Since the early 1970s memebership has been in a process of continual decline inmost industrialised countries, including Australia. Australian Bureau of Statistics survey datae estimates Australian union density rates declined twenty percentage points between 1975 ( 51.0 percent) and 1996 (31.0...

Over the last decade a large decline in union membership and influence has been observed in many countries. This observation has prompted many researchers to consider the means by which individual unions are able to mitigate the effects of less favourable economic and political conditions on...

South Africa faces many difficult problems in designing economic institutions in the post apartheid era. No sub-set is more controversial than those which condition and structure exchange in the labour market. What set of institutions will help to solve the key social problems of inequality and...

The analysis of Australian union behaviour, growth and structure has centred on the relationship between unions and arbitration. To varying degrees it has been assumed that Australian unions are, through their involvement and legal incorporation into the arbitral system of labour market...

Mathematically tractable models of unionism have been well developed and are widely used in the economic literature. However, assumptions about union goals and preferences, and how these are determined, are not supported by extensive empirical evidence. Following the lead of Clark and Oswald...

Shortly after the re-election of the Howard government in October 1998 a group of five prominent economists proposed a plan to 'cut the jobless rate' in an open letter addresses to the Prime Minister (The Australian, October 26 1998). This article seeks to critically consider the economist's...

The chaebol, family-controlled conglomerates, which now dominate the South Korean economy constitute a unique type of business enterprise in the development worldwide of capitalist economies. With the support of a developmentalist state, the chaebol played a central role in rapid...

The relationaship between organisations' value system and their human resource management (HRM) system is investigated surveying human resource managers in 443 Australian organisations. Organisations were grouped into four main value types - Elite, Leadership, Meritocratic and Collegial,...

The following discussion presents an alternate strategy for evaluating how F.W. Taylor's managerial innovations affected Australian workers during the second decade of teh twentieth century. This is no straightforward task. In the first place, there is little agreement about the nature, degree...

In the mid 1990s Australian employers operate in an environment marked by rapid change and uncertainty. The last decade has witnessed significant changes in global market conditions, government regulatory policies, production processes/work systems and increased environmental concerns. In this...