Production Regimes and Class Compromise among European Warehouse Workers

The orderly functioning of global capitalism increasingly depends on the labor of logistics workers. But social scientists have yet to produce nuanced accounts of the labor process in the many ports, warehouses, and distribution centers that lie at the heart of logistics work. In this study, the authors seek to connect the nascent field of critical logistics studies to theories of the labor process in an effort to understand the production regimes that arise in warehouse work under different economic and regulatory conditions. Using qualitative data gathered at four European warehouses owned by the same third-party logistics firm, the authors identify several distinct types of production regimes at these warehouses and analyze the conditions accounting for each. Even in this globally oriented industry in which firms seek to standardize their international operations, locally rooted conditions play a significant role, generating sharply different forms of labor control even within the same firm.status: Published onlin

From ‘ivory tower traditionalists’ to ‘entrepreneurial scientists’? Academic scientists in fuzzy university-industry boundaries

Growing intensity of university-industry ties has generated an intense debate about the changing norms and practices of academic scientific work. This study challenges the protagonists’ views on the emergence of a dominant market ethos in academic science and growing influence of the ‘new school’ entrepreneurial scientists. It argues that academic scientists are active agents shaping the relationships between science and business, and shows continued diversity in their work orientations. Drawing on neo-institutional theory and the notion of ‘boundary work’, the study examines how scientists seek to protect and negotiate their positions, and also make sense of their professional role identities. It identifies four different orientations, the ‘traditional’ and ‘entrepreneurial’, with two hybrid types in between. The hybrids are the dominant category and are particularly adept at exploiting the ambiguities of ‘boundary work’ between academia and industry. The study is based on 36 interviews and a survey sample of 734 academic scientists from five UK research universities