Everyday Politics of the World Economy

In this chapter I explore how we might rethink labour's agency in the global economy. Specifically, I consider how three features of theorising about the nature of global capitalism have intersected to shape the way in which regulatory international political economy (RIPE) literature has historically considered workers and their organisations. The first feature of much RIPE literature is its capital-centric nature, which has presented a theoretical approach in which capital is viewed implicitly as the agent of global economic change, while labour is seen largely as little more than a passive victim of capitalist economic forces. The second feature is that the central focus of RIPE has been the interactions within the international arena of nation-states, to the general exclusion of other social actors such as labour organisations. The third is that RIPE has commonly theorised the geographical scales at which social life is typically seen to exist – scales such as ‘the local’, ‘the regional’, ‘the national’ and ‘the global’ – in areal terms, that is to say as little more than spatial ‘containers’ of social life. In such a view, social actors like unions are viewed as constituted ontologically within the confines of these various spatial units (e.g., within localities, regions, nation-states, or the global economy), rather than as being constituted, say, along a continuum of spatial scales (what I mean by this distinction will become clearer below).