ILPC is among the most important global events for research, analysis, and empirical and theoretical discussion in the field of labour studies, the labour process and capitalist transformations. Each year, the conference brings together scholars and policymakers in sociology, business and management, industrial relations, organisational analysis and other disciplines to present their research, promote international collaborations and initiate processes of shared knowledge creation.

The conference welcomes papers on any aspect of labour processes, labour markets, labour organising and labour reproduction. Illustrative examples of topics include:

• Labour process and other critical theories of labour issues
• Labour mobility and its implication for managerial rules and labour process
• Migrant workers and forms of organizing and resistance in the workplace and beyond
• Industrial relations, representation, and trade union strategies
• Labour process and reproduction process
• Power, inequality and labour market segmentation
• Worker’s voice, or silence, participation, mobilization and solidarities
• Skills, knowledge and labour process
• Gender, race, ethnicity and class at work
• Technology, control the corporation and autonomy
• Changing forms of employment relations in a global perspective (e.g. unfree, forced, informal)
• Time, space and the labour process
• Political economy, workplace regimes, global value chains and mobility
• Welfare states, social policy, and the disciplining of labour
• Gendered divisions of labour, digitalized care, and the green transition

Key words should be given that indicate the focus of research and the methods used. The abstract should contain clear information about theoretical orientation, findings, methodology, and what contribution is being made to knowledge. Abstracts of papers that are concerned solely with theoretical or conceptual matters will need to provide clear information on how they address and advance relevant debates. We encourage contributions from the Global South and North.

Apart from single abstracts we also welcome proposals for a small number of symposia (of 1.5 hours’ duration) addressing the conference theme. Proposals should be between 750 and 1000 words, encompassing a detailed description of the structure and (potential) contributors (with a short note as to whether they have already confirmed their availability) as well as a statement about how the symposium will contribute to the conference theme. International collaborations are especially welcome. Please submit proposals to ilpc2027@uca.es until 31st October 2026, or contact one of the conference organisers beforehand for an informal discussion.

This stream is focused on exploring why migrants work as hard as they do. It acknowledges that the manufacturing of migrant worker consent is geographically complex and varied. Control over migrant workers occurs both at and beyond the workplace and drawing on labour process theory (for control within the workplace) and labour control regime theory (for control outside of the workplace) this stream will demonstrate how migrant work ethic is emplaced across various geographies. It is important, we argue, to draw together these two theoretical approaches to fully understand how migrant labour power is activated, realised, and in many cases exploited by capital. To date, migration scholars have paid less attention to labour control regime theory than labour process theory and few have considered the two frameworks in parallel.

Care work occupies a structurally distinct position in the landscape of labour. It is simultaneously indispensable and devalued, intimate and politically charged. While issues such as the “care crisis” are increasingly hypervisible in social discourse, care workers themselves remain systematically invisibilised both in these discourses as well as in analyses of labor organizing and resistance. Despite this, organising and resistance in care work is on the rise. Care workers are forming their own associations, community initiatives and unions, as well as organising through established unions. This stream invites contributions that take care work seriously as a sector through which to rethink foundational concepts of agency, resistance, control, and space.

Care work occurs across diverse and often liminal spaces: behind the closed doors of a private house, within institutional care homes, along transnational care chains, and digitally mediated. These spaces do not merely host the labour process, but they also shape how care is performed, how control is enacted, and what forms of worker’s agency or resistance become possible.
Boundary struggles between public and private, paid and unpaid, further condition the emergence or suppression of worker voice. From a perspective of social reproduction it also raises questions of how care work is rendered and valued as ‘real work’ instead of as a ‘labour-of-love’.

We welcome contributions that analyse the labour process of care work, in all its forms. In line with the overall theme of ILPC 2027, we also emphasise the spaces of care and how spatial organisation structures mechanisms of control and shapes differentiated possibilities of agency and resistance. While institutional care home settings may enable more classical forms of worker organising, highly individualized and often migrant live-in care workers must rely on alternative strategies. These spatial and organisational configurations also shape how digitalization transforms control and surveillance, both empirically and conceptually.

Feminisation and racialisation are not incidental features of care work but structural conditions that shape how caring labour is recognized or rendered invisible. This stream invites contributions that examine how these (and additional) intersecting hierarchies condition the legitimacy accorded to care workers' grievances, their access to collective voice, and the forms of control they face. We are also interested in interrogating how the ‘fetish of care’ constrains what is thinkable as agency or  resistance, and how normative expectations of care work can obscure or delegitimize workers’ political actions.

Finally, we are interested in how micro-level everyday, often informal or subtle forms of resistance - such as coping, strategic compliance, refusal or negotiation - can accumulate, shift or transform into more formalised repertoires of resistance. At the same time, we are attentive to the macro level: how care workers (dis)engage with, withdraw from, or reshape welfare states, care regimes, labour markets, and political institutions across different (transnational) geographic and institutional contexts.

We welcome contributions that look at or beyond:

• The labour process of different forms of care work
• Forms of agency, resistance in care work, participation, voice and mobilization, with respect to the different spaces of care
• Management and control in care work
• The experience of migrant workers in care
• Urban and rural divides in care work
• Care work, digitalisation and AI
• Care work in relation to the (welfare) state and care regimes
• (Gender-based) violence and care work and its relation to control or space
• Care ethics, social reproduction feminism and the labour process
• Paid and unpaid care work with an emphasis on work
• Repression and obstacles to agency and resistance in care work
• Comparative and cross-national perspectives
• Agency within social reproduction mechanisms
• Intersecting identities and how they condition agency and resistance

This special stream also explicitly invites activists in the field of care work, co-research inside and outside of academia, PhDs and early career researchers as well as more experienced researchers from around the globe. Our aim is to engage in exchange to contribute to research and practices in the context of spaces for (resistance and agency in) care work.

Labour conflicts have returned to the centre of public and academic debate. Across many countries, workers have increasingly resorted to strikes and other forms of collective action in response to inflation, restructuring, digitalisation, and the continuing erosion of labour’s institutional resources. At the same time, unions and other labour organisations are experimenting with new organisational strategies, new repertoires of mobilisation, and innovative ways of collecting and using data to support organising, bargaining and strategic decision-making. Yet these developments have received relatively limited attention within Labour Process Theory and the broader labour studies literature.

This stream explores the relationship between strikes, labour organisations, and the production and use of knowledge as a strategic resource. We particularly encourage contributions examining how unions and other labour organisations generate, collect and analyse data on strikes, industrial action and worker mobilisation; how such knowledge shapes organisational learning and strategy; and how labour organisations evaluate the outcomes and effectiveness of collective action. We are also interested in how labour-generated knowledge challenges official statistics and contributes to new understandings of worker resistance.

The stream welcomes empirical, theoretical and methodological contributions from across disciplines, including labour process studies, industrial relations, sociology of work, political economy, labour geography and digital labour studies. Comparative and international perspectives are particularly encouraged.

Possible themes include:

• Strikes as strategic resources within union renewal and labour organising;
• Labour-generated data, strike mapping and alternative knowledge infrastructures;
• Measuring strike outcomes, mobilisation and bargaining success;
• Organisational learning, strategic capabilities and union renewal;
• Digital tools, data infrastructures and worker organising;
• Comparative experiences of strike mobilisation across countries and sectors;
• Labour power resources, mobilisation and organisational capacity;
• Spatial dimensions of strikes, solidarity and worker coordination;
• Methodological innovations in researching industrial action and labour mobilisation.

The stream speaks directly to the conference theme, ‘Spaces of Work and Resistance’. Strikes are inherently spatial processes, unfolding across workplaces, industries, supply chains and territories. Equally, the production of labour-generated data creates new organisational spaces through which workers and unions coordinate action, exchange knowledge and develop strategic capacities across geographical boundaries. Understanding how labour organisations produce and mobilise knowledge therefore offers new insights into the spatial organisation of resistance and the contemporary dynamics of labour mobilisation.

The stream aims to foster an international network of researchers examining worker mobilisation and labour strategy from diverse methodological and theoretical perspectives. It also seeks to encourage dialogue between academics and practitioners, recognising that unions, worker centres and labour organisations are increasingly producing their own datasets, analytical tools and strategic frameworks to support organising and bargaining. This makes the stream particularly well placed to facilitate new collaborations across countries and between researchers and labour organisations.

By bringing together research on strikes, labour-generated knowledge, organisational learning and labour strategy, this stream seeks to advance understanding of how workers and their organisations are developing new capacities to resist, organise and exercise power under contemporary capitalism.