In studying the impact of industry on class organization, social scientists have assumed that the effects of technological advance increase with time and that, as technology molds, dehumanizes, and alienates workers, the pressure mounts to change the system through political action. William H....

The main aim of this paper is to identify those school-level and locality-level factors that significantly affect each of the three stages in a young adult's educational trajectory in North West England: GCSE results, track taken at age 16 and 'A'-level scores. By applying three-level models to...

This paper examines the development of machine maintenance work in eight plants in Cumbria. It assesses both the arguments from the ‘flexibility’ literature concerning multi-skilling, and the ‘labour process’ debate about the deskilling of modern manual work. The eight...

This paper examines trends in the earnings of engineering workers in a local labour market since 1979. Despite the strong presumption that skilled differentials have widened during the 1980s, the paper reveals that there has been marked stability in overall relativities. This pattern is probed...

This paper details the historical and contemporary relationships between firms, across a wide spectrum of sectors, in Rochdale, Lancashire. This area was a classic example of an industrial district and the paper aims to examine the present forms of the sub-contracting relation between large and...