Dr Orlando Lazar

Orlando is a political theorist researching domination and the workplace, with a particular interest in new and emerging forms of work. His DPhil was in political theory at Oxford, and his BA and MPhil were in philosophy at the University of Cambridge. At St Edmund Hall, Orlando teaches the finals papers Theory of Politics, Marx & Marxism, and Feminist Theory, as well as the theory components of the prelims paper Introduction to Theory & Practice of Politics.

My research focuses on domination, republicanism, and work, and my doctoral thesis concerned contemporary republican approaches to the workplace. My ongoing research takes this project forward, looking at structural accounts of domination, and at distinctively modern forms of precarious work. Most recent republican writing on work (including my own doctoral work) tends to imagine a traditional employment contract – a set number of hours worked, overseen by a manager, in return for a regular wage. I propose to reorient this approach towards an analysis of emerging forms of work – platform and gig economy work, automation, algorithmic management and surveillance, and remote and flexible working. These new labour practices risk handing significant and unfamiliar forms of power to employers, and challenge many of the traditional ways that republicans have approached the workplace.

From a normative analysis of distinctively modern forms of employment, and the new forms of domination they can involve, I’m also interested in a practical set of questions: how should we re-organise work and the workplace to best promote freedom and non-domination?

(2021) ‘Micro-domination’, European Journal of Political Theory, online first.

(2020) ‘Work, Domination, and the False Hope of Universal Basic Income’, Res Publica 27, 427-446.

(2019), ‘A Republic of Rules: Procedural Arbitrariness and Total Institutions’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 22 (6):681-702.

(2019), ‘Work, Domination, and Contemporary Republicanism’, DPhil Thesis. Available online at https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d631dd22-77f6-4635-a260-7a355ef0fddb