Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Everyday IPE: revealing everyday forms of change in the world economy
- Part I Regimes as cultural weapons of the weak
- 2 The agency of labour in global change: reimagining the spaces and scales of trade union praxis within a global economy
- 3 The agency of peripheral actors: small state tax havens and international regimes as weapons of the weak
- 4 Southern sites of female agency: informal regimes and female migrant labour resistance in East and Southeast Asia
- Part II Global economic change from below
- Part III Bringing Eastern agents in
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - The agency of labour in global change: reimagining the spaces and scales of trade union praxis within a global economy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Everyday IPE: revealing everyday forms of change in the world economy
- Part I Regimes as cultural weapons of the weak
- 2 The agency of labour in global change: reimagining the spaces and scales of trade union praxis within a global economy
- 3 The agency of peripheral actors: small state tax havens and international regimes as weapons of the weak
- 4 Southern sites of female agency: informal regimes and female migrant labour resistance in East and Southeast Asia
- Part II Global economic change from below
- Part III Bringing Eastern agents in
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In this chapter I explore how we might rethink labour's agency in the global economy. Specifically, I consider how three features of theorising about the nature of global capitalism have intersected to shape the way in which regulatory international political economy (RIPE) literature has historically considered workers and their organisations. The first feature of much RIPE literature is its capital-centric nature, which has presented a theoretical approach in which capital is viewed implicitly as the agent of global economic change, while labour is seen largely as little more than a passive victim of capitalist economic forces. The second feature is that the central focus of RIPE has been the interactions within the international arena of nation-states, to the general exclusion of other social actors such as labour organisations. The third is that RIPE has commonly theorised the geographical scales at which social life is typically seen to exist – scales such as ‘the local’, ‘the regional’, ‘the national’ and ‘the global’ – in areal terms, that is to say as little more than spatial ‘containers’ of social life. In such a view, social actors like unions are viewed as constituted ontologically within the confines of these various spatial units (e.g., within localities, regions, nation-states, or the global economy), rather than as being constituted, say, along a continuum of spatial scales (what I mean by this distinction will become clearer below).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Everyday Politics of the World Economy , pp. 27 - 44Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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