The growth of service work has introduced the customer as a third party to the employment relationship. Yet dominant images of customer relations portray docile service workers offering de-personalized care to sometimes aggressive but otherwise not much more agential customers. This paper seeks...

Purpose – The purpose of this short paper is to introduce the special issue and outline its major themes. Design/methodology/approach – The control-resistance literatures are described, and the necessity for field-led empirical accounts is amplified, as a precursor to introducing the...

This article proposes the lens of moral economy as a useful ethical framework through which to assess HRM practice, with a particular focus on the strategic use of contingent work (‘non-standard’ employment practices including temporary, agency and outsourced work). While contingent work...

Over the past two decades the National Health Hospital Service has been subjected to considerable changes in is organization. 'New' public sector management (NPM) has been given the task of changing hospital culture and making service provision more efficient. Nurses, as the largest occupational...

The incorporation of health professionals into the management of the British National Health Service (NHS) is a distinctive strategy ultimately aimed at involving senior nurses and doctors through normative devices. Rather than attempting to directly manage professionals, which has proved to be...