Recent years have witnessed an extraordinary expansion of research on precarious work, migration, platform labour, labour geography, informal work and new forms of worker mobilisation. Although these literatures have significantly advanced our understanding of contemporary capitalism, they have often developed as relatively separate conversations. This stream builds directly on the debates initiated by the recent Work, Employment and Society Special Issue The Organisation and Mobilisation of the ‘Unusual Suspects’: Worker Agency, Alternative Organising and Spatial Dynamics under Contemporary Capitalism. Rather than treating migrant, precarious, outsourced, informal and platform workers as exceptional cases and/or difficult-to-organise groups, the Special Issue argues that these "unusual suspects" provide a privileged lens through which to understand the broader restructuring of labour, employment and collective action under contemporary capitalism.
The objective of this stream is not simply to continue that conversation, but to broaden it by bringing together scholars working across labour process theory, industrial relations, labour geography, political economy, feminist labour studies, migration studies and organisation studies. In particular, we seek to encourage a more systematic dialogue between research conducted in the Global North and the Global South. While many organisational innovations associated with precarious workers have recently received increasing attention in Europe and North America, similar forms of labour mobilisation have long characterised labour politics across Latin America, Africa and Asia. Rather than viewing these as separate empirical worlds, the stream explores how experiences across different regions can speak to one another and contribute to a more genuinely global understanding of labour mobilisation.
The stream starts from a simple proposition: the transformations affecting work today require us to rethink labour agency, organisation and mobilisation across the world together. Capital has proven relentlessly inventive in devising new material and discursive forms of control, fragmentation and domination. The forms of organisation available to subaltern workers, by contrast, too often remain those bequeathed by an earlier conjuncture, and are increasingly unequal to the stakes. The premise of this stream is that the historical dilemmas now confronting workers cannot be met without a serious reformulation of how collective action itself is conceived. Accordingly, the stream invites contributions that engage with four interconnected themes.
First, how should labour process scholars conceptualise worker agency under increasingly fragmented and unequal labour regimes? Rather than reducing agency to either resistance or consent, we welcome contributions exploring its multifaceted contradictory, negotiated, situated and sometimes contradictory character. Second, how are organisational forms changing? We encourage papers examining conventional unions, independent unions, worker centres, grassroots organisations,
migrant associations, feminist organisations, digital communities and other hybrid organisational forms. Rather than framing these as competing models, we are
interested in how different organisational infrastructures interact, complement and transform one another. Third, how do space and scale shape labour mobilisation? We particularly welcome research examining how workplaces, logistics systems, neighbourhoods, migrationroutes, homes and digital infrastructures actively produce new possibilities, and new limits, for worker organising. Finally, what can the experiences of the "unusual suspects" contribute to labour process theory itself? We encourage papers that place migrant workers, informal workers, outsourced workers, care workers, logistics workers, platform workers, racialised workers and other historically marginalised groups at the centre oftheoretical debates, asking what their experiences reveal about wider transformations of capitalism rather than treating them as peripheral empirical cases.
A distinctive ambition of the stream is therefore to encourage dialogue across national contexts and theoretical traditions. We particularly welcome comparative papers,
North–South dialogues and contributions that explore how concepts developed in one context may illuminate labour struggles in another. The stream welcomes conceptual, empirical and comparative papers using qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods.
Possible themes include:
- Labour agency under precarious capitalism
- Hybrid forms of labour organisation
- Unions and alternative organising
- Migrant labour and collective action
- Labour geography and spatial agency
- Platform labour and algorithmic management
- Community organising and social reproduction
- Logistics and labour conflict
- Intersectionality and labour politics
- Informal work and worker mobilisation
- Global North–Global South comparisons
- Transnational labour organising
- New research agendas for labour process theory
The proposed stream directly responds to ILPC's aim of promoting new and under-explored debates capable of broadening the conference community. Building on the theoretical agenda developed in the recent Work, Employment and Society Special Issue, the stream seeks to move beyond fragmented analyses of precarious workers’ resistance and instead develop a more integrated understanding of labour agency, organisation and mobilisation under contemporary capitalism. It also aims to strengthen dialogue between scholars working in different geographical contexts, particularly across the Global North and Global South. We hope the stream will provide an inclusive space for established and early-career researchers to engage in comparative and interdisciplinary conversations and to contribute to an emerging international research agenda on the changing nature of labour mobilisation.