Based on a case study of Saudi Arabia's WTO accession, the article offers a critique of conventional factor- and sector-based models of trade policy, proposing instead a two-level institutional account that is likely to be relevant for non-democratic states in general. Historically grown...

The paper recounts the history of Saudi Arabia's first national oil company, Petromin, which was originally supposed to take the place of foreign-owned Aramco. As a result of Petromin's inefficiency and personal rivalries among the Saudi elite, however, Petromin was progressively relegated to...

Gaps in labour rights and labour prices between nationals and migrant workers are the main causes explaining the low participation of GCC citizens in the region’s private labour markets. Past policies of “Gulfization” have not directly addressed these structural constraints but have rather...

Contingency formulations of Human Resource Management (HRM) theory suggest that the effectiveness of HRM practices should vary across firms. This study examined whether the relationship between HRM practices and productivity in manufacturing companies is contingent upon organizational climate...

Equal opportunities policies and family-friendly practices are examined using data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey in order to assess (i) their associations with union recognition and strategic human resource management and (ii) the outcomes of what has recently been described...

In this paper we test the HRM/union substitution hypothesis that human resource management (HRM) practices act as a substitute for unionization. We use British workplace data between 1980 and 1998 which allows us to examine for the first time whether increased HRM incidence has coincided with...

In this chapter we examine the relationship between Human Resource Management (HRM) and productivity. HRM includes incentive pay (individual and group) as well as many nonpay aspects of the employment relationship such as matching (hiring and firing) and work organization (e.g. teams, autonomy)....

We propose a selective view of human resource management (HRM) that is guided by work motivation theory, arguing that one of the means by which firms achieve higher performance is by investing in certain forms of HRM practice that help fulfil intrinsic work values and thereby influence...