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      Call for Papers: Hierarchies of domesticity – spatial and social boundaries. Deadline for submissions is 30th September, 2024. Full details can be read here.

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      Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation

      Volume 15, Issue 2
       
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      Organising challenges in the era of financialisation: The case of videogame workers

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            Abstract

            A long-term study of videogame developers reveals that they face challenging working conditions and wish for unionisation, although they remain mostly non-unionised. In the broad corpus of literature on propensity to unionise, scholars often offer different explanations of feeble propensity among precarious workers in low-skilled jobs, on the one hand, and those in knowledge work, on the other. We contend that this neglects a larger shared context of increasing financialisation of organisations that has a deterrent effect on intentions to unionise. The effect of financialisation on workers' representation of interests is less studied than the process of financialisation itself and its effect on worsening working conditions. Yet financial stakeholders are now important labour relations actors even while not formally present in the system. We draw on literature on propensity to unionise and new actors in labour relations to include the effect of financialisation and challenge the dichotomous explanation of propensity to unionise that opposes low-skilled jobs to knowledge work.

            Content

            Author and article information

            Journal
            Journal ID (doi): 10.2307/j50010512
            Journal ID (jcode): workorgalaboglob
            Title: Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation
            Publisher: Pluto Journals
            ISSN: 1745-641X
            ISSN: 1745-6428
            Publication date (Print): 1 January 2021
            Volume: 15
            Issue: 2 ( doiID: 10.13169/workorgalaboglob.15.issue-2 )
            Pages: 7-24
            Article
            Publisher ID: workorgalaboglob.15.2.0007
            DOI: 10.13169/workorgalaboglob.15.2.0007
            SO-VID: e1a04788-8085-40d4-8a9b-21c13f6759ea
            Copyright © © Marie-Josée Legault and Johanna Weststar
            License:

            All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

            History
            Custom metadata
            lang eng

            ScienceOpen disciplines: Sociology,Labor law,Political science,Labor & Demographic economics,Political economics
            Keywords: propensity to unionisation,collective action,project-based work,precarious work,knowledge work,financialisation,videogame industry

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