Global value chains, organizations and industrial work

Rather than focussing exclusively on a list of key figures in the sociology of industrial, organisational and work sociology, the chapter considers organisation and industrial work in the context of thematic periods in the development of capitalism since 1945. The argument is made that the kind of studies of organisation and work undertaken throughout the history of our discipline, together with the scope of our understanding of organisation, work and employment have always been constrained by the geographies, spaces, sociologies, and temporality of determinate forms taken by the level of development of the capitalist firm. Our radical global value chain analysis of the ethanol sector in Brazil is used to exemplify this thesis.