards and their role in influencing practices in export-oriented work. It situates its examination of this evidence in relation to the economic, social and regulatory contexts in which work and its poor outcomes for safety and health are experienced in many LMICs, and hence in relation to the challenges that confront the effective utilisation of regulatory action. The article argues that these contextual challenges are formidable, and evidence of the operational means of securing sustainable improvements to work health and safety in the face of them remains incomplete. But it concludes that the 2022 amendment could contribute a useful driver for the considerable strategic orchestration and leadership required to achieve such effective utilisation if, within the ILO, there were a tripartite consensus concerning its desirability.
This article aims to demonstrate how gender, class, and race are intertwined at the micro level, addressing the interaction of lived life and social policy, through biographical interviews, in Brazil. Less interested in the analysis of inequalities per se, this article focuses on the way black, elderly, poor, female heads of families, living in urban neighbourhoods, manage to subjectively resignify objective domination. The in-depth biographical approach reveals the (re)construction of their subjectivity, defining personal sacrifice as a form of protagonism (agency) and empowerment. This process of resignification occurs by exchanging the unit of experience they relate to, from the individual to the family unit. It engages with social policies (social assistance, public health, and social housing) implemented by the latest Labour Party’s term of office (2003–2016). These policies are based on the role of women as responsible for the family unit. The focus on subjectivity, in different Brazilian metropoles, challenges the production of conformed neoliberal selves, in this case of women, within a specific Global South context, marked by historically high levels of inequality and informal work, since the formal end of slavery.
Households seeking childcare often turn to labour market intermediaries such as placement agencies and digital platforms to facilitate their search. This article draws on a qualitative research project to examine the respective roles played by agencies and platforms, comparing the structural power dynamics they engender between workers, clients, and intermediaries. First, it argues that digital platforms stand in an ambiguous position in relation to the formalisation of childcare. While they have contributed to reducing transaction costs and standardising processes, this has often been through the creation of more flexible and insecure forms of work compared with agencies. Second, in contrast with literature emphasising the disciplinary effects of platforms, we claim that they institute new forms of ‘constrained flexibility’, which have increased workers’ access to jobs, control over their schedule and communication with clients, while simultaneously subjecting them to increased market pressures and requiring higher levels of digital and entrepreneurial skills.
As the demand for online freelance labour is on the rise, it is critical to have a thorough understanding of the implications for freelancers. This article contributes to this understanding by synthesizing the empirical, academic literature centering the narratives of freelancers working through online freelance platforms. In doing so, it aims to answer the question of what is known about how these freelancers experience and navigate their work. The analysis identifies four prevailing themes, that is: (1) employment opportunities and motivating factors; (2) challenges; (3) freelancer agency; and (4) livelihood outcomes, and uncovers that online freelance labour results in an uneven distribution of livelihood outcomes. It also shows that detailed knowledge on this distribution is lacking. To fill this gap, this article proposes an agenda for future research based on Heeks’ (2022) model of adverse digital incorporation and revolving around four dimensions: design inequality, resource inequality, institutional inequality, and relational inequality.
Workers at Rutgers University, the state university of New Jersey, US, have formed the Coalition of Rutgers Unions (CRU). This workplace-based union coalition engages in wall-to-wall organizing, which seeks to include every Rutgers worker, irrespective of occupation, status, or union affiliation. This form of coalition creatively retains the benefits of certified unions while navigating the sectionalism encouraged by American labour laws. CRU’s recovery of traditional organizing principles amid neoliberal conditions is a new industrial unionism. It is thereby an example of the union renewal affirmed by proponents of social movement unionism. CRU is also an organizational model for workers in large, complex, heterogeneous workplaces with multiple existing unions. This article draws from qualitative interviews with CRU activists to discuss its participants, structure, activities, and its role in a victorious 2023 strike at Rutgers University.
Labour platforms such as UBER, PeoplePerHour and Rappi have become a global phenomenon. Their business model is affecting global labour markets and disrupting service industries such as ride hailing, cognitive work and food delivery. Labour platforms not only rely on a flexible labour supply but are also at the forefront of utilising new technologies such as algorithms to control labour. For this reason, scholarly analyses of labour platforms are increasingly employing an integrated approach that accounts for the different layers of control intersecting at the point of production. Following such an approach, an ethnographic case study in platform food delivery was conducted, aided by semi-structured interviews and digital artifacts. This case study shows that algorithmic control is able to reduce effort indeterminacy but is less equipped to cope with indeterminacy of mobility induced by flexible labour supply. As such, algorithmic control was integrated with two additional control mechanisms: first, core workers were put into a position of controlling peripheral workers; and second, attempts were made to craft a community that offered strategic managerial avenues. Altogether, given the interplay between effort and mobility power, the study contributes to an understanding of technological control internal to social and institutional relations.
This article connects Adam Smith’s maxims of taxation—as well as a possible precursor to Smith’s maxims: Roussel de la Tour’s Richesses de l’Etat—with Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan’s critique of optimal taxation theory. Among other things, Brennan and Buchanan’s critique of the optimality criterion fills an important gap not only in the optimal taxation literature but also in Adam Smith’s thought.
By grounding Global Value Chains/Global Production Networks studies in Labour Process Theory, this article shows how firms structure work in globalised teams to reproduce North-South inequalities, preventing the Global South from truly ‘catching up’. Following a within-case comparison design, the article compares the work of software engineers within the same firm in the US and India. Through 70 in-depth interviews, it demonstrates that as the firm offshores software work, it also unevenly deskills workers. While ‘execution’ tasks are offshored, ‘conception’ tasks remain onshore. In the process, workers are segmented even as they are combined in a single labour process. It further shows that the interaction of labour-process constraints with the historically-determined location of the software-services market in the Global North shapes the distribution of tasks and reproduces the core-periphery unevenness in this sector.
