Work in the Global Economy: Editorial Introduction

Abstract

The 2021 launch of Work in the Global Economy (WGE) has three underlying aims: first, to openup a new space to analyse and debate the changing conditions of work and labour in an era of globalised, unleashed capitalism; second to interrogate, theoretically and empirically, the labour process as a distinct moment in the circuits of capital; third, to re-connect the politics of production with the wider contradictory processes of capital accumulation. To achieve these aims, WGE welcomes the submission of new studies that deepen our knowledge of work patterns and organisations in different regions, nation states, local and international chains of production, distribution, and exchange. Looking ahead the challenge is to expose the institutional means of labour subordination, patterns of resistance, conflict and accommodations while revealing analytically how social relations at work are framed by wider class relations within a global context conditioned by crisis tendencies, regional inequalities, and uneven development.The Journal will build upon a tradition of shared scholarship and a commitment to theory building and rigorous empirical enquiry that has been exemplified by the annual International Labour Process Conference (ILPC). The latter has sought over many years to analyse and understand the interplay of labour process relations, wage-labour markets, social reproduction, and state regulatory and disciplinary powers. The Journal will therefore strive to sustain and extend this tradition by publishing findings from researchers working in and across labour and employment studies, work sociology, political economy, labour geography, and development. What follows is a brief outline of the intellectual trajectory of labour process theory and analysis and a forwardlooking research agenda for the Journal.As is well known, interest in the labour process gathered pace and, initially at least, owed much to the renewal of scholarship in Marxist political economy following the 1974 publication of Braverman's Labour and Monopoly Capital (LMC). Braverman's project was to build upon the classical Marxian account of the capital -wage labour relationship, and uncover the historical stages in the quest by capital to overcome the obstacles to valorisation and accumulation posed by `the subjective state of the workers, by their previous history, by the general social conditions under which they work as well as the particular conditions of the enterprise and by the technical settings of their labor' (Braverman, 1974: 57). Inspired by his own work experiences (he was a coppersmith for many years) and taking as his wider canvas the consolidation of US monopoly