Handbook Of Employment And Society

‘. . . provides valuable analysis and debate. It is clearly of value to students, providing comprehensive coverage of the relevant ground, and to both students and academics familiar with the territory for whom the essays begin to point the way toward future debates, clearly highlighting the necessity of geography to fully understanding work and employment.’
– Oliver Mallett, Industrial Relations Journal

‘This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the analytical interactions between geography, space, work and employment. Space is not simply a banal backdrop against which work and employment processes and relations operate. Rather, the specific geographical context both colours, and is coloured by, the modes and nature of work and employment taking place in that context. Moreover, these issues are magnified by the tensions between processes operating at the local and global scales. The volume is particularly timely in the light of the recent credit crisis.’
– Philip McCann, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

‘This Handbook represents a major milestone in the revitalization of scholarship on work and employment. It demonstrates that human geography can – indeed, must – be integrated into labor studies and industrial relations. Our present era may be characterised as global capitalism, but “working space” is a social (and often highly contested) construct and people live and work in a particular place. To drive these points home, the editors weave together contributions highlighting the experience of workers in a wide variety of locations. The result is a volume rich in conceptual and practical insights; it deserves a wide audience.’
– Charles J. Whalen, Utica College and Cornell University, US

‘This major edited volume from some of the most eminent scholars writing on employment and society is to be welcomed. . . The reader is rewarded with an invaluable volume of excellent work from original empirical research.’
– Jane Holgate, Leeds University, UK in Labor Studies Journal

‘The book is exemplary. . . [The editors’] three introductions are. . . a wonderful summary of research and debates. . . [and the book as a whole] should expand the perceptions of the naive, transform the ideas of the sceptics and provide a useful summary for the believers. . . This book will enlighten and elucidate.’
– Janis Bailey, Griffith University, Australia in Journal of Industrial Relations

This Handbook deepens and extends the engagement between research concerned with work and employment and labour geography. It links fundamental concepts concerning the politics of place that human geographers have developed in recent years with the world of work.

Internationally recognised scholars from around the world have been brought together to debate the questions that arise at the intersection of the worlds of production, reproduction and consumption. They consider developments in the geographical and work and employment literature, as well as theorising and understanding how social actors’ lives are deeply geographically structured. They explore what space and geography mean for work and employment, examine workers as objects in socio-spatial relations and concentrate on workers’ accommodation of, and resistance to, the new geographies of capitalism in the global economy.

Advanced students, postgraduates and scholars in sociology, geography, business studies, industrial/labour relations and employment studies will find this Handbook of immense value.

Contents:

1. Foundations
Andrew Herod, Susan McGrath-Champ and Al Rainnie

PART I: WORK, SPACE AND THE STATE
2. Globalisation and the State
Bob Jessop

3. Creating Markets, Contesting Markets: Labour Internationalism and the European Common Transport Policy
Peter Turnbull

PART II: WORKING SPACES
4. Working Spaces
Al Rainnie, Susan McGrath-Champ and Andrew Herod

Section 2.1 Regionalisation, Globalisation and Labour

5. Labour Markets from the Bottom Up
Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore

6. Clothing Workers after Worker States: The Consequences for Work and Labour of Outsourcing, Nearshoring and Delocalisation in Postsocialist Europe
John Pickles and Adrian Smith

7. Tele-mediated Servants and Self-servants of the Global Economy: Labour in the Era of ICT-enabled E-commerce
Matthew Zook and Michael Samers

8. Gender, Space and Labour Market Participation: The Experiences of British Pakistani Women
Robina Mohammad

9. Filipino Migration and the Spatialities of Labour Market Subordination
Philip F. Kelly

Section 2.2 Building Space

10. Competing Geographies of Welfare Capitalism and its Workers: Kohler Village and the Spatial Politics of Planned Company Towns
Kathryn J. Oberdeck

11. Work, Place and Community in Socialism and Postsocialism
Alison Stenning

12. Plastic Palm Trees and Blue Pumpkins: Synthetic Fun and Real Control in Contemporary Space
Chris Baldry

13. Dormitory Labour Regimes and the Labour Process in China: New Workers in Old Factory Forms
Ngai Pun and Chris Smith

PART III: WORKERS IN SPACE
14. Workers in Space
Al Rainnie, Andrew Herod and Susan McGrath-Champ

Section 3.1 Labour Institutions in Space and Place

15. Global Unions versus Global Capital: Or, the Complexity of Transnational Labour Relations
Ronaldo Munck and Peter Waterman

16. Methodological Nationalism and Territorial Capitalism: Mobile Labour and the Challenges to the ‘German Model’
Christian Berndt

17. European Works Councils: From the Local to the Global?
Ian Fitzgerald and John Stirling

18. The New Economic Model and Spatial Changes in Labour Relations in Post-NAFTA Mexico
Enrique de la Garza Toledo

Section 3.2 Organising in Space and Place

19. Contested Space: Union Organising in the Old Economy
Bradon Ellem

20. Contesting the New Politics of Space: Labour and Capital in the White Goods Industry in Southern Africa
Andries Bezuidenhout and Edward Webster

21. The Multi-scalarity of Trade Union Practice
Jeremy Anderson, Paula Hamilton and Jane Wills

22. Working Space and the New Labour Internationalism
Rob Lambert and Michael Gillan

23. Online Union Campaigns and the Shrinking Globe: The LabourStart Experience
Eric Lee

24. ‘Across the Great Divide’: Local and Global Trade Union Responses to Call Centre Offshoring to India
Phil Taylor and Peter Bain

PART IV: AFTERWORD
25. Workers, Economies, Geographies
Noel Castree

Index