Hierarchies at Work

Race, World-Systems, and Legal Distribution

Buch | Softcover

416 Seiten

2025
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
978-0-231-21225-0 (ISBN)

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This book challenges dominant understandings of both economic inequality and the future of work. Leading scholars in law, social sciences, and the humanities consider the production and reproduction of global hierarchies by revisiting and deploying three critical approaches that emerged in the late twentieth century: racial capitalism, world-systems theory, and critical legal distributional analysis. They demonstrate that these methods—especially when brought together—offer new insights into the forces that entrench the asymmetries of power and wealth that are too often shorthanded as inequality. They also uncover elisions and erasures of the past and present in prevailing technological-determinist narratives about the future of work.

Hierarchies at Work features powerful, grounded studies of the dynamics of work and livelihood in sites ranging from garment factories in Jordan and palm oil fields in Colombia to dairy farms in the United States. These studies underscore the necessity of thinking about the future of work and livelihoods through their racialized past and present and recognizing the systemic role of law in unequal distribution. Highlighting alternative imaginaries that contest systems of domination and subordination, this timely book offers resources to spur more just futures across local and global levels.

Karen Engle is Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: Feminist Interventions in International Law (2020) and The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (2010). Neville Hoad is associate professor of English and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS (2025) and African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (2007).

Acknowledgments
Introduction, by Karen Engle and Neville Hoad
Part I. Global Hierarchies: Racial Capitalism, World-Systems, and Legal Distributional Analyses
1. Neville Alexander: Racial Capitalism South African Style, by Dennis Davis
2. Walter Rodney, World-Systems Theory, and Racial Capitalism, by Nicole Burrowes
3. Critical System Analysis and the Great Disparities, by David Kennedy
4. Law Distributes: Ricardo, Marx, CLS, by Duncan Kennedy
5. Distributional Analytics and the TWAIL Tradition, by Vasuki Nesiah
Part II. The Future of Work: Challenges to Dominant Framings
6. The Future of Work from a Victorian Past, by Neville Hoad
7. Recovering the Past and the Outside: Sites for New Imaginaries of the Future of Work, by Kerry Rittich
8. Financialization, Fissuring, and Global Futures of Work, by Jennifer Bair
Part III. Global Hierarchies at Work: Grounded Accounts
9. Labors in Time and Subjectivity: Gender Nonconformity and Racial Capitalism in the Making of Eighteenth-Century New Orleans, by Vanja Hamzić
10. Garment Work, Refugees, and Resistance: The Jordan Compact, by Jennifer Gordon
11. Distributional Analysis and Supply Chain Interventions: Migrant Worker Organization in Vermont’s Dairy Industry, by Jennifer Bair
12. Beyond Essential: Growth, a Pandemic, and the Future of Expendable Workers in a “Progressive” Texas Boomtown, by Karen Engle and Samuel Tabory
13. Land and Labor in the Colombian Palm Oil Industry, by Helena Alviar García and Jorge González Jácome
14. Dead Ends and Blind Alleys in the Future of Work: Notes from Italy, by Jorge L. Esquirol
List of Contributors
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	17.04.2025
Reihe/Serie	New Directions in Critical Theory ; 83
Zusatzinfo	7 bw figures
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 235 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Makrosoziologie
	Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management
ISBN-10	0-231-21225-9 / 0231212259
ISBN-13	978-0-231-21225-0 / 9780231212250
Zustand	Neuware