Frederick Harry Pitts
I am an interdisciplinary political economist who writes, researches, teaches and advises about the futures of work produced by the digital and green transitions, and how governments, politicians and policymakers shape these futures through place-based industrial policies.
I am a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Director of Business Engagement & Innovation for Humanities & Social Sciences on the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus in my hometown of Penryn, where I am part of the Institute of Cornish Studies and lead the South West Doctoral Training Partnership pathway Global Challenges & Transformations: Geopolitics, Mobilities & Inequalities. I have held previous research and teaching positions at the universities of Bath, Bristol, the West of England and Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Much of my current research and consultancy centres on how what I call ‘workplace geopolitics’ are playing out in strategically important industries and infrastructures in the UK and Europe, from critical minerals to telecommunications. A particular focus is on my homeland of Cornwall in the far west of the British Isles, and the potential for green and digital reindustrialisation to guarantee the workforce good, skilled jobs and our communities broad-based economic growth.
Investigating these themes, I am a Co-Investigator of two major research council investments in collaboration with industrial partners ranging from BT to the South West Trades Union Congress: the Economic & Social Research Council Centre for Sociodigital Futures and the UKRI Critical Minerals Accelerating the Green Economy Centre. I am also a Fellow of the Institute for the Future of Work, University of Bristol Business School and the ESRC Digital Futures at Work Research Centre, and Secretary of the British Universities Industrial Relations Association.
My most recent book is the Handbook for the Future of Work, coedited with Julie MacLeavy as part of the Routledge International Handbooks series. My five previous books, such as Value (2020), have promoted new conceptual approaches to the critique of political economy applied to key issues in contemporary capitalism. Spanning 50+ articles and chapters in academic publications and 100+ pieces for popular media, my work has been translated into Farsi, Chinese, Spanish, French, Polish and Italian.
In recent years I have worked closely with the Foundation for European Progressive Studies and Progressive Britain, as well as partners including Demos Helsinki and trade unions Prospect and Community, to develop social democratic strategies on ‘cybersecuronomics’ and a progressive politics of work for the age of unpeace. Supported by major funders such as the Shared Prosperity Fund, Research England and the Economic & Social Research Council, previous funded projects have explored regional strategies for good work, the politics of automation risk, and coworking spaces in the COVID-19 pandemic.
My commentary on policymaking, political economy and the politics of work has been frequently featured and covered in media including the Guardian, the Times, the Economist and the Financial Times. I regularly collaborate with and consult for companies, organisations and other actors across the public and private sectors, including large corporations, local authorities, trade unions, business associations, thinktanks and politicians.
I am a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Director of Business Engagement & Innovation for Humanities & Social Sciences on the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus in my hometown of Penryn, where I am part of the Institute of Cornish Studies and lead the South West Doctoral Training Partnership pathway Global Challenges & Transformations: Geopolitics, Mobilities & Inequalities. I have held previous research and teaching positions at the universities of Bath, Bristol, the West of England and Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Much of my current research and consultancy centres on how what I call ‘workplace geopolitics’ are playing out in strategically important industries and infrastructures in the UK and Europe, from critical minerals to telecommunications. A particular focus is on my homeland of Cornwall in the far west of the British Isles, and the potential for green and digital reindustrialisation to guarantee the workforce good, skilled jobs and our communities broad-based economic growth.
Investigating these themes, I am a Co-Investigator of two major research council investments in collaboration with industrial partners ranging from BT to the South West Trades Union Congress: the Economic & Social Research Council Centre for Sociodigital Futures and the UKRI Critical Minerals Accelerating the Green Economy Centre. I am also a Fellow of the Institute for the Future of Work, University of Bristol Business School and the ESRC Digital Futures at Work Research Centre, and Secretary of the British Universities Industrial Relations Association.
My most recent book is the Handbook for the Future of Work, coedited with Julie MacLeavy as part of the Routledge International Handbooks series. My five previous books, such as Value (2020), have promoted new conceptual approaches to the critique of political economy applied to key issues in contemporary capitalism. Spanning 50+ articles and chapters in academic publications and 100+ pieces for popular media, my work has been translated into Farsi, Chinese, Spanish, French, Polish and Italian.
In recent years I have worked closely with the Foundation for European Progressive Studies and Progressive Britain, as well as partners including Demos Helsinki and trade unions Prospect and Community, to develop social democratic strategies on ‘cybersecuronomics’ and a progressive politics of work for the age of unpeace. Supported by major funders such as the Shared Prosperity Fund, Research England and the Economic & Social Research Council, previous funded projects have explored regional strategies for good work, the politics of automation risk, and coworking spaces in the COVID-19 pandemic.
My commentary on policymaking, political economy and the politics of work has been frequently featured and covered in media including the Guardian, the Times, the Economist and the Financial Times. I regularly collaborate with and consult for companies, organisations and other actors across the public and private sectors, including large corporations, local authorities, trade unions, business associations, thinktanks and politicians.
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Books & Special Issues by Frederick Harry Pitts
The Handbook for the Future of Work offers a timely and critical analysis of the transformative forces shaping work and employment in the twenty-first century.
Focusing on the past two decades, the handbook explores how technological advancements, automation and a shifting capitalist landscape have fundamentally reshaped work practices and labour relations. Beyond simply outlining the challenges and opportunities of automation, the handbook integrates these emerging realities with established discussions of work. Importantly, it moves beyond dominant technology-centric narratives, probing into broader questions about the nature of capitalism in a time of crisis and the contestation for alternative economic models. With contributions from established and emerging authors, based in institutions around the world, the handbook offers a systematic overview of the developments that have sparked radical shifts in how we live and work, and their multifaceted impacts upon social relations and identities, practices and sectors, politics and environments.
The handbook is unique in its exploration of the potential for economic transformations to reshape the centrality of work in our social and political imaginaries. A useful resource for students and researchers, the handbook serves as an essential guide to this new intellectual landscape.
This book introduces new approaches that deploy concepts from Marx’s critique of political economy to renew the study of labour, value and social antagonisms in the broad area of management and organisation studies.
Exploring established and emergent strands of Marxian theorising inside and outside management and organisation studies, it delves into, beyond and behind the ‘hidden abode’ of production to examine a range of issues including: the relationship between the workplace and the market; the relationship between conflicts at work and wider social and political movements; the role of class, gender and race in capitalist society; and the interconnection of work and labour with the environmental crisis.
The book will be of interest for academics, postgraduate students and researchers interested in radical perspectives on work, organisation and economic life. Representing both a critical introduction to existing theories and a theoretical contribution to the development of the field of study in its own right, it condenses challenging ideas into a short, readable volume without losing their complexity or sophistication.
Journal Articles by Frederick Harry Pitts
The Handbook for the Future of Work offers a timely and critical analysis of the transformative forces shaping work and employment in the twenty-first century.
Focusing on the past two decades, the handbook explores how technological advancements, automation and a shifting capitalist landscape have fundamentally reshaped work practices and labour relations. Beyond simply outlining the challenges and opportunities of automation, the handbook integrates these emerging realities with established discussions of work. Importantly, it moves beyond dominant technology-centric narratives, probing into broader questions about the nature of capitalism in a time of crisis and the contestation for alternative economic models. With contributions from established and emerging authors, based in institutions around the world, the handbook offers a systematic overview of the developments that have sparked radical shifts in how we live and work, and their multifaceted impacts upon social relations and identities, practices and sectors, politics and environments.
The handbook is unique in its exploration of the potential for economic transformations to reshape the centrality of work in our social and political imaginaries. A useful resource for students and researchers, the handbook serves as an essential guide to this new intellectual landscape.
This book introduces new approaches that deploy concepts from Marx’s critique of political economy to renew the study of labour, value and social antagonisms in the broad area of management and organisation studies.
Exploring established and emergent strands of Marxian theorising inside and outside management and organisation studies, it delves into, beyond and behind the ‘hidden abode’ of production to examine a range of issues including: the relationship between the workplace and the market; the relationship between conflicts at work and wider social and political movements; the role of class, gender and race in capitalist society; and the interconnection of work and labour with the environmental crisis.
The book will be of interest for academics, postgraduate students and researchers interested in radical perspectives on work, organisation and economic life. Representing both a critical introduction to existing theories and a theoretical contribution to the development of the field of study in its own right, it condenses challenging ideas into a short, readable volume without losing their complexity or sophistication.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, in these ways, ‘digital technology is often merely extending and radicalising logics that have been at work for centuries’ (Altenreid, 2019: 122). This chapter contends that the concept of value helps understand these logics, being crucial for understanding precisely how what gets measured gets managed and mediated, articulating the intersection between what goes on at the level of the workplace and what goes on at the level of the market. It is especially important to restate the importance of value as a means of social mediation and articulation in the context of the claims of some scholars that digital transformation calls into question conventional forms of measurement and valorisation redundant (Hardt and Negri, 2017).
the ‘worker’ in the contemporary context. Whilst acknowledging technical changes in the contemporary context of working relations, we argue that it is the continuities and contradictions in current labour market dynamics that more usefully identify the challenges for both conceptualising and regulating contemporary work. Highlighting the spatial challenges to contemporary workplace governance we look at three factors: the mobility of work, the mobility of things as trade, and the ‘new workers’ (hyperflexible workers employed through platforms and other new arrangements of work that are made possible by technological advances) to identify key continuities in the factors and actors of the so called ‘future’ of work. To contextualise these factors as they manifest in particular sectors, we consider the cases of care work and agricultural work, both areas which have been subject to great speculation over projected transformation. The paper then turns to the challenges of law and regulation and demonstrates how work is enmeshed in legal developments which go far beyond labour and employment law. In conclusion, we argue that there is need for a radical new conceptualisation of work, in both social and legal terms, yet this must be grounded in recognition of the continuities of capitalist relations of production and accumulation, rather than the fears and fantasies of a worker-free future.
Measurement challenges: Approaches to measuring productivity are controversial. To understand productivity growth, a range of factors must be considered. These include regional differences, ecosystems, market competition, inward investment, sector-specific strengths and the implications of wider regime elements, such as taxes, leading to complex questions about appropriate ways to model and measure productivity. At the firm level, prior research suggests that firms only have a partial understanding of productivity and many experience difficulties in measuring it. Specifically, capacity and capability are lacking for analysing productivity performance data, and few firms could describe how productivity matters for wages.
Management practices: There is some evidence that good management practices may have a positive effect on firm-level productivity. Management practices are broadly "what an organisation's managers do: how they plan, deliver and utilise the firm's assets, both human and capital. Characteristics of effective management practices found in high productivity businesses relate to employee decision-making and effort, good strategic leadership, skills development and behaviours associated with growth such as exporting, innovating and continuous improvement. Moreover, the ability of managers to embrace and adapt to new technology, engage in innovation, and address processes and elements appears to be important.
External support: Support services might benefit firms, increasing the ‘diffusion’ of best practice, equipping businesses with the necessary tools to become more productive. However, barriers to uptake of support services include doubts over the benefits and value of support versus the cost, relationship failure due to the lack of trust in the support and concerns that the assistance will not be appropriate. The concept of business ecosystems is relevant to understand beneficial systemic conditions found in such ecosystems, relating to networks of entrepreneurs, leadership, finance, talent, knowledge and support services.
AUTHORS: Paul CHATTERTON - Ana Cecilia DINERSTEIN - Peter NORTH - F. Harry PITTS
In this paper, we suggest that not enough attention is being paid to the place of political contestation and antagonism in terms of how SDGs are being rolled out as part of a broader consensual, liberal geo-politics under conditions of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. In particular, we argue for more consideration of the significance of the SSE as way to achieve the SDGs through responding to a broader crisis of social reproduction and work where millions of people cannot live with dignity, and looming climate crisis is not addressed. We want to foreground that the SSE is offering novel and tangible alternative forms of social production, useful work and means of the social reproduction of life beyond the current capitalist crisis that are being developed from the grassroots up, and which represent a challenge to conceptions of the SDGs as a policy prescription or mobilising utopia within an overall framework of neoliberal globalism. Consequently, we argue for policy in support of the SSEs that facilitates, rather than tames, these radical grassroots critiques and for the development of an autonomous, meso-civil society SSE sector.
Paper prepared for the United Nations Inter-Agency Task Force on the Social and Solidarity Economy (UNTFSSE) Call for Papers 2018
Implementing the Sustainable Development Goals: What Role for Social and Solidarity Economy?
and the rule of value under the auspices of a national state, postcapitalist and post-work vistas represent abstract ‘bad utopias’ that break insufficiently with the present, and in some ways make it worse, replacing a wage over which workers can lawfully struggle with a state administered monetary payment that creates a direct relationship of power between citizen and state. This is highlighted in the potential adoption of basic income as part of authoritarian nationalist policy platforms including that of Nerendra Modi in India. Suggesting that struggles over the contradictory forms assumed by social reproduction in capitalist society are themselves labour struggles and not external to them, we pose a ‘concrete utopian’ alternative that creates the capacity to reshape the relationship between individuals, society and the rule of money, value and the state rather than reinforce it. To illustrate this we examine the Unemployed Workers Organisations instituted in Argentina. This poses one potential means of devolving monetary and non monetary resources and power rather than centralising them in the hands of an all-powerful ‘postcapitalist’ state that would carry all the scars of the society it sets out to surpass. Such a 'concrete utopia' would create space for, and not liquidate or falsely resolve, class struggle in, against and beyond capitalist development.