Abstract
Examinations of the effects of globally distributed work and the creation of new international divisions of labour often focus on quantifiable or structural issues such as challenges to the employment relationship, formal working conditions, contracts, working time, or wage regulation. However, the content of work, however, may also be affected by the restructuring of value chains; but this is difficult to track and to regulate, and may have both objective and subjective dimensions. This paper addresses these issues, drawing on 58 case studies of four different economic sectors in 13 European countries as well an international study on multinational strategies of outsourcing and offshoring to India and China. It analyses the processes leading to segmentation and fragmentation and looks at how employees' consent is obtained for these changes and explanations for the extent to which workers accept the changes brought about by value chain restructuring or find ways to resist them.
Highlights
Across an ever-growing variety of production and service sectors, we are observing a continuing growth in globally-distributed work and the creation of new international divisions of labour
Defined by Hopkins & Wallerstein (1986:159, in Gereffi & Korzeniewicz, 1994) as, ‘a network of labour and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity’, a global commodity chain (GCC) consists of sets of inter-organisational networks clustered around one commodity or product’ (Gereffi & Korzeniewicz, 1994:2)
The commodity chain approach tried to capture the interrelationships between production, Bridges and barriers: globalisation and the mobility of work and workers distribution, and consumption and include how these are shaped by social relations
Summary
Across an ever-growing variety of production and service sectors, we are observing a continuing growth in globally-distributed work and the creation of new international divisions of labour. There are a number of methods that have been employed to map and analyse developments behind this ‘compression of time and space’ (Harvey, 1989) These include tracing the sequential transformation of goods and services, examining horizontal network structures, and identifying the types of governance and control processes across the chain. The concept of systemic rationalisation (Sauer et al, 1992; Altmann & Deiß, 1998) offered an early critique of such strategies This literature pointed out that rationalisation had previously been directed toward particular work processes or subprocesses: effects were primarily sought in the area of processing costs, especially with respect to (direct) personnel costs. Later did tasks involving what is often referred to as ‘knowledge work’ become a target for restructuring processes It was unclear whether the same logic applied to optimising cost structures or whether systemic rationalisation could apply to ‘knowledge work’
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