This paper explores the interplay between capital, socio-spatial structure and grassroots agency in the context of the recent trajectories of labor geography. Based on field research conducted in Dȇrsim, Turkey, our analysis unfolds the constraining role of socio-spatial structure in the agency and praxis of grassroots movements and their geography-making and crisis-displacement from below. Through the case study, we propound a concept of socio-spatial fix to explain how this praxis conjoins with and assists capital in both staving off its recurrent crises and reproducing its own logic of accumulation. Our analysis reveals that the socio-spatial fix in Dȇrsim, which is constituted by the grassroots struggle against hydroelectric power plant projects, performs three functions. First, it facilitates the production of capitalist social relations and spaces; second, it strengthens and maintains the existing social order through temporally moderating the province’s chronic problems; and third, it provides legitimacy for the capitalist exploitation of nature, culture and histories. Our research contributes to the emerging pluralist school of labor geography, providing an empirically substantiated insight into how capital reproduces itself via socio-spatial fixes produced by constrained grassroots agency.

The UK agri-food industry is heavily dependent on migrant labour and, as result, the position and experiences of migrant workers have remained topics of research interest for over a decade. To date, a prolific body of research in the organisation studies literature has addressed the subordinate and exploited position of migrants against a backdrop of precarious terms and conditions of work. Studies have also extolled the scope for worker mobility and resistance, as well as explored the intersectional and non-reductive complexity of migrant life. Although offering valuable insights, these literatures present a disembedded portrayal of the agri-food industry, studying its regulatory provisions, everyday routines and work patterns in abstraction from the spaces within which they occur. Existing research has failed to recognise these processes as modes of space production, in line with Henri Lefebvre’s trialectic framework. This issue of Organization enables us to bring empirical and theoretical insights into this often neglected area, pertaining both to the study of migrant labour spaces and the identification of the rhythms through which these spaces are produced. Accordingly, our study combines Rudolf Laban’s ‘ontology of rhythm’ and Henri Lefebvre’s ‘rhythmanalysis’ methodology. Aided by our own positionality as former agri-food workers, we show how regulating, connecting and ‘dressage’ rhythms intersect agri-food space in a process of relational and multifaceted ‘ordering’, rather than static order. We contribute to the organisation studies literature by conceptualising the missing, spatial dimension in the agri-food migrant industry and demonstrating the value of rhythmanalysis as an underutilised methodology for its continued study.

Most workers around the world are part of the precariat, characterized by non-permanent, informal, short-term, low-pay, low-skill, and insecure jobs. While there have been many socio-economic critiques of the negative impacts of precarity on workers, the literature has increasingly asked how precarious workers actually live their lives and how their subjectivities are produced on a daily basis. We contribute to this literature by providing a psychosocial account of the ambivalent experiences of precarious workers. We contend that the interplay of recognition and misrecognition plays a crucial role, as the vulnerable, working subject becomes entangled in a complex web of recognizability. We present insights from 104 in-depth interviews, providing a Lacanian analysis of how precarious workers develop unconscious attachments to neoliberal values that are central to the logic of precarity. Understanding this ambivalence helps us develop a more nuanced view of an ethics of precarious workers’ vulnerability.