Hierarchies at Work

Race, World-Systems, and Legal Distribution

Karen Engle, Neville Hoad

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English

Columbia University Press
20 June 2025

Social classes; Social theory; Business & management

Series: New Directions in Critical Theory

This book challenges dominant understandings of both economic inequality and the future of work. Leading scholars in law, social sciences, and the humanities consider the production and reproduction of global hierarchies by revisiting and deploying three critical approaches that emerged in the late twentieth century: racial capitalism, world-systems theory, and critical legal distributional analysis. They demonstrate that these methods-especially when brought together-offer new insights into the forces that entrench the asymmetries of power and wealth that are too often shorthanded as inequality. They also uncover elisions and erasures of the past and present in prevailing technological-determinist narratives about the future of work.

Hierarchies at Work features powerful, grounded studies of the dynamics of work and livelihood in sites ranging from garment factories in Jordan and palm oil fields in Colombia to dairy farms in the United States. These studies underscore the necessity of thinking about the future of work and livelihoods through their racialized past and present and recognizing the systemic role of law in unequal distribution. Highlighting alternative imaginaries that contest systems of domination and subordination, this timely book offers resources to spur more just futures across local and global levels.

Edited by: Karen Engle, Neville Hoad
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Volume: 83
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780231212243
ISBN 10: 0231212240
Series: New Directions in Critical Theory
Pages: 416
Publication Date: 20 June 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Karen Engle is Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: Feminist Interventions in International Law (2020) and The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (2010). Neville Hoad is associate professor of English and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS (2025) and African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (2007).

Reviews for Hierarchies at Work: Race, World-Systems, and Legal Distribution

There could hardly be a more pivotal moment for this rigorous volume on distributive justice and work. Engle and Hoad bring some of the most recognized critical legal scholars into dialogue around foundational literature on racial capitalism and world systems theories, moving the work of ""others"" from margin to center. -- Adelle Blackett, Canada Research Chair in Transnational Labor Law, McGill University The future of work and transformations of inequality are deeply entwined with each other and with racial capitalism, the shifting world-system, and the persistence of imperialism alongside efforts to decolonize. Hierarchies at Work helps connect the political economy and geographies of exploitation and struggle today. -- Craig Calhoun, University Professor of Social Sciences, Arizona State University This extraordinary collection brings together the study of law, history, sociology, and literature. Taken together, the included essays propose and exemplify new ways of thinking about global history, racial capitalism, and the strategies—legal and otherwise—ordinary people have used to shape, confound, and resist the roles they've been assigned in the history of capitalism. One by one, these rigorous essays revisit and revivify ongoing arguments and point the way to emergent questions. -- Walter Johnson, author of <i>The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States</i>