Book Review: Alex J Wood, Despotism on Demand: How Power Operates in the Flexible Workplace.

First, Wood shows how the new flexible despotism regime undermines the legacies of the old hegemonic regime and its stable compromise equilibrium between capital and labour interests. This book addresses the important problem of the transformations of workplace regimes in the 21st century, postulating the emergence of a new flexible despotism regime in low-end service workplaces. Here Wood identifies the practice of "flexible scheduling", which gives managers a powerful mechanism to discipline workers by controlling their schedules without necessarily having to lay off. [Extracted from the article]