New research highlights shifting realities of logistical labour in a globalised world
Author
Date 8 August 2025
A newly released special issue of the journal Work, Organisation, Labour and Globalisation highlights the shift in how global logistics is transforming labour across industries and continents.
Titled New Worlds of Logistical Labour: Spaces, places, technologies, workers, the issue is co-edited by researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), ADM+S Affiliate and former Research Fellow Dr Christopher O’Neill, and ADM+S Student Lauren Kelly, alongside Dr Tom Barnes from the Australian Catholic University.
Bringing together ten original articles, the collection explores how global logistics is reshaping the nature of work through radical technological change and new spatial and social dynamics.
With contributions spanning five continents, the special issue offers a significant intervention into the growing field of logistics and labour studies.
“While reiterating the widespread and ongoing influence of despotic workplace practices in logistics globally, the collection challenges assumptions of geographical universalism that characterise much modern debate about logistical labour,” the editors write.
Key themes across the collection include:
- The blurring of analytical boundaries that traditionally divide places of work and industry;
- The complex and reciprocal relations between technology and labour;
- Fresh perspectives to debates about continuity versus novelty in contemporary work, addressing issues such as labour displacement, labour augmentation, workplace regimes and algorithmic management
The special issue builds on research conducted as part of the ADM+S-funded project Precarious Warehouse Work and the Automation of Logistical Mobilities, led by Dr Christoper O’Neill in 2023. A workshop held under the project laid the foundation for the issue, which features contributions from nine ADM+S members and affiliates.
Among the featured articles are:
- Digital twins and logistical labour: Models, plans and the inversion of the ‘real’ by Zoe Horn and Michael Richardson, which investigates how simulation technologies are reshaping the logistics workforce;
- The logistical episteme: Tracing the location of warehousing industries in Malaysia by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, which explores the spatial logic of warehousing in Southeast Asia;
- When algorithmic management was new: Engineered standards and the managerial prerogative in Australia by Christopher O’Neill, Lauren Kelly, Jake Goldenfein, Thao Phan, and Jathan Sadowski, which revisits the early adoption of algorithmic oversight in the logistics sector.
Access the open access special issue New Worlds of Logistical Labour: Spaces, places, technologies, workers
