Call for Papers

From capitalism’s historical origins, firms have always creatively relied on and leveraged divisions within the workforce, such as gender, age, race, disability and nationality, to extract value from labour along different rates of exploitation and modalities of dispossession. In organization studies, analyses of work and their relation to differences and inequalities have often been approached from two broad, complementary perspectives. A first group of studies has investigated how differences operate as principles of organizing the labour process within organizations, either excluding or unequally including workers. These studies investigate how certain combinations of organizational policies, structures, technologies, cultures and affective spheres erect boundaries that reproduce unequal regimes, in which certain groups thrive and others are subjected to intensified forms of control, oppression and hyper-exploitation (e.g., Piro & Sacchetto, 2021; Zanoni & Miszczynski, 2023).
 
A second tradition of scholarship has rather taken specific marginalized socio-demographic groups, such as migrants, women, LGBTQI+ workers, disabled workers, etc. as the unit of analysis, documenting their experiences, discrimination, specific professional paths and outcomes, needs, affects, as well as their modalities of resistance and mobilization (e.g., Andrijasevic et al., 2019).
 
While the scholarship in both traditions takes the broader productive, institutional and technological context seriously, analyses remain wedded to explaining, respectively, the organization as the place and the actor where difference and inequality are produced, and the specific position and embodied experience of the marginalized socio-demographic group under examination.
 
This sub-theme provides a forum for scholarship that investigates the partitioning and re-assemblage of labour and the population as a whole, both in paid work and social reproductive work, by foregrounding the key role of various types of infrastructures – technological, social, legal, institutional, political, geographical – in co-shaping such forms of differentiation. Infrastructures are

“built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space. As physical forms they shape the nature of a network, the speed and direction of its movement, its temporalities, and its vulnerability to breakdown. They comprise the architecture for circulation, literally providing the undergirding of modern societies, and they generate the ambient environment of everyday life” (Larkin, 2013: 327).

The sub-theme takes stock of what has come to be known as the ‘infrastructural turn’ in the social sciences (Stokes & De Coss-Corzo, 2023), which draws attention to the social and material structures through which (in)security and vulnerability are mediated and unequally distributed (Berlant, 2016; Cowen, 2017; Strauss, 2019) through borders that racialize, gender, disable, etc. The infrastructural turn addresses the growing awareness of the key role of shifting divisions within the population not only in the historical dispossessions at the origins of capitalism, but also in on-going ones and in processes of differential exploitation (Issar, 2021; Melamed, 2015). They are inherent in processes of capitalist accumulation, located both in the market economy and in the value-bearing processes of social reproduction in the household, communities and what is left of welfare institutions (Bhattacharya, 2017; Zanoni, 2023). Infrastructures, it has been argued, are key to the production, maintenance and mobilization of these multiple partitions and the constitution of re-assemblages.
 
Lazzarato understands this dynamic process as employers’

“logic [. . .] of locating, constructing and consolidating a multiplicity of ‘normalities’. The goal of the management of these ‘normalities’ does not seek conformity to one model, but to maintain them in a state of ‘equal inequality’, of competition, to encourage differentials and perpetuate a ‘mobilizing’ uncertainty. Inclusion and exclusion, the normal and the abnormal, do not determine a ‘great division’; they are instead variables of governmental action that tends, anyway, to multiply cases, situations or statuses. Government acts less through a divide than through the modulation of divisions and of differences” (Lazzarato, 2009: 119).

This modulation crucially rests, we argue, on infrastructures that constitute architectures for the circulation of value-bearing bodies to occur in specific, differentiated ways that unequally ‘distribute’ vulnerability. These infrastructures are often taken for granted, but become visible when they break down, such as for instance during the pandemic, and global flows of people and commodities are disrupted, revealing our mutual dependencies (Zanoni, 2020). Or they become visible when sectors, such as such as transportation, food delivery, care and household services, hospitality, etc., are reorganized as platforms to capture new workers, while redefining work statutes and work and employment conditions (van Doorn, 2017; Zanoni, 2023; Zanoni & Pitts, 2023). Infrastructures can, however, also be made visible by our own research approach, focusing for instance on how cross-border migration and mobility are facilitated by a variety of actors and their ‘logistics’ (Alberti & Sacchetto 2024), rather than assuming they are merely following top down institutional processes (Lin et al., 2017; Miszczynski, 2020).
 
Under this sub-theme we would like to gather contributions that approach the fragmentation of labour and the production of difference and inequality as continuous processes enabled by dynamic material, institutional, cultural and digital infrastructures of work and social reproduction. Rather than starting from the purview of the organization or specific groups of workers to understand contemporary transformations of work, the logics of accumulation and worker subjectivities, we welcome perspectives that consider how these infrastructures of work mediate bottom up everyday practices and wider institutional, socio-economic processes, and with what effects.
 
We welcome contributions addressing the following aspects of infrastructures of work and social reproduction or analogous ones. The list is not intended to be exhaustive:

• Migration intermediaries – formal and informal – as transnational infrastructure

• The composition of labour between digital and labour market infrastructures

• Infrastructures for the capture of labour from the Global South and their relation with multiple, related crises of social reproduction

• The role of legal infrastructures and their use by actors in the mobility of labour

• Social infrastructures facilitating transnational labour and social reproduction regimes and their relation to the state and non-state actors

• Familial infrastructures biologically and socially reproducing workers

• Sabotage of infrastructure

• Conflicts surrounding physical infrastructures and the circulation of the population

• (the fantasy of) ‘Seamless’ logistics and ‘corridors’ as essential infrastructure in the global economy

• The role of the local state in creating and governing infrastructures of labour

• Platforms as techno-legal infrastructures re-assembling labour and producing surplus population

• Policing infrastructures as dispossession regimes

• The role of technological infrastructures such as warehouse management systems and surveillance systems in enforcing competition between workers

• Digital infrastructures that allow labour to be provided at a distance and the tensions around social reproduction (remote work, gig work)

• Infrastructures of informality

• Equality policy making as infrastructure curation

• Mobility and immobility infrastructures that allow for the temporary or longer-term movement of workers within differential regimes of entitlements

• Creating and sustaining alternative infrastructures for social reproduction (e.g., new community forms, cooperatives, commons…)

• The role of (alliances of diverse) institutional actors (trade unions, social movements, local state, parties…) in disrupting and reappropriating infrastructures that divide labour

• (innovative) Methodologies to empirically investigate the changing infrastructures of work and social reproduction

• (conflicts in) The governance of infrastructures of work and social reproduction (at the local, national, supranational, transnational scale).

References

• Alberti, G., & Sacchetto, D. (2024) The politics of migrant labour: Exit, voice and social reproduction. Bristol University Press.

• Andrijasevic, Rutvica, Rhodes, Carl, & Yu, Kyoung-Hee (2019) Foreign workers: On the other side of gendered, racial, political and ethical borders. Organization, 26, 313–320.
• Berlant, L. (2016) The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34(3), 393-419.
• Bhattacharya, T. (Ed.). (2017). Social reproduction theory: Remapping class, recentering oppression. London: Pluto Press.
• Cowen, D. (2017). Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3067-infrastructures-of-empire-and-resistance
• Issar, S. (2021) Listening to Black Lives Matter: Racial Capitalism and the Critique of Neoliberalism. Contemporary Political Theory, 20, 48–71.
• Larkin, B. (2013) The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42(1), 327-343.
• Lazzarato, M. (2009). Neoliberalism in action inequality, insecurity and the reconstitution of the social. Theory, Culture & Society, 26, 109–133.
• Lin, W., Lindquist, J., Xiang, B., & Yeoh, B. S. (2017). Migration infrastructures and the production of migrant mobilities. Mobilities, 12(2), 167-174.
• Melamed, J. (2015) Racial capitalism. Critical Ethnic Studies, 1(1), 76–85.
• Miszczynski, M. (2020). Mutual dependency: Offshored labour and family organisation in post-socialist Romania. Organization, 27(5), 641-659.
• Piro, V. & Sacchetto, D. (2021) Subcontracted racial capitalism: the interrelationship of race and production in meat processing plants. Work in the Global Economy, 1(1-2), 33–53.
• Stokes, K., & De Coss-Corzo, A. (2023) Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography. Progress in Human Geography, 47(3), 427-446.
• Strauss, K. (2019) Labour geography III: Precarity, racial capitalisms and infrastructure. Progress in Human Geography, 44(6), 1212-1224.
• van Doorn, N. (2017) Platform labor: On the gendered and racialized exploitation of low-income service work in the ‘on-demand’ economy. Information Communication & Society, 20(6), 898–914.
• Zanoni, P. (2020) Whither Critical Management and Organization Studies? For a performative critique of capitalist flows in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Management Studies. DOI: 10.1111/joms.12655
• Zanoni, P. (2023) Social reproduction theory as lens and method: Multiplying struggles for equality beyond the workplace. In S. Katila, E. Bell and S. Meriläinen (Eds.) Handbook of Feminist Methodologies in Management and Organization Studies. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp 123-139.
• Zanoni, P. & Miszczynski, M. (2023) Post-diversity, precarious work for all: Un-bordering categories of socio-demographic difference in the Amazon warehouse. Organization Studies. DOI: 10.1177/01708406231191336
• Zanoni, P. & Pitts, H. F. (2022) Inclusion through the platform economy? The ‘diverse’ crowd as relative surplus populations and the pauperization of labour. In: I. Ness (Ed.) Routledge Handbook of the Gig Economy. London: Routledge, pp. 33-45.
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