Jamie Peck is reader in economic geography and member of the International Centre for Labour Studies at the University of Manchester. He has published extensively on labor market theory, regional economic restructuring, employment policy evaluation, and the geopolitics of economic governance and social regulation. A research associate of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, his research has been supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the European Science Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund (New York), and the Australian government, while he has consulted to the European Commission, the UK Department of Employment, and numerous local authorities, labor unions, and economic development agencies. He is currently researching the political economy of welfare reform on a Harkness Fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

1. Introduction: Places of Work
I. Making Labor Markets
2. Making Workers: Control, Reproduction, and Regulation
3. Structuring the Labor Market: A Segmentation Approach
4. Locating the Local Labor Market: Segmentation, Regulation, Space
II. Placing Labor Markets
5. Flexibilizing Labor: Insecure Work in Unstable Places
6. Domesticating Work: Restructuring at Work, Restructuring at Home
7. Building Workfare States: Institutions of Labor Regulation
8. Localizing Labor: Geopolitics of Labor Regulation
9. Epilogue: Local Dialectics of Labor

Challenging the prevailing idea that labor markets are governed by universal economic processes, this significant work argues instead that labor markets develop in tandem with social and political institutions, and thus function in locally specific ways. Focusing on the complex social processes that lie at the heart of the labor market, the author offers a provocative new perspective and proposes new ways of conducting research in the area.