Mapping the discursive in labour geographies

Abstract

Geographical debates surrounding labour have hitherto tended to sideline its discursivity – that is its ongoing construction as a category of the economy – and the politics of the discourses of labour involved in this process. To address this lacuna, this paper engages with three bodies of scholarship in the social sciences which explicitly foreground the discursive construction of labour: work on subjectivity and power in the labour process; feminist investigations into gendered globalization processes; and studies on the discursive power of labour. These reveal labour discourses as multiscalar phenomena that operate at workplaces, as mechanisms of work organization and control within transnational capital circuits, as knowledge networks that underpin how labour is valued, and as resources for labour agency. The paper closes by proposing a distinctively geographical research agenda which involves mapping the discursive geographies of labour, examining how labour discourses are ‘placed’ and encountered, and exploring their role in building geographies of labour agency.

Solidarity on the move: Imaginaries and infrastructures within the People's March for Jobs (1981)

“…The march informed what Anant and Coe (2021) have described as a 'discursive labour geography', which foregrounded pride and dignity within a context of deindustrialisation. This challenging of the stigma of unemployment was as much imaginary as it was material, with marchers commenting on the impact the experience had on them and the communities encountered.…”

The multiple geographies of constrained labour agency

“…Through doing so, they often achieve a third category of power, namely institutional power , which derives from the embeddedness of workers in formal and informal systems of rules and regulations at the subnational, national, and international scales (see Mashayamombe, 2020, for an illustrative example). Finally, various modes of societal power , proposed by Schmalz et al (2018) as a fourth category, have been investigated, including the role of discursive power in labour geography (Chun 2009; Anant and Coe 2021) and the role of coalition power in global union campaigns (Brookes 2013; Magdahl and Jordhus-Lier 2020).…”