This paper reports on the effects on employment relations and conceptions of citizenship of the shift from bureaucratic to market-led forms of public service provision in britain. Two contrasting case studies are reported, one based on the public education service, the other on the utilities....

It is widely believed that the legal institution of the contract of employment is currently undergoing a conceptual crisis as a result of changes in labour markets, the organisation of production, and the form of the enterprise. A historical and comparative perspective, however, indicates that...

Law and economics scholarship has recently begun to investigate the role of social norms in shaping actors' incentives. This paper presents empirical findings on the way in which a group of such norms, known collectively as the 'London Approach', guide the resolution of financial distress by...

We present two linked, longitudinal case studies of the use of quasi markets in UK broadcasting over the past decade: one looks at the regulated outsourcing of programme making to independent producers, the other at the development of an internal market system within the BBC. New network forms...

This paper considers a number of potential justifications for regulatory intervention aimed at overcoming 'contractual failure' in stakeholder relations. Two distinct functions of stakeholding are identified, in terms of 'contract' and 'innovation' respectively. These conceptions are linked to...

We use cointegration analysis of a new longitudinal legal dataset to show that strengthening creditor rights in India during the 1990s and 2000s led to an increase in bank credit, supporting the view that legal systems can shape financial development.

The Trade Boards Act 1909 was a landmark in the development of minimum wage regulation in Britain and around the world. Although their powers were limited, the trade boards had immediate and tangible effects in terms of raising living standards, and over time they became a core part of the...

Legislation mandating equality of pay between women and men was among the earliest forms of sex discrimination legislation to be adopted in Britain. However, the model embodied in the Equal Pay Act 1970 is increasingly being questioned: the law is, at one and the same time, highly complex and...

The aim of this paper is to reassess the place of labour law in the wider area of employment relations research and to argue the case for labour law's importance to social scientists. We give an analytical account of the principal institutional features of labour law as a form of legal...

The corporate governance environment in the UK and US is generally thought to be hostile to the emergence of cooperative employment relations of the kind exemplified by labour-management partnerships. We discuss case study evidence from the UK which suggests that, contrary to this widespread...