Throughout history and in every geographical location, the rise and fall of industry, which impact the fate of large populations, are tied to the development and cultural entanglement of particular models that are articulated with political power. Models are understood as knowledge devices – expert, theoretical, practical and commonsense – that are embedded in cultural and social environments and designed through struggles at various scales. This book results from the collaboration of an interdisciplinary team bringing together specialists in anthropology, geography, sociology, economics, political science, mathematics and engineering around the theme of ‘Models and their Effects on Development Paths’. Based on empirical research conducted on the heavy industries, Industry and Work in Contemporary Capitalism addresses how models that inform the organization of work and production and are created by powerful actors may diverge from, overlap with, or contradict the models articulated by less powerful actors on the ground, and how they are connected across material and cultural spaces. Careful observation of industrial work and production as they unfold in and across specific localities and affects people’s livelihoods is complemented by analysis of how models circulate, through which channels of power, which institutional entities, which political connections. This volume explores an extensive theoretical terrain and a number of empirical cases that show, from different perspectives, how ideas about the economy, about work and industry, materialize in specific practices and interventions that affect people’s livelihoods.

In this long-awaited book, Ursula Huws brings together the results of decades of prescient research on labour market transformation to provide an authoritative overview of the impacts of technological, economic, social and political change on working life in the 21st century. Placing current upheavals in global labour markets firmly in their historical context, she debunks myths about the impacts of artificial intelligence on labour, pointing to the processes whereby new employment is created, as well as old jobs destroyed, while never underestimating the contradictory impacts of digitalisation on work organisation, resistance, adaption and innovation. This book is underpinned by a clear conceptual framework, that analyses the dynamics of the restructuring of capitalism and labour, taking full account of unpaid social reproductive work, and integrating a feminist analysis whilst also pointing to new forms of commodification that will shape the future. Labour in Contemporary Capitalism will be an invaluable resource and point of reference for students and scholars studying the sociology of labour, economic structures, technology, and globalisation.

The book addresses how power and power resources remain important analytically as well as empirically dimensions for analysing contemporary capitalism. It provides a theoretical framework for studying, understanding, and explaining changes in the world of work and how that leads to changes in contemporary capitalist societies. Changes in the world of work are closely related to increasing inequality, growing social unrest, and societal polarisation. Hence the book seeks to deepen our understanding of how developments in the sphere of work have implication far beyond the direct impact on workers. The book focuses on how workers and unions utilise their various power resources to off-set the power advantage of employers and capital in the sphere of labour politics, which have crucial linkages with both cultural life, politics, and the market. Although workers’ and unions’ power and influence have been declining almost universally across the world, the argument in the book is that they still hold power resources that can challenge and sometimes alter outcomes in another direction than what employers and capital wants. Hence the theory can help understand the possibilities that workers and unions still have and how these resources affect the outcomes of the labour-capital struggle. A core contribution of the book is that it develops theoretical propositions about power resource theory, provides clear definitions of the core concepts as well as apply the power resource theory to a range of new or emerging topic fields like global value chains, minimum wages, and migrant workers.

This volume analyses contemporary capitalism and its crises based on a theory of capitalist evolution known as the social structure of accumulation (SSA) theory. It applies this theory to explain the severe financial and economic crisis that broke out in 2008 and the kind of changes required to resolve it. The editors and contributors make available new work within this school of thought on such issues as the rise and persistence of the "neoliberal," or "free-market," form of capitalism since 1980 and the growing globalization and financialization of the world economy. The collection includes analyses of the U.S. economy as well as that of several parts of the developing world.

Bringing together ethnographic case studies of industrial labor from different parts of the world, Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism explores the increasing casualization of workforces and the weakening power of organized labor. This division owes much to state policies and is reflected in local understandings of class. By exploring this relationship, these essays question the claim that neoliberal ideology has become the new ‘commonsense’ of our times and suggest various propositions about the conditions that create employment regimes based on flexible labor.

This edited collection provides a series of accounts of workers’ local experiences that reflect the ubiquity of work’s digitalisation. Precarious gig economy workers ride bikes and drive taxis in China and Britain; call centre workers in India experience invasive tracking; warehouse workers discover that hidden data has been used for layoffs; and academic researchers see their labour obscured by a ‘data foam’ that does not benefit them. These cases are couched in historical accounts of identity and selfhood experiments seen in the Hawthorne experiments and the lineage of automation. This book will appeal to scholars in the Sociology of Work and Digital Labour Studies and anyone interested in learning about monitoring and surveillance, automation, the gig economy and the quantified self in the workplace.

This book argues that there is no single best institutional arrangement for organizing modern societies. Therefore, the market should not be considered the ideal and universal arrangement for coordinating economic activity. Instead, the editors argue, the economic institutions of capitalism exhibit a large variety of objectives and tools that complement each other and can not work in isolation. The various chapters of the book ask what logics and functions institutions follow and why they emerge, mature and persist in the forms they do.