Grounding globalization: labour in the age of insecurity: Webster, E., Lambert, R. and Bezuidenhout, A.

Abstract

The authors of this latest addition to the literature on labour and globalisation aim to bring the debate back down to the ground. Webster, Lambert and Bezuidenhout draw inspiration from a quote taken from Michael Burawoy's manifesto For a Sociological Marxism. The ethnographic archaeologist, claims Burawoy (2003: 251), is one ‘who seeks out local experiments, new institutional forms, real utopias if you wish, who places them in their context, translates them into a common language and links them on to another across the globe’. By using three case studies from three very different countries—South Korea, Australia and South Africa—the book represents a search for institutional forms and local experiments found in real worker struggles around the world. While these workers show admirable guts and creativity, the conditions facing their mobilisation initiatives are less than ideal. The book starts out by depicting workers’ experiences of the ‘manufactured insecurity’ stemming from years of economic restructuring and corporate takeovers. Insecurity is omnipresent in the world of work, but takes on quite different expressions in the three case countries. The authors link these experiences together by referring to Karl Polanyi's notion of the self-regulated market, constantly on the lookout for new subjects to commodify: human beings, their labour and their land. While Polanyi's ideas have been subject to intense debate over the years, the introductory chapter on ‘the Polanyi problem’ contains interesting arguments about the counter mobilisation against the Great Transformation. In particular, the authors provide reflections around the different kinds of power that workers might possess—ideas which are pertinent to ongoing debates about the agency of labour.