Hierarchies at Work
Race, World-Systems, and Legal Distribution
Published on 10. June 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
416 pages
978-0-231-21225-0 (ISBN)
Description
This book challenges dominant understandings of both economic inequality and the future of work. Leading scholars in law, social sciences, and the humanities consider the production and reproduction of global hierarchies by revisiting and deploying three critical approaches that emerged in the late twentieth century: racial capitalism, world-systems theory, and critical legal distributional analysis. They demonstrate that these methods-especially when brought together-offer new insights into the forces that entrench the asymmetries of power and wealth that are too often shorthanded as inequality. They also uncover elisions and erasures of the past and present in prevailing technological-determinist narratives about the future of work.
Hierarchies at Work features powerful, grounded studies of the dynamics of work and livelihood in sites ranging from garment factories in Jordan and palm oil fields in Colombia to dairy farms in the United States. These studies underscore the necessity of thinking about the future of work and livelihoods through their racialized past and present and recognizing the systemic role of law in unequal distribution. Highlighting alternative imaginaries that contest systems of domination and subordination, this timely book offers resources to spur more just futures across local and global levels.
Hierarchies at Work features powerful, grounded studies of the dynamics of work and livelihood in sites ranging from garment factories in Jordan and palm oil fields in Colombia to dairy farms in the United States. These studies underscore the necessity of thinking about the future of work and livelihoods through their racialized past and present and recognizing the systemic role of law in unequal distribution. Highlighting alternative imaginaries that contest systems of domination and subordination, this timely book offers resources to spur more just futures across local and global levels.
Reviews / Votes
This extraordinary collection brings together the study of law, history, sociology, and literature. Taken together, the included essays propose and exemplify new ways of thinking about global history, racial capitalism, and the strategies-legal and otherwise-ordinary people have used to shape, confound, and resist the roles they've been assigned in the history of capitalism. One by one, these rigorous essays revisit and revivify ongoing arguments and point the way to emergent questions. -- Walter Johnson, author of <i>The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States</i> There could hardly be a more pivotal moment for this rigorous volume on distributive justice and work. Engle and Hoad bring some of the most recognized critical legal scholars into dialogue around foundational literature on racial capitalism and world systems theories, moving the work of "others" from margin to center. -- Adelle Blackett, Canada Research Chair in Transnational Labor Law, McGill University The future of work and transformations of inequality are deeply entwined with each other and with racial capitalism, the shifting world-system, and the persistence of imperialism alongside efforts to decolonize. Hierarchies at Work helps connect the political economy and geographies of exploitation and struggle today. -- Craig Calhoun, University Professor of Social Sciences, Arizona State UniversityMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
7 bw figures
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-231-21225-0 (9780231212250)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
06/2025
1st Edition
Columbia University Press
€39.49
Available for download
Persons
Karen Engle is Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: Feminist Interventions in International Law (2020) and The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (2010).
Neville Hoad is associate professor of English and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS (2025) and African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (2007).
Neville Hoad is associate professor of English and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS (2025) and African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (2007).
Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction, by Karen Engle and Neville Hoad
Part I. Global Hierarchies: Racial Capitalism, World-Systems, and Legal Distributional Analyses
1. Neville Alexander: Racial Capitalism South African Style, by Dennis Davis
2. Walter Rodney, World-Systems Theory, and Racial Capitalism, by Nicole Burrowes
3. Critical System Analysis and the Great Disparities, by David Kennedy
4. Law Distributes: Ricardo, Marx, CLS, by Duncan Kennedy
5. Distributional Analytics and the TWAIL Tradition, by Vasuki Nesiah
Part II. The Future of Work: Challenges to Dominant Framings
6. The Future of Work from a Victorian Past, by Neville Hoad
7. Recovering the Past and the Outside: Sites for New Imaginaries of the Future of Work, by Kerry Rittich
8. Financialization, Fissuring, and Global Futures of Work, by Jennifer Bair
Part III. Global Hierarchies at Work: Grounded Accounts
9. Labors in Time and Subjectivity: Gender Nonconformity and Racial Capitalism in the Making of Eighteenth-Century New Orleans, by Vanja Hamzic
10. Garment Work, Refugees, and Resistance: The Jordan Compact, by Jennifer Gordon
11. Distributional Analysis and Supply Chain Interventions: Migrant Worker Organization in Vermont's Dairy Industry, by Jennifer Bair
12. Beyond Essential: Growth, a Pandemic, and the Future of Expendable Workers in a "Progressive" Texas Boomtown, by Karen Engle and Samuel Tabory
13. Land and Labor in the Colombian Palm Oil Industry, by Helena Alviar Garcia and Jorge Gonzalez Jacome
14. Dead Ends and Blind Alleys in the Future of Work: Notes from Italy, by Jorge L. Esquirol
List of Contributors
Index
Introduction, by Karen Engle and Neville Hoad
Part I. Global Hierarchies: Racial Capitalism, World-Systems, and Legal Distributional Analyses
1. Neville Alexander: Racial Capitalism South African Style, by Dennis Davis
2. Walter Rodney, World-Systems Theory, and Racial Capitalism, by Nicole Burrowes
3. Critical System Analysis and the Great Disparities, by David Kennedy
4. Law Distributes: Ricardo, Marx, CLS, by Duncan Kennedy
5. Distributional Analytics and the TWAIL Tradition, by Vasuki Nesiah
Part II. The Future of Work: Challenges to Dominant Framings
6. The Future of Work from a Victorian Past, by Neville Hoad
7. Recovering the Past and the Outside: Sites for New Imaginaries of the Future of Work, by Kerry Rittich
8. Financialization, Fissuring, and Global Futures of Work, by Jennifer Bair
Part III. Global Hierarchies at Work: Grounded Accounts
9. Labors in Time and Subjectivity: Gender Nonconformity and Racial Capitalism in the Making of Eighteenth-Century New Orleans, by Vanja Hamzic
10. Garment Work, Refugees, and Resistance: The Jordan Compact, by Jennifer Gordon
11. Distributional Analysis and Supply Chain Interventions: Migrant Worker Organization in Vermont's Dairy Industry, by Jennifer Bair
12. Beyond Essential: Growth, a Pandemic, and the Future of Expendable Workers in a "Progressive" Texas Boomtown, by Karen Engle and Samuel Tabory
13. Land and Labor in the Colombian Palm Oil Industry, by Helena Alviar Garcia and Jorge Gonzalez Jacome
14. Dead Ends and Blind Alleys in the Future of Work: Notes from Italy, by Jorge L. Esquirol
List of Contributors
Index