Böcker i Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation-serien

Globalisation opens up many new choices for employers, both to relocate work and to tap into a flexible labour pool through the use of migrant workers. There is a complex interplay between the movement of jobs to people (offshore outsourcing) and the movement of people to jobs (migration). As well as examining the spatial dynamics of offshore outsourcing, this collection explores some of the ways that both jobs and workers are becoming more mobile, and looks not only at the implications of this for the careers and conditions of workers in footloose employment but also what it means for the workers who are left behind when global forces snatch away their more geographically rooted jobs. Drawing on research carried out in Eastern and Western Europe, North and South America and Asia, this collection brings together a diverse range of studies, in the process providing important new insights into both the barriers to and the enablers of employers' access to a global reserve army of labour. It also demonstrates that global spatial restructuring is not necessarily a single one-off process but typically involves complex mutual adaptation at a local level.

It is often argued that 'digital labour' or 'virtual work' is fundamentally different from traditional forms of labour carried out offline, with 'work' and 'play' collapsed together to become 'playbour' and new forms of value creation that do not fit traditional economic models. But however 'immaterial' their labour processes, workers still have bodies that become exhausted and require feeding and housing in the 'real' economy. Drawing on both theoretical and empirical research, this collection takes a critical look at how online work can be theorised and categorised (including revisiting concepts of 'deskilling' developed in the 1970s). It also analyses how the development of online work has meshed with broader trends in organisational restructuring to erode traditional employment norms, time structures and models of behaviour at work, placing new stresses on offline daily life.

Supply chains are becoming ever more tightly integrated as corporations vie with each other to bring their products to global markets before they lose their value through replication or obsolescence. This restructuring of supply chains involves the interaction of a range of different public and private, local and global actors, including companies