Call for Papers
37th International Labour Process Conference
General Call for papers
The 37th International Labour Process Conference (ILPC) will be held in Vienna, Austria, from 24 to 26 April 2019. Each year the ILPC brings together researchers from a variety of countries with the objective of enhancing our understanding of contemporary developments relating to work and employment. The conference organizers welcome papers on any issue concerning the analysis of labour processes, labour markets, labour organising and labour reproduction.
The 2019 conference will additionally focus on ‘Fragmentations and Solidarities’ in contemporary work and employment relations. Recent developments in the economy and society challenge the institutional frameworks of employment, accelerating the ongoing processes of deregulation and flexibilisation. This reiterates segregation along the lines of gender, ethnicity and qualifications and creates new formal and symbolic boundaries within the workforce. Furthermore, transnational forms of work organization and global value chains modify and partly intensify the divisions of labour, deepening the unequal distribution of wealth, ecological hazard, and risk to health and social security among employees in the world. Global inequality, in return, pushes workers to leave their home countries and migrate to adjacent or more distant formal or informal labour markets, raising the issue of solidarity within and between the formally and informally employed workforces. Finally, new technologies appear to increase their impacts in uncertain directions: augmenting the share of knowledge work and improving skill levels, threatening jobs, and/or increasing the pressure on workers and the scope of managerial control. There is considerable risk of new fragmentations of employment according to different skill levels, forms of contract and locations of work. A key aim of the conference is to use labour process analysis to understand the varied mechanisms that produce fragmentations in work and employment relations, and to explore the foundations of solidarity on the level of individuals, of collective action, and on the level of national and supra-national policies. This also includes a focus on how changes in the labour process and in employment relations impact on wider societal and political developments.