Jeffrey Harrod

Jeffrey Harrod is a writer and essayist on politics and international political economy and known for his work on the power of corporations and the position of labour in international economic relations. He has been critical of global approaches which reduce the importance of nation-states. Working with Robert W. Cox a power dynamics approach to the political economy of work was developed. Harrod's application of this approach to those in low-waged or precarious employment is currently used by researchers in those fields. Since 2012 he has maintained a blog and in 2016 published his first novel, After Man.

He is professor emeritus from Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and visiting professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Academic
Harrod was born in London, England and started work as an office boy at age 15 and later worked as a London bus conductor. After two years compulsory military service he graduated in international law from University College London, international relations from Lehigh University, Pennsylvania and with a Ph.D. (political science-international relations) from the University of Geneva's Graduate Institute of International Studies, in Switzerland. He has held academic positions at the University of West Indies, Jamaica, University College London, University of Colorado, University of Amsterdam and the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University where he held the chair of International and Comparative Labour Studies and became deputy rector.

International trade unionism
He was a foreign correspondent for international economic affairs for the trade newspapers of Fairchild Publications before joining the United Nations International Labour Organisation as research coordinator at its Institute for Social Studies. Subsequently, Harrod became permanent consultant for research and publications for the International Federation of Chemical, Energy and General Workers' Unions (ICEF) (an international trade union) where he worked with Charles Levinson and Vic Thorpe producing books, annual reports on world social economy and industry bulletins. As ICEM resource person he provided lectures and consultations to unions, movements and political parties in, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, Bulgaria and Pakistan.

Political economy of work and labour
Harrod and Robert Cox worked together on a power dynamics approach to what was conventionally called labour relations or industrial relations. It was launched in the companion volumes by Robert Cox and Harrod – Harrod's Power, Production and the Unprotected Worker (1987) and part 1 of Cox's Production, Power and the Making of World Order (1987). In this approach work and labour are viewed through different patterns of power found in forms of production ranging from peasant to corporate throughout the world. Both Cox and Harrod used this view in their teaching and work in international political economy. Harrod continued to revise and develop the original approach and other researchers expanded its use in the study of world politics. Cox and Harrod have together been criticised for bias for their selective use of Marxian concepts.

Global political economy
Harrod's work in global political economy involves the power interplay between types of labour relations, corporations and non-governmental organisations. His Trade Union Foreign Policy (1972) revealed that foreign trade unions accepted corporate strategies aimed at labour in bauxite mining in Jamaica. Similar corporate strategies were shown in Asbestos: The Politics and Economics of a Lethal Substance (1990) (with Vic Thorpe). Harrod's book on Labour and Third World Debt (1994), which detailed how the policies of international economic agencies and corporations dealing with foreign debt involved labour in the global south, was translated from English into Danish, Spanish and Urdu. He has continued to focus on the social, political and geo-political problems raised by the corporation as an institutional power at both the domestic and international levels. Harrod posted in 2012, under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, a complete online course on Global Political Economy.