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Staff Profile

Professor Al James

Professor of Economic Geography

  • Email: al.james@ncl.ac.uk
  • Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 6346
  • Personal Website: https://geoworklives.com
  • Address: School of Geography, Politics and Sociology (Henry Daysh Building, 3rd floor, Room 3.16)
    Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 7RU

    Twitter: @Re_AlJames
    ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5697-5331
    Scopus Author ID: 12238997800
Background

Al James

BA Geography (Cambridge), PhD Economic Geography (Cambridge), FRSA, FRGS

My research and teaching programme in labour geography engages with major international debates around: (1) workers' everyday struggles to combine work, home and family; (2) gendered relations of production and social reproduction; and (3) digitally-mediated work futures in platform capitalism.  

Current projects seek to feminise 'digital labour' through new engagements with invisible women crowdworkers in the platform economy (British Academy); and the shifting logistics of social reproduction in UK trucking in the wake of Brexit and COVID (ESRC Transforming Working Lives Programme, with Debbie Hopkins (Oxford), Anna Davidson (Huddersfield), Nicky Gregson (Durham) and Kaveri Medappa (Oxford)).

I am currently working on a research monograph that draws on 7 years of research to explore the gendered dynamics of labouring on digital labour platforms and give voice to the millions of women gig workers and their families remain unfairly marginalised within platform labour debates. The book extends work recently showcased by the ILO (Working from Home Report 2021), WIRED Magazine 2023, and The Gig Economy Project (Brave New Europe 2023), also recognised as one of the most downloaded journal papers in Work in the Global Economy.

My research programme is concerned to: see the making of capitalism through the eyes of workers rather than simply firms and capital (labour geography); expose the masculinist limits of ‘universal’ economic theory through new engagements with women and gendered social reproduction (feminist economic geography); and engage with organisations working to improve the lives of workers and their families (economic geography outreach). 

Earlier streams of research advanced new understandings of: work, employment and labour organising that challenge an anaemic Western 'universalism' in economic theory (cosmopolitan economic geography); and how cultures of learning and innovation shape patterns of uneven regional development (regional cultural economy).

To date, my research has engaged with workers, firms, labour unions, and governments in the UK, USA, Ireland and India, and involved collaborations with like-minded colleagues in Labour Studies, Gender Studies, Digital Sociology, Business / Management, Development Studies, and Transport Geography. This work has been supported financially by the Economic and Social Research Council, Arts and Humanities Research Council, British Academy, Nuffield Foundation, Centre for the Study of Migration, RGS-IBG, Cambridge Humanities Research Scheme, and Newcastle University Research Excellence Academy. 

I am a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and have held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2017-18). As Research Director in Geography (2018-2022) I led Newcastle Geography's successful REF2021 submission. In January 2024 I take over as Head of Geography and Deputy Head of School, in the School of Geography Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University. Previously I held lectureships at two other international hotspots in Economic Geography: Queen Mary University of London (2007-2016) and Cambridge University (2003-2007).  

My writing is free to download from the geoworklives research website, also ResearchGate, GoogleScholar, and Slideshare pages, please do take a look. And if you a looking to pursue a PhD or a Postdoc and can see a good fit with my research interests then please get in touch. 

Recent / forthcoming publications:

James A. 2022. Women in the Gig Economy: Feminising ‘Digital Labour’. Work in the Global Economy 2(1): 2-26.

James A. 2023. Gendered Labour Geographies in the Cloud. In: Andrew Herod, ed. Handbook of Labor Geography. Edward Elgar, 2022. In Press.

James A. 2022. Platform work. In: Johnstone, S.; Wilkinson, A.; Rodriguez, J, ed. Encylopedia of Human Resource Management (2nd edition). Elgar, 2022. In press.

Research

Research Focus in a Nutshell

labour | gender inequality | social reproduction | gig work | platform economy | work-family balance | trucking


Current Projects

PLATFORMING WOMEN IN THE GIG ECONOMY (British Academy):

This work explores the gendered dynamics of working on digital labour platforms. Millions of women worldwide find paid work through digital labour platforms, many with the hope of achieving better reconciliation of paid work with childcare and family. Yet women’s work-lives remain marginalised within the expansive digital labour research agenda, which remains strangely wedded to a focus on ‘digital economic man’. As part of a growing feminist digital labour agenda, this research has since 2018 engaged with over 110 women in the UK using a range of popular remote crowdwork platforms prior to and during COVID-19 (including PeoplePerHour, Upwork, Freelancer and TaskRabbit). The research combines online interviews, with autobiographical images, and artist renderings through collaboration with Jennie Temple. See: geoworklives.com

This work makes visible multiple precarities, hardships and gendered exclusions experienced by women crowdworkers - which include gendered constraints on women’s abilities to compete for gig work, female gig worker health and safety, and gendered exclusions from government protections due to discontinuous income histories and previous periods of maternity and childcare. It also identifies pragmatic coping tactics that women platform workers have developed to reduce their vulnerabilities and effect improvements in their work-lives (including platform switching, shift back into formal employment, tag team childcare, shared profiles), albeit without necessarily challenging larger structures of constraint at the level of platform architectures, and unequal household divisions of labour. The research also asks women crowdworkers themselves to reimagine and redesign platforms, user agreements, algorithmic systems of control, and platform policy governance, in ways which would make their everyday work-lives easier.  The latest phase of this work explores women's experiences of juggling platform work with homeschooling and childcare during the COVID pandemic and lockdown. 

TRUCKING LIVES (ESRC, Transforming Working Lives Programme £3.9M): 

This project offers the first large-scale, multi-method empirical investigation of mobile workers in the UK road freight sector. It makes visible the everyday work-lives of truck drivers, identifies the changes needed to recruit and retain a demographically diverse truck driver workforce. And, through stakeholder partnership it explores pathways to implement actions to improve workers’ lives for the better. Conceptually, it builds on growing recognition of the significance of mobility in different areas of everyday life, extending this to focus on forms of paid work in which mobility is intrinsic but increasingly problematic for labour recruitment and retention. The project combines expertise in mobilities studies, transport geography and labour geography, extending the team's earlier work on: the gendering of freight work (Debbie Hopkins, Oxford; Anna Davidson, Huddersfield), mobile work, truckers and road freight within logistical systems (Nicky Gregson, Durham), and family friendly work-lives (Al James, Newcastle). The project has been designed with, and has support from, the road freight sector (Eddie Stobart, Road Haulage Association), workers’ union (United Road Transport Union) and government (Department for Transport), all of whom are eager to hear and amplify workers’ voices. @TruckingLives


Previous Projects

WORK-LIFE ADVANTAGE (ESRC): The societal and moral significance of successfully integrating paid work with other meaningful parts of life is profound. Yet many employers remain sceptical, perpetuating hardship for many workers. In response, this work explored how employer-provision of family-friendly working arrangements, can simultaneously enhance firms’ capacities for learning and innovation, in pursuit of long-term competitive advantage. This work was developed over a decade through engagement with female technology professional organisations (Girl Geeks, womenintechnology, WISE, WITS), policy-makers, labour organisations, and employers (Ireland’s Equality Authority, Irish Congress of Trade Unions, SIPTU, National Centre for Partnership & Performance, Irish WLB Network), who facilitated access to over 300 women, and 150 IT employers (employing 8000 workers) in the UK and Ireland. This work exposes and disrupts a series of widely-held yet highly problematic assumptions within the regional learning and innovation literature rooted in the masculinist myth of the disembodied ‘ideal worker’, for whom work is primary, time available to work unlimited, and the demands of family and personal life insignificant. It also contributes to an holistic regional development agenda, concerned to expand the narrow analytical focus of regional analysis beyond economistic indicators of competitiveness, growth and productivity, also to include gender equity, quality of life, and family well-being.  

WORK IN INDIA'S NEW SERVICES ECONOMY (Nuffield Foundation): at the forefront of high profile debates around ‘jobless growth’, youth unemployment, and jobs-led development in the global South, the rapid growth of India’s new services economy has been celebrated as: providing new opportunities for ‘decent work’ and urban livelihoods; a vital means to absorb India’s growing cohort of educated unemployed; and spearheading India’s transition to a global economic power. However, there remains major debate around the degree to which India’s ‘modern services’ offer socially inclusive employment opportunities for skilled workers from lower castes, ethnic and religious minorities. Over a decade, this collaborative research (with Bhaskar Vira (Cambridge), Philippa Williams (QMUL), Fiona McConnell (Oxford)) engaged with over 2500 service workers across multiple service sectors (including IT/BPM, hospitality, retail, media, aviation, insurance, finance), also exploring the developmental role of a nexus of ‘labour market intermediaries’ (recruiters, voice accent trainers, placement agencies) in upgrading workers’ skills and brokering upward mobility amongst graduates from historically marginalised religious minorities and lower castes.  


Recent presentations

  • Gendered digital labour and platform inequalities: feminising platforms? INDL5 L: International Network on Digital Labour 5th Conference, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 3-5 November 2022. 
  • Gendered digital labour and platform inequalities: feminising platforms? University of Edinburgh and University of Toronto Symposium on Reimagining Platforms, 31 October 2022, University of Edinburgh. 
  • Lockdown work-lives: home/working in the gig economy during COVID-19. 4th International Feminist Geography Conference, June 17 2022, Boulder CO. 
  • Lockdown work-lives: home/working in the gig economy during COVID 19. 6th Global Conference on Economic Geography, June 7 2022, Dublin (University College Dublin). 
  • Platforming women, work and family in the gig economy. Cambridge University, Philomathia Seminar Series. 23 November 2021. 
  • Thinking Beyond the Proper Job and a Century of Labouring Man. Durham University, Department of Geography, online seminar workshop 17 March 2021 (with Tania Li, Siobhan McGrath, Matt Bailie-Smith, Penelope Anthias). 
  • Gendering the Gig Economy: Online Work Platforms as a 'Godsend'? University of Leeds, Centre for Employment Relations, Innovation and Change, Disrupting Technology Conference, 16 January 2020. 
  • Women, work and family in the online gig economy: healthy and safe? HM Government Health and Safety Executive, Chief Scientist's Seminar, HSE Liverpool, 9 December 2019. 
  • Digital Work/Place: Platform Work-Lives in Practice. Regional Studies Association 2019 Summer Conference, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 5 June 2019. 
  • Gendered Digital Work Lives: Feminising the Platform Economy? Invited keynote Warwick Business School / Institute of Advanced Studies, Future of Work and Inequalities workshop, University of Warwick, 13 May 2019. 
  • Digital Work Lives: Feminising the Gig Economy? Zurich Human Geography Colloquium Series, University of Zurich, 16 April 2019. 
  • Digital Tech for Gender Justice? Invited lecture to People’s Bank of Govanhill Glasgow / Swap Market, Digital Economy Community Currency Workshop, 14 December 2018. 
  • Digital Work Futures: Women in the Online Gig Economy. Women, Work and Activism: Pasts Presents and Futures Conference, Newcastle University, 10 November 2018. 
  • Women in the Gig Economy: Platforms as 'Godsend'? University of Edinburgh, Royal College of Art, 24 August 2018 (Artists in the Gig Economy). 
  • Gendered Post-Wage Futures? Women in the Online Gig Economy. Post-Wage Economy: Retheorising Work Workshop, Queen Mary University of London 29 July 2018. 
  • Gender Inclusive Regional Studies. RSA book launch of Work-Life Advantage: Sustaining Regional Learning and Innovation, Regional Studies Conference 2018 Lugano, Switzerland, 5 June, with Sally Hardy. 
  • Work-Life Advantage (Al James 2017, RGS-IBG Book Series) - AAG book launch: Author Meets Critics (Chris Benner, Rikard Eriksson, Kendra Strauss, Megan Blake, Cian O'Callaghan, Kim England). American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2018, 12 April, New Orleans. 
  • Gendered digital work-lives: juggling online gig work and motherhood. American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2018, 13 April, New Orleans.
  • Digital Work-Lives and Gender Inclusive Growth in the 'Sharing' Economy. University of Southampton Work Futures Research Centre / Web Science Institute (Digital Labour Series). 7 February 2018.

Funded Projects

  • Trucking Work Lives: Making Space for People in Truck Driving Work (ESRC 2022-2025). With PI Debbie Hopkins (Oxford), Anna Davidson (Huddersfield), Nicky Gregson.  
  • Digital Work-Lives and Gender Inclusive Growth in the 'Sharing Economy' (2017-18). British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. 
  • Re-Imagining Economies: Towards More Socially Inclusive Economic Geographies (2017-20). With Stuart Dawley, Alex Hughes, Helen Jarvis, Danny MacKinnon, Andy Pike, Jane Pollard, Gareth Powells. Newcastle University Research Excellence Academy. 
  • In the Business of Economic Geography: Tracking the Movement of Economic Geographers into Business and Management (2015-16). With Mike Bradshaw (Warwick), Catherine Souch (RGS-IBG), Neil Coe (NUS), James Faulconbridge (Lancaster). See: www.egrg.rgs.org/business-of-econ-geog
  • Investigating Socially Inclusive Growth in India’s New Service Economy (2013). With Bhaskar Vira (Cambridge), Philippa Williams (QMUL), and Fiona McConnell (Oxford). Cambridge Humanities Research Grants Scheme. 
  • Islamic Charitable Giving in London’s East End (2010-2013). Kavita Datta (QMUL), Al James (QMUL), and Jane Pollard (Newcastle). Centre for Migration Studies (QMUL) and Newcastle University. 
  • Promoting Equality and Diversity in Economic Crisis (PEDEC) (AHRC 2010-12). With Kate Malleson (QMUL Law), Lizzie Barmes (QMUL Law), Geraldine Healy and Hazel Conley (QMUL Business Management).  
  • Impacts of Work-Life (Im)Balance on Innovation & Learning in Regional Economies (2006-9). ESRC, RES-000-22-1574-A. Project evaluated as ‘Outstanding’. Project affiliated to ESRC Gender Equality Network (GeNet). 
  • Worker Mobility and Labour Market Intermediaries in the Call Centre Industry: An International Comparison (India and the UK) (2006-9). With Bhaskar Vira (Cambridge), Nuffield Foundation (SGS 32348). 
  • Regional Culture, Corporate Strategy, and High Tech Innovation: Salt Lake City (1999-2002).  ESRC, doctoral research funding, Cambridge University (R-00-429-934-224).

Research Recognition

Teaching

Undergraduate:

Crises of Economies: Money and Labour (GEO3160), Geographies of Working Lives (GEO3416), Economic Geography (GEO2099), Local and Regional Development (GEO3114)

PostDoctoral 'Supervision'

  • Dr Harry Pettit (2019-20) - 1 yr postdoc, Reimagining Economies Project, Newcastle Research Excellence Academy (inclusive gig economy focus) - moved to Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at University of Northumbria.
  • Dr Erica Pani (2017-18) - 1 yr postdoc, Reimagining Economies Project (inclusive finance focus), Newcastle Research Excellence Academy - moved to Assistant Professorship in Geography at the LSE.


Doctoral Supervision:

  • Vasileios Ntouros (with Vasilis Vlachokryiakos, Open Lab, NU). 'Digital Platforms, People Over Profit Sharing Economy Schemes' (2020-24). EPSRC Digital Civics studentship, Newcastle University. 
  • Marisol Keller (with Karin Schwiter and Christian Berndt, Zurich). 'How digital labour platforms reshape spatio-temporal patterns of work' (2019-2022). HSS studentship, University of Zurich.
  • Aditya Ray (with Philippa Williams, QMUL). ‘Work in India's New Service Economy: Employee experiences in the domestic voice‐based consumer‐interaction industry in Pune’ (2014–17). QMUL Doctoral Studentship Award.
  • Vincent Guermond (with Kavita Datta, QMUL). 'The financialisation of remittances: an example from the London to Ghana remittance corridor' (2014–2020, part-time). QMUL Doctoral Studentship Award.
  • Robert Stephenson (with Alastair Owens, QMUL; Laura Bedford and Eleanor John, Geffrye Museum). ‘Men juggling work, home and family in (post)recession London’ (2012-17, part-time). AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award.  Part of larger programme of research ‘Home-Work’ (4 CDAs 2012-15), co-ordinated by Alison Blunt. 
  • Josh Phillips (with Kavita Datta, QMUL). ‘Exploring the geographies of credit amongst entrepreneurial new migrant groups in London’ (2010-14). QMUL Doctoral Studentship Award. Completed.
  • Camille Aznar (with Kavita Datta QMUL). ‘Risk, financial exclusion and migrant workers in London’ (2009-2012). ESRC CASE studentship with the Runnymede Trust. Completed.
  • Supriti Bezbaruah (with Cathy McIlwaine, QMUL). ‘The evolving relationship of work, women and the State in India: the experience of the banking sector’ (2007-2011). Self-funded. Completed. Thesis subsequently written up as research monograph: Bezbaruah S. (2015) Banking on Equality: Women, Work and Employment in the Banking Sector in India. London: Routledge. 
  • Laurent Frideres (with Ron Martin, Cambridge University). ‘The spatial and temporal dynamics of industrial specialization & clustering in the regional economy’ (2004-2010).  Funded by The Luxembourg Ministry for Education. Completed. Awarded prize 2011 RGS-IBG PhD Prize (Economic Geography Research Group).  

 

Publications