Alessandra Mezzadri

• PhD Development Studies
• Reader in Global development and Political economy at SOAS University of London

Reflecting a longstanding intellectual heritage in Marxist political economy, contributions to agrarian studies have variously referred to the production, distribution and extraction of value. Despite this central role within the heritage of agrarian studies, the concept of value is often used inconsistently between authors and sometimes deployed w...

The last decade has seen a renaissance of feminist political economy studies centred on the concept of ‘social reproduction’. These aim at studying global capitalism from the vantage‐point of what produces and sustains life, expanding the social boundaries of processes and subjects analysed in political economy. Contributing to this research agenda...

This analysis theorises the central role of the urban–rural divide in the making of value relations and exploitation in contemporary labour regimes. Inspired by insights contained in Diane Elson’s ‘value theory of labour’ and informed by evidence on labour circulation in India’s ‘Sweatshop Regime’, the article combines Early Social Reproduction Ana...

This ground-breaking Handbook broadens empirical and theoretical understandings of work, work relations, and workers. It advances a global, intersectional labour studies agenda, laying the foundations for the politically emancipatory project of decolonising the political economy of work. Moving beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries, this Hand...

This conversation brings together feminist scholars from various backgrounds and epistemological traditions around a central topic in feminist debates that is today more relevant than ever, social reproduction. It begins by examining social reproduction as a concept and its entanglements with the dynamics of global capitalism from human geography a...

The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated processes of labour transition from industrial work to the informal economy, which have always characterized the life of the working poor. This paper explores this kind of reverse transition, that is, when the Lewisian dream of having an industrial job comes to an end, and workers are forced into a reverse migrat...

This article proposes a reading of the COVID‐19 crisis through a social reproduction lens, with a focus on the restructuring of reproductive sectors, the world of work and the generation of differentiated surplus populations, and considers the implications of this reading for global development debates on inequality and informal labour. Learning fr...

This article portrays the COVID-19 pandemic as a planetary crisis of capitalist life and analyses it through the feminist political economy lens of social reproduction. Celebrating the plurality and distinctiveness of social reproduction theorisations, the article deploys three approaches to map the contours of the present conjuncture; namely Socia...

There has been a recent resurgence in interest in the theorization of labour regimes in various disciplines. This has taken the form of a concern to understand the role that labour regimes play in the structuring, organization and dynamics of global systems of production and reproduction. The concept has a long heritage that can be traced back to t...

The COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed the relevance of social reproduction as a key analytical lens to interrogate contemporary capitalist processes. Building on insights from distinct theoretical traditions, in this introductory contribution to the special issue in Feminist Global Political Economies of Work we propose social reproduction as a prism...

This article deploys a feminist political economy approach centered on social reproduction to analyze the reconfiguration and regeneration of multiple inequalities in households and the labor markets during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on this approach, the analysis unpacks the multiple trajectories of fragility the current crisis is intervening on...

In this commentary, the authors discuss how the high demand for personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic can help draw attention to society's deep-seated reliance on forced labor.

This article explores ‘time’ as a crucial category of analysis shaping and shaped by the dynamics of exploitation and social reproduction across the global assembly line. Focusing on the Indian garment industry, the article develops a feminist political economy of time stressing the productive and reproductive temporalities of exploitation, which g...

Critically engaging with Marxist‐Feminist debates, this article argues that only interpretations of social reproduction as value‐producing capture the features of contemporary informalised labour relations. Building on early social reproduction analyses and informed by debates in political economy of development and feminist geography, the article...

Part of the Critical Perspectives on Work and Employment series, this edited collection brings together contributions from leading international scholars to initiate an important dialogue between labour process analysis and scholarship on work in the Global South. This book characterises the forms of work and labour process that characterise global...

Short online contribution focusing on the limits of productivity arguments to explain prices and wages in the garment industry

Radical feminist analyses have always placed considerable emphasis on the crucial role played by social reproduction for the development of capitalism. Early social reproduction analyses-primarily premised on housework but also more broadly concerned with wage-lessness-developed a robust critique of Marxian views that identified processes of value-...

This article deploys the concept of ‘classes of labour’ to map and compare non‐factory labour relations in the garment chain across Delhi and Shanghai metropolitan areas. It contributes to commodity studies by unpacking the great complexity of mechanisms of ‘adverse incorporation’ of informal work in global commodity chains and production circuits....

Amidst new global initiatives to promote garment workers’ health and safety following a spate of deadly factory disasters across the Global South, this critical review calls for an expanded research agenda that looks beyond the workplace to examine the complex politics, spatialities, and temporalities of garment workers’ health and wellbeing. Drawi...

The Sweatshop as a Regime, full introduction to the book The Sweatshop Regime, CUP 2017

This book explores the processes producing and reproducing the garment sweatshop in India. Drawing from Marxian and feminist insights, the book theorizes the sweatshop as a complex ‘regime’ of exploitation and oppression, jointly crafted by global, regional and local actors, and working across productive and reproductive realms. The analysis illust...

Drawing on approaches to class stressing the multiplicity of labour relations at work under capitalism and from feminist insights on oppression and social reproduction, this paper illustrates the interconnection between processes of class formation and patriarchal norms in globalised production circuits. The analysis emphasises the nexus between th...

Analyses of labour contracting crucially inform studies of labour informalization and precarious work in industrial systems and production networks. Challenging conceptualizations emphasizing contractors’ intermediary role, and drawing from debates on petty commodity production and interlocking, this article analyzes labour contractors in the home-...

Analyses of labour contracting crucially inform studies of labour informalisation and precarious work in industrial systems and production networks. Challenging conceptualisations emphasising contractors' intermediary role, and drawing from debates on petty commodity production and interlocking, this article analyses labour contractors in the home-...

Deploying an approach to chain analysis concerned with regional differentiation and backshoring, this article investigates the regional complexities of the garment commodity chain in India and its multiple local sweatshop regimes to illustrate the limitations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) norms. First, the article shows that India’s dist...

Today, India is an important player in garment export. Production is highly “localised” and scattered across the subcontinent. It is organised in industrial clusters, with distinct production and labour practices and product specialisations. Product cycles involve numerous ancillary activities, and are often decentralised from main urban tailoring...

The contents of this Development Viewpoint reflect the views of the author(s) and not necessarily those of CDPR or SOAS. www. soas.ac.uk/cdpr Email: cdpr@soas.ac.uk Telephone: +44 (0) 207 898 4316

The ‘globalisation’ of the garment industry has taken place in a context of increasing flexibilisation and informalisation of labour. Concerns of corporate social responsibility, especially in the form of codes of conduct, have been presented as a potential way to address this ‘race to the bottom’ for labour. Focusing on the experience of two impor...

Globalisation has affected the industrial trajectories of developing countries, producing an increasing disarticulation between the management of production and regimes of labour control. While production regimes have been projected into the global arena, labour regimes have remained apparently anchored to regulatory mechanisms provided by local so...

Globalisation has affected the industrial trajectories of developing countries, producing an increasing disarticulation between the management of production and regimes of labour control. While production regimes have been projected into the global arena, labour regimes have remained apparently anchored to regulatory mechanisms provided by local so...

Corporate Strategy and Industrial Development (CSID) University of the Witwatersrand Over three decades of neoliberal policies had a severe effect on labour, in developed and developing regions alike. In developed regions, neoliberalism managed to crash the resistance of organised labour, significantly curtailing its institu-tionalised power and sp...

The rise of neo-liberal globalisation in the 1980s impacted the industrial trajectories of developing countries, signalling the shift from 'the development project' to the 'globalisation project'. Within the legacy of neo-liberal globalisation, many countries became production nodes within global commodity chains, exploiting their comparative advan...

The rise of Neoliberalism in the 1980s dramatically transformed the industrial practices of many developing countries, signalling the shift towards export-oriented industrialisation. Since then, the spread of globalised production has gone hand-in-hand with intensified exploitation of a decentralized, flexible and cheap labour force (Mezzadri 2008)...