ILPC 2026

 Critics of labour process analysis have sometimes accused it of an over-emphasis on control in the workplace. Over the past decade labour process researchers have responded by moving away from workplace-centric analysis. Labour process theory has been linked to accumulation regimes and 'disconnected capitalism' (Thompson 2013); global value chains and global production networks (Newsome et al. 2015); and global labour mobility and the 'double indeterminacy of labour power' (Smith 2006). In such work, the control regime is treated, explicitly or implicitly, as a meso level construct with applications at sector, value chain/production network and corporate levels. 

  At the same time, and drawing from Burawoy’s (1985) early framework, scholars sympathetic to labour process analysis have underlined the significance of labour control regimes that span different places, spaces, and scales, and link relations of production to those of circulation and reproduction (Anner 2015; Baglioni 2017; Campling and Smith forthcoming Mezzadri 2016; Pattenden 2016). Influenced by earlier insights emphasising the heterogeneity of forms of labour exploitation within capitalism (Banaji 2011), labour control has been framed in terms of the interplay of labour exploitation and disciplining (Baglioni 2017), through a focus on the immediate contexts of the labour process (Pattenden 2016), and as part of a wider ‘sweatshop regime’ (Mezzadri 2016). Simple and expanded reproduction, then, are shaped by various forms of social differences such as gender, caste and race, while state institutions as well as organisations of capital and labour mediate class relations and the extraction of surplus-value.  

 This proposed symposium views labour control regimes as integral to theory-building in a labour process tradition. It brings together scholars from a variety of perspectives in a panel to discuss the content, context and scope of the term. How does the concept contribute to understanding the material and political conditions of labour? How do labour, capital, and state institutions shape these regimes? What are the implications for class struggle?

References available on request 

Speakers: 

Paul Thompson, Professor of Employment Studies, University of Stirling, UK. 

Elena Baglioni, Lecturer in Global Supply Chains, Queen Mary University of London, UK.

Alessandra Mezzadri, Senior Lecturer in Development Studies, SOAS, University of London, UK.

Jonathan Pattenden, Senior Lecturer in Politics and Development Studies, University of East Anglia, UK.