Intense global competition and the advent of a raft of employment regulations (notably, the national minimum wage, or NMW) have placed the UK garment industry under severe pressure. The prospects for a significant segment of this sector -- ethnic-minority-owned businesses -- appear to be...

Intense global competition and the advent of a raft of employment regulations (notably, the national minimum wage, or NMW) have placed the UK garment industry under severe pressure. The prospects for a significant segment of this sector-ethnic-minority-owned businesses-appear to be extremely...

This paper addresses two related issues: the effect of the 'regulatory shock' of the National Minimum Wage on small firms and the consequent effects on the commonly observed practice of 'informality'. It draws on a survey of such firms but primarily uses case study evidence from five firms to...

The social and economic institutions of a country provide a framework shaping the performance of individual firms. The introduction of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) in the UK provides a key illustration of the weakness of institutions and the ways in which they might be strengthened. Evidence...

The role of human resource management practices in promoting the performance of firms is widely debated. Yet much of the debate has reached an impasse, with uncertain results as to which practices in fact work and why. It has, moreover, rarely gone beyond the context of large firms. This paper...

The concept of the High Performance Work System (HPWS) is a comparativelyrecent development in Human Resource Management (HRM). An HPWS is a worksystem comprising of various employment relations practices intended to createcompetitive advantage by integrating the firm’s strategic objectives...

In recent years there have been important academic and policy-related developments in thefield of ethnic-minority entrepreneurship in the UK. It is a subject that is marked by increasingtheoretical sophistication and activity on the part of policy makers and practitioners. We investigatethe...

This paper examines the management of employee relations in South Asian firms in the UK independent restaurant sector. Key working practices pertaining to the employment relationship are examined in a particular socio-economic and spatial context. Acknowledging such contexts facilitates an...