'Putting labour in its place': global value chains and labour process analysis

The origins of this Special Issue lie in a stream organized at the International Labour Process Conference (ILPC) held in Stockholm in 2012. The editors' interest in this area emerged from work on the retail supply chain (Newsome, 2010), call centres and business process outsourcing (Taylor, 2010), and spatiality, work and employment (Rainnie et al., 2011). The underlying rationale for the stream was to attract papers that situated labour and the labour process within the global commodity chain (GCC), global value chain (GVC) and global production network (GPN) frameworks. The articles in this collection reflect different positions and divergent approaches in their attempt to integrate labour. We now provide some necessary context for understanding the debates with which they engage.