Symposium theme
In the current era of financial crisis and austerity, the topic of this Symposium assumes a particular urgency. Across the globe, a body of received knowledge regarding labour law and labour markets is being used by national governments and supranational institutions alike to legitimise the lowering of labour standards and the dismantling of collective institutions for the regulation of employment terms and conditions and the resolution of disputes. The purported ‘truth’ about labour markets is that legal rights and labour market institutions constitute undesirable ‘rigidities’ and, as such, barriers to increased employment levels and economic growth. The origins of this truth lie with a particular strand of economic rationality or logic that is derived from a version of neoclassical economics. Such is its pervasiveness in policy discourse today that it has come to enjoy the status, almost, of a new common-sense: something that can be claimed and assumed without being proven.
Beginning from a recognition of the importance of labour market analysis to a full and useful understanding of law and policy in the field, the aim behind the Symposium is to give consideration to methodologies applicable to the study of labour law and labour markets: methodologies drawn, in particular, from the fields of new institutional economics, economic sociology and political economy. The intention is that work presented at the Symposium would contribute to the longer term research goal of identifying and refining a methodology that would allow for the analysis of the role of (labour) law in constituting markets and, at the same time, for recognition of the inherently political nature of the question how markets are constituted, how they are combined with or constrained by non-market institutions and modes of action and interaction.
Dissemination
Participants will be invited to present original research and within 6 months after the date of the Symposium, to submit final drafts of papers for publication. The organiser of the Symposium will seek in advance of that date to secure an agreement for publication of the papers as a collection, preferably as a special issue of a refereed journal.
Bibliography
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D Ashiagbor, P Kotiswaran, A Perry-Kessaris (eds) (2014) 65(3) Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, special issue
D Ashiagbor, ‘Evaluating the Reflexive Turn in Labour Law’ in A Bogg, C Costello, ACL Davies, J Prassl (eds), Migrants at Work (Hart 2015)
L Barmes, ‘Individual Rights at Work, Methodological Experimentation and the Nature of Law’ in A Blackham & A Ludlow (eds), New Frontiers in Empirical Labour Law Research (Hart 2015)
S Deakin and F Wilkinson, The Law of the Labour Market (Oxford 2004).
S Deakin, ‘Concepts of the Market in Labour Law’, in A Numhauser-Henning and M Rönnmar (eds), Normative Patterns and Legal Developments in the Social Dimension of the EU (Hart 2013)
R Dukes, The Labour Constitution (Oxford 2014)
J Fudge, ‘Constitutionalizing Labour Rights in Canada and Europe: Freedom of Association, Collective Bargaining, and Strikes’ (2015) Current Legal Problems
J Fudge and K Strauss, ‘Migrants, Unfree Labour, and the Legal Construction of Domestic Servitude: Migrant Domestic Workers in the UK’ in C Costello and M Freedland (eds) Migrants at Work: Immigration and Vulnerability in Labour Law. (Oxford 2014)
R Knegt, ‘A farewell to ‘protection’: rethinking the labour law-market nexus’ (2014)
J Julen Votinius, ‘Parenthood Meets Market-Functionalism: Parental Rights in the Labour Market and the Importance of Gender, in A Numhauser-Henning and M Rönnmar (eds), Normative Patterns and Legal Developments in the Social Dimension of the EU (Hart 2013)
S Marshall, ‘How Does Institutional Change Occur? Two Strategies for Reforming the Scope of Labour Law’ (2014) 43(3) Industrial Law Journal 286-318
Claire Mumme, ‘Property in Labour and the Limits of Contract’ in Mattei and Haskell (eds), Research Handbook on Political Economy and Law (Edward Elgar 2016)