Call for Papers

IIPPE Conference: The Political Economy of Work and the Value-Form

27th Mar 2017

8th Annual Conference in Political Economy:

 ‘The Political Economy of Inequalities and Instabilities in the 21st Century’ 

International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy (IIPPE) Critical Political Economy Research Network (CPERN) Berlin Institute for International Political Economy (IPE)

September 13-15, 2017, Berlin School of Economics and Law

Call for papers and activist proposals [Deadline April 1st]:

The Political Economy of Work and the Value-Form

http://iippe.org/wp/?p=3059

The 21st century has seen an increasing polarisation of job quality, income and precarity in the world of work. Political economy can help us understand these phenomena by providing the appropriate methodological tools. Marxian approaches provide a conceptual a basis that links money relations and labour process relations in the production and circulation of value. The IIPPE political economy of work group seeks to investigate applications of value theory to the process of exploitation and other concrete phenomena related to work. This entails synthesising detailed examinations of workers experiences with value-informed analyses of production, circulation, and employment relations.

We invite you to submit proposals for individual papers, themed panels or streams of panels related to our lines of inquiry. These may include theoretical and empirical contributions to any aspect of the political economy of work, although we are especially interested in proposals grounded in historical and contemporary debates on value-form theory. We hope that through the use of a value-form analytic, scholars and activists alike will be able to develop novel political insights into contemporary relations of production and reproduction, as well as conceptualise emergent forms of work – from ‘services’ to creative industries. In this spirit, we welcome contributions on the following themes:

  • Political economic approaches to work and inequality after deindustrialisation
  • The value-form and the outsourcing of the state and public sector
  • Value and the financialisation of employment relations
  • Political economic approaches to ‘service work’
  • Mapping productive and unproductive labour in the 21st century
  • Empirically grounded discussions of concrete, abstract, private, and social labour
  • The political implications of value for human resource management
  • Empirical research on knowledge production and circulation
  • Value-informed workers’ inquiries into labour processes
  • Emotional labour, value, and the political economy of work
  • The work of social reproduction and value
  • Feminist political economy of work and domestic labour

We encourage the submission of panel proposals (consisting of up to four presentations) as an opportunity to showcase the work of study groups in greater depth than is possible in single presentations. We particularly encourage the submission of papers and panels that contribute original empirical engagement with the theory of value.

Abstracts of individual papers (max. 500 words) or panel proposals (max. 500 words plus abstracts of the individual papers) can be submitted via the IIPPE Webpage: http://iippe.org/wp/.

The deadline for submission is APRIL 1st, 2017.

For other questions and additional information contact: Matthew Cole bnmc@leeds.ac.uk