Labour conflicts have returned to the centre of public and academic debate. Across many countries, workers have increasingly resorted to strikes and other forms of collective action in response to inflation, restructuring, digitalisation, and the continuing erosion of labour’s institutional resources. At the same time, unions and other labour organisations are experimenting with new organisational strategies, new repertoires of mobilisation, and innovative ways of collecting and using data to support organising, bargaining and strategic decision-making. Yet these developments have received relatively limited attention within Labour Process Theory and the broader labour studies literature.
This stream explores the relationship between strikes, labour organisations, and the production and use of knowledge as a strategic resource. We particularly encourage contributions examining how unions and other labour organisations generate, collect and analyse data on strikes, industrial action and worker mobilisation; how such knowledge shapes organisational learning and strategy; and how labour organisations evaluate the outcomes and effectiveness of collective action. We are also interested in how labour-generated knowledge challenges official statistics and contributes to new understandings of worker resistance.
The stream welcomes empirical, theoretical and methodological contributions from across disciplines, including labour process studies, industrial relations, sociology of work, political economy, labour geography and digital labour studies. Comparative and international perspectives are particularly encouraged.
Possible themes include:
- Strikes as strategic resources within union renewal and labour organising;
- Labour-generated data, strike mapping and alternative knowledge infrastructures;
- Measuring strike outcomes, mobilisation and bargaining success;
- Organisational learning, strategic capabilities and union renewal;
- Digital tools, data infrastructures and worker organising;
- Comparative experiences of strike mobilisation across countries and sectors;
- Labour power resources, mobilisation and organisational capacity;
- Spatial dimensions of strikes, solidarity and worker coordination;
- Methodological innovations in researching industrial action and labour mobilisation.
The stream speaks directly to the conference theme, ‘Spaces of Work and Resistance’. Strikes are inherently spatial processes, unfolding across workplaces, industries, supply chains and territories. Equally, the production of labour-generated data creates new organisational spaces through which workers and unions coordinate action, exchange knowledge and develop strategic capacities across geographical boundaries. Understanding how labour organisations produce and mobilise knowledge therefore offers new insights into the spatial organisation of resistance and the contemporary dynamics of labour mobilisation.
The stream aims to foster an international network of researchers examining worker mobilisation and labour strategy from diverse methodological and theoretical perspectives. It also seeks to encourage dialogue between academics and practitioners, recognising that unions, worker centres and labour organisations are increasingly producing their own datasets, analytical tools and strategic frameworks to support organising and bargaining. This makes the stream particularly well placed to facilitate new collaborations across countries and between researchers and labour organisations. By bringing together research on strikes, labour-generated knowledge, organisational learning and labour strategy, this stream seeks to advance understanding of how workers and their organisations are developing new capacities to resist, organise and exercise power under contemporary capitalism.