The School of Geography’s Professor Adrian Smith has recently published a co-edited book entitled Labour Regimes and Global Production, along with School of Business and Management colleagues Dr. Elena Baglioni and Professor Liam Campling, and the National University of Singapore’s Professor Neil Coe.
The book traces the intellectual development of labour regime concepts across various disciplines to shed light on the changing nature of work and employment in today’s world economy. It draws on research in political economy, development studies, sociology and economic geography.
Building on these foundations it considers conceptual debates around labour regimes and global production relating to issues of scale, informality, gender, race, social reproduction, ecology and migration, and offers new insights into the work conditions of global production chains from Amazon's warehouses in the United States, to industrial production networks in the Global South, and to the dormitory towns of migrant workers in Czechia. It also explores recent mobilisations of labour regime analysis in relation to methods, theory and research practice.
Speaking about the recent publication, Professor Smith said: “I am delighted to see this collaborative project out in the world. The pandemic has meant that it was slightly delayed, but the issues that the book addresses are no less important because of that. Indeed, the pandemic has made clear how fragile global supply chains are; the fragility of which is a core theme in examining labour regimes in global production”.
The book has its origins in the joint QMUL Centre on Labour and Global Production and National University of Singapore Global Production Networks Centre workshop which took place in January 2019.
The book is published by Agenda Publishing – find out more about the book here.