The role of trust in vertical contractual relationships between firms in Britain, Germany, and Italy is investigated with a survey of over sixty firms. After a review of the literature in which the nature of trust is discussed and set against a background of social norms and legal systems, data...

From 2000 the NHS was subjected to a series of far reaching reforms, the purposes of which were to increase the role of the primary care sector in commissioning and providing services, promote healthier life styles, reduce health inequality, and improve service standards. These were seen as...

The focus of this chapter is on the quality of part-time and full time employment by using available European datasets with a special attention to the Italian case. The evidence provided shows that one needs to be very cautious in generalizing about part-time employment in the EU when the...

Analyses of individuals\' working lives make a variety of assumptions about the relationship between time, wellbeing and economic stress. Some assume that stress will accumulate in adverse environments, leading to chronic effects of, for instance, long-term unemployment or job insecurity. Other...

Contemporary societies are characterised by new and more flexible working patterns, new family structures and widening social divisions. This book explores how these macro-level changes affect the micro organisation of daily life, with reference to working patterns and gender divisions in...

Studies have linked cross-national variations in occupational gender segregation with various economic, social and normative characteristics of countries. This study contributes to the research on the role of normative or ‘cultural’ characteristics by examining the influence of the...

A survey of a random sample of over 600 employed adults in the Northampton area is used to compare men's and women's perceptions of the content of their jobs and to construct an index of skill. Differences were found between men and women in perceptions of both the types of skills required in...

This paper explores the empirical evidence for segmentation in the labour supply using survey data from a local labour market. Employees were clustered using variables relating to their work histories, current job attributes, employment expectations and personal attributes. Five clusters of...

The methodological component of this paper describes a novel way of analyzing work-history data, treating the job change as the unit of analysis rather than the individual or the job. After considering the theoretical and practical problems and advantages of such an approach, two examples are...