CONCLUSIONSI have ranged so widely in this chapter that it is
difficult to end with a set of concise conclusions
about the significance of the changing nature and
distribution of work and the diverse set of theo-
retical approaches to its analysis. I want there-
fore in this conclusion to focus in the main on a
set of issues about policy and political responses
to contemporary shifts rather than to attempt a
summary. I shall address three sets of issues at
different spatial scales from inside the organiza-
tion to international cooperation.
At the scale of the organization, perhaps one
of the most significant implications of the
expanding body of work about social identity
and workplace experiences has been for theoreti-
cal and practical conceptions of social justice
and for policies to implement more equal treat-
ment between diverse workers. There is a grow-
ing recognition that issues about embodiment,
weight, age, sexuality, physical ability and skin
colour as they affect workplace performances
and evaluations are economic, and not merely
socio-cultural, issues. Cultural attributes are thus
part of the basis of economic discrimination
(Fraser, 1997; Turner, 1996; Young, 1990). This
argument has opened up a series of questions
about how to effect greater equality in the work-
place through recognizing difference and so
introducing specific policies for different groups.
Examples being introduced include: ideas about
workplace mentoring; policies to ensure that
appraisal and promotion schemes discriminate
evenly rather than assuming workers have no
dependants; and wider policies based on ethnic
and gender audits to identify possible areas of
unequal treatment. In the economy as a whole,
some nation-states have accepted that to facili-
tate growing workplace participation for all
individuals, regardless of age and status, new
forms of what have become called work/life
balance policies are necessary in order to ensure
that responsibilities that were once accepted by
the family or supported by welfare provisions for
dependants, which are now being cut in neolib-
eral states, are still able to be carried out as more
and more households include dual or multiple
workers. As well as policies that explicitly
recognize women’s maternal responsibilities,
some states have accepted that to shift stubborn
gender inequalities, policies that facilitate men’s
participation in the domestic sphere are also
needed. Paternity and parental leave provisions
have been introduced in, for example, many of
the European Union states, although progress is
slow and uneven.While local and national policies may have a
limited impact as global capital constructs new
geographies of investment and disinvestment
and the global proletariat is increasingly at the
mercy of decisions taken in the headquarters of
global corporations, it is clear that policies to
protect workers from their immediate conse-
quence are also crucial. While Britain has chosen
to emphasize the ‘flexibility’ of its workforce
with extremely limited protection against redun-
dancy, France, for example, has adopted a more
protectionist course, and yet there seems to be
little difference in their relative success at
attracting inward investment. In the face of
global capitalism, however, new forms of work-
ers’, consumers’ and ecological movements that
traverse spatial and cultural differences in the
same way as capitalism are becoming more
important, aided by the technological innova-
tions that lie behind the emerging knowledge and
network societies. In these movements, social
and cultural beliefs about equity and justice that
also accept diversity and build on it are an essen-
tial aspect of the challenge to the profit motive
and economic ‘rationality’. Indeed, new areas of
theoretical and empirical investigation develop-
ing theoretical approaches and methodologies
that are more usually the province of social and
cultural geographers are providing part of the
impetus to look in different ways at the uneven
effects of economic restructuring, economic
inequality, spatially uneven development and the
cultures of particular ways of labouring. Perhaps
a challenge that remains is to develop analyses
that connect these new approaches to political
struggles against the unequal impacts of labour
market restructuring and economic change
between and across geographic scales.
Analyses of the future of work that celebrate
the relative freedoms of highly skilled ‘detradi-
tional’ workers in new knowledge economies,
but neglect the consequences for the growing
global working class who labour under conditions
of increasing exploitation, are an inadequate
response to the enormous implications of the
new ways of working that are emerging in the
twenty-first century. It seems clear to me that a
combination of materialist and cultural perspec-
tives is necessary to understand the complex ways
in which diverse labour forces are constructed
and cultures of production are produced and
maintained within organizations and localities.
The central role played by local women workers
in the extension of new modes of economic flex-
ibility in the development of a global proletariat,
for example, cannot be explained without an
understanding of the spatially variable gendered
practices and ideologies that influence labourCULTURES OF LABOUR 1113029-ch04.qxd 03-10-02 10:30 AM Page 111