Labour Regimes and Global Production By Elena Baglioni, Liam Campling, Neil M. Coe and Adrian Smith. Agenda Publishing, UK/USA, 2023, 352 pp., ISBN: 9781788216791, Price £29.99, p/b.
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| Author | Siobhán McGrath |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12762 |
Received: 6 July 2023 Accepted: 7 July 2023
DOI: 10.1111/b jir.12762
BOOK REVIEWS
Labour Regimes and Global Production
By Elena Baglioni, Liam Campling, Neil M. Coe and Adrian Smith. Agenda Publishing,
UK/USA, 2023, 352 pp., ISBN: 9781788216791,
Price £29.99, p/b.
Siobhán McGrath
Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, Worcester,Massachusetts, USA
Correspondence
Siobhán McGrath, Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, Jefferson Academic Center, Room 220, 950 Main
Street, Worcester,Massachusetts, 01601, USA.
Email: SiMcGrath@clarku.edu
The recent renewal and reformulation of a ‘labour regimes’ framework is signalled by the publi-
cation of Labour Regimes and Global Production, edited by Elena Baglioni, Liam Campling, Neil
M. Coe and Adrian Smith. The aim of developing such a framework is to better understand ‘the
combination of social relations and institutions that bind capital and labour in a form of antag-
onistic relative stability in particular times and places (p. 1)’. The volume will clearly appeal to
scholars (and students) of labour from a number of disciplines, and more widely to those working
from political economy perspectives with an interest in labour. Contributions come froma num-
ber of disciplines, including geography, development studies and business/management. While
the book’s geography is inevitably uneven, there is considerable (and productive) variety in the
places which come into view — from factories, warehouses and fields to dormitories and house-
holds in both the Global North and the Global South. The book demonstrates a careful balance
between consolidating the framework on the one hand, while on the other hand noting differences
in perspective, incipient debates and areas for further development.
The attempt to sketch out a framework that puts not only labour as a category but workers as
agential actors at the centre is certainly ambitious. The editors depict labour regimes as historically
formed, as contested, and as produced at the intersections of ‘local social relations’, the inter-firm
dynamics of global production networks, and ‘the gendered and racialized politics of social repro-
duction’ (p. 3) — often drawing on notions of articulation and disarticulation in orderto manage
such contingency and complexity. There is frequent reference to the literature on Global Com-
modity Chains, Global Value Chains and Global Productions — implying, perhaps, that in spite
valuable work on labour, this body of literature is inevitably ‘capital-centric’. The labour regimes
framework sets out to get beyond these limits — to situate the micro-politics of workplaces and
labour relations within wider political economic structures. This avoids either treating the for-
mer in isolation or the latter as overly determinant. The emerging framework, therefore, seeks to
attend to both ‘labour control and labour agency’ (p. 3), and it is explicitly multi-scalar.
Following the introduction, the book proceeds in three sections. The first section on
‘antecedents’ grounds the project within a number of theoretical strands. While the terminology
Br J Ind Relat. 2023;61:975–992. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 975wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/bjir
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