According to the Howard government and some 'small business' organisations, the changes made to Australian industrial relations arrangements by the 2005 'Work Choices' Act will be of particular importance to small and medium sized establishments (SMEs). Specifically, the dilution of the...

By the early 1990s employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) had become more prevalentin unionized firms than in nonunionized firms. However, little research has been devoted to examining the implications of ESOPs for collective bargaining. Ben-Ner and Jun (1996) model ESOPs as a buyout option for...

Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in Personnel Review, published by and copyright Emerald.

Theoretical reasoning disagrees about what type of bargaining system performs best. We have tested the explanatory power of three competing hypotheses: neoliberalism, coporatism and the hump-shape hypothesis. All of these hypotheses lack empirical support due to two main shortcomings. First,...

Incorporating Human Resource Management policies within the regulatory and institutional framework that governs contemporary industrial relations has always been problematic. This paper details the nature and causes of this problem, noting the different conceptual and practical understandings...

The response of human capital accumulation to changes in the anticipated returns to schooling determines the type of skills supplied to the labor market, the productivity of future cohorts, and the evolution of inequality. Unlike the US, the UK or Germany, Spain has experienced since 1995 a drop...