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While isolated episodes of work stoppages keep occurring, aggregate industrial action rates have been on the decline over the last five decades. Attempts to explain this trend centre on the short-term effects of the business cycle and the long-term impacts of labour market liberalisation, deindustrialisation and globalisation. This paper argues that household indebtedness is a missing piece of the puzzle. Since indebted employees tend to become self-disciplined at the workplace on the fear of losing their job and defaulting, this paper argues that the post-1970 rise of household financialisation is associated with the decline of strike activity. The econometric evidence reported provides strong support to this argument for the cases of Japan, Korea, Sweden, the United States and the United Kingdom over the period 1970–2018.

© 2019, © 2019 Oxford Department of International Development. This paper examines the consequences of the hugely successful expansion of South-South Cooperation since the new millennium. For all the achievements, variations and change over the 1950s-late 1990s, ‘SSC 1.0’ was characterised by relative neglect within the 'international' development community, and by many orthodox and critical scholars. In the chronological schema of the paper, ‘SSC 2.0’ refers to the period of remarkable expansion from the early 2000s to the present. The emergence of ‘SSC 3.0’, I suggest, is currently revealed by a discernible set of shifts driven in large part by the expansionary successes of SSC 2.0, as well as other turns in the global political economy. Three contemporary trends are identified: cooperation narratives that are increasingly ‘muscular’, nationalistic and pragmatic; difficulties sustaining claims to ‘non-interference’ in partner countries; and the further erosion of ideational and operational distinctiveness.

The three papers that comprise this dissertation contribute key building blocks for my analysis of migration corridors as critical spatialities with the potential to significantly rework our approach to global migration governance—including in legal, political, and scholarly discourses. The study is a multi-site ethnographic account of migration corridors—circuits of human mobility within and across national borders that are governed by nation states as well as transnational financial, political, and social forces. It examines governance of migration corridors traversed by migrant agricultural, domestic, and garment workers in relationship to three building blocks: (1) expulsions that propel migration (e.g. national/global patterns of uneven development, environmental devastation, corporate land grabs, and conflict); (2) junctions where disparate migration flows converge and are redirected, including urban production and service hubs, special economic zones (SEZs), and territorial borders; and (3) forces that direct migration flows (e.g. legal regimes, product and labor supply chains, securitization, patriarchal norms, and local processes shaped by women labor migrants, recruitment intermediaries, and kinship and social networks).

Proponents recommend Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to a trifold crisis of work, wage and social democracy. Synthesising Marxian form analysis with Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory, this paper suggests that these crises relate to historically-specific capitalist social forms: labour, money, and the state. These separate but interlocking crises of social form are temporary and contingent expressions of an underlying, permanent crisis of social reproduction. Mistaking the pervasive crisis of social reproduction in its totality for a temporary or contingent trifold crisis of work, wage or social democracy, UBI proposals seek to solve it by moving through the same social forms through which they take effect, rather than confronting the social relations that constitute their antagonistic undertow and generate the crisis of social reproduction. The paper considers two other solutions proposed to handle the deeper-rooted crisis with which UBI grapples: Universal Basic Services (UBS) and Universal Basic Infrastructure (UBIS) Both propose non-monetary ways past the impasses of the UBI, addressing much more directly the constrained basis of individual and collective reproduction that characterises capitalist social relations. But they retain a link with capitalist social forms of money and state that may serve to close rather than open the path to real alternatives. The paper concludes that the contradictions these ‘abstract universals’ touch upon are best mediated through more bottom-up and struggle-based ‘concrete universals’ that address the manifold crises of work, wage and social democracy that undergird them. Such alternatives would leave open dynamic tensions around work and welfare in contemporary capitalism without promise of their incomplete resolution in the name of a false universality unattainable in a world characterised by antagonism, domination and crisis.

The UK market for energy service contracts is expanding, owing in part to the emergence of intermediaries for those contracts in different parts of the public sector. These intermediaries combine a legal framework for establishing contracts with an organisational framework that facilitates contract negotiation and execution. This paper examines the nature and operation of these intermediaries in more detail, including their achievements to date and their similarities and differences. It uses ideas from transaction cost economics to develop a theoretical model of the contracting decision and shows how intermediary organisations can lower the transaction costs incurred by both clients and contractors, thereby increasing the viability of contracting. The paper argues that intermediaries can play an important role in expanding the market for energy service contracts, and hence in delivering cost-effective energy efficiency improvements throughout the public sector.

This paper provides new theoretical and empirical insights into the reproduction of transnational corporate elites between firms’ internal labour markets, rather than from expatriation. Theoretically, the paper advances understandings of the reproduction of transnational corporate elites by drawing on a pioneering engagement with the global talent, transnational elite and labour market intermediary discourses. These new theoretical insights are generated through an original case study of the role of global executive search firms in Singapore who create pipelines for the recruitment of transnational corporate elites between firms’ internal labour markets. The findings also highlight the vital role of Singapore’s neoliberal labour market practices and Foreign Talent programme to ‘win the war for talent’. By situating this research on the agency of executive search in reproducing Singapore’s transnational corporate elite, the paper’s overarching contribution is to ‘decenter’ North American and ‘Western’ perspectives on the reproduction of knowledge on transnational corporate elites.

The paper considers what it means to contest austerity and what political contestation of austerity says about how austerity as a political process should be conceived. It does so through separating a narrow view of austerity as fiscal consolidation from actually existing austerity as a broader political economic process ongoing in different ways in different countries. Through a case study of crisis, austerity and contestation as it relates to housing in Spain, the paper argues that to contest actually existing austerity it is necessary to contest both the wealth and power of the actors that have gained from austerity, not least finance capital. Through bank bailouts and the creation of a bad bank, the reforms demanded by the troika have opened up Spanish housing to direct wealth extraction by global finance capital whilst half a million households have been evicted and hundreds of thousands live with insurmountable debt. The Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH, Platform for the Mortgage-Affected) has contested austerity in Spanish housing by contesting finance capital through civil disobedience whilst campaigning for anti-austerity reforms to housing and mortgage legislation, aiming to limit how housing can be a sphere of wealth extraction for finance capital.

This paper explores women’s entrepreneurial activities in the Oman and Qatar in light of the state attention given to promoting entrepreneurship in the region over the past decade. In the Gulf Arab countries, like in many rapidly developing economies, neoliberal growth discourse abounds. Along with this, the promotion of entrepreneurship and embrace of individual enterprise is paramount. Despite the dominance of the state in political and economic spaces, Gulf governments have embraced the rhetoric of the market and entrepreneurship. Drawing from semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participant observation conducted between 2011 and 2015, this paper examines this phenomenon. In a region stereotyped with weak gender development outcomes, female entrepreneurship is largely cast as a positive development aimed at liberating and empowering women through individual enterprise. In contrast, this paper finds that the same forces that are meant to empower women often reproduce or reinforce certain gender norms while introducing new forms of dependency. Gulf female entrepreneurs confront competing tensions within three intersecting political economy logics: the structural logic of the economy, the logic of development narratives, and the logic of socio-economic organisation.

Agri-industrial production is supported by the agriculture–migration nexus, in which industrial-scale horticultural production relies on migrant workers. In this article I consider the time-related pressures on workers who are internal migrants from rural regions of Morocco. My account illustrates how workers are impacted by the demands from consumers for fresh food, year round, as well as by the rhythms of nature, and of social reproduction. I use concepts from EP Thompson's depiction of the transition from rural to factory work to describe the tensions in agricultural production at industrial scale for foreign markets. The concepts used are nature's time (related to seasonality, weather, daylight) and industrial time (of the market), and I adjoin to this the category of social-reproductive time in order to show these three time-related pressures function together. The identification of this threefold time-pressure on migrant workers in agri-food production builds on the recent attention of scholars to seasonality as a conceptual lens, and the identification of rhythms to highlight intersectional inequalities in the everyday. The paper is based on ethnographic and interview data from the Moroccan region of Chtouka Ait Baha, from which tomatoes and other crops are produced at industrial scale for export. I find that, together, the three temporal pressures lead to workers suffering exhaustion and finding themselves far from mobile and available to move with the seasons; rather, they are ‘locked in’ to this low-wage sector.

The 21st century has witnessed a significant transformation of the economies of many developing countries. Consequently, many studies have argued that the centre of gravity of the global economy is shifting from the Western core to the semi-peripheral East. Vassilis Fouskas and Bülent Gökay’s global fault-lines model detailed in their book titled The Fall of the US Empire: Global Fault-Lines and the Shifting Imperial Order is an attempt to use some ideas of the theory of plate tectonics to explain the historical-geographic tectonic shifts in the global political economy. This paper shows the major arguments of the global fault-lines model and shows the link between the plate tectonics theory and the global fault-lines model. Finally, it highlights the implications of the tectonic shifts in the global political economy and by so doing argues for the expansion of BRICS and strengthening of the south-south cooperation paradigm.

Local authorities are key actors for implementing innovative energy efficiency technologies (retrofitting) to reduce end-use energy demand and consequently reduce negative effects of high energy use such as climate change and public budget deficits. This paper reports the results of a large-scale survey of German municipalities by assessing drivers and barriers for deploying LED street lighting as an example of innovative retrofits. The results indicate that competencies and capacities, transparency of the underlying technology base, and a clear proposition of savings are crucial drivers for municipal retrofitting engagement. Most significant barriers include lack of experience, the tendency to wait for future improvements of innovative energy efficiency technologies, and existing contracts with energy suppliers, manufacturers, or other conventional retrofitting contractors. Investments in municipal competency building (both regarding technologies and procurement) as well as diffusing standard tendering criteria and (public) monitoring of their effectiveness are highly recommended to accelerate the municipal modernization process.

Despite the scholarly attention given to the causes of the Financial Crisis 2007-2009, there has been no research on the mundane organisation of the CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligations) market. By studying connections between supply-side actors, our paper examines structural developments in the CDO market. We treat the CDO as a network product, thus viewing the product as interface through which parties involved in the production interact. Our database contains interactions between supply-side actors involved in 373 US CDOs which are analysed using network analysis tools to draw out longitudinal structural developments and the centrality of actors. Our findings highlight how activity in the supply-side exploded after 2003 through the entrance of new actors as the market scaled up; however, actors present before 2003 remain central at the height of market activity in 2006/07, whereas new entrants appear to gain little traction. Crucially, the network exhibits a core-periphery structure centred on actors linked to mundane organising functions that have received little attention in previous studies, but where their central position may have contributed to the poor CDO market performance and financial crisis.

Energy efficiency retrofits are often impeded by high perceived investment risks, long payback periods and a lack of skills. At the municipal level these issues are particularly pronounced as procuring, implementing, and managing retrofits can exceed existing municipal governance capacities. The diffusion of municipal LED street lighting as a replacement for conventional lighting serves as an example. This paper argues that technological (e.g. complexity and maturity), economic (e.g. selling services vs. products and financing costs), institutional (e.g. property situation and contracts) and competency barriers to retrofitting (e.g. lack of measurement capacity and qualified facilitators) translate into transaction costs. We develop a taxonomy of appropriate modes of municipal retrofitting governance based on transaction costs economics. The findings indicate that more market-based solutions, energy performance contracts in particular, can facilitate the procurement of innovative energy efficiency retrofitting solutions and associated investments among municipalities if neutral tenders, open-book accounting, municipal ownership and intermediary organisations allow municipalities to choose appropriate governance structures for particular technologies and retrofits.