Through an empirical study of working time in the United Kingdom, we explore the scope for initiatives based on corporate social responsibility (CSR) to engender voluntary action by employers to raise labour standards. Our evidence suggests that a CSR-based approach faces considerable problems...

The EU Working Time Directive has so far had little impact on an ingrained culture of long-hours working in the UK. Case studies suggest that the use of individual opt-outs from the 48-hour limit on weekly working time is a principal reason for this. However, removal of the individual opt-out...

The British film industry has long been characterised as highly volatile, chronically unstable and liable to recurrent crises. The traditional policy response up until the 1980s involved support through a mixture of quotas, fiscal support and industry levies. During the 1980s this policy stance...

It is argued here that - contrary to current conventional wisdom - an active market for corporate control is not an essential ingredient of either company law reform or financial and economic development. The absence of such a market in coordinated market systems during their modern economic...

We present evidence on the evolution of labour law in five countries (the UK, USA, Germany, France and India) using a newly-created dataset which measures legal change over time. The results cast light on the claim that legal origin, or the influence of common law and civil law regulatory...

The contract of employment heads the list of those labour market institutions whose continued usefulness is called into question by what appear to be fundamental changes in the world of work. However, given the multiple tasks of classification, regulation and redistribution which it has...

Standard economic theory sees labour law as an exogenous interference with market relations and predicts mostly negative impacts on employment and productivity. We argue for a more nuanced theoretical position: labour law is, at least in part, endogenous, with both the production and the...

The Slovenian Corporate Governance Code for Public Joint-Stock Companies was adopted in March 2004. Using a systems-theoretical approach, we examine the extent to which the implementation of the Code has resulted in the kinds of 'reflexive' learning processes which the 'comply or explain'...

This paper reports on the effects on employment relations and conceptions of citizenship of the shift from bureaucratic to market-led forms of public service provision in britain. Two contrasting case studies are reported, one based on the public education service, the other on the utilities....

It is widely believed that the legal institution of the contract of employment is currently undergoing a conceptual crisis as a result of changes in labour markets, the organisation of production, and the form of the enterprise. A historical and comparative perspective, however, indicates that...