The aim of this paper is to reassess the place of labour law in the wider area of employment relations research and to argue the case for labour law's importance to social scientists. We give an analytical account of the principal institutional features of labour law as a form of legal...

We use data from REPONSE 2004 and WERS 2004 to analyse whether approaches to HRM differ according to whether an establishment is part of a company with a stock exchange listing. In both countries we find that listing is positively associated with teamworking and performance-related pay, while in...

The 'business case' for gender equality rests on the claim that organisations can improve their competitiveness through improved diversity management, in particular by reducing turnover and training costs and minimising reputational and litigation risks arising from potentially discriminatory...

We review the different regulatory mechanisms which have been used in the UK context to promote gender equality in employment over the past decade, including legal enforcement based on claimant-led litigation, collective bargaining, pay audits, and shareholder pressure. Evidence is drawn from...

We analyse a recently developed leximetric dataset on Indian labour law over the period 1970 to 2006. Indian labour law is seen to be highly protective of workers' interests by international standards, particularly in the area of dismissal regulation. We undertake a time-series econometric...

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...

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 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...

This paper reconstructs the evolutionary path of the contract of employmentin English law. It demonstrates that the contract of employment is a more recent innovation than widely thought, and that its essential features owe as much to legislation as they do to the common law of contract. The...

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...