Logistical Worlds

Rossiter, Ned

doi:10.5130/csr.v20i1.3833

Cited by 50 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…A recently emerging body of research critically discusses logistics as a central process of late capitalism in which the logic of efficient mobility across time and space governs increasingly larger aspects of the economy, but where counter-practices and oppositions are also central to its consequences (Chua et al 2018). Rather than being the blueprints for real flows, these plans can be understood as fantasies of the opportunities to realise coordination across extended spaces in a logistical world (Rossiter 2014) and includes translations between different suppliers (Tsing 2009). In order to unveil the fragmented and disorderly character of logistics beyond these fantasies, I focus on the mundane economic and ideological practices (Higgins and Larner 2017) of coordination that connect different actors and make circulation possible.…”

Section: Supply Chains and The Interoperability Of Transnational Econmentioning

confidence: 99%

Logistics of migrant labour: rethinking how workers ‘fit’ transnational economies

Krifors

2020

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

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New approaches to understanding the mediation of migration have emerged from literature on migration industries, migration infrastructures and migration brokerage. These studies point out the importance of economic processes in migration by studying how recruiters and brokers negotiate im/mobilities, within and outside the state. This article argues that there is a need to develop a complementing theorisation of the economies of migration, since the centrality of migrant labour, the role of employers, and the extraction of value from the transnational situation of migrants' lives remain vague. Emerging scholarship around a logistics of migration that accounts for supply chain organisations and the quest for transnational interoperability is suggested for this purpose. The article utilises ethnographic data from Sweden on labour recruiters and employers in two sectors: the wild berry industry and the ICT industry. Logistics, the art and science of coordinating supply chains [Cowen, Deborah. 2014. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. University of Minnesota Press.], produces a commodification of im/mobility in specific contexts of labour and social reproduction. Migration, therefore, represents one, more or less integrated, aspect of extracting value. Critical perspectives on logistics have the potential to link the emerging frameworks on mediation with observations of how globalising markets affect migrant workers and their lives.

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Section: Supply Chains and The Interoperability Of Transnational Econmentioning

confidence: 99%

Logistics of migrant labour: rethinking how workers ‘fit’ transnational economies

Krifors

2020

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

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“…In doing so, they produce an abstract space that is “equivalent, exchangeable, interchangeable” (Chua et al 2018; Lefebvre 2009:233, quoted in Chua et al 2018:622). Yet this “desire for a trans‐scalar smooth world” (Rossiter 2014:65) remains unattained, and is deeply troubled. A “counter‐logistics” made of multifarious “labour, anticolonial, and antiracist struggles” accompanies the expansion of supply‐chains (Chua et al 2018:623).…”

Section: Humanitarian Logistics and Humanitarian Goodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A “counter‐logistics” made of multifarious “labour, anticolonial, and antiracist struggles” accompanies the expansion of supply‐chains (Chua et al 2018:623). Ned Rossiter’s (2014) metaphor of the “Logistical Worlds” videogame provides a good entry point to those. Rossiter (2014:65) shows how the “universal logic of interoperability across software platforms and infrastructural component” that characterises logistics “is accompanied by any number of contingencies: labour strikes, software glitches, inventory blowouts and traffic gridlock”.…”

Section: Humanitarian Logistics and Humanitarian Goodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Refugee Shelter in a Logistical World: Designing Goods for Supply‐Chain Humanitarianism

Pascucci

2020

Antipode

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Focusing on the design and production of the IKEA Foundation "Better Shelter" and on its use in a camp on the island of Lesvos, Greece, this article explores the role of logistical calculative rationales in the provision of emergency shelters to refugees. It argues that an engagement with the critical geographies of logistics contributes to the study of such "humanitarian goods" in two main ways. First, it foregrounds the technologies that allow emergency shelter products to circulate across production sites and disaster and border zones, and their connections to broader infrastructures and commercial networks in what recent literature has called "supply-chain humanitarianism". Second, a logistical lens highlights the disruptions that characterise the production and usage of emergency shelter products. The analysis adds to a body of work that exposes humanitarian technology and design as sites of friction, deeply embedded in global processes of bordering and accumulation.

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“…Following from Deleuze (), in a post‐Fordist environment, such as the big data‐infused retail store, power is mobile and mobilised by technology. The aim of this technologically‐infused surveillant workplace is efficiency, a situation that Rossiter (: 53) views as a nightmare combination of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and key performance indicators (KPIs) used to modulate the experience of the work world. The tracking of employees becomes an informatised sovereignty (Rossiter, : 68) where ‘code is king’ and data are used to maximise the effectiveness of worker bodies.…”

Section: The Modern Retail Store As a Big‐data Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The aim of this technologically‐infused surveillant workplace is efficiency, a situation that Rossiter (: 53) views as a nightmare combination of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and key performance indicators (KPIs) used to modulate the experience of the work world. The tracking of employees becomes an informatised sovereignty (Rossiter, : 68) where ‘code is king’ and data are used to maximise the effectiveness of worker bodies. With no delay between movement and data collection and processing, code means that there is always, and only, work.…”

Section: The Modern Retail Store As a Big‐data Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

A smart place to work? Big data systems, labour, control and modern retail stores

Evans¹,

Kitchin²

2018

New Technol Work Employ

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The modern retail store is a complex coded assemblage and data‐intensive environment, its operations and management mediated by a number of interlinked big data systems. This paper draws on an ethnography of a retail store in Ireland to examine how these systems modulate the functioning of the store and working practices of employees. It was found that retail work involves a continual movement between a governance regime of control reliant on big data systems which seek to regulate and harnesses formal labour and automation into enterprise planning, and a disciplinary regime that deals with the symbolic, interactive labour that workers perform and act as a reserve mode of governmentality if control fails. This continual movement is caused by new systems of control being open to vertical and horizontal fissures. While retail functions as a coded assemblage of control, systems are too brittle to sustain the governmentality desired.

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Logistical Worlds

Abstract: The unruly worker, the software glitch, wilful acts of laziness, sabotage and refusal,

Cited by 50 publications

References 2 publications

Logistics of migrant labour: rethinking how workers ‘fit’ transnational economies

Logistics of migrant labour: rethinking how workers ‘fit’ transnational economies

Refugee Shelter in a Logistical World: Designing Goods for Supply‐Chain Humanitarianism

A smart place to work? Big data systems, labour, control and modern retail stores

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