Interrogating Multiscalar Labour Regimes: Extending Debates on Fragmentation and Dynamism

ABSTRACT Labour regime analysis examines the relational dynamics of regulation and agency shaping the politics of work in the arenas of production, circulation, social reproduction and representation. Recent scholarship on multiscalar labour regimes has noted their dynamism (i.e., they change over time) and fragmentation (i.e., distinctive experiences of the same work between different workforces), and begun exploring how the regime's regulation/agency dynamics are shaped by these processes. This article builds on these debates to present fragmentation and dynamism as intertwined organising logics of the multiscalar labour regime. It does so by: (i) reframing ideas of fragmentation in the context of labour market segmentation; (ii) extending existing understandings of dynamism to include the multiple, intersecting modalities of temporal relations shaping a labour regime, from everyday time at the workplace through to longer cycles of political and infrastructural time; (iii) demonstrating the differentiated ways in which temporal relations play out in this expanded view of fragmented labour regimes; and (iv) highlighting the concomitant expanded conceptualisation of the spaces of social reproduction and circulation of labour this approach demands. Derived from ongoing work on critical mineral labour regimes, this enhanced perspective is more broadly instructive for the study of new labour regimes in formation or labour regimes in transition, thus broadening the scope of existing studies which tend to focus on already established labour regimes.