Digitalization of labour and global value chains

It is necessary to investigate digitalization as a global phenomenon that responds to the new logics of capital accumulation and expansion in terms of both space and time. While Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have enabled the rise of a network-based company structure, they have also triggered new forms of division of labour and a new organization of production. Technology and labour are distributed in global value chains that are based on different phases and different contents of production and take place in specific places. At the same time, far from being a linear process, technological innovation and global production chains are constantly being reshaped by economic and political processes, which take place at different specific nodes.

Structural changes triggered by the new phase of digitalization compels us to take a critical look at the relationship between work and technological innovation. The new forms of work, new production processes, and new services introduced by digitalization and platformization need to be understood as specific social phenomena that form part of a more general process of global economic competition involving both traditional industries and new companies. Temporal acceleration and constant connectivity are two of the main principles of the new world of work shaped by digitalization, which through outsourcing and offshoring is extending its networks of production into new areas of the globe. Although most of the implications of this process are global, a focus on specific sectors is essential in order to avoid the shortcuts of deterministic and unilinear hypotheses. Indeed, contradictory dynamics are at work at different levels of this process. This is especially the case in a highly fragmented, specialized, and constantly changing international division of labour in which State, transnational institutions, traditions of industrial relations, and worker power operate.

In the current networked configuration of international production and trade, the expansion of digital technologies in terms of both space and time needs to be investigated through the analysis of its ‘global value chains’ (Gereffi et al, 2005). This involves looking at the complex phases of production that are distributed across several areas of the world. One of the main emerging labour divisions implies the formation of a centre (or ‘head’) of the chain, which governs and directs knowledge work, designs productive and managerial innovation, and the articulation of ‘arms’ that organize, execute, and perform manual work and material production.