Geographies of job quality

For geographers, issues of job quality are considered in conjunction with wider questions of how people live in households and communities. This binds questions about the quality of jobs to wider questions about where, why and who holds which jobs. After explaining this perspective, the chapter introduces five areas of geographical research in which questions of job quality are central: regional polarization; global production networks; global care chains; platforms and the gig economy; and the potentials of labour agency. The conclusion emphasizes that job quality depends on the job, the worker and context, which, like all labour market processes, are inherently spatial and unavoidably place based.