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.

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.

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.