Abstract submissions will open in due course. Submitted abstracts must be 500 words excluding references. The deadline for submission is October 31st 2025. Details on special streams can be found below.
Special Stream 1.1: The Algorithmic Turn: AI, Professional Labour, and the Reconfiguration of Work
Convenors: Dr Caroline Barrett, University of York (Caroline.barrett@york.ac.uk) Dr François Schoenberger, University of Oxford (Francois.schoenberger@bsg.ox.ac.uk) Prof Daniel Muzio, University of York (Daniel.muzio@york.ac.uk)
This stream critically examines the "algorithmic turn" in professional labour, exploring how Artificial Intelligence (AI) fundamentally reshapes expert work. This shift foregrounds core Labour Process Theory questions on control, value creation, worker agency, and occupational structure evolution under technological and capitalist pressures. Driven by AI, the 4th industrial revolution uniquely impacts professions, posing an existential threat to some through deskilling and job destruction, while others see opportunities for augmentation, improved services, and productivity. Regardless, professions and organizations are deeply transforming, affecting their size, structure, skills, practices, identities, and public access to services. Historically, professionalism thrived on occupational closure and controlled expertise. AI now challenges this by making knowledge infinitely accessible, questioning "peak professionalism" and potentially shifting power/rewards to AI solution owners. New AI-focused professions may also emerge. Within professions, AI disrupts stable structures, fostering new entrants and business models. Algorithmic management extends oversight, reconfiguring professional autonomy. AI profoundly impacts individual professionals, demanding new skills (digital literacy, ethical reasoning) and raising critical questions on ethics, accountability, and future training. Ultimately, this stream leverages Labour Process Theory to understand not just AI's impacts, but how and why. We invite contributions exploring how professionals resist, adapt, or shape these developments, and how new configurations of discretion, authority, expertise, value, and control emerge across hierarchies.
Key Questions & Thematic Areas: We welcome papers that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:
- The Algorithmic Threat & Promise: How AI displaces or enhances professional work; the implications of AI-driven knowledge accessibility for occupational closure; the erosion or evolution of professions as exclusive knowledge domains.
- Transformations within Professional Organisations: New business models challenging traditional regulation; AI's impact on hierarchies, leverage ratios, and power dynamics; the role of legacy institutions in mediating change; new forms of organizational experimentation.
- The Individual Professional in an AI Era: Shifting lived experiences, identities, and agency; emerging essential skills (digital literacy, ethical reasoning); new ethical challenges; adaptation of professional training; forms of resistance or compliance to algorithmic oversight.
- Envisioning Future Professionalisms: The rise or decline of specific occupations due to AI; potential resurgence of manual/craft labour; how professionals are shaping the future of their fields; emerging alternative models of professionalism.
Special Stream 1.2: Inequalities and the Labour Process
As more mothers enter and remain in the labour market, and more fathers engage in unpaid care work after becoming parents, there is a growing need to understand the diversity of career and family life courses. These trajectories have become increasingly heterogeneous, with work and family life deeply interconnected, having profound implications for parents’ ability to reconcile work and family, and for broader outcomes related to family and child wellbeing.
Previous research and policy debates have primarily focused on the ways in which careers—the productive sphere—are disrupted by family responsibilities, particularly childbirth and childrearing—the reproductive sphere. Historically, women have disproportionately shouldered the burden of unpaid care and domestic labour, which has had more severe consequences for their career progression compared to men. This has been referred to as the 'motherhood penalty', which manifests in lower pay, reduced wellbeing and slower career progression. In contrast, research has pointed to a ‘fatherhood premium’ with studies suggesting a positive relationship between men’s paid work and their overall well-being. While this evidence suggests gender inequalities at the intersection of family formation and career development, there is more nuance to this given the variations in career and family life course cross-nationally as well as according to gender and sexual orientation .
Existing research on careers often relies on static indicators conceptualised as ‘outcomes at one point in time’ or ‘trend outcomes’ such as labour force participation, employment continuity, or the gender wage gap. While these are important, they offer a limited and overly simplified view of career and life-course development, often treating either careers or family life as the primary driver of a given outcome. For instance, prior studies frequently frame childbirth—especially for women—as a key turning point in career trajectories. However, this narrow focus neglects a wider range of life events and transitions that interact with work, including changes in life such as divorce and in income resulting in instability and indicators of career progression such as promotions or occupational mobility. To date, there has been little research that captures how such events interact dynamically to shape different types of career paths for mothers and fathers.
This stream seeks to fill this empirical gap by exploring the dynamic interplay between family and career trajectories through mixed methods approaches that allow for deeper exploration of life and career intersections, and for identifying how key life events contribute to heterogeneous career pathways. We also consider events before, during, and after childbirth, and how these affect career patterns and gender equality. Intersectional perspectives are also of high interest to the stream, incorporating gender, sexual orientation, and possibly geography—to account for variation in experiences across different social groups and national contexts to delve deeper in the career experiences that mothers and fathers have to share and provide contextualised insights. By conceptualising the work-family relationship as a dynamic and evolving process rather than a one-off event or outcome, the stream aims at a more comprehensive understanding of how gender differences continue to shape careers and family wellbeing, not only for working parents, but also for employers and policymakers, who often overlook the diversity of career patterns shaped by parenthood and the broader social and institutional environment.
Special Stream 1.3: Ageing, Occupation and the Politics of Longevity: Reconfiguring Labour, Class and Inequality in an Ageing Workforce
Convenors:Nicholas Black, Clive Trusson, Catherine Casey, Sarah Barnard, and Victoria Phillips – Loughborough Business School, UK. For any enquiries, please contact: N.Black@lboro.ac.uk
A profound demographic transformation is underway, driven by the rapid growth of the global population aged 60 and over (Field et al., 2013). This group reached 1 billion in 2020 and is projected by the World Health Organization to rise to 1.4 billion by 2030 and 2.1 billion by 2050. By 2030, one in six people worldwide will be over 60, and by 2050, one in four. These demographic shifts pose major challenges for labour markets, welfare systems, and the political economy of work, raising urgent questions about how labour is organised across the life course.
The implications of ageing are deeply occupational. The capacity to work beyond statutory retirement is uneven and shaped by job demands and working conditions. Retirement ages, still applied as universal benchmarks tied to state pension entitlement, reflect social constructs more than actual capacity (Johfre & Saperstein, 2023). Physically demanding roles in construction, healthcare, and emergency services impose far greater strains on the body than professional or administrative work (Vermeer et al., 2016). As a result, white-collar workers are often able to extend their careers, while manual and care workers are more likely to exit the labour force prematurely through exhaustion, injury, or chronic illness. These unequal capacities intersect with class, gender, race, and migration histories, producing sharply divided trajectories of ageing and labour force participation (Moen et al., 2022).
In this context, policy actors such as the World Economic Forum (2025) have promoted the idea of the “longevity economy,” portraying older populations as untapped human capital. Framed around lifelong learning and age-inclusive workplaces, this discourse presents extended working lives as both empowerment and sustainability. Yet it obscures the structural realities of capitalism, where later-life security is increasingly individualised. For many, particularly those in low-wage or precarious occupations, continued employment is less a matter of choice than necessity. At the same time, older workers often encounter subtle and institutionalised ageism. Stereotypes cast them as resistant, less capable, or costly (Cebola et al., 2023). These biases are unevenly distributed since professionals are more likely to be retained for their expertise, while workers in lower-status roles are deskilled, marginalised, or made redundant—despite often having the greatest financial need to remain employed.
This stream invites papers that critically examine the intersections of ageing, occupation, and the restructuring of labour under capitalism. We welcome studies that explore how occupational groups experience ageing in relation to job demands, precarity, health inequalities, and institutional discrimination. We also encourage analyses of the macro-political economy of ageing and work, including the role of digitalisation, welfare reform, and employer practices in shaping extended working lives.
Special Stream 1.4: Sustainability and Labour Organisations
Convenors:Paolo Borghi (Univ. of Pavia); Guido Cavalca (Univ. of Salerno); Licia Cianetti (Univ. of Birmingham); Francesca Gabbriellini (Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli); Marco Marrone (Univ. of Salento); Enzo Mingione (Univ. Milano Bicocca); Costantino Romeo (École Polytechnique, Paris)
The triple transition - green, digital and sociodemographic - reshapes work, creating opportunities but also risks of job loss, insecurity, skills mismatch and inequality. Trade unions, grassroots movements and digital activism are crucial in steering a just transition mediating impacts and promoting fair redistribution, inclusion and democracy at work. This session has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it aims to examine how the integration of new technologies and the imperative for sustainability impact labour organisation. On the other hand, the session aims to consider the role these aspects may have in improving democracy at work and in reducing inequalities, thus aiming to contribute to the debate promoted in recent years by the global network Democratizing Work (https://democratizingwork.org/). This stream welcomes empirical, comparative and theoretical contributions to understand how collective actors influence these transformations and support workers and communities.
Objectives:To examine how green, digital and demographic shifts reshape labour and workers’ rights; explore trade unions, grassroots and platform workers’ role in fostering just transition; assess top-down vs. bottom-up approaches (industrial policy, ecological planning, worker-led initiatives); analyse territorial and digital divides and inequalities across regions, ages and migrant/native workers; contribute to the debate on democratizing work by linking sustainability and democracy; foster interdisciplinary dialogue via case studies, theory and comparative analysis; identify strategies for reskilling, upskilling and social protection.
Contributions are invited on: grassroots/worker-led transition initiatives; top-down strategies (ecological planning, industrial policies); territorial dimensions of triple transition; platforms and digital divides; transformation of workers’ organisations and movements; conflicts among unions and civil society; reskilling, green jobs, and climate negotiations.
Special Stream 1.5: Labour Migration and the Labour Process: Transformations in Labour Mediation
Convenors:Olga Gheorghiev (Oslomet); Gabriela Alberti (Leeds University Business School); Peter Birke (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen); Marketa Dolezalova (Leeds University Business School); Valeria Piro (University of Padua); Devi Sacchetto (University of Padua); Francesca Alice Vianello (University of Padua)
This stream builds on the work of a growing network of researchers examining migration and the labour process, consolidated through a dedicated stream at the ILPC in Göttingen (2024). Across past meetings, we have explored how the dynamics of migration intersect with the fragmentation of employment relations, the crisis and reconfiguration of trade union movements vis-à-vis migrant workers, migrant workers’ social reproduction, mobilisation, racialisation, and bordering practices.
In this stream, we turn our attention to labour intermediaries—staffing agencies, recruitment brokers, outsourcing firms, and digital platforms. These organisations do not simply facilitate labour supply but actively shape the labour process itself: by bridging fragmented employment structures, enforcing discipline across borders and in the workplace, and conditioning access to labour markets and mobility. The role of intermediaries is particularly pronounced in contexts where restrictive border regimes coexist with persistent labour demand, creating profitable spaces of value extraction.
We particularly welcome contributions that foreground the agency of migrant workers, explore transversal solidarities across race, citizenship, skill, and status, and offer novel theoretical insights into how categories of “migrant labour/worker” are constructed and mediated.
Special Stream 1.6: Uber is Not the Same Everywhere: Grounding Platform Labour in the Global South
Convenors: Joanna Octavia (University College London) and Muhammad Yorga Permana (Bandung Institute of Technology)
This special stream explores the evolving role of digital labour platforms in the Global South, where platform work – both location-based and cloud-based – is increasingly framed as a site of innovation, adaptation and community-building. In contexts marked by high informality, uneven infrastructure and weak welfare systems, platform labour often offers new avenues for economic participation, skill development and entrepreneurial activity, albeit not without their own challenges (Permana, 2025; Octavia, 2021; Wood et al., 2018).
In contrast, the dominant narrative of platform work in the Global North often frames it as a threat to labour rights – undermining job security, fragmenting worker solidarity and intensifying algorithmic control (see, for example, Tassinari and Maccarrone, 2020). Such perspectives tend to assume a more institutionalised labour landscape, characterised by strong labour laws, collective bargaining mechanisms, and state oversight. Yet despite these divergent narratives, workers across both the Global North and Global South face shared structural challenges: precarious working conditions, opaque algorithmic management, and deep worker-platform power asymmetries.
This stream invites critical engagement with how location-based and cloud-based digital labour platforms reshape work, power and resistance across geographies in the Global South, while comparing insights across North-South divides. It aims to deepen the interdisciplinary understanding of platform labour as a global phenomenon shaped by local conditions, and to rethink what solidarity, regulation and fairness might look like in digitally mediated work environments marked by informality.
We welcome contributions that:
- Examine how platform labour intersects with informal economies, entrepreneurial activities, and legal frameworks in the Global South
- Investigate the local socio-cultural and political dimensions of platform work, including how social norms, institutional structures, and cultural practices (re)shape worker experiences
- Analyse the heterogeneity and diverse trajectories of platform labour, such as its uneven distribution of risks and rewards
- Explore how platform workers navigate, resist and repurpose platform structures within their local contexts
- Situate platform work within wider development challenges, such as infrastructure gaps and urban inequality
- Challenge dominant narratives of platform work as wholly exploitative or emancipatory
- Compare how precarity is experienced, negotiated and contested across global contexts