In the United States, the past twenty years have been marked by significant restructuring of both financial and physical corporate assets designed to strengthen firms' relative market position either voluntarily or in response to the threat of take-over. Firms have also restructured work systems...

Union recognition procedures are about to be reformed in the UK. Current legislative reform proposes automatic certification. Business prefers mandatory representation votes. Will the choice of union recognition procedure affect certification success? This paper provides empirical evidence on...

This paper argues that in order to facilitate informed debate and to develop a coherent social and employment policy in Europe, it is necessary to clarify the different meanings of the term 'labour market flexibility'. It questions whether the deregulation of the labour market is an inherent...

This paper is concerned with recent changes in the way capital-labour relations are regulated in german smes. By investigating 28 firm case-studies in the ruhr area, it is argued, first, that capital-labour relations in germany are getting downscaled and decentralised, profoundly changing the...

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 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...

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....