Accommodation for valorization: living at work and the labour process

The article examines the relationship between forms of worker accommodation and the labour process, aiming to identify the settings in which work is influenced by the ways workers are accommodated. Drawing on a range of case studies, we use secondary analysis to propose a typology of differentiated links between the two spheres. Acceleration in commodity circulation reshapes both the temporal organization of work and the spatial organization of production networks (Harvey, 1990). This, we argue, has forced the labour process and worker accommodation to become closely interconnected and mutually influential. Theorizing this relationship we suggest creates dyadic effects between workplaces and living spaces for the labour process. In one direction, living spaces are drawn to the site of production, giving rise to work-centred accommodation that often takes collective, institutionally-organized or worker self-organized forms. Accommodation is subordinate to the workplace for extracting value from labour. In the other direction, the labour process is dispersed into domestic space, producing heterogeneous forms of home working. Here, the living spaces subsidize the workplace for labour valorization. We further differentiate work-centred accommodation into four ideal types: workplace-confined, workplace-controlled, workplace-tied and worker-organized accommodation. In both work-centred and home-centred accommodation, we examine the labour processes effects through the effort and mobility indeterminacies that labour and capital traverse (Smith, 2006).