The globalisation of world trade in combination with the use of information and communications technologies is bringing about a new international division of labour, not just in manufacturing industries, as in the past, but also in work involving the processing of information.
Organisational restructuring shatters the unity of the traditional workplace, both contractually and spatially, dispersing work across the globe in ever-more attenuated value chains.
A new ‘cybertariat’ is in the making, sharing common labour processes, but working in remote offices and call centres which may be continents apart and occupying very different cultural and economic places in local economies.
The implications of this are far-reaching, both for policy and for scholarship. The dynamics of this new global division of labour cannot be captured adequately within the framework of any single academic discipline. On the contrary, they can only be understood in the light of a combination of insights from fields including political economy, the sociology of work, organisational theory, economic geography, development studies, industrial relations, comparative social policy, communications studies, technology policy and gender studies.
This journal aims to bring together insights from all these fields to create a single authoritative source of information on the new global division of labour, combining theoretical analysis with the results of empirical research in a way that is accessible both to the research community and to policy makers. Read more about our aims.
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NOW INDEXED BY SCOPUS
We are proud to have been positively evaluated for inclusion by the Content Selection and Advisory Board of SCOPUS, who say about Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation:
‘The papers, while substantively and theoretically diverse, do hew closely to the theme of work in the global economy. All of them were well-done, interesting, well worth reading, and judging from the citation profile, read and cited by other scholars with some frequency.’
Work organisation, labour & globalisation 