Labour, Efficiency, Critique: writing the plantation into the technological present-future

Stefan Ouma and Saumya Premchander
Additional contact information
Stefan Ouma: Department of Geography, 98919University of Bayreuth, Faculty of Biology Chemistry & Earth Sciences, Universitätsstraße 30, 95447 Bayreuth, Germany
Saumya Premchander: Department of Geography, 98919University of Bayreuth, Faculty of Biology Chemistry & Earth Sciences, Universitätsstraße 30, 95447 Bayreuth, Germany

Environment and Planning A, 2022, vol. 54, issue 2, 413-421

Abstract: In this commentary, we call upon critical labour scholars, including labour geographers, to feature what sociologist Palmer called the ‘thrust of efficiency’ more centrally in their work. We put forth that the push for efficiency, as made possible by digital technology, needs to be analysed in terms of its historical lineage as well as in terms of its geographical scope. Centreing efficiency in critical labour studies, necessitates three scholarly moves. These are particularly relevant for labour geography, a field that has so far tended to circumvent questions of coloniality/labour, digital Taylorism, and the politics of (re-)writing economic geographies, in by-passing the literatures that deal with them. The plantation, an analytical category and ontic reality that stretches across several yet often unconnected bodies of literature – literary studies, Black Geographies, Caribbean studies, and the Black Radical Tradition, as well as in Global History – is central to our effort. Eventually, writing the plantation into the technological present-future can be the starting point for a larger and historico-geographically informed critique, in economic geography and beyond, of efficiency, a mode of thinking-cum-praxis based on input–output calculations, objectifying practices, violent value extraction and the removal of undesired ‘social frictions’ for the sake of capital accumulation.

Keywords: digital Taylorism; plantation; Black geographies; surveillance capitalism; labour geographies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X211065452 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:54:y:2022:i:2:p:413-421

DOI: 10.1177/0308518X211065452

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().