Competition & Change

This article discusses various aspects of labour processes in services characterized by value chains that cross organizational, company, regional or national boundaries. Starting from value chain analysis it first addresses the main conceptual issues in the investigation of service value chains and networks from a labour process perspective. Second, it highlights three particular themes in the analysis of the labour process in services and illustrates these with empirical examples: modularization of services and codification of knowledge, organizational flexibility and flexible employment, and the concurrence of co-operation and competition. In the conclusion, the article sketches significant characteristics of services and service work that need to come into focus in value chain and network analysis from a labour process perspective.

The IT industry was considered relatively resistant to the international relocation of jobs, but such a perception changed profoundly during the 1990s when IT companies relocated services to low-wage destinations on a larger scale. According to many authors, IT offshoring not only jeopardizes jobs in high-wage countries, but also fundamentally changes the organization and control of IT work. Whereas IT work was once considered a prime example of post-Taylorist work organization, it is argued that the global division of labour necessitates the standardization and formalization of the labour processes, leading to extended managerial control and reduced autonomy for employees. Drawing upon two case studies in transnationally operating IT companies, this article critically examines this prognosis. It argues that forms of work organization and control in the IT industry do not develop homogeneously or uniformly. Instead, it is possible to identify specific modes of reorganization with very different consequences for employees' autonomy in the labour process that are shaped by the dynamic interplay between different patterns of internationalization, on the one hand, and the specific institutional settings of the offshore destinations, on the other.

This article analyses the engineering labour process within global networks of production and design of the electronics industry. Its main argument is that the labour process in peripheral product design locations in Eastern Europe has developed considerably with regards to levels of autonomy in work tasks organization and control structure. A detailed case study on one particular product development centre in Bucharest, Romania illustrates these developments. Labour process theory is employed to analyse and understand dynamics in the local labour process organization, while the global design network approach locates labour process dynamics within a network perspective. Local factors such as the labour market are central to the analysis advancing a more dialectical perspective on the relations between global and local levels of internationalization. The analysis shows how integrated forms of international division of labour are increasingly developing.

Despite their central position, workers' relationships have often been a neglected issue in commodity chain approaches. This article analyses how the social relations of workers are affected by economic upgrading in the wild berry global commodity chain (GCC). It is argued that the social effects in a GCC are the result of multiple power spatialities, which must be analysed both according to workers' rights and from a household perspective. In the Swedish wild berry GCC, foreign workers are contracted on a seasonal basis to collect the raw material. The regulated workers, who are principally from Thailand, are subject to social upgrading as well as social downgrading, involving the potential for both exploitation in the Swedish labour market and social empowerment in their homeland. It is concluded that a complex mix of hierarchical, networked and topological power spatialities explain the construction of the wild berry GCC and its effects on worker relations.

Over the last two decades the global commodity chain, global value chain and global production network (GCC/GVC/GPN) frameworks have facilitated valuable research into contemporary global capitalism. However, much of this research has paid insufficient attention to work and workers. Recently, the concept of social upgrading, with a strong emphasis on workers' conditions, has been advanced by leading GCC/GVC/GPN theorists, as a potential remedy to the previous lacunae. This article welcomes this development, but also argues that the social upgrading concept represents an elite comprehension of relations between capital, the state and labour. It is argued that the concept, derived from the International Labour Organization's Decent Work Agenda, denies the reality of labour's exploitation by capital and is therefore only partially equipped to explain the existence of indecent work. The Decent Work Agenda and the social upgrading concept expect improvements in work to be delivered by elite actors such as firms, national states and international organizations. It is argued that, through re-visiting Marx's explication of the capitalist labour process, it is possible to comprehend the nature of capitalist exploitation, the root causes of indecent work and resistance to it, and thus to develop an alternative conception of social upgrading. The article presents evidence from North East Brazilian export horticulture to support these arguments.

The changing nature of global production and distribution processes and their impact on the capital–labour relationship raise a number of questions for labour process analysis. Where business operates across national boundaries whether as multinational companies (MNCs) or as lead firms in international supply chains, the relational nature of power relationships between and within firms is significant to understanding the bargaining power of labour at the point of production (Coe et al., 2008a). Although there is no single body of theory relating to the analysis of international supply chains, the article argues that the perspectives developed by different authors relating to global commodity chains (GCCs), global value chains (GVCs) and global production networks (GPNs) have a contribution to make to labour process analysis. This contribution lies in the understanding of the contested nature of systems of managerial control, on the one hand, and the sources of resistance and ability of labour to mobilize, on the other.