Beyond disciplinary boundaries: Leveraging complementary perspectives on global labour

Abstract

This symposium-style article brings together scholars from history, sociology and political science to explore how different disciplinary traditions can contribute to a productive dialogue on workers’ collective action and labour power around the world. Grounded in reflections on recent research in three disciplinary communities, the article encourages scholars to tap into findings from other academic traditions to refine the focus and the contextualization of their own analyses. This strategy of moving beyond disciplinary boundaries, the article argues, promises to expand inherited styles of inquiry by encouraging analyses with a wider selection of cases, a more conscious temporal anchoring and broadened geographic reach. The evolution of scholarship along these lines would honour each discipline’s particular conceptual commitments and simultaneously seek to enlist them more broadly for a deeper understanding of labour’s contemporary reorientation.