Workers, Power and Society

The book addresses how power and power resources remain important analytically as well as empirically dimensions for analysing contemporary capitalism. It provides a theoretical framework for studying, understanding, and explaining changes in the world of work and how that leads to changes in contemporary capitalist societies. Changes in the world of work are closely related to increasing inequality, growing social unrest, and societal polarisation. Hence the book seeks to deepen our understanding of how developments in the sphere of work have implication far beyond the direct impact on workers. The book focuses on how workers and unions utilise their various power resources to off-set the power advantage of employers and capital in the sphere of labour politics, which have crucial linkages with both cultural life, politics, and the market. Although workers' and unions' power and influence have been declining almost universally across the world, the argument in the book is that they still hold power resources that can challenge and sometimes alter outcomes in another direction than what employers and capital wants. Hence the theory can help understand the possibilities that workers and unions still have and how these resources affect the outcomes of the labour-capital struggle. A core contribution of the book is that it develops theoretical propositions about power resource theory, provides clear definitions of the core concepts as well as apply the power resource theory to a range of new or emerging topic fields like global value chains, minimum wages, and migrant workers.

Jens Arnholtz is an associate professor at the Employment Relations Research Centre (FAOS), Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. His research interests are in the field of employment relations, with a special focus on cross-border labour mobility, posting of workers, Europeanization of national labour markets and power resource theory. Bjarke Refslund is an associate professor in sociology at Aalborg University. He holds a PhD degree in political science from Aalborg University. His main research areas include industrial relations, labour migration, and labour market sociology, and he has been working on collectivism and unions, organising migrant workers, precarious employment, public regulation and Europeanisation of labour markets amongst others.

Chapter 1: Power resource theory for contemporary society: A research framework Part 1: The five power resources Chapter 2: The structural power of workers under capitalism: A marketization approach Chapter 3: Associational Power Resources: How organisational properties matter for the power of workers Chapter 4: Institutional Power Resources: A Critical Analysis Chapter 5: Ideational Power Resources Chapter 6: Coalition Power Resources Part 2: Empirical applications Chapter 7: Why varieties of power resources matter Chapter 8: Workers' power in supply chains and global production networks - resources, contexts and agency Chapter 9: Leveraging power resources for a decent minimum wage Chapter 10: Power resource theories and the case of trade unions and migrant labour in increasingly fragmented labour markets Chapter 11: Power resources in the public sector employment relations Chapter 12: Conclusion - Power resource theory: where are we at, where should we go and what challenges lay ahead