Anthropology and labour law

This Chapter explores the scope of interest, recurring themes and insights that anthropology brings to the topic of labour law and regulation. Drawing on a selection of anthropological studies, some directly, and others incidentally, concerned with the analysis of work regimes, the author discusses how anthropology brings a focus on capturing the complexity of interconnections between work and culture. In often researching socio-economic peripheries, the discipline also provides evidence of the limits of state labour law, and documents the non-state forms of regulation that are just as, or even more, important to determining the reality of work arrangements. Anthropology also brings a clear acknowledgment of agency and provides evidence for the everyday reworking of regulatory influences at the ground level. Finally, anthropological evidence has the potential for use in designing regulatory interventions and for judicial decision-making but this has an attendant set of problems and risks.