In the introduction to this volume on ‘dislocating labour’ we seek to lay the ground for an anthropology of labour that extends beyond the industrial heartlands from which the concept emerged. Remaining aware of the analytical purchase of the focus on the labour/capital relation, we argue that the ethnographic exploration of this relation allows us to extend the reach of the labour concept. It also allows us to explore the diverse ways in which labour relations are experienced beyond the confines of the economic, bringing kinship, personhood, affect, politics, and sociality firmly back into the frame of capitalist value creation. We draw on the notion of dislocation to extend the repertoire of labour analysis beyond that of dispossession and/or disorganization. By dislocation we refer to the unevenness of transnational capitalism's unfolding and the ways in which both places and persons are reconfigured by the movements of capital. Dislocation thus refers to the spatial movements of refugees and migrant workers, but also to other senses of disruption, such as the sentiment of feeling out of place, or of losing your bearings as things move and change around you.

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This essay analyses time and labour among small Dominican furniture producers. The Dominican Republic's small workshops and firms experience much waiting – not speed and political‐economic integration, but, instead, slowness, blockades, and marginalization. The national production of furniture has faced increasingly tough competition from imported commodities. In the early 1990s, the national finances were in crisis. Pressured by its international lenders, the state deregulated and opened the economy, while it has continued to spend little on the development of the country's workshops and industry. In addition, the country's electricity sector is in poor condition and long blackouts are the norm. Because of the situation, the country's small furniture makers are forced to live with contradictory and clashing social rhythms. The diversity among forms of time is navigated through concrete labour and in the everyday. Contemporary global capitalism ought to be understood as a contingent outcome of labour activity in the form of a myriad of localized, mundane efforts to ‘fix’ it. Such efforts always mirror a specific political and social history. By exploring contemporary capitalist time through a focus on particular forms of labour, we can analyse how global capitalism's discrepant rhythms help to give shape to, disrupt, and dislocate forms of labour in a given place. At the same time, we show how the involved agents seek to adapt to, and work on the effects of, the conflicts between rhythms.

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