Call for Papers

The world of work is today at multiple crossroads. Under contemporary capitalism, work is too often exploitative and alienating, failing to provide workers with meaning and adequate material rewards (Vidal, 2019). The harmful effects of how we organize work, our economies, and societies have become visible through crises ranging from climate, environmental and health disasters to extreme inequalities, political instability, and geopolitical conflicts. These crises beg profound questions about the desirability and viability of our current unbridled production, circulation, and consumption of commodities.
 
In our sub-theme, we want to tackle these big questions from the bottom up by taking stock of the dominant trends in current workplaces. Our contention is that capital increasingly organizes work through the ‘multiplication of labor’ (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013), using different forms of employment to fragment workforces and fuel uncertainty, exploitation, and precarization of workers, even in contexts with stronger labor protections (Crane et al., 2019). Employers are creating these ‘fissured workplaces’ (Weil, 2014) by relying on employment arrangements that undermine workers’ rights and protections, from temp agency labour, posted work, subcontracting, and self-employment, to gig and platform work, sheltered workshops, offshoring into global supply chains, and the organized migration of workers with in-demand skills such as nurses and engineers (e.g., Carver & Doellgast, 2021; Healy et al., 2017; Swart and Kinnie, 2014; Theunissen et al., 2022; Vallas and Schor, 2020).
 
Globally, ‘standard employment’ represents an exception (Neilson & Rossiter, 2008). Long-term, full-time employment at a living wage and with industrial rights (e.g., freedom of association, collective bargaining, workplace representation, pension rights, unemployment benefits, health insurance, elderly care, parental leave, and more) and the social benefits from collective agreements have never been an empirical reality for most workers on the planet. At the same time, the market-mediated fissuring of work and employment relations has fueled polarization, conflict, and exclusion in the workplace and beyond (e.g., Helfen et al., 2020, Berthod et al., 2021) by subjecting an increasing share of the workforce to varying levels of precarity (Neilson & Rossiter, 2008); this phenomenon is even more pronounced in demanding, often essential jobs largely done by historically subordinated groups, such as women, racialized workers, and migrants.
 
Against this background this sub-theme offers a forum to debate whether and how it is plausible to envisage more positive futures for work, and if so, what it would take for these to be realized. For this purpose, we invite contributions that consider how work and employment should be reorganized and re-imagined to ensure our livelihoods. We seek to bring together perspectives from multiple disciplines studying organizations, work, and employment to stimulate new integrative insights, advance knowledge, and envision alternatives. We particularly welcome submissions related to the following three main themes: (1) How to broaden perspectives on work in organization studies, (2) how to make organizations work more sustainably, and (3) how to envision new ways of mobilizing workers. In these areas, the sub-theme seeks both theoretical contributions and theoretically-informed empirical research on the contemporary worlds of work.
 

Theme 1: Broadening our understanding of work and workers

This first theme is about broadening the scope of investigation of work to what has to date been largely excluded from it. The reduction of our understanding of work to waged work has, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, been interrogated across a wide range of social sciences. It has also revealed the largely hidden but in no way less crucial role of non-commodified work, including socially reproductive care work, affective work, and subsistence work in sustaining both human life and economic activities (Mezzadri, 2022). The debate on jobs and workers that are ‘essential’ to the functioning of society has laid bare how contemporary institutions fail to adequately value them. It has also raised consciousness about the profound racial, gendered and geographical cleavages in labor markets, pointing to the concentration of large groups of workers in various forms of more or less coerced and forced labor (e.g., carceral work, indentured work) and the highly unequal distribution of symbolic and material rewards, wealth, protection and social and economic risks (e.g., Alamgir et al., 2022; Zanoni, 2020).

Illustrative questions for this theme are:

• What comes to be defined as work and what is excluded? Why?

• What kinds of vocabularies enable us to recover the multiplicity of work beyond traditional binaries such as core/periphery, standard/non-standard, paid/non-paid, productive/reproductive?

• What forms of unfree labor are found in organizations, economies and societies? How are they constitutive of the globalized contemporary economy?

• How do the terms of work come to be defined along gendered, racialized, ableist and colonialist lines, and what is the effect on our understanding of work and for specific groups of workers?

• How are struggles for recognition of non-wage work organized? Which political strategies are effective in securing recognition for them?

Theme 2: Making organizations work more sustainably

Assuming the fragmentation of the workforce and the endurance of wage work as a central feature of production and wealth distribution, research is warranted that envisions how organizations can be adapted and retooled to protect workers better and provide more equal access to resources and sustainable work (Weil, 2014). In current discourse, heterogeneous economic, technological, and cultural worldviews intersect, leading to diverging diagnoses and contradicting recommendations for organizations. For example, while there are strong voices calling for capitalist firms to become more sustainable (Ferraro et al., 2015), the quest for alternative ways of organizing within and beyond traditional hierarchies is gathering momentum, foregrounding more radical solutions that challenge dominant modes of organizational governance (Barin Cruz et al, 2017).
 
Likewise, studies are divided in their dystopian and utopian expectations regarding the potentials and dangers of new technologies such as algorithms, internet platforms, and collaborative robots in changing the labor process. At the same time, not enough is yet known about how skills, jobs, processes and cultures of work change when work is reconfigured. For example, younger cohorts entering the labor market through more unstable employment arrangements can be expected to be more suspicious of claims about the virtuousness of work.

Exemplary questions are:

• Which institutional solutions can effectively facilitate a ‘just transition’ for workers adversely impacted as economies move towards more ecological sustainability?

• How can we reclaim alienated wage work to give meaning and organize our social reproduction equally and sustainably? What can we learn from spaces of non-commodified work for the future of work?

• What alternative understandings of work would allow us to see and reward work more fairly? Ho do work cultures change and adapt at the shop floor level, and how do managers and workers evaluate new cultures of work in various contexts?

• What avenues for sustainable work are offered variously by cooperatives, B-corps, social enterprises, and other more democratic, worker-governed organizations?

• What explains how technologies shape the organization of work in businesses and other organizations?

Theme 3: Envisioning new forms of activism and mobilization for better work

Our third theme seeks to explore new forms of activism by workers and their allies. Injustice at work comes in many forms, with the salience of different grievances waxing and waning in dynamic capitalist environments (Gahan & Pekarek, 2013). For example, the rapid emergence of movements like MeToo# or Black Lives Matter has brought renewed attention to enduring problems of violence against women and systemic racism. Leveraging digital media, both movements have translated into offline activism and campaigning at work and beyond.
 
Increasingly, labor activists and scholars are looking to intersecting forms of identity-based injustice to frame campaigns for positive change at work (Lee & Tapia, 2021). While ‘traditional’ unions have been busy experimenting with new organizational forms and practices (e.g., community organizing, mergers, new membership models, digital tools), it remains to be seen whether they will more fully embrace the opportunity to build intersectional solidarity for fighting employer power. Alongside varied and ongoing efforts at ‘revitalization’ by ‘traditional’ unions (Gold et al., 2020), prominent examples of workers at Starbucks, Amazon, Apple, and in the gig economy joining together in ‘grassroots’ or ‘indie unions’ hint at a resurgence in unionization and mobilization (Tapia et al., 2015). Activists are also exploring new ways of leveraging consumer power to improve working conditions in the gig economy (Healy & Pekarek, 2023).
 
To make sense of these developments, we invite contributions that challenge conceptions of ‘labour’ as a unitary analytical and political category. Non-exhaustive, illustrative questions for this theme are:

• How are unions developing their repertoires of action to regain power and influence in a hostile environment?

• Which workplace and social issues are sparking employee activism to challenge organizational practices?

• How is the emergence of new grassroots and independent unions shaping the dynamics of worker representation and voice?

• To which extent can struggles for better work be strengthened by struggles outside it?

• What institutional interventions are most effective for tackling forced labor, wage theft and other employer transgressions of labor standards?

References

• Alamgir, F., Alamgir, F. & Alamgir, F. I. (2022). Live or be left to die? Deregulated bodies and the global production network: expendable workers of the Bangladeshi apparel industry in the time of Covid. Organization, 29(3): 478-501.
• Barin Cruz, L., Aquino Alves, M., & Delbridge, R. (2017). Next steps in organizing alternatives to capitalism: toward a relational research agenda. M@n@gement, 20(4): 322-335.
• Berthod, O., Helfen, M., & Wirth, C. (2021). Organizational expulsion: How boundary work produces inequality in German airports. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 37 (3).
• Carver, L., & Doellgast, V. (2021). Dualism or solidarity? Conditions for union success in regulating precarious work. European Journal of Industrial Relations, 27(4): 367–385.
• Crane, A., LeBaron, G., Allain, J., & Behbahani, L. (2019). Governance gaps in eradicating forced labor: From global to domestic supply chains. Regulation & Governance, 13(1): 86-106.
• Delfanti, A. (2021). Machinic dispossession and augmented despotism: Digital work in an Amazon warehouse. New Media & Society, 23(1): 39-55.
• Ferraro, F., Etzion, D., & Gehman, J. (2015). Tackling grand challenges pragmatically: Robust action revisited. Organization Studies, 36(3): 363-390.
• Gahan, P., & Pekarek, A. (2013). Social movement theory, collective action frames and union theory: A critique and extension. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 51(4): 754-776.
• Gold, M., Preuss, L., & Rees, C. (2020). Moving out of the comfort zone? Trade union revitalisation and corporate social responsibility. Journal of Industrial Relations, 62(1): 132-155.
• Helfen, M., Sydow, J., & Wirth, C. (2020). Service delivery networks and employment relations at German airports: Jeopardizing industrial peace on the ground? British Journal of Industrial Relations, 58(1): 168-198.
• Healy, J., & Pekarek, A. (2023). Consumers in the gig economy: resisting or reinforcing precarious work? In Ness, I. (ed) The Routledge Handbook of the Gig Economy. Routledge: New York, 246-257.
• Healy, J., Nicholson, D., & Pekarek, A. (2017). Should we take the gig economy seriously? Labour & Industry, 27(3): 232-248.
• Kellogg, K. C., Valentine, M. A., & Christin, A. (2020). Algorithms at work: The new contested terrain of control. Academy of Management Annals, 14(1): 366-410.
• Lee, T. L., & Tapia, M. (2021). Confronting Race and Other Social Identity Erasures: The Case for Critical Industrial Relations Theory. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 74(3): 637-662.
• Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press.
• Mezzadri, A. (2022). Social Reproduction and Pandemic Neoliberalism: Planetary Crises and the Reorganization of Life, Work and Death. Organization, 29(3): 379-400.
• Neilson, B., & Rossiter, N. (2008). Precarity as a political concept, or, Fordism as exception. Theory. Culture & Society, 25(7-8): 51-72.
• Swart, J., & Kinnie, N. (2014). Reconsidering boundaries: Human resource management in a networked world. Human Resource Management, 53(2): 291-310.
• Tapia, M., Ibsen, C.L. & Kochan, T. A. (2015). Mapping the frontier of theory in industrial relations: the contested role of worker representation. Socio-Economic Review, 13(1): 157-184.
• Theunissen, A., Zanoni, P. & Van Laer, K. (2022). Fragmented capital and (the loss of) control over posted workers: A case study in the Belgian meat industry. Work, Employment & Society. DOI: 10.1177/09500170211059733.
• Vallas, S., & Schor, J. B. (2020). What do platforms do? Understanding the gig economy. Annual Review of Sociology, 46(1): 273-294.
• Vidal, M. (2019). Work and exploitation in capitalism. The labor process and the valorization process. In Vidal, M., Smith, T., Prew, P. et al. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx. New York: Oxford University Press, 240–260.
• Weil, D. (2014) The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It. Harvard University Press: London.
• Zanoni, P. (2020). Prefiguring alternatives through the articulation of post- and anti-capitalistic politics: An introduction to three additional papers and a reflection. Organization, 27(1): 3-16.
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