Module description
This module explores the centrality of labour in contemporary and historical development, with a focus on how labour is shaping today’s emerging economies. It places multiple work and labour relations, from factory work and slavery in the industrial revolution, to the surge in informality and the precariat in the global economy of the twenty-first century, at the centre of our inquiry about developmental trajectories. The interactions between these types of labour help us explain how different economic arrangements emerged and how they have changed over time. Organized labour informed the creation of welfare states, while labour conditions and regulations are key to social and economic security. At the same time, the reproduction of labour forces relies on a wide range of gendered relationships and processes, some of which traditionally have taken place within the household, but that have been increasingly commodified and commercialised in recent decades. This module provides frameworks for understanding these processes as well as the policy challenges they generate, demonstrating that labour remains an indispensable analytical category for development studies.
Assessment details
class presentation (10%)
2,000 words policy memo (90%)
Please note, this assessment information is subject to change for 2025/26
Educational aims & objectives
The educational aims of this course are:
- To explore the worlds of work, labour, and labour regimes through a multidisciplinary framework.
- To investigate the complex economic and social networks of formal, informal, subsistence, and reproductive labour underpinning different case studies of production, circulation, and distribution of goods and services across the global economy.
- To study the ways in which households, firms, governments and international organizations individually and collectively inform how workforces are created, put to work, and reproduced.
- To unpack how agents with different roles, interests, and degrees of power affect the conditions in which they participate in global networks, including wages, working conditions, profits, and the allocations of risks.
- To equip students with the critical tools to interrogate contemporary labour activism and policy debates on a global scale.
- To prepare students to engage with the challenges the future of work poses for emerging economies in their quests for equitable, sustainable development.
Learning outcomes
At the end of this module:
- Students will have mastered key theories and concepts from political economy, economic sociology, global history, human geography and development studies pertaining to the study of global labour.
- Students will understand how historical events and processes have shaped the rise and decline of unionism, mutualism and cooperativism, as well as different regulatory frameworks for producing, employing, and reproducing different labour forces.
- Students will be able to analyse how regulatory structures, political power of firms, states and other organizations (local, national and international) affect the conditions of workers in any given industry.
- Students will have expanded their skills in teamwork and public speaking through the preparation and delivery of class presentations.
- Students will have exercised independent research skills by undertaking critical analysis of the causes of a significant labour problem, and to identifying potential strategies and policy solutions