Assembling a Labor Market

The booming voice industry in the Philippines is a case of an emergent global labor market. New technologies developed over the past several decades allow companies to spin off or relocate their phone services anywhere in the world. Differences in labor costs across regions of the world matter, but the resulting search for ideal labor is as much a social as an economic process. To capture this social dynamic, this chapter analyzes markets as assemblages. The key mediators in such as assemblage are firms, states, and workers. This chapter provides the theoretical tools to understand labor markets as assemblages, and suggests why some assemblages are more stable than others.