On Power at Work

Power at Work: A Global Perspective on Control and Resistance , edited by Marcel van der Linden and Nicole Mayer-Ahuja, marks an important moment in the trajectory of labour history over the last half century. Writings on labour have seen a shift from a focus on institutional history to social history in the 1960s, to the cultural and linguistic turn of the 1980s, and, over the last decade or so, a move to reclaim the material in new ways. 1 In the 1970s, the labour process and shopfloor politics was an important theme in writings on labour – Marxist and non-Marxist – but these were often framed in reductive and teleological narratives derived from the experience of the Global North. 2 Recent writings demonstrate a renewed interest in workplace politics from fresh perspectives that look at the relationship between the production process and cultural transformation in complex ways.