This first issue of Work in the Global Economy for 2025 represents a passing of the editorial baton for the journal, as this is the last issue to be prepared by the first team of editors-in-chief, Sian Moore and Kirsty Newsome. As the new team, Giorgos Gouzoulis, Jean Jenkins and Martin Krzywdzinski, we would like to thank Kirsty and Sian for their work in setting up the journal and steering it through the first three years of its life in such excellent fashion. One important result of their development work is the journal’s inclusion and ranking in the Chartered Association of Business Schools’ Academic Journal Guide 2024. We are looking forward to taking responsibility for a journal that has undergone such impressive development since its inception.

Since the first issue in 2021, the journal has succeeded in establishing itself as a forum for a wide range of submissions from a diverse group of scholars, both established and early career academics, who share a concern with the transformation of labour processes in the global economy. Published articles have included contributions not only on classical questions of labour process theory and the development of control and consent regimes in the workplace, but also on new questions of labour mobility, migrant work, racial capitalism, and the upheavals associated with technical change such as the development of the platform economy and new surveillance and automation technologies. The articles in the journal have thus analyzed what might be termed ‘classic’ workplaces in the manufacturing and service sectors, as well as different forms of precarious, subcontracted and unpaid work. The reach of such contributions is international, with analysis of the resistance and resilience of labour very much positioned in a global setting and taking account of developments in countries across Asia, Africa, South America and Europe.

In the first years of the journal it has published two issues per annum. Such is the increasing number, quality and diversity of submissions that we are pleased to announce that the journal will move to three issues per year from 2025 onwards. The move to three issues will be complemented by further development of the journal in terms of its reach. We want to continue the path taken in recent years to develop Work in the Global Economy as an attractive and inclusive forum for authors from fields such as the sociology of work, organizational and economic sociology, science and technology studies, labour geography, human resource management, and political economy. We will continue bringing together contributions from different regions of the world, with the aim of engaging with theoretical debates and research traditions in context. At the same time, we also want to cultivate the origins of the journal and support its ambition to be an outlet for the further development of labour process theory. To this end, we want to strengthen the links between the journal and the International Labour Process Conference (ILPC), which has become a growing and lively interdisciplinary place for labour research, broadly defined.

In recent years, the ILPC and labour process studies have also become an increasingly open academic space for scholars who use different levels of analysis and methodologies. Traditional sociology of work has focused for decades on the analysis of individual workplaces and the experiences of work degradation faced by non-managerial workers. In contrast, labour geographers, political economists and industrial relations scholars have been focusing more on the evolution of national and sectoral-level systems of work organization and regulation, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Both approaches have offered – and are still offering – very important insights on a wide range of questions linked to labour process studies. In the light of the ILPC becoming more interdisciplinary and methodologically open, our goal is for Work in the Global Economy to develop as a similarly inclusive and open space for studies that use different levels of analysis and research methodologies. We believe that approaching important questions from different angles in terms of theoretical frameworks, levels of analysis, and methodology, is fundamental for the further development of our understanding of existing and emerging issues related to work and the labour process.

With all these aspirations in mind, the articles presented in this first issue of 2025 signal the diversity of approach we wish to nurture and support in contributions to Work in the Global Economy. The six articles combine to comprise an issue where analysis of workers’ subjectivities, work processes, labour market mechanisms and regulation is placed in an international context, considering cases from the Global North (United Kingdom, Austria, United States) and the Global South (Brazil), and drawing links between labour, class, gender and race across different sectors.

Three contributions focus specifically on the large field of platform work. The first, by James Muldoon, Natalie Sedacca and Paul Apostolidis (2025) compares the role of placement agencies and digital platforms in the UK care sector, and highlights the different power dynamics at play. While care work on digital platforms is characterized by greater precariousness, it also offers workers greater control over work schedules and choice of clients. The authors refer to this ambivalence as ‘constrained flexibility’.

The second article, by Benjamin Herr (2025), is an ethnographic study of platform food delivery workers in Austria, and his findings also show an ambivalence in power relations. On the one hand, the platforms succeed in controlling work effort technologically, but on the other hand they repeatedly have difficulties in guaranteeing a sufficient labour supply. In mitigating these conditions, managers rely not only on technological control but also on personal control by supervisors and normative control, seeking to create a ‘community spirit’ among the platform workers in order to persuade them to take on less attractive shifts and working times.

In the third contribution on platform work, Jorien Oprins (2025) presents a systematic review of the platform work research literature and discusses the findings in terms of employment opportunities and motivational factors, challenges, freelance agency and livelihood outcomes. He argues for a future research agenda aligned with the concept of inequality, focusing on design inequality, resource inequality, institutional inequality and relational inequality.

The fourth paper in this issue is by Paul Christopher Gray and Jordan House (2025). Here we move away from platform work to examine the successful strike of the Coalition of Rutgers Unions at the State University of New Jersey, US. A central characteristic of this union is that it breaks with the traditions of segmentation according to occupation or employment status and includes all Rutgers workers. The authors see this union as a central example of union renewal and organizational model and discuss its development alongside the course of the strike.

Next we move to analysis of the situation of black, elderly, poor, female heads of families in Brazil, authored by Isabel Georges and Tarcísio Perdigão Araújo Filho (2025). This article focuses on the interaction of individual life courses and social policies. The authors discuss the process of ‘resignification’, in which women interpret their personal sacrifices resulting from structural discrimination as a form of empowerment. The ambivalence of social policies in Brazil is also highlighted as they are essentially based on a conception of the role of women in the family. Thus, while they give women badly needed resources, at the same time they impose constraints and perpetuate gender inequalities.

Finally, David Walters, Phil James and Richard Johnstone (2025) examine the influence of global and national regulatory standards and private governance on working conditions in low- and middle-income countries. They discuss whether the addition of the principle of a ‘safe and healthy work environment’ to the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work is appropriate and sufficient to the task of improving working conditions. The study comes to ambivalent conclusions. A systematic literature analysis shows that regulatory approaches show very mixed results and often suffer from a lack of implementation and enforcement. At the same time, they see opportunities for a positive impact of the amendment of the ILO principles if the new regulation can be combined with coordinated cooperation between local health and safety and labour regulators and non-state actors.

As the new editors-in-chief, we hope that this stimulating set of articles will be of interest to the growing readership of Work in the Global Economy. Future issues are already in preparation and will cover themes such as Manufacturing, Work and Housing, and Ecology and the Labour Process.

We invite you to join us as the journal develops, and would encourage you to read, comment and contribute to the lively academic forum we aim to maintain, nurture and grow together in the years to come.