Reconceptualising Work and Employment in Complex Productive Configurations

Abstract

Increasingly, work and employment take place within network firms, value chains, and other organisational forms extending control beyond the firm’s legal boundaries. This article proposes a model rooted in sociological concepts (work organisation, control, and risk) to analyse how social relations of work and employment are structured, and how inequalities are manufactured, in these organisational forms. First, we change the level of analysis, moving from firm to productive configuration. Second, we propose the notion of social labour relations, to grasp the relationship between workers and any entity likely to control their conditions of work and employment. Social labour relations articulates five dimensions that could be used to compare groups of workers who are participating in the same configuration. Third, we analyse how control is exercised by which entity/entities and over which social labour relation dimension. Such an understanding is essential to provide avenues for institutional renewal: namely to reconnect control and responsibility.