From CLGP to CLaSP
The Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP), previously known as the Centre on Labour and Global Production (CLGP), was formed in 2016 with the aim of understanding global production beyond the firm. We pursued and advanced research that recognized, firstly, that social relations structure the organisation of global production, and secondly, that the concrete ways in which global production takes place structure forms of uneven development. In doing this, we sought to take seriously the historical and geographical specificities of the forms that global production takes. Moreover, this agenda allowed the Centre to focus much-needed attention on foundational industries in global business such as agriculture, fisheries and transportation alongside more widely studied sectors such as garments and automotives.
The annual workshops organized by the Centre in those early years are indicative of this core agenda: on ‘Chinese Labour Regimes’ and ‘Uneven Development in Global Value Chains’ (the latter in collaboration with the Centre d’Economies de l’Université Paris Nord) in 2017 and on ‘The Labour of Logistics: Workers and resistance across global supply chains’ in 2018.
CLaSP events through the years
The Centre, however, did not remain limited to these issues and expanded its engagement to the sphere of social reproduction and its multiple dimensions, from the reproduction of the capitalist system to the reproduction of the working classes, the generational, daily reproduction of workers as well as the reproduction of life more broadly, including the environment. Towards this, we have hosted notable visiting scholars and hosted a series of events on or linked to social reproduction in recent years, including an annual workshop in 2019 titled ‘Social Reproduction Within and Beyond Production: Old and New Challenges for the Analysis of Work and Workers’, a 2020 event on ‘Social Reproduction and Race: Intersections Between Capitalism and Colonialism’ and an annual lecture in 2020 on ‘Ecology, Labour and the Climate Crisis’.
History too has been a crucial pillar of our research. While historicizing the capitalist political economy underlies the work of all our members, we have also had dedicated events on historical scholarship relevant to understanding business. In 2019, we hosted a workshop on the ‘Politics of Production in Pre-Modern Britain’ with early career researchers and in 2020, we had a book launch of Jairus Banaji’s A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism.
Through these events as well as other conversations, joint PhD supervisions and collaborative research projects, the Centre’s work also underlined the need to position labour and workers much more centrally in global production debates – and in a way that is cognizant of their agency. For some members, this coalesced into the labour regime analysis which articulates the capital/labour relation at different scales and in relation to production, circulation, social reproduction and ecology. This culminated in an edited book titled Labour Regimes and Global Production, published in 2022. An upcoming workshop in October 2023 on Workers’ Enquiries reflects a different yet related approach towards recentring the question of work and labour in global production.
All these threads of work continue to be developed and consolidated at the Centre through individual and collaborative work of members. At the same time, the renaming of the Centre as CLaSP signals a new, exciting phase of growth.
Firstly, and most obviously, the addition of ‘sustainability’ to the title represents a cross-cutting interest in investigating how ecology informs and is in turn shaped by questions of labour and production. We are interested in exploring the multiple dimensions of sustainability and grappling with the contradictions within policies, practices and struggles for it rather than approaching sustainability through blueprint solutions. This is also an important motivation in engaging with non-academic actors across our research and events, such as the 2022 ‘Labour Regimes at Sea’ workshop. Some of our forthcoming events in the summer of 2023, e.g. the end-of-year event on ‘Labour in the Green Transition’ and a workshop on ‘Labour regimes and ecology’ are reflective of the Centre’s collective interest in this area.
East London walking tour, April 2022
Our long-standing attention to foundational industries lends a unique, grounded perspective to this agenda on sustainability, especially as it directly engages in questions of commodification of nature. But some of our members are also engaged in the study of creative industries and cultural production, which constitutes a second area of growth in this phase. We study the creative industries not only through the lens of ecology but more generally, to critically interrogate how cultural production and the labour involved in it is shaped through political, economic and social issues at different scales.
A third area of growth for us is financialization. While this theme has been present in our work from the beginning (reflected in several of our past and more recent events), we are now looking to engage in more focused ways on how finance is reconfiguring different business sectors and with what effects for other kinds of businesses and workers. A start is being made through an upcoming workshop on ‘Development on credit: Financialization and its effects across the international development agenda’ in June 2023 (co-organized with the Queen Mary Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences).
The Centre has come a long way since its formation and expanded its scope of work in distinct but inter-linked ways. Today, we are an interdisciplinary group with backgrounds in Critical Management Studies, Development Studies, Economic Geography, Industrial Sociology, International Political Economy, History and Anthropology, and with regional specializations in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the UK. What binds us across this diversity is our drive to unpack business and management in historically informed and politically engaged ways. Individually and collectively, the work of each member elucidates business politics and fleshes out the actually-existing infrastructures of production and circulation that shape contemporary political economy at the micro, meso and macro levels. In doing this, the Centre offers space for unique perspectives in the intellectual landscape of critical business and management studies. But it does more. By opening up the ‘black box’ that sectors, organizations, firms and business strategies are often (though not always) treated in other disciplines and public discourses – and by highlighting their variety and complexity – the Centre has the potential to inform much wider scholarship, practice and policy.
Our new blog – of which this is the first piece – will, we hope, provide a space to share the richness of the Centre’s work and serve as an invitation for wide-ranging academic and non-academic audiences to engage with us.