The study of the spatial contexts and scales in which workers live, and organize, and work to address particular economic and political problems. Mitchell (2011) Antipode 43, 2, 563 believes that ‘putting workers and their practices and interests right at the heart of our analyses and making these ontologically prior in our theorizing’ are at the heart of labour geography. Smith and Butler (2000) Env. & Plan. A 32, 9 see it as the ways in which labour, largely political labour, has influenced the geographical landscape; ‘understanding work requires knowledge of the wider economic, political, and cultural context in which employment takes place’. Herod (2003) Int. Labor & Work.-Class Hist. 64 argues that ‘workers make their own geographies, though not under the conditions of their own choosing’.
Major themes are: the role of work and employment in contemporary capitalist society (M. Pacione (2005) and Cumbers et al. (2003) Env. & Plan. A 35, 9); workers’ socio-geographical positionality in explaining employment within and beyond the workplace (Smith (2000) Env. & Plan. A 32, 10 on economic practices in eastern Europe, and Herod (2000) Env. & Plan. A 32, 10 on workers, neoliberalism, and globalization); workplace structures and identity (Dowell in T. Barnes et al., eds (2002) and Wills et al., guest editorial (2000) Env. & Plan. A 32, 9).
Gazier (2006) Background Paper, 11th EU–Japan Symposium, discusses the differentiated impact of globalization on work, and Gritsai (2005) GaWC Res. Bull. 162 and Winther (2001) Urban Studs 38 write on the evolution of a changing spatial division of labour. See Yildirim (1999) Work, Empl. & Soc. 13 and Whitelegg (2003) Antipode 35, 2 on spatial changes in employment relations. MacKinnon et al. (2008) Env. & Plan. A 40, 6 detect a major shift in industrial relations ‘away from national collective bargaining to a system of localized company bargaining’. See Jones in Valler and Wood, eds (2004) on geographies of local labour regulation, James (2007) Geog. Compass 2, 1 on gendered geographies of labour, Wills (2001) Antipode 33, 3 on geographies of union organization; Wills and Lincoln (1999) Env. & Plan. A 31, 8 on cultures of work; and Jackson and Palmer-Jones (1999) Dev. & Change 30, 3 on the embodiment of employment. See also Lier (2007) Geog. Compass 1, 4 for a review of labour geography.