This is the third book to be published in the Studies in Social Harm series – a series which was established to provide a holistic and multi-disciplinary focus on social harms. When harms – such as pollution, violence and poverty to name a few – are researched from academic disciplinary silos we are often left with partial and distorted assessments of social problems. When such harms are explained solely or predominantly in terms of individual calculus or failure, we fail to connect the manufacture, re-production, and re-configuration of harms to wider social structures and processes. Consequently, we misrecognise how social harms can be prevented by identifying the most relevant policy changes and interventions that are required for the improvement of people's well-being. The series Studies in Social Harm, through a blending of new theoretical and conceptual frameworks, methods, and empirical research, aims to address and rebut these omnipresent short-sightings within contemporary social sciences analyses.

In that vein, Sam Scott's book Labour exploitation and work-based harm is both relevant and timely, in a period in which issues – such as trafficked labour at one extreme and zero-hour contracts at the other – have come to the fore of public and policy debates. Casting aside dominant criminological perspectives, with their reliance on legal definitions and remedies, and their tendency to focus on the most extreme forms of labour exploitation occurring as a result of the unscrupulous actions of a criminal minority, Scott develops a framework for understanding work-based harm based on the concept of control. Scott contends that workplace harm arises when controls over workers become exploitative and lead to negative outcomes (for example, with regards to physical or mental health). By identifying work-based harm as resting on a continuum, he invites readers to move beyond the consideration of extreme work-based harms such as slavery which are already criminalised to ‘legal and non-coercive employment relationships that are, nevertheless, problematic’ (see p 17). Supplementing a vast array of quantitative data provided by international organisations like the International Labour Organization, with original qualitative research including studies involving low-wage migrant workers, Scott provides rich testimonial evidence ‘to show how workers may be subject to different types and degrees of control and how this control can become excessive and oppressive’ (see p 13).