Globalisation and the contested process of international corporate restructuring: employment reorganisation and the issue of labour consent in the international oil industry

Labour is typically treated as a passive victim of corporate restructuring processes in discourses on globalisation, rendered helpless by rationalisat ion and downsizing, and structurally place-bound and defenceless against in creasingly mobile and footloose capital. This paper forms part of a growing body of work in the geographical literature that seeks to contest this vie w, reinserting labour as an actor in the context of globalisation. Specific ally, we consider labour as an autonomous agent in the corporate labour pro cess, through an examination of the impact of current processes of organisa tional restructuring in multinational corporations upon employment relation s. We argue that corporate restructuring is a socially embedded, and theref ore highly problematic, process involving issues of negotiation, consent, a nd resistance between managers and workers, and that current restructuring is therefore destabilising established patterns of social relations by whic h corporations secured worker consent in the past. Our argument is develope d using a case study from the international oil industry.