Robert Miles

Robert Miles on April 14, 2014. Picture taken on campus at UNC Chapel Hill. Robert Miles, also known as Bob Miles, is a British sociologist. Miles has worked as a professor of sociology at University of Glasgow and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Early life Miles was educated at Dover Grammar School for Boys. He served as program director until 2017, and built the program up to offer more than 330 programs in 70 countries.

In addition to Miles and Phizacklea, other authors who reacted against the race relations' orientation included Ambalavaner Sivanandan and members of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and John Solomos from the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick.

Work Robert Miles' work focused on the nature of the different forms of existing modern racism, the distinct ideological formations of British, English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish nationalisms, their multiple intersections, and as well as in their formation as nation-state within the broader European context. Miles' intellectual trajectory is also known for his critique of classical racial theories, which he claims particularly ignore the role of labour migration in the processes of racialisation within the capitalist economic system.

Migrant labour In 1982, his book Racism and Migrant Labour was published and reviewed by notable journals. Miles sees labour migration as a necessity of capitalism, as the labour market of this economic system develops alternatives to continue to deploy exploitation, and thus allow the accumulation of wealth of the non-proletarian classes to continue to be exponential.

Unfree labour Miles' reflections on the problems concerning capitalism were developed in his doctoral thesis Anomaly or Necessity: Capitalism and Unfree Labour. This doctoral dissertation was published as a book in 1987 as Capitalism and Unfree Labor: Anomaly or Necessity? (originally titled Anomaly or Necessity: Capitalism and Unfree Labor). In this work, Miles suggests that capitalism develops contradictions, such as the existence of unfree labour, despite being based on trade and production. Miles maintains that since the seventeenth century, guest workers with limited mobility, slaves, and contract labourers have increased exponentially in the capitalist countries of Western Europe.