Valeria Pulignano
Biographic Data
| ID | 273769 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Valeria Pulignano |
| GIVEN NAMES | Valeria |
| FAMILY NAME | Pulignano |
| SIGNATURE | PULIGNANO V |
| AFFILIATIONS | KU Leuven |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6466-491X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 147 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Contested hegemony in digital-age production politics
This article contributes to debates on digital-age production politics by foregrounding contested hegemony as central to understanding how labour shapes production regimes amid Industry 4.0 (I4.0) in Belgian automotive plants. We show that the coercive introduction of new technologies generates contestation from labour, while negotiation serves to secure its conditional consent. We introduce hegemonic flexibility and hegemonic automation as produ…
Gender, climate change and trade unions
This conceptual article explores the tensions that climate change creates between environmental sustainability, gender equality and economic stability. It argues that these dimensions fundamentally challenge the foundations of traditional industrial relations (IR) and thus trade union strategy. By bringing union studies into dialogue with feminist political economy and eco-feminist perspectives, and drawing on scholarship and current evidence of …
Technological Change, Work and Power
Artificial intelligence and other digital technologies are rapidly transforming work, reviving longstanding questions about technology, labor, and power. While much attention has focused on AI's capabilities, its effects on work are neither uniform nor technologically determined. Rather, they depend on how digital technologies are embedded in practices and institutional power relations structuring authority, control, and autonomy. This editorial …
Classed insecurity
Unpaid labour holds a paradoxical role in waged work, integral to the ideal worker norm of commitment and sacrifice, central to precarious employment yet often overlooked in analyses of insecurity. This article develops a class-sensitive account of how unpaid labour shapes the relationship between precarious work and insecurity. Drawing on qualitative data from dancers and care workers, we conceptualise unpaid labour as a mechanism through which …
You Sneak the Human Back in
This paper investigates how automatic translation (AT) technologies, including neural machine translation (NMT) and Gen-AI (e.g., ChatGPT), are reshaping the creative agency and professional identity of translators. While prior research has explored the impact of automation on translation quality and labor conditions, little attention has been paid to how it reconfigures translation as meaningful creative work. We draw on 110 narrative interviews…
Labour Governance of Platforms
Scholarly work on labour platforms has primarily examined labour governance in relation to the role of algorithmic management in labour control. This article instead argues that platform labour governance involves organising and structuring the broader market environment to ensure a continuous and adaptable labour supply. We showcase the processes of ‘market-making’ and ‘market-shaping’ to explain how labour platforms in food delivery and care se…
What Defines Our Unique Precarity? A Response to the Reviews
status: Published
Mobilising operaismo in the digital age
This article examines whether the recent surge in labour mobilisations within the gig economy represents genuinely novel forms of worker resistance, or whether it is a reconfiguration of established patterns of collective action. To achieve this, the article analyses the relationship between workers’ struggles and changes to the labour process, comparing contemporary gig workers’ mobilisations with those of the ‘mass worker’ in Western Europe in …
Just transitions, trade unions and the need for a new (European) eco-social contract
Mapping social protection coverage for platform workers
The aim of this paper is to examine if and how the reclassification of platform workers from self-employment status to employment status can provide them with adequate social security protection. Little is known about how this transition would guarantee platform workers adequate social protection within the social protection scheme for employees. National social security schemes, in particular income replacement benefit schemes, often (still) dep…
Why does unpaid labour vary among digital labour platforms? Exploring socio-technical platform regimes of worker autonomy
Digital platforms provide many workers with vital income and offer the promise of flexible work, and yet also contribute to experiences of precariousness and exploitation, particularly with regard to pressures to undertake unpaid work. This article explores why unpaid labour is necessary and what drives its extent and form among diverse types of digital platforms. We theorize two ideal types of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ socio-technical platform regimes…
Variations of Freelancers’ “Effort-Bargain” Experiences in Platform Work
This article delves into freelancers’“effort-bargain” experiences within platform work, where effort is exchanged for income. The study of experiences enables us to understand how freelancer–platform relationships evolve in light of the platforms’ lack of recognition of freelancers’ skills. Drawing on 63 interviews across four platforms within the online labor market (OLM), the authors present a theoretical framework explaining a “skill-driven co…
Introduction to a Special Issue
Employment relations in Europe today differ from how they were prior to the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, as key terms and conditions (e.g., wages) and sectors of economic activity (e.g., platform work and the green economy) are now subject to direct political intervention by the European institutions. Transnational (horizontal) competition within the Single European Market has long provided a context for national employment re…
Workers’ contentions over unpaid labour time in food delivery and domestic work platforms in Belgium
This article examines how platform workers providing food delivery and domestic services in Belgium engage in contentions over unpaid labour time. Drawing on theories of organisational misbehaviour around the ‘wage–effort’ bargain, we explore how workers reclaim some control over their income by contesting their exposure to unpaid labour time. Based on a qualitative analysis of two labour platforms, the article illustrates how platforms’ systems …
Determinants of union strategies towards the twin digital and green transitions in the German and Belgian automotive industry
This article examines union strategies towards the twin digital and green transitions, comparing the German and Belgian automotive industries. The drive towards net-zero and more digital economies is manifested through the move from fossil fuel-powered cars to electric cars, engendering a reorganisation of production, work and employment among car manufacturers. We identified two strategic union response patterns. While German unions are developi…
Informal employment on domestic care platforms
This article explains how digitally mediated provision of domestic care services perpetuates the invisibility and informality of such work through individualising risk, which we operationalise by one of its dimensions, that of unpaid labour. We understand unpaid labour as the cost of the risk borne individually by workers at the intersection of the social (inter-personal) and economic (monetary) spheres. Drawing on the experiences of domestic car…
The 'Grey Zone' at the Interface of Work and Home
This conceptual article develops a framework based on the 'total social organization of labour' for analysing the implications precarious work in the public sphere has for the reorganization of the private domestic sphere. The core proposition is that a 'grey zone' of unpaid labour exists which needs to be negotiated - or at least tolerated - within a household to engage in precarious paid work. A 'grey zone' is theorized as a necessary transitio…
Control and consent regime dynamics within labour platforms
Much is known about how labour platforms use ‘algorithmic management’ to implement rules which govern labour by matching workers (or service providers) with clients (or users). But little is known about whether and how platform workers engage with these rules by manipulating them to their own advantage, and how this accounts for wider ‘regime dynamics’ across (and within) different types of platforms (for example, on-location and online). Based o…
Unpaid labour in online freelancing platforms
Sociology scholars have shown that unpaid labour is widespread in digital labour platform work, yet no study has shed light on the mechanisms generating unpaid work in the digital platform sector. This paper aims to fill this gap and points to the mechanisms produced at the interface between platforms' marketization strate-gies and the regulation of self-employment in national contexts to explain the way in which unpaid labour unfolds in online f…
Faire face à la précarité au temps du Covid‐19
Les auteurs analysent les répercussions de la pandémie de COVID‐19 sur l'activité et le vécu des travailleurs de plateforme en Pologne et la réaction de cette main‐d'œuvre dans ces circonstances particulières. Ils observent que les fortes fluctuations de la demande ont exacerbé les distorsions propres à une relation de travail asymétrique, non régulée et atypique et repèrent plusieurs stratégies mobilisées par les travailleurs pour y remédier, en…
Faces of Precarity
This chapter argues for a perspective on the study of precarious work which draws from earlier critical labour studies and feminist analyses of the role of domestic labour in the reproduction of capitalism in order to focus on the (micro-)social foundations of the (macro-) structural changes in the collective institutions, operations and outcomes of labour markets under neoliberalism. Especially, we point to the challenges that the fading away of…
E-democrazia al lavoro
Questo contributo mette in evidenza le problematicità derivanti dagli effetti della tecnologia digitale sulla democrazia. Tre sono i temi principali che vengo affrontati. Il primo è legato al controllo di sistemi tecnologici avanzati nelle mani di una élite che rischia di aumentare il suo potere e la sua influenza sulle masse di utenti e consumatori che utilizzano le nuove tecnologie. Il secondo tema, direttamente connesso al primo, riguarda la f…
Digital Cleavages and Risk in the Platform Economy in Belgium
The adoption of digital technologies challenge existing institutional approaches towards labour markets segmentation and dualisation by dissolving the employer-employee nexus. When national governments adapt to digitalisation by deregula-tion they risk to fostering "flexibility at the margin" which can reinforce digital cleavages at the intersection of tasks, skills and new technology. This is because deregulation threatens the existing country-b…
Connecting at the edge
In this paper we examine how commodification and labour control unfold within a digital labour platform, focusing on the connections between the platform, its users and workers. Based on a qualitative study covering couriers, clients, restaurants and the management of a food delivery platform in Belgium, we shed light on the complexity of commodification, explaining how the platform simultaneously empowers and disempowers all participants. We ill…
Working Hard for the Ones You Love and Care for Under Covid-19 Physical Distancing
In 2020, Covid-19 was spreading quickly in nursing homes, leading to numerous challenges for care workers. We tell the story of Marieke, a devoted female care assistant working in a Belgian nursing home that is customer-centred in their organisational model. Her narrative provides poignant insights into the 'work and life' struggles and conflicts of a female care assistant facing the challenges of this model during the Covid-19 pandemic, which ha…
Solidarity at Work
Solidarity is not a unified phenomenon with unchanging qualities; it partakes of moral, political and performative elements that are underpinned and reinforced by a shared work context, an organisational infrastructure and an institutional frame which together create distinctive path dependencies in solidarity across different forms of capitalism. Neo-liberalism has challenged these path dependencies by changing the material conditions and the id…
Connecting at the edge
In this paper we examine how commodification and labour control unfold within a digital labour platform, focusing on the connections between the platform, its users and workers. Based on a qualitative study covering couriers, clients, restaurants and the management of a food delivery platform in Belgium, we shed light on the complexity of commodification, explaining how the platform simultaneously empowers and disempowers all participants. We ill…
Why does unpaid labour vary among digital labour platforms? Exploring socio-technical platform regimes of worker autonomy
Digital platforms provide many workers with vital income and offer the promise of flexible work, and yet also contribute to experiences of precariousness and exploitation, particularly with regard to pressures to undertake unpaid work. This article explores why unpaid labour is necessary and what drives its extent and form among diverse types of digital platforms. We theorize two ideal types of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ socio-technical platform regimes…
Trade unions and labour market dualisation
This article addresses the questions of the extent to which, and the reasons why, western European trade unions may have privileged the protection of 'insiders' over that of 'outsiders'. Temporary agency workers, among whom migrant workers are over-represented, are taken as a test case of 'outsiders'. The findings from a comparison of Belgian and German multinational plants show that collective agreements have allowed a protection gap between per…
The 'Grey Zone' at the Interface of Work and Home
This conceptual article develops a framework based on the 'total social organization of labour' for analysing the implications precarious work in the public sphere has for the reorganization of the private domestic sphere. The core proposition is that a 'grey zone' of unpaid labour exists which needs to be negotiated - or at least tolerated - within a household to engage in precarious paid work. A 'grey zone' is theorized as a necessary transitio…
Production Regimes and Class Compromise Among European Warehouse Workers
The orderly functioning of global capitalism increasingly depends on the labor of logistics workers. But social scientists have yet to produce nuanced accounts of the labor process in the many ports, warehouses, and distribution centers that lie at the heart of logistics work. In this study, the authors seek to connect the nascent field of critical logistics studies to theories of the labor process in an effort to understand the production regime…
Worker agency and trade union renewal
Contrary to predictions of continued weakness of the union movement in post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, in recent years Polish trade unions have undertaken various revitalisation attempts, including campaigns to organise unions in the private sector. Although the existing literature accounts for this internal union transformation by referring to macrosocial and institutional factors, this article suggests that the emerging …
Developing a Cross-National Comparative Framework for Studying Labour Market Segmentation
Working Hard for the Ones You Love and Care for Under Covid-19 Physical Distancing
In 2020, Covid-19 was spreading quickly in nursing homes, leading to numerous challenges for care workers. We tell the story of Marieke, a devoted female care assistant working in a Belgian nursing home that is customer-centred in their organisational model. Her narrative provides poignant insights into the 'work and life' struggles and conflicts of a female care assistant facing the challenges of this model during the Covid-19 pandemic, which ha…
Introduction to a Special Issue
Employment relations in Europe today differ from how they were prior to the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, as key terms and conditions (e.g., wages) and sectors of economic activity (e.g., platform work and the green economy) are now subject to direct political intervention by the European institutions. Transnational (horizontal) competition within the Single European Market has long provided a context for national employment re…
Flexibility and Security within European Labor Markets
In this comparative qualitative study, the authors examine how local bargaining shapes the trade-off between labor flexibility and employment security policies in four multinational subsidiaries in Belgium, Britain, and Germany. They also consider whether and how union power to shape flexibility and security policies is affected by national institutions, the way that multinationals organize their subsidiaries, and local contextual factors. Findin…
Just transitions, trade unions and the need for a new (European) eco-social contract
Bureaucracy transcended? New patterns of employment regulation and labour control in the international automotive industry
Contemporary changes in patterns of work and management are alleged to have given rise to the post-modern organisation and the diminishing importance of traditional bureaucracy. This paper is concerned with the changing nature of labour control in new ‘multi-enterprise’ settings in the international automotive sector. Rather than eliminating bureaucracy, the tools of industrial bureaucracy are becoming more sophisticated
Variations of Freelancers’ “Effort-Bargain” Experiences in Platform Work
This article delves into freelancers’“effort-bargain” experiences within platform work, where effort is exchanged for income. The study of experiences enables us to understand how freelancer–platform relationships evolve in light of the platforms’ lack of recognition of freelancers’ skills. Drawing on 63 interviews across four platforms within the online labor market (OLM), the authors present a theoretical framework explaining a “skill-driven co…
Activated and included? The social inclusion of social assistance beneficiaries engaged in “public works”
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss how employment regulations and stigma, arising from working for welfare in “public works”, limit the social inclusion of social assistance beneficiaries. Activation in “public works” is meant for those beneficiaries unable to participate to the unsubsidised labour market because of range of work impairments. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on qualitative interviews concerning the pers…
Determinants of Indefinite Contracts in Europe
Using individual-level data from the 2010 wave of the European Working Conditions Survey ( ewcs ), and country-level data on unemployment, employment protection legislation and union density for 21 European countries, this paper provides a comprehensive multi-level analysis of the determinants of indefinite employment contracts. The authors find that workers’ autonomy on the job, the intensity of computer use, and the presence of general and spec…
Firm-level restructuring and union strategies in Europe
A range of literature has attempted to reconceptualize union agendas for firm-level restructuring by identifying variety in local union strategic responses. This article explores the conditions under which local unions respond strategically to company restructuring in the Netherlands, Italy and Ireland. Two distinct types of union strategies are identified: confrontation based on ‘job protection’; cooperation based on ‘job transition’. Evidence s…
Restructuring of work and union representation
This paper explores the implications of teamwork for trade unions, especially the assumption that new management strategies supporting teamwork may lead to the marginalisation of union organisation and influence. The fieldwork involves a cross-national comparison of Fiat in Italy and Rover in the British Midlands. The argument is advanced that institutional and socio-political factors rooted in the national system of industrial relations shape un…
Sociologia Del Lavoro N. 86-87, 2002
Union struggle and the crisis of industrial relations in Italy
This paper argues that the Berlusconi government is seeking to replace the 'social concertation' arrangement between government and trade unions with 'social dialogue' in an effort to undermine trade union 'power'. This endeavour by the government to impose a policy of 'social dialogue' would severely limit trade unions' influence in economic and social policy decision-making and leave Berlusconi free to introduce reforms favouring his friends in…
Bureaucracy transcended? New patterns of employment regulation and labour control in the international automotive industry
Contemporary changes in patterns of work and management are alleged to have given rise to the post-modern organisation and the diminishing importance of traditional bureaucracy. This paper is concerned with the changing nature of labour control in new ‘multi-enterprise’ settings in the international automotive sector. Rather than eliminating bureaucracy, the tools of industrial bureaucracy are becoming more sophisticated
Change in contemporary Italy's social concertation
This article examines the crisis of social concertation in Italy since 2000. We argue that this crisis is not due exclusively to the political shift from a centre‐left to a centre‐right government led by Silvio Berlusconi, or the end of the European integration phase. It reflects the continued failure of Italian social concertation to address problems of economic growth and work productivity was apparent by the second half of the 1990s. We argue …
Worker agency and trade union renewal
Contrary to predictions of continued weakness of the union movement in post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, in recent years Polish trade unions have undertaken various revitalisation attempts, including campaigns to organise unions in the private sector. Although the existing literature accounts for this internal union transformation by referring to macrosocial and institutional factors, this article suggests that the emerging …
The Crisis of Social Democratic Trade Unionism in Western Europe
Firm-level restructuring and union strategies in Europe
A range of literature has attempted to reconceptualize union agendas for firm-level restructuring by identifying variety in local union strategic responses. This article explores the conditions under which local unions respond strategically to company restructuring in the Netherlands, Italy and Ireland. Two distinct types of union strategies are identified: confrontation based on ‘job protection’; cooperation based on ‘job transition’. Evidence s…
Understanding varieties of flexibility and security in multinationals
Most studies of flexicurity have focused on formal institutions within distinctive national labour market systems. However, the level and types of flexibility and security in a national labour market are to an important extent influenced by company-level processes, relationships and policies; thus a micro-perspective should be integrated into the study of flexibility and security. This article advances understanding of the influences of decentral…
Temporary Agency Work and Trade Unions in Comparative Perspective
The article examines local union approaches toward temporary agency work in Belgium and Germany. Heterogeneous plant-level use of temporary work is explained by differences in collective bargaining, together with representation structures and rights for agency workers. Specifically, within a context providing effective rights for representation, the Belgian unions responded to firms’ economic difficulties by improving the working conditions of ag…
Trade unions and labour market dualisation
This article addresses the questions of the extent to which, and the reasons why, western European trade unions may have privileged the protection of 'insiders' over that of 'outsiders'. Temporary agency workers, among whom migrant workers are over-represented, are taken as a test case of 'outsiders'. The findings from a comparison of Belgian and German multinational plants show that collective agreements have allowed a protection gap between per…
Flexibility and Security within European Labor Markets
In this comparative qualitative study, the authors examine how local bargaining shapes the trade-off between labor flexibility and employment security policies in four multinational subsidiaries in Belgium, Britain, and Germany. They also consider whether and how union power to shape flexibility and security policies is affected by national institutions, the way that multinationals organize their subsidiaries, and local contextual factors. Findin…
Determinants of Indefinite Contracts in Europe
Using individual-level data from the 2010 wave of the European Working Conditions Survey ( ewcs ), and country-level data on unemployment, employment protection legislation and union density for 21 European countries, this paper provides a comprehensive multi-level analysis of the determinants of indefinite employment contracts. The authors find that workers’ autonomy on the job, the intensity of computer use, and the presence of general and spec…
Reconstructing Solidarity
Reconstructing Solidarity is a book about unions’ struggles against the expansion of precarious work in Europe, and the implications of these struggles for worker solidarity and institutional change. The authors argue against the ‘dualization’ thesis that unions act primarily to protect labour market insiders at the expense of outsiders, finding instead that most unions attempt to organize and represent precarious workers. They explain difference…
Industrial relations in Italy in the twenty-first century
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the developments which have characterized Italy’s industrial relations from post-war Fordism to neo-liberal hegemony and recent crisis, with a particular focus on the major changes occurred in the twenty-first century, especially those concerning concertative (tripartite) policy making between the government, the employers’ organizations and the trade unions. Design/methodology/approach This stud…
Activated and included? The social inclusion of social assistance beneficiaries engaged in “public works”
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss how employment regulations and stigma, arising from working for welfare in “public works”, limit the social inclusion of social assistance beneficiaries. Activation in “public works” is meant for those beneficiaries unable to participate to the unsubsidised labour market because of range of work impairments. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on qualitative interviews concerning the pers…
Developing a Cross-National Comparative Framework for Studying Labour Market Segmentation
Employment relations in Italy
The Italian employment relations system has tended to baffle comparative scholars, who have had a hard time placing it into cross-country classificatory schemes—both those issuing from the literature on corporatism and, more recently, those based on the Varieties of Capitalism literature. Beginning with the early 1990s, though, the situation of Italian employment relations changed dramatically. In the 1990s, the Italian employment relations syste…
Shifting Solidarities
L’expérimentation institutionnelle au travail, pour le meilleur (ou pour le pire)
Dans différents contextes nationaux, institutionnels et organisationnels, et dans un contexte d’incertitude, diverses formes d’organisation de travailleurs, anciennes et nouvelles, mènent des expérimentations en réponse aux lignes de fracture majeures des changements auxquelles elles sont confrontées. L’introduction de ce numéro spécial se concentre sur ces processus: la disruption des formes traditionnelles de régulation du travail et de l’emplo…
Einleitung
In unterschiedlichen nationalen, institutionellen und organisationalen Kontexten und unter ungewissen Bedingungen versuchen traditionelle und neue Arbeitnehmerorganisationen Antworten auf die Frage zu finden, wie mit den großen Konfliktlinien der Veränderungen umzugehen ist, mit denen sie konfrontiert werden. Die Einleitung zu dieser Themenausgabe befasst sich vorrangig mit diesem Prozess des Experimentierens: der Disruption traditioneller Formen…
Workplace change and institutional experimentation
This article examines institutional experimentation by linking the dynamics of capital accumulation, the adoption of new digital technologies within the labour process, and institutional settings. Our inductive qualitative case study within the service (logistics) sector in Europe sheds light on the processes through which local stakeholders engage in workplace change through institutional experimentation. It also illustrates how and under which …
Introduction
In different national, institutional and organisational contexts, and in conditions of uncertainty, worker organisations, old and new, are experimenting in response to the major fault lines of change they face. This introduction to the special issue focuses on these processes of experimentation: the disruption of traditional forms of regulation of work and employment; how a variety of actors are engaged in experimentation about the governance of …
Production Regimes and Class Compromise Among European Warehouse Workers
The orderly functioning of global capitalism increasingly depends on the labor of logistics workers. But social scientists have yet to produce nuanced accounts of the labor process in the many ports, warehouses, and distribution centers that lie at the heart of logistics work. In this study, the authors seek to connect the nascent field of critical logistics studies to theories of the labor process in an effort to understand the production regime…
Solidarity at Work
Solidarity is not a unified phenomenon with unchanging qualities; it partakes of moral, political and performative elements that are underpinned and reinforced by a shared work context, an organisational infrastructure and an institutional frame which together create distinctive path dependencies in solidarity across different forms of capitalism. Neo-liberalism has challenged these path dependencies by changing the material conditions and the id…
Political science (39 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (31 works) · Economics (28 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (26 works) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (22 works) · Business (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (16 works) · Politics (14 works)