Sub-theme 84: Work and Employment at Multiple Crossroads: Building Better Futures from the Present
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
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