The nature and character of the part-time workforce has been at the forefront of recent controversies about women's employment. Drawing on new data on the characteristics, attitudes and preferences of over one thousand female part-time employees, this study highlights important diversities amongst the part-time workforce. The results show that the women in the sample had gravitated to part-time work from a range of different employment backgrounds, and for a variety of motivations. While the majority of the women workers were content with their current part-time work arrangements, a significant minority wished to change their employment status to full-time work and a substantial number of part-time women workers wanted to return to full-time work in the future. The research examines the characteristics of such women, and argues that the stereotyping of the part-time workforce as universally ‘home-centred’ or committed to the ‘marriage career’ is misplaced.

The recognition that the majority of British children are involved in paid employment at some time before the minimum school leaving age has not been accompanied by comparable analytical advances. Large numbers work in areas beyond those traditionally identified with ‘children's work’ and are to be found in marginal, flexible, service sector jobs, defined by unskilled and low paid manual labour. The efforts of US researchers to link ‘adolescent work’ to child development and socialisation merely pathologises children's involvement in work, while the greater sensitivity of British researchers to the possible connections between work and changes to children's social lives provides only limited insight. It is demonstrated here that children's involvement in work is closely related to employers' increased demand for part-time student labour and that children are making themselves available for work in response to both the changing distribution of family income and the commodification of their leisure time.

This paper presents a detailed case study of a non-union company that adopts a comprehensive HRM approach. Recent accounts of such workplaces identify benefits for employees inducing a perceived lack of need for union membership. This paper reveals a rather different picture in a case where some of the gains for employees proved illusory. Managerial strategy was geared towards attitudinal compliance, work intensification and the suppression of any counter-balancing trade union activity. The costs of compliance were high and management were exceptionally harsh upon individuals who could not or would not fit in. Workers resistance was more evident than in previous work suggesting they are not easily seduced by ‘human relations’ practices.

Welfare states are developing forms of payment for care such that the boundary between ‘work’ and ‘care’ is breaking down. Various types of payment are being introduced, but one of the most interesting is the widespread development of direct payment schemes whereby disabled people are given cash instead of services, and expected to use these monies to purchase directly the services of personal assistants. This paper uses the evidence of a small qualitative study of personal assistants to investigate the question of control and power within the care relationship, and the issue of boundary setting between employer and employee. The paper also considers how far this new type of paid care work is different from other forms of paid care which impinge upon the body.

Using case study evidence from an investigation of ‘quality’ initiatives and working practices in three offices within a District of the Benefits Agency (BA), this article examines the contradictory role of new public management on employees. Decentralised management, performance related pay, teamwork philosophies and the promotion of a ‘customer’ culture reflect a move away from a traditional civil service bureaucratic form of organisation. However, the implementation of change within local settings has brought about variations in local management approaches, work organisation and staff perceptions. The consequences of these are explored and we consider whether the BA’s attempts to empower staff have been thwarted by a progressive intensification of workloads. Our research, by illustrating the importance of variations in local settings, warns of the dangers of evaluating institutional and employment change in the public sector as if it were the result of a coherent and consistent neo-liberal re-structuring strategy. Moreover, it examines reasons why some change initiatives have been unsuccessful. Finally, we identify a recent shift in emphasis within the BA which presages a move away from service quality to economy and draw some initial conclusions about the future impact on employment in this sector.

The recent debates about the underclass and social exclusion have focused attention on the social networks of the unemployed. However, the research in this area has largely failed to take on board the gender dimension of sociability. Using survey data this paper compares the patterns of sociability of unemployed men and women. It is argued that women's more home-centred social activity and their stronger neighbourhood and kinship links means that their social networks are less vulnerable to unemployment than men's. It is found that women's previous pattern of labour market participation is critical in building up a social network which is resistant to unemployment. However, a social network that is external to the labour market may also have some negative implications. An absence of friends in employment could lead to a detachment from the world of work. The networks of unemployed men and women are found to feature a much higher than normal concentration of unemployed members and are deficient in employment contacts. Contrary to underclass predictions this does not lead to a reduction in employment commitment but it does have repercussions for the availability of support and access to job information.

This paper investigates the association between opportunities to take part in work-environment dialogue and peripheral labour market position, which was operationalised in terms of short-term employment. A stratified representative sample from Statistics Sweden's Labour Market Survey – with 50 per cent of persons on short-term, and 50 per cent on a long-term contracts – is analysed (n=1,564). More contingent workers than permanent employees report a lack of work environment knowledge. They perceive themselves to be disfavoured with regard to the education/training required to do their job. Further, they regard their form of employment as making it more difficult to raise criticism and to get their viewpoints heard. Women show a greater risk of not being involved in work environment issues. The findings are discussed in relation to legislation and further research.

This article examines non-financial employment motivation and mental well-being among people in different labour market situations, such as unemployment, stimulating employment or instrumental employment, and controls for the possibility that variations in motivation and well-being are either caused by present labour market status or are the result of a selection process. The article is based on a panel study of 1,782 Swedes who were interviewed at the beginning of 1996, when all were unemployed, and then again at the end of 1997, when the labour market situation had changed for some of them. The results show that, in 1997, the unemployed had the same level of employment commitment as individuals with instrumental jobs, but as compared to people with stimulating jobs, their non-financial employment motivation was weaker. In general, the unemployed report poorer mental well-being than the employed. Results support the hypothesis that the substantial changes in employment commitment and mental health observed between 1996 and 1997 are primarily due to the labour market situation in 1997. The results refute the notion that the level of employment motivation is a major determinant of the likelihood of getting a paid job.

This paper investigates the relationship between local unemployment rates and individual ill health. It is a case study of Britain in 1984–1991 based on secondary data analysis of the two sweeps of the Health and Lifestyle Survey (1993). High levels of unemployment are distinguished from increasing rates of unemployment and the effects of each on health in different employment statuses are compared, as are the outcomes for contrasting measures of ill health. Increasing rates of unemployment are seen to impact on job stress, but it is high levels of unemployment that influence premature death and self assessed health. Respiratory function is unaffected by unemployment rates. The effects of unemployment rates hold for all employment statuses, regardless of the higher job stress among the full-time employed and their otherwise better life expectancy and self assessed health. The relationships for unemployment rates and employment status are not confounded by sex, age, region or social class.

This paper compares the level of organisational commitment in three former state socialist societies (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) with that in a market-based society (Britain). Among the former state socialist societies, Bulgaria represents the country that had remained closest to the patterns of work organisation that prevailed before 1989, whereas the Czech Republic and Slovakia had moved further towards marketisation. The analysis draws on data from nationally representative surveys of the workforce in the four countries. The results show that organisational commitment was lower in all of the former state socialist societies than in Britain, but that it was lowest of all in the societies that were more fully engaged in the transition to a market economy. There is evidence that the patterns of work organisation typical of state socialism did have the effect of lowering commitment, most importantly because of the way they restricted initiative and self-determination in work. However, it seems likely that this was exacerbated in the case of the transitional societies by sharper aspirations for work enrichment and by the greater unpredictability of organisational developments in a rapidly changing environment.

The connections between home and work are manifest in tensions which exist between individual employment mobility and the social and spatial situatedness of the household micro-economy. This nexus is a significant dimension of a growing number of dual earning households. At a fundamental level, the co-ordination of home and work hinges on opportunities and constraints pertaining to residential location and mobility and the way this issue is negotiated through the life-course. However, this is not simply determined by the many logistical difficulties associated with the co-ordination of more than one employment from a single residential location. Households are ‘situated’ in place in a variety of ways which feed into strategies of relative mobility and attachment to place. It is suggested that the way that households accommodate the demands of home and work are constituted through a meshing together of the action spaces and social relations of individual household members in these spheres. In effect, household behaviour emerges from a ‘tangled web’ of networks: of social and kin relations; of resource provision; and of information, knowledge and learning.

This paper argues for the need to attend to the situatedness of household strategies that attempt to co-ordinate home and work. It suggests that this is achieved by observing the way strategies of relative mobility and attachment to place reproduce, and are reproduced through, networks within a locale. Existing concepts of strategy and network are combined and operationalised together through the interpretation of biographical narratives from interviews with couples from a sample of nuclear family households.

The aim of this paper is to assess the validity of the ‘empowerment thesis’: the belief that new forms of work organisation are overturning traditional managerial structures and returning control to employees. Specifically, the project seeks to explore the role of ‘empowering’ forms of work organisation (in particular Total Quality Management, team-based work and consultative committees) and of occupational hierarchies, respectively, in influencing levels of employee autonomy. Data from the 1995 Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (AWIRS95) are used to construct quantitative indicators of ‘empowering’ forms of work organisation, hierarchy and employee autonomy. Associations between the variables are measured. The analysis shows no association between ‘empowerment’ and employee autonomy. There are, however, clear relationships between employees' positions within occupational hierarchies and their levels of control over their work. Therefore, the empowerment thesis is rejected. A provisional explanation for the failure of empowerment to enhance employee autonomy can be found in the fact that organisational power resides primarily in organisational structures. Contrary to claims of the emergence of the ‘post-bureaucratic organisation’, hierarchical structures remain central to the majority of contemporary organisations, and the impact of other changes to work organisation must be understood in this context.

The economic reforms of the late 1970s in China have raised general living standards particularly in the coastal urban areas. At the same time, however, they have increased unemployment and widened inequalities. This article examines these issues in Guangzhou, one of the cities where market principles dominate, by looking at workers' actual living standards as well as how they perceive them. Clearly workers in private and semi-private industries have benefited from the economic reforms while employees of state owned industries feel betrayed and left behind. This has both social and political implications.

It is widely believed that domestic outsourcing is booming. Many believe the growth of market services is a response to increasing time pressures arising from new responsibilities in the paid workforce, and to an inflexible sexual division of labour at home. The interpretation of the consequences of the purported growth of domestic outsourcing has been both divided and extreme. Paid domestic services have been declared: (1) a thing of the pre-industrial past (Coser 1973); (2) a victim of self-servicing (Gershuny 1983); and (3) the last frontier in the continuing advance of the market in post-industrial society (Ruthven 1994). Consequently, the alleged boom in outsourcing has been viewed either as the resurgence of a pre-modern form of the exploitation of labour (possibly based on race or ethnicity), heralding a deeper and more intractable form of social stratification (Arat-Koç 1989; Glenn 1992; Gorz 1994; Gregson and Lowe 1994; Probert 1997; Romero 1992), or as the future engine of opportunity (Ruthven 1997). Unfortunately all this discussion has run ahead of the facts. Two areas of research are vital – one is a study of the demand for outsourced domestic goods and services, and the other is wide-ranging comparative study of the labour relations in the domestic outsourcing industry. This paper addresses the first of these areas. It describes a study of trends in expenditure on domestic outsourcing drawing on an analysis of Australian Household Expenditure Surveys 1984–1993/4. This information is then interpreted in the light of our knowledge of trends in time use over the same period.

This article reports on a study of shopfloor ‘coping’ behaviour in an engineering company which had launched a major ‘World Class Manufacturing’ (WCM) initiative. The article unpacks the meaning of WCM and shows how its impact varied markedly between different manufacturing cells. More centrally, it reveals a significant gap between managerial understanding and attitudes to the new manufacturing and the response found among a significant proportion of employees. In particular, through a close analysis of employee accounts and concerns, it is shown that shopfloor employees, far from viewing initiatives such as WCM as panaceas, regard them as disruptions to routines which have somehow to be accommodated. Moreover, the analysis reveals how employee coping behaviour simultaneously allows them to achieve that accommodation and enables the shortcomings in the planned initiatives to be at least partly rectified. Coping behaviour therefore both subverts the WCM programme and allows it to function.

Official counts of unemployment in the coalfields have not reflected the large-scale losses of thousands of jobs from the mining industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Recent studies have suggested that there are indeed high incidences of unemployment among ex-miners and that much of the unemployment in the coalfields is ‘hidden’, masked by the removal of miners from the official unemployment register through early retirement or being classed permanently sick. This paper examines how miners have been absorbed into the labour market over a ten-year period, between 1981 and 1991. Using data from the ONS Longitudinal Study a sample of miners are identified in 1981 and their labour market position in 1991 examined. The data are used to highlight changes in occupation, employment status and social class. In addition, regional differences in unemployment and joblessness are assessed.

The notion of complementarity to analyse the relation between paid work and housework has had a limiting, and possibly misleading, influence upon understanding the persistence of inequality in the home. Through our interviews with a group of male shift working process workers, from three manufacturing firms, we explore their perceptions of their roles and relations at work and in the home. We focus upon their experience and interpretation of gendered role activity – themselves as breadwinners and their wives as homemakers. We explore their attitude to and experience of paid work, and their involvement in housework. We begin by considering the difficulties associated with defining housework, and measuring men’s and women’s levels of activity and responsibility. We consider what being a ‘breadwinner’ means to the process workers, and how they translate this into their responsibility to enable their wives to be at home caring for their children. Then we focus upon one part of housework – laundering. Through this activity we explore the persistence of the unequal division of housework, despite changes in paid work, and highlight ways in which this inequality is sustained. We conclude that ambiguity, paradox and uncertainty undermine the dichotomous ordering of gendered relations, and that the balance and equity implied in the notion of complementarity provides an inadequate explanation of the gendered distribution of housework.

This article examines a co-operative union-management approach towards Total Quality Management (TQM) by recourse to a case study from the auto components manufacturing sector. Its purpose is twofold; first, it suggests that in contrast to much critical thinking, under certain conditions TQM need not undermine trade unions. Indeed, it is argued that a more moderate trade union stance towards TQM, in some circumstances, may prove to be a more effective form of resistance than a militant one. Second, the article provides insights into the ways in which TQM reinforces existing power relations, hierarchical structures, organisational bureaucracy and inequality, rather than transforming them as TQM pundits contend. The argument, however, is not that TQM simply enhances management control in a unilinear fashion. This is because it not only poses dangers for trade unions, but also presents management with dilemmas and contradictions. TQM is understood, therefore, to be part of the continuing and complex effort by management to balance control and consent within employment, the dynamics, and outcomes of which, are uncertain and need to be empirically examined.

This paper examines whether the supply side characteristics of the low paid are associated with the labour market wage setting institutions of five countries; Britain, Luxembourg, Germany, Spain and the USA, using the harmonised PAnel COmparability (PACO) data based on household panel studies and the Spanish European Household Panel survey. The age, education, marital status, children, lone parent status, household type, employment status of spouse, and housing tenure of the low paid are examined. The links between these characteristics, the low paid and labour market institutions are examined through multivariate analyses. Labour market wage setting institutions clearly influence the characteristics of the low paid and explain the variations in supply side, as well as demand side characteristics across countries.

This paper examines practitioner reactions to occupational de-segregation in pharmacy – the effects, for women and men, of a rapid female entry into the profession. The topic is documented in terms of processes of integration, ghettoisation, and re-segregation. With data collected from licensed pharmacists in Ontario, Canada, we find little evidence of either genuine gender integration in the profession or gender re-segregation precipitated by collective male discontent. While female practitioners are more positive in their evaluation of their jobs and their profession, there is no indication that current satisfaction and dissatisfaction is a harbinger of male – or female – flight from pharmacy. We discuss these findings in the light of arguments about a job and gender queue in the labour market.