Rethinking labour markets: A critical-realist-socioeconomic perspective

Abstract

There are currently two main accounts of labour markets: the mainstream labour market (MLM) account, which avoids serious analysis of social structures; and a rather unsystematic SOCIOECONOMIC account, which recognises that labour markets are embedded in social structures, but remains ambiguous vis-à-vis the nature of this embedding. Augmenting the latter with a critical-realist approach serves to reduce that ambiguity, and allows us to break completely with the idea that there are phenomena called ‘labour markets' that are embedded in other phenomena called ‘social structures'— and to move, instead, towards the realisation that labour markets just are, or are exhausted by, the very social structures that constitute them.