Review of Marcel van der Linden and Nicole Mayer-Ahuja (editors) (2023) Power at Work – A Global Perspective on Control and Resistance.

China, Turkey, New Zealand, Yugoslavia, South Africa, Belgium and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Marcel van der Linden and Nicole Mayer-Ahuja have divided their edited volume into ten chapters, plus an introduction and a conclusion.Van der Linden starts his historical perspective by emphasising that "already in 1685, the French Code Noir provided a legal framework for slavery" (Van der Linden, 2023: 2).Two things are noteworthy on this.First, this sharply contradicts the apostles of neo-liberalism's make-believe that deregulation of business is the prevailing mode of operation.In reality, work has been regulated for a very long time.Second, law makes managerial domination over workers possible.All too often, law is merely an accessory for capitalism (Pistor, 2019).Unlike the many anti-worker and anti-union laws that underwrite capitalism, "workers have generally been in favour of restricting employer's discretionary power as much as possible" (Van der Linden, 2023: 3).In essence, what is assumed to be "discretionary power" actually boils down to management's despotic caprice, arbitrariness and whims.Page 3 covers what the entire book is all about, namely, the "constant shifting [of the] frontier of control" (Van der Linden, 2023: 3) between workers and management.In great and often highly illuminating detail, the book explains these shifting frontiers.Not surprisingly, "Karl Marx referred to this as the silent coercion of economic circumstance, which reduce workers' capacity to confront management" (Van der Linden, 2023: 4).To camouflage this, the ideologues of neo-liberalism put up a "ceremonial faade" (Van der Linden, 2023: 5) of supposedly free labour freely entering into the labour market -unless, of course, one wants to be exposed to meagre rations of a constantly diminishing welfare state.The French Nobel Prize winner Anatole France once explained, "the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread".Meanwhile, and despite the known power asymmetries in the labour market (Offe & Wiesenthal, 1980) that structurally disadvantage workers and greatly advantage management, the author correctly notes that "where there is power, there is resistance" (Van der Linden, 2023: 6).Yet, managerial "coercion still exists" (Van der Linden, 2023: 6), as can be observed from an Amazon warehouse to a Bangladeshi sweatshop.However, Van der Linden also writes that "absolute control is impossible" (Van der Linden, 2023: 12).As a consequence, "managers always need some degree of voluntary cooperative effort from their workers" (Van der Linden, 2023: 11).On the other hand, "even today, workers resort