Global Amazon: Reflections from a Collaborative, Cross-Regional Project on Labor and Social Contestation of the E-Commerce Giant amidst International Expansion

Synthesizing the rich insights from the contributors to a volume on “Global Amazon” we are co-editing encompassing our research in the U.S. and Latin America and colleagues on/in Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, and Africa, we offer tentative generalizations about contests around ongoing processes of transformation of spatial and organizational structures of e-commerce by the U.S. giant as well as its national, regional, and global competitors. An overarching claim points to two apparently contradictory developments. On the one hand, Amazon benefits from the fact that e-commerce is a historically novel, boundary-spanning and -confounding economic activity that undermines the easy application or activation of established “20th century” institutional structures and patterns of agency, which themselves have undergone change and in many cases erosion in the first quarter of the 21st century—in particular, in employment relations, competition policy, and zoning and local and regional development. This situation, together with subtle, often successful exercise of “platform power” to naturalize the spread of a form of capitalism that privileges putative consumer wants and needs and rapid movement of goods into their hands above all else, leaves it, and its competitors, “two steps ahead” of regulators and social and political forces that would place limits on its freedom to remake labor processes, employment patterns, and structures of competition and spatial organization. On the other hand, Amazon’s power and its effects can easily be overstated, and need to be put into sharper temporal and geographic perspective. The further the company spreads, the more it is a “late entrant” to already emerging national markets, the more it faces local and global competitors, the greater the patchwork capitalism varieties it must react to, and the more it is met by counter-hegemonic efforts to constrain that expansion and ameliorate its heavy and geographically concentrated negative socio-economic and environmental impacts.