Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper suggests that there has been far more change in French labour market policy since the early 1980s than is commonly acknowledged. It suggests that in a new economic and ideational environment the reproduction of the Bismarckian institutions that frame French labour market policy has itself been a vector of gradual but decisive change in the latter’s goals and logic. The policies started by compensatory measures in the interests in labour shedding. However, these ‘good old recipes’ soon provoked untenable cost pressures, eventually resulting in a recalibration of rights to benefit payments. This recalibration was made possible by the introduction of two new kinds of policy instrument in the French labour market policy context, described in section: a minimum income social assistance benefit, and special derogatory employment contracts for particular groups among the unemployed. These instruments introduced new policy logics that have subsequently come to increasingly dominate the policy sector.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper presents an institutional approach to understanding why labour rights protections succeed or fail. It argues that compliance theory from international law is the best tool to guide institutional reform of labour protections. Illustrations are drawn based on forced labour in Central America and the Dominican Republic.

Borrowing from comparative political economy, the paper examines labour institutions, the so-called ‘rules of the game’ comprised of rules, norms and actual behaviours. Using this institutional framework, it is possible to identify combinations of problems in labour rights protection. For example, norms may exist that contradict written rules. Alternatively, a written rule may contradict its normative goal and thereby undermine it. Of course, even well written rules may not be effectively enforced. Additionally, formal labour rights institutions interact with informal institutions such as corruption or blacklisting and, in the face of weak formal institutions, they may prevail in structuring social behaviour. Finally, formal institutions beyond the labour sphere, such as immigration institutions, also impact on labour protections.

Based on the understanding that institutions reinforce and contribute to labour rights violations, the paper presents an approach to labour rights compliance founded on Harold Koh’s compliance theory from international law. Compliance theory is well suited to institutional approaches because it, like institution theory, treats norms, rules and behaviours as critical components in achieving change and compliance. The paper contends that, to be successful, interventions must be integrated, multiple and mutually reinforcing, creating circumstances where actors adopt norm-based behaviours because they have been internalized.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: During the last fifteen years European Union member states implemented extensive reforms in their social and labour market policies. The paper demonstrates how these reforms aimed at, and resulted in, the intensification of commodification of European labour and sets to explore the governance of this process, theoretically and empirically. The first part of the paper outlines the conceptual framework by theoretically exploring the two key concepts: recommodification and governance. The paper argues that previous conceptualizations of recommodification were limited as they concentrated on policies for the unemployed and, thus, reproduced the artificial division between economy and society. An alternative, power-theoretical perspective is proposed, where both the (labour) market and the policies that regulate labour in and out of it, are viewed as instituted processes - always-embedded in society but under different modes of embedding - governed by states and, gradually, by supranational entities like the EU. It is argued that governing this continuous ?constitution? of the (labour) market entails the governance of the power dynamic between labour and capital, a dynamic that unfolds in three interlinked dimensions: discursive, structural/institutional and relational. Recommodification is, thus, conceived as a process of reification whereby labour is gradually transformed from a socio-historical subject - that was originally socio-politically 'recognised' by both state and capital as a social agent- to an 'economic' object, re-regulated to 'flexibly' adapt to the capriciousness of the market. Further, the concept of governance is redefined as a form of political regulation of social subjects that involves both the 'steering' of the subjects' behavioural practices towards particular social and politico-economic goals (?formal? policy) and a 'mode of doing policy', i.e. the organisational arrangements and procedures for policy delivery (operational policy). Empirically, the paper identifies relevant trends which indicate that during the last decade the commodification of European Labour intensified, though with considerable degree of variation between the EU countries. On the basis of these findings the paper ends with a discussion of the characteristics of the governance of labour's recommodification in the EU, primarily via the European Employment Strategy and the use of the Open Method of Co-ordination, as well as other recent policy initiatives (Bolkenstein directive) aiming to further disembed labour markets.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper argues that reconceptualising production within the relations of global development is an important step in overcoming what the editors of this volume term ‘anachronistic approaches’ in contemporary development theory. Notwithstanding the centrality of production within global capitalism, its status within critical development studies is at low ebb. This is partly a consequence of the mainstream ascendancy of neoclassical economics and its methodological autism, but also because the alternative approaches that development theory currently draws upon – institutional economics and global commodity chains – offer too narrow a perspective to fill the void. One of the weaknesses of these perspectives is the way in which labour – both as a social practice and as a productive potential embodied in human bodies – is ignored. This neglect is problematic because it is impossible to adequately conceptualise questions of identity, power, (re)distribution and socio-economic change without placing labour and the process of production – in both its material and social elements – at the forefront of critical development theory. To overcome this labour blindness, the paper argues that we should focus upon the interplay between locally embedded production relations and the abstraction of these economic activities in the form of market price and inter-firm competition. The dynamic relationship between these two processes – embedding and abstraction – provides a unifying conceptual basis on which we can examine how workers and their communities both produce and contest social reproduction across different geographic locales and social contexts.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Given the recent global explosion of participation in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), the video game industry has struggled to address the challenges presented by the concurrent escalation of gray markets in virtual goods and currency. One dimension of this challenge is the "outsourcing" of labour for the production of gray market goods, increasingly provided by vulnerable youth in impoverished areas of the world. Although terminals in Shanghai internet cafes may not fit traditional visions of exploitative labor conditions, and the creation of weaponry, clothing, and skill sets for the avatars of bourgeois players certainly has dimensions of craftsmanship, the work is often time-consuming, physically arduous, and mind-numbingly repetitive. The fact that this work is defined by those who contract for it and those who perform it as play further obscures its place in a global networked hierarchy in which relations between leisure and labor are reconfigured.