The Dictionary of Human Geography

drive for labour market flexibility has fuelled
the growth of the working poor in many loca-
tions, and new forms of politicalresistance,
such as living wage campaigns, are growing as
a result. jwi

Suggested reading
McDowell (2003); Peck (1996).

labour process The means through which
labour power is extracted from workers: the
phrase originates inmarxism, though it refers
more broadly to the organization of work. Be
they in the field, factory or filing department,
when workers are employed, they enter into a
labour process through which their work is
organized and surplus (which is realized as
capital) is extracted. As such, writers who
use this phrase are often doing so with a
focus onpowerrelations in the workplace:
they have an interest in the relationship
between managerial control, technologies of
work, subjectivity and workers’ resistance.
Research into the labour process exploded
with the publication of Braverman’s (1974)
Labor and monopoly capitalism, which sug-
gested that the de-skilling of work was the
dominant tendency in the capitalistmode of
production. Geographers, however, played
very little part in this subsequent explosion of
work on de-skilling. Instead, these ideas about
the labour process have been manifest in de-
bates about spatialdivisions of labour.
In her seminal work,Spatial divisions of
labour, Massey (1984) highlighted the ways in
which the drive for profitability leads corpor-
ations to reconfigure the geography of their
operations, breaking up and stretching out
the labour process across space. Thus, man-
agerial functions tend to be separated from
those of manual labour and, increasingly,
companies have developed complex structures
of production at global dimensions. In what
have been called globalcommodity chains,
many of the largesttransnational corpor-
ationsnow take advantage of a complex and
fast-changing international division of labour,
using subcontracted production and service
delivery companies to reduce costs, minimize
risk and increase flexibility (Dicken, 2003;
Hale and Wills, 2005). As such, the labour
process has a very clear geography, in which
the map of manufacturing and, increasingly,
service industries (such as call centres) is
organized at a global scale. The separation of
control from production raises a number of
important questions about responsibility and
power. Workers are generally disempowered

by this extension of corporate geography and

the spatial reorganization of the labour pro-

cess. As a result, trades unions are experiment-

ing with new forms of internationalism and are

attempting to forge alliances with consumers

to find new sources of power (seelabour

geography).

Ultimately, geographers have sought to

root understandings of the labour process in

place, highlighting the way in which the

labour process changes social relations and

political possibilities within and between dif-

ferent locales. jwi

Suggested reading

Burawoy (1979).

labour theory of value A cornerstone of

classical economics, prominent in the writings

of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The work

of the French Physiocrats (notably Franc ̧ois

Quesnay and the elder Mirabeau) was a prox-

imate influence on Smith’s formulation of a

labour theory; more distantly, the writings of

the proto-liberal philosopher John Locke,

especially his Second treatise on government

(1681), were a likely influence. In his moral-

political theory, Locke defended the virtues of

individual labour, the sanctity of property

acquired by mixing labour with objects

and the natural rights of individuals – and

conceived for the state the limited but

critical role of regulating and securing private

property(seeliberalism).

Why have a labour theory of value at all? For

one, Locke’s version of the labour theory pro-

vided no indication of how to bring into

equivalence different forms of private property

within a generalized exchange economy.

Adam Smith’s version of the labour theory

attempted exactly that: his purpose was to

demonstrate the ‘natural price ... [or] the

central price, to which the prices of allcom-

moditiesare continually gravitating’ (1991

[1776], p. 61), or in other words, their intrin-

sic worth above and beyond the ephemeral

fluctuations of market price. This, of course,

begged the question: Which commodity

served as the natural basis of all others?

During the early industrial era (seeindustrial

revolution), it was tempting to infer that

‘labour’ was the common basis of all

exchanged goods. But neither Smith, nor

Ricardo, who adopted his labour theory,

could resolve a basic contradiction; namely,

what the natural price of labour should be.

Karl Marx made the breakthrough. He drew

a distinction between the ‘use-value’ and

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LABOUR PROCESS