The paper analyses the contemporary organizational restructuring of production and work and derives some salient implications for the labour market. The analysis focuses on the switch from occupational specialization at 'Tayloristic' organizations to multi-tasking at 'holistic' organizations....

The paper examines the determinants of the division of labour within firms. It provides an explanation of the pervasive change in work organization away from the traditional functional departments and towards multi-tasking and job rotation. Whereas the existing literature on the division of...

This paper explores the implications of the ongoing reorganization of firms for inequality in the labour market. We show how recent technological advances in physical and human capital can lead to the breakdown of occupational barriers, creating demands for new combinations of skills, and...

This paper traces the process whereby the apprenticeship system came to be regulated by industrial tribunals during the period 1900 to 1930. It describes how the regulation emerged, the motives that underpinned it, and the wider political debate about the apprenticeship system at the time. It...

Business training programs are a popular policy option to try to improve the performance of enterprises around the world. The last few years have seen rapid growth in the number of evaluations of these programs in developing countries. We undertake a critical review of these studies with the...

We develop and analyse a structural model of efficiency wages founded on reciprocity. Workers are assumed to face an explicit trade-off between the disutility of providing effort and the psychological benefit of reciprocating the gift of a wage offer above some reference level. The model...

This paper proposes a conceptual framework to investigate the effects of central bank independence, of the degree of centralization of wage bargaining and of the interaction between those institutional variables, on real wages, unemployment and inflation. The labour market is characterized by...

Given the concern about restructuring and the role of insiders during the transition, we analyse the determinants of (and trade-off between) investment and wages in Slovenian firms. We find that investment behaviour is more consistent with the imperfect capital market (internal funds) hypothesis...

In this paper we study the endogenous determination of minimum wage employing a political-economic game-theoretic approach. A major objective of the paper is to clarify the crucial role of the strength of the workers' union and of political culture on the determination of the minimum wage. In...

This paper presents a simple search and bargaining economy in which firms use concave production. Because a firm and worker negotiate over the worker's marginal productivity, the firm's wage is a function of its labour force. Reacting to this wage function, firms choose an excessively large and...