In the middle of things: the political economy of labour beyond the market
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract While legal analyses of political economy typically centre on events and processes within the market, this discussion argues that contemporary dilemmas requires attention to labour and productive activity at its edges and beyond. Questions surrounding labour provide an unparalleled vantage point from which to assess how groups are differentially situated within the economy, especially at moments of economic crisis and transformation. The constitutive role of law in market relations, in turn, makes legal analysis fundamental to understanding how risks and rewards at work are distributed. Reflecting on the role of macroeconomic governance to work, evident in times of crisis in particular, and drawing upon concepts and tools developed within critical legal thought, this paper analyses two sites of labour, unpaid household care work and informal labour, that are at the centre of distributive struggles around work now. As the historical separation of the household and market labour discloses, transformations of legal form, and classification played a critical role in the simultaneous production of waged labour and valueless care. Similar processes are underway in labour markets now; thus, understanding the legal constitution of value and of work itself remains central to questions of inequality now. Bargaining analysis as well as taxonomies of family law suggest the significance of a wide range of legal rules and their interaction to labour market outcomes and the position of workers. The analysis of informal work points in a similar direction, as contract, competition, and corporate law and beyond are all implicated in the growth of informality and precarity at work. Finally, uncovering the legal foundations of racial fragmentation at work requires attention to multiple legal regimes as well as the conceptual and ideological commitments that sustain them. All engage questions about the role, and transformation, of legal form, classification and consciousness within contemporary political economy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".