How We Struggle: A Political Anthropology of Labour By Sian Lazar. Pluto Press, Jan 2023, 304 pp., ISBN: 9780745347516, Price £19.99, p/b
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| Author | Laura McQuade |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12764 |
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(rather than including it only in the analysis of particular sectors such as the ‘green economy’) is
plainly urgent.
Returning to the key aims of the volume, it seeks to set out a framework that accounts for
both ‘labour control and labour agency’ (p. 3) and is explicitly multi-scalar. There are instances
in which the contributions fail to live up to these aspirations — in which workers’ voices and
actions fade into the background, or in which certain processes (e.g. regulation, social reproduc-
tion) are assigned a priori to particular scales rather than being treated as ‘a matter of empirical
investigation’ (Rioux, p. 122). But arguably, these aims are achieved when taking the volume as a
whole. Overall, the volume achieves a remarkable breadth and depth that will serve scholars of
labour and political economy well. And as noted above, the volume also sets out a clear agenda
for further developing a framework that is capable of attending to the myriad aspects of a critical
political economy of labour.
ORCID
Siobhán McGrath https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7827-0874
DOI: 10.1111/b jir.12764
How We Struggle: A Political Anthropology
of Labour
By Sian Lazar. Pluto Press, Jan 2023, 304 pp., ISBN: 9780745347516,
Price £19.99, p/b
Laura McQuade
University of Lincoln
Correspondence
Laura McQuade, Lincoln International Business School, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK.
Email: lmcquade@lincoln.ac.uk
‘How We Struggle’ is a wide-ranging description of worker resistance from the traditional under-
standings of unionism in heavy industry through various job types in the modern era and other
kinds of labour that are not included in the formal sector,including patchwork, when people take
part in multiple labour processes for small amounts of money and for possibly short time lengths,
and the labour of social reproduction. Through ethnographic anthropology,the sphere of worker
relations is grounded in a wider consideration of people’s lives, thereby reducing the view that
work/life is a dichotomy of two contrasting entities that should be considered separately. Lazar
highlights that the recent push to emphasize work/life balance excuses employers of the need
to provide a community in their workplaces through work-related welfare like company-owned
holiday homes (p. 32) because that is life and is a different thing to work.
Lazar aims to answer questions including: how should we think about labour agency in a post-
Fordist world? How do people around the world and across workplaces try to improve their life
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