Where's the Labour in the International Division of Labour? Rethinking the Production of Global Development.

This paper argues that reconceptualising production within the relations of global development is an important step in overcoming what the editors of this volume term 'anachronistic approaches' in contemporary development theory. Notwithstanding the centrality of production within global capitalism, its status within critical development studies is at low ebb. This is partly a consequence of the mainstream ascendancy of neoclassical economics and its methodological autism, but also because the alternative approaches that development theory currently draws upon - institutional economics and global commodity chains - offer too narrow a perspective to fill the void. One of the weaknesses of these perspectives is the way in which labour - both as a social practice and as a productive potential embodied in human bodies - is ignored. This neglect is problematic because it is impossible to adequately conceptualise questions of identity, power, (re)distribution and socio-economic change without placing labour and the process of production - in both its material and social elements - at the forefront of critical development theory. To overcome this labour blindness, the paper argues that we should focus upon the interplay between locally embedded production relations and the abstraction of these economic activities in the form of market price and inter-firm competition. The dynamic relationship between these two processes - embedding and abstraction - provides a unifying conceptual basis on which we can examine how workers and their communities both produce and contest social reproduction across different geographic locales and social contexts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]