Call for papers: Work in the Global Economy
Themed Issue: Labour geographies of global production networks
Guest Editor: Oliver Pye, University of Bonn, Germany
Abstract deadline 30 April 2025, Submission deadline 15 September 2025
https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.c ... erview.xml
This themed issue aims to explore Global Production Networks (GPN) from a Labour Geography perspective. It starts from the observation that much of contemporary production – and therefore also work and labour processes – are organised in transnational commodity chains. The concept of GPN was developed from a critique of the Global Value Chain approach as being too narrowly focused on transactions between firms, and the implicit managerial perspective that this entailed.GPN scholarship insists on the social and political ‘horizontal’ embeddedness of ‘vertical’ production processes. In recent years, an increasing number of scholars have responded to calls to bring labour agency into the analysis of GPNs. From this perspective,GPNs link different labour regimes that have specific histories and spatialities and consist of networked groups of ‘embodied labour” with their own subjectivities and struggles.
From a Labour Geography perspective, on a very basic level, workers, not (only) capital, produce GPNs. Rather than mapping lead firms, suppliers, logistical hubs etc., as a managerial approach would, labour geographers view GPNs as geographically differentiated sets of linked antagonistic relations between labour and capital. Spatial restructuring is a terrain of class struggle, connected to geographically different rates of exploitation. Labour does not only respond to capital’s spatial strategies, capital has to react to successful labour organising and political regulation in particular regions of the world. Just as labour regimes based on coercion and consent can be seen as a response by capital to workers’ reluctance to perform as wage slaves, spatial strategies by capital (relocating, outsourcing, the commodification of new natural resources) are in part a response to spatial agency and organising by workers and their organisations.
One goal of the themed issue is to think through the spatial and geographical essence of GPNs – conceptually, empirically and politically – as groups of workers in specific places who are linked to each other through circuits of production, distribution and circulation. Factories, mines, plantations, offices, warehouses, supermarkets, hospitals, banks etc. are not only ‘fixed capital’ which is embedded for longer periods in specific places, but also workplaces made up of real people selling their labour power. The creation and constant transformation of any GPN is thus a history of struggles in these places. Similarly, the infrastructures connecting these places are not (only) roads, railways, ports, tankers etc. Doing the connecting are truck drivers, train drivers, dockers, sailors and other groups of workers. Understanding GPNs as places linked by networks in this way also applies to financial networks, which from a Labour Geography perspective are not ‘money’ but bank employees concentrated in geographical places who are in an antagonistic relation to hedge fund managers, investors, speculators etc. Another relevant spatial category is territoriality, as most GPNs are involved in resource extraction which expands into new landscapes, transforming the livelihoods of those living there and creating new groups of proletarians in the process. And GPNs combine different scales, from the scale of the body to the national scale, the latter which, via the state, is instrumental in regulating capital but also in creating and cementing new spatial inequalities at the global scale.
Recent advances in Labour Geography have begun to include feminist and ecological perspectives by systematically integrating processes of social reproduction into the analysis of spatial agency of workers and by emphasizing the ecological materiality of labour processes. This echoes the aspiration of the GPN approach which wishes to embed production sites within the environmental conditions of each particular place and within the ‘horizontal’ networks organising reproduction processes. Each node of a GPN consists of workers who have been ‘re/produced’ by women in a different space from where they end up working. This seems obvious but supply chain analysis does not usually include the side of social reproduction that makes GPNs possible. Thinking geographically about this would entail looking at how and where spaces of production and reproduction are linked. In this vein, a GPN should be analysed as Global Re/Production Networks (GRPNs). Similarly, the extraction, appropriation and metabolism of non-human-nature needs to be systematically integrated in the analysis.
This themed issue seeks to bring together conceptual papers that address GPN research in this way. Our view is that this is not an end in itself, but that a spatially informed analysis that starts to tell the history of GPNs as one of interlinked struggles by workers is a prerequisite for developing transnational organising strategies. In this way, we hope this issue contributes to a new labour transnationalism. There is a general consensus that the globalisation of production has tended to weaken and fragment the global labour movement. At the same time, the reorganisation of production in supply chains creates new vulnerabilities for capital and structural opportunities for labour. With Global labour unions such as IndustriALL,Global Framework Agreements, Transnational Union Networks, and new kinds of transnational campaigning, labour has started to respond to the challenges and new possibilities that GPNs offer. A systematic, spatial analysis of GPNs from a Labour Geography perspective could be a tool to develop more explicitly transnational organising strategies in the future.
Our overarching question is what Labour Geography can contribute to the analysis of Global Production Networks. We are particularly interested in the following questions:
•How can the multi-scalarity of GPNs be analysed as interlinked groups of workers in antagonistic relationship to capital?
•Is it possible to tell the story of GPNs as a history of struggles of spatially interlinked workers?
•How can we systematically integrate social reproduction and non-human nature into our analysis of GPNs?
•How are GPNs being restructured, spatially, digitally and what consequences does this have on different groups of workers and their struggles.
•How can a spatially informed analysis of GPNs be used to develop new, transnational organising strategies?
Please submit relevant abstracts to oliver.pye@uni-bonn.de by the 30th April. Draft articles are expected by the 15th of September 2025. Publication of the themed issue is planned for September 2026.
Please follow the WGE author instructions: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.c ... or-authors
Sharon Harris PhD, Journals Development Editor
Bristol University Press and Policy Press, 1-9 Old Park Hill, Bristol BS2 8BB, UK
sharon.harris@bristol.ac.uk
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5873-3563
www.linkedin.com/in/sharon-harris-471b212a9
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