1. Introduction: Places of Work
I. Making Labor Markets
2. Making Workers: Control, Reproduction, and Regulation
3. Structuring the Labor Market: A Segmentation Approach
4. Locating the Local Labor Market: Segmentation, Regulation,
Space
II. Placing Labor Markets
5. Flexibilizing Labor: Insecure Work in Unstable Places
6. Domesticating Work: Restructuring at Work, Restructuring at
Home
7. Building Workfare States: Institutions of Labor Regulation
8. Localizing Labor: Geopolitics of Labor Regulation
9. Epilogue: Local Dialectics of Labor
Jamie Peck is reader in economic geography and member of the International Centre for Labour Studies at the University of Manchester. He has published extensively on labor market theory, regional economic restructuring, employment policy evaluation, and the geopolitics of economic governance and social regulation. A research associate of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, his research has been supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the European Science Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund (New York), and the Australian government, while he has consulted to the European Commission, the UK Department of Employment, and numerous local authorities, labor unions, and economic development agencies. He is currently researching the political economy of welfare reform on a Harkness Fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
This is an ambitious book, incorporating multilayered
conceptualizations of local labor markets in ways that push beyond
the explanations in neoclassical economic, labor segmentation, and
regulation theory of their structures....a truly monumental
achievement that is sure to redefine the course of current research
in economic and industrial geography, as well as beyond the
disciplinary boundaries. --Meghan Cope, Department of Geography,
State University of New York at Buffalo, Journal of Regional
Science
...Intelligent and intellectually rewarding...No labor market
theorist, or researcher for that matter, can ignore this book. --R.
A. Beauregard, New School for Social Research in Choice
Jamie Peck has written the definitive treatment of labor markets.
His approach is at once quite original and provocative, integrating
many threads and themes in the academic literature with a rare
appreciation of the role that public policy plays (and does not
play) in structuring the nature and performances of local labor
markets. It is a book that all social scientists can read with
profit; it is a book that will make an enormous difference to
research in the field over the coming years. --Gordon L. Clark,
University of Oxford
Economists imagine that the process by which workers and job
openings are matched is roughly analogous to the buying and selling
of personal computers, shirts, or football tickets: regulated by
supply and demand, mediated by price. In fact, 'the labor market'
is governed by contradictory and intensely conflictual institutions
and social norms. Moreover, the forms of social
regulation--especially the nature and extent of labor market
segmentation--vary from one locale to another. The particular
histories of and conditions within these localities matter to how
their labor markets operate. Furthermore, these spatial differences
directly reinforce unequal power relations between workers and
their employers, which in turn shape the location choices of
business and the distribution of income.
Peck's great achievement is to unify these dimensions info one
coherent conception. This is a tremendous intellectual
accomplishment, which will have a powerful and lasting impact on
all the social sciences, not only geography. --Bennett Harrison,
Visiting Professor of Political Economy, John F. Kennedy School of
Government, Harvard University; author of Lean and Mean, and
co-author of The Deindustrialization of America
Jamie Peck's book, Work Place, is an important, path-breaking
account of labor's place in capitalist space. In a text that is
theoretically sophisticated, richly detailed, incisively argued,
and highly accessible, the author proceeds from dilemmas and
contradictions inherent in labor power as a fictitious commodity to
reveal the complex, spatially uneven nature of the socially
imbedded, socially regulated nature of labor markets. Whilst
synthesizing much of the best recent work in institutional
economics, the regulation approach, and economic geography, Peck
goes well beyond it in placing labor markets and institutions in
various local, regional, national and supra-national contexts and
in showing how workers and work are continually being replaced in
Fordism, the crisis of Fordism, and the search for 'after' Fordism
solutions. The arguments of Work Place are bound to shape the
research agenda on these and many other issues. I recommend it
unreservedly. --Bob Jessop, Professor of Sociology, Lancaster
University
- ...intelligent and intellectually rewarding...No labor market
theorist, or researcher for that matter, can ignore this book.
--Choice, 4/8/1996
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