Thesis
Labour process in e-commerce logistic service network : analysis of Amazon in India
- Creator
- Rights statement
- Awarding institution
- University of Strathclyde
- Date of award
- 2025
- Thesis identifier
- T17563
- Person Identifier (Local)
- 202158189
- Qualification Level
- Qualification Name
- Department, School or Faculty
- Abstract
- The advent of e-commerce has significantly transformed retail and logistics services, driven by advancements in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This transformation has reconfigured the retail landscape, leading to the rise of transnational e-commerce giants like Amazon. In parallel, the concomitant logistics services of warehousing and delivery have evolved to support digitally mediated retailing, fundamentally altering how goods are stored, processed, and delivered. Furthermore, e-commerce firms have subsumed several regional logistics firms into their operations through various inter-firm relationships, such as outsourcing, subcontracting, and subsidiarisation, converting e-commerce-linked logistics services into a production network. As logistics integrates more deeply with e-commerce operations, it has redefined labour processes, work organisation, and employment relations in the sector. This thesis explores the labour process within Amazon’s e-commerce-linked logistics service network (or e-LSN) in India through a year-long field study of functionally interconnected warehousing facilities across Karnataka and Kerala. Specifically, it investigates how interactions between technological innovations, managerial control mechanisms, inter-firm relationships, flexible labour utilisation practices, broader political economy of e-commerce, and that of the regional labour markets in which the different logistics facilities are embedded, shapes the labour process and employment relations at the different nodes or facilities in the network. The research objectives of the thesis are the following. First, it is to analyse the organisational structure, division of labour, and managerial control mechanisms within and across Amazon’s e-LSN in India. Second, it is to examine the impact of Amazon’s proprietary digital technologies on the labour process and managerial control mechanisms. Third, it is to investigate how Amazon’s inter-firm organisational arrangements such as subcontracting and subsidiarising logistics operations to partner enterprises affects labour processes. Fourth, it is to assess how regional socio-economic conditions influence labour recruitment, and utilisation at the worksites; and finally, explore workers’ experiences, and exercise of agency, including adaptation, recalcitrance, and resistance to changing their conditions at work. In the quest to understand the source of economic value circulated across production networks, this thesis has synthesised Global Production Network (GPN) with Labour Process Theory (LPT) to address key theoretical gaps. The Global Commodity Chain (GCC) and Global Value Chain (GVC) frameworks have been instrumental in analysing inter-firm governance structures and value distribution but have largely confined labour’s active agency to value distribution struggles. While these frameworks have provided critical insights into inter-firm relations, they remain limited in their treatment of employment relations, managerial control mechanisms, and labour’s role in value creation. The GPN framework represents a theoretical advance over GVC, broadening the analytical scope by incorporating regional political economies, institutional actors, and the broader capitalist circuit of accumulation. However, despite these strengths, GPN continues to fall short in fully analysing labour’s role in value generation, particularly in how workers shape and are shaped by production networks beyond their positioning in distributional processes. GPN scholarship has often overlooked the structural antagonism between capital and labour, failing to adequately incorporate how labour struggles, bargaining, and workplace control mechanisms shape production networks. By integrating the labour process in the production network, this thesis has not only investigated the role of labour as an agency in the ‘capturing the value’ debate but also as an active agent in creating value. Simultaneously, it has contributed to enhancing labour process theory by analysing how the labour process and managerial control mechanisms become reconfigured when integrated within the sites of and across a production network. In analysing the factors shaping the labour process and managerial control mechanisms in Amazon’s facilities, previous studies have largely focused on how innovations in ICT and algorithmic-driven digital tools have transformed capital and employment relations within individual sites. However, these studies have treated the labour process in particular facilities as discrete entities, separate from Amazon’s e-LSN. This thesis is the first study of the labour process in Amazon’s warehouses in Global South that analyses the network comprehensively by integrating warehouse facilities, including receipt, stowing, picking, packing, and sortation, with last mile delivery services. Workplace employment relations in these facilities underscore that digitally mediated functionally interconnected production and service activities do not only create new jobs but also transform the labour process of existing forms of jobs. Labour Process Theory (LPT) has explicated managerial control mechanisms and their transformation over time with technological innovation. While algorithmic control has received disproportionately greater attention from scholars than established forms of control (simple, bureaucratic, technological, normative), this thesis demonstrates how algorithmic control melds with and transforms other forms of control, further reducing workers’ ability to exercise discretion or autonomy at work. This finding debunks technological determinism by highlighting the enduring significance of widely recognised human mediated control mechanisms. Algorithms themselves do not exercise power autonomously but rather, agency is conferred by management, which interprets and acts upon algorithmic-generated data. The thesis provides evidence that a certain degree of management discretion persists, albeit within the constraints imposed by Amazon’s digital ecosystem. For example, tolerance of worker errors and underperformance may vary based on fluctuations in market demand and order volumes, bolstered by flexible labour utilisation practices. Given that these sites are functionally linked, their operations and performance reciprocally influence one another. Amazon integrates warehousing and delivery functions through algorithmically generated performance monitoring metrics at site and individual levels. Algorithms serve to coordinate operations across these interconnected sites by calculating the required time to dispatch each order from each facility so that it reaches the customer within strict temporal parameters. Site-level performance metrics cascade down through functions, ultimately determining individual worker targets, and exacerbating pressure on warehouse workers and delivery drivers. Amazon’s global dominance in e-commerce, including in India, is well acknowledged. After critically reviewing the role of financial capital, investment in digital capital, and Amazon’s extra-firm relationships with the government, the thesis highlights how Amazon has occupied the position of lead firm in its e-LSN. Leveraging its dominant position, Amazon orchestrates competition across its network to reduce labour costs and the share of value distributed to partner enterprises. Algorithmically generated site-level performance metrics rank and evaluate facilities, with lower-performing sites penalised by reducing their operating capacity and payment rates. This site-level competitive pressure is transmitted to workers through ever-demanding productivity targets, job insecurity, and layoffs, further leveraging flexible labour utilisation practices and strategies. By integrating LPT with the political economy of labour in India, this thesis identifies the effects of informal national and regional labour markets on recruitment, utilisation, and workforce composition with each facility in the network. Amazon extensively hires workers on part-time or short-term contracts, reducing labour costs but increasing workforce vulnerability. This contractual segmentation differentiates not only workers, but also managers, a case found unique to India. Further, differential labour utilisation practices between migrant and local employees and on gender lines reinforces disparities. This growing tendency of informalisation of previously formal work has been observed in India but is now emerging in the Global North. Following GPN theory, this thesis highlights the dialectics of global-local relations, demonstrating how Amazon’s strategic coupling with local suppliers reinforces informal labour practices, cheapening labour through intensified work, precarious employment, and reduced job and income security. Labour remains indispensable in production networks, with agency to disrupt value distribution and transform value creation. Amazon employs a combination of managerial control mechanisms, integrating simple, technological, bureaucratic, normative, and algorithmic controls to intensify work pressure, overcome labour indeterminacy, and thwart imminent labour counter actions, including resistance. Consequently, workers experience reduced autonomy, increased job insecurity, and severe concerns over health and wellbeing. In response, workers do exhibit, however limited, resistance through sabotage, slowdowns, and, in some regions, collective action. Regional political economies influence these responses; in Karnataka, resistance remains individualistic, while in Kerala, with a stronger labour movement tradition, collective actions such as strikes have occurred. However, Amazon’s strategies of segmenting workers and discouraging association-building undermine organised resistance. Moreover, this dialectical relationship between control and resistance indicated from this study resonates the persistence of structural antagonism in employment relationship under contemporary mode of production. Finally, this thesis delivers insights into the elusive connectivity problem of LPT by situating Amazon’s labour process within both the broader circuit of capital accumulation in e-commerce sector and the national and regional socio-economic factors structuring employment. These broader forces beyond the network further configures work intensity, division of labour, and surplus value extraction. By incorporating the political economy of labour in India and the global e-commerce market into LPT and GPN, this research offers a deeper understanding of how labour process and employment relations are simultaneously shape and are being shaped within global production networks.
- Advisor / supervisor
- Taylor, Philip
- Briken, Kendra, 1972-
- Resource Type
- DOI
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