This article tests the assumption that youth's work attitudes are changing to reflect the restructured labour markets that often are taken as a characteristic of late-modernity. Comparing 1985 and 1996 cohorts of high school leavers in a Canadian city, we find that occupational aspirations increased significantly since 1985, especially among females, in ways consistent with employment trends in a service-based economy. However, the 1985 and 1996 youth cohorts wanted very similar conditions in a job, and in each cohort we observed significant gender differences. General attitudes towards work and education also remained fairly constant. We discuss the implications of these findings for school-work transition research and for larger debates about youth responses to conditions of late-modernity.

This paper examines the relationship between processes of demographic class formation, gender inequality and age stratification in England and Wales between 1971 and 1991. Existing research shows that the complex process of class restructuring which took place in these years is linked to considerable changes in the position of women, especially related to their growing numbers in professional and managerial occupations. We seek to show that changing processes of age stratification were also related to the remaking of class and gender relations in these years. Data from the Longitudinal Study (approximately 193,000 men and 203,000 women aged 23–57 in two age cohorts; 1971 and 1981), Samples of Anonymised Records (approximately 121,500 men and 126,000 women aged 23–57 in 1991), General Household Survey 1983–1992 (32,609 men and 16,191 women aged 23–57 in fulltime employment) and from the National Child Development Study, 1981 and 1991 (2205 men and 887 women aged 23 and 33, in fulltime employment) were used to examine the movement of individuals through changing opportunity structures over the twenty-year period. We found a distinct hardening of the relationship between age and class in these two decades for men, with a marked increase in social polarisation between young men and older men, but for women this relationship was very different, with young women seeing considerable evidence of an improvement in their fortunes.

The role of unemployment benefits in explaining the rise and apparent persistence of OECD unemployment has attracted a great deal of scholarly as well as political interest. The disincentive effect of unemployment benefits has mostly been studied with micro-level data, whereas the importance of different unemployment regimes for explaining cross-national differences in unemployment rates has been a rather unexplored area of research. For the purpose of this article, data was collected on the duration and replacement levels of unemployment benefits for an average production worker in 17 OECD countries for the period 1960–1990. This data was then related to the level and trends in unemployment in these countries. The results indicate that there is no systematic evidence that countries with more generous unemployment have experienced higher levels of unemployment, nor that reforms to increase the generosity of unemployment benefits have caused unemployment rates to increase. However, there are some indications that a few countries with relatively long benefit duration experienced a relatively large increase in their unemployment rates in the mid-1970s.

This paper examines service work within the contemporary airline industry which has recently been shaped by managerial initiatives aiming to deliver ‘quality service’. We focus upon the gendered consequences of this. On the basis of original empirical research, three specific arguments are advanced: firstly, recent competitive pressures and accompanying managerial initiatives are intensifying demands upon female employees for the production of emotional labour, subjective commitment to organisational aims and sexual difference within parts of the airline industry; secondly, despite the enormous power of such managerial demands, the ‘spaces’ for female employees to comply, consent and resist remain ‘open’ within the aspects of the industry studied; thirdly, the power of the gendered managerial prescription investigated here is related to the way it is embedded within the structural and inequitable capital-labour relation. The paper is informed by an approach which places the process of gendering inside class relations, and stresses the need to empirically interrogate the historically-specific ‘lived experience’ of gendered power relations in order to adequately analyse and explain such phenomena.

This article explores the use of ‘company culture’ as a means of management control. It reports on research conducted in a consultancy that aimed to secure loyalty from its employees through a conscious policy of organised ‘play’ at company socials. Employees were given a certain amount of freedom over their working lives in exchange for accepting company regulation of their social time. Here it is argued that this normative control differs from historical attempts to ensure that employees were of good moral character. In earlier interventions social and community obligations were emphasised, now every ‘virtue’ encouraged is designed to be exercised in the workplace, often at the expense of the individual or the community. Further, that while control through organisational culture does have some of the advantages claimed for it in the prescriptive literature, it also extends the employment contract to areas previously outside the managerial prerogative.

There is increasing evidence of a widespread recognition within the British trade union movement of the need to change. Amongst the directions of change being considered is adoption of the ‘organising model’ borrowed from the United States. MSF was probably the first major British union to go down this path, thereby promising to transform itself from an organisation that had pioneered the conservative ‘servicing model’ to one in the forefront of promoting a radical alternative. This transformation is far from unproblematic and this article examines the tensions and difficulties encountered through a study of NHS membership organisation two regions. In the process of the examination, the article highlights the inadequacies of approaches to union decline that either regard it as an inevitable result of objective circumstances or believe that new policies to counter decline can be adopted by managerial fiat and without recourse to widespread discussion among members to build a consensus.

The past two decades have seen a significant shift in the industrial relations climate throughout Europe. More widespread use of individual contracts and the proliferation of non-standard forms of employment – in particular fixed-term and temporary contracts – have led many commentators to question whether or not loyalty to trade unions and collectivism in general is in serious decline. The workforce in Finland has experienced particularly profound changes over the past decade, due to the economic collapse of the early 1990s which saw unemployment levels soar to over 18 per cent. The purpose of this article is to discuss the challenges of individualisation to the Finnish workforce's attitude to trade unions and collective action, on the basis of questionnaires sent to trade union members. The data collected was supplied by responses from members of Finland's three main trade union confederations.

The past two decades have witnessed a trend towards the use of fixed-term and part-time contracts in higher education in the UK, where over a third of routine academic work is now carried out by staff on fixed-term contracts (Ainley 1994). As Kogan et al. (1994: 53) have noted, this increased casualisation of academic labour has been driven by the need for universities and colleges to reduce labour costs. The move towards a more ‘flexible’ and cheaper workforce is largely a response to governmental resource restrictions and the need to cope with increased student numbers (Kogan et al. 1994). In order to cope with financial pressures, universities have increasingly sought to diversify their funding and become more entrepreneurial in attracting income from sources other than the government (Wasser 1990; Ziman 1991). External research grants and contracts play an increasingly important role in the finances of many institutions, with a concomitant rise in the number of researchers employed on fixed-term contracts.

The recent syntheses of research on training at work or the education-work relationship have underlined the difficulty of defining their boundaries (Tanguy 1986; Jobert et al. 1995; Raffe 1995). Different themes demarcate the domain including professional integration, training (educational policy, institutional framework and training programmes) and qualifications. The analytical treatment of the subject is also different in Germany, Great Britain and Italy, because each country experiences specific economic circumstances and institutional modalities particular to their respective education systems (Jobert, Marry and Tanguy 1995). Our approach confirms these diagnostics from another direction.

Christel Lane and Reinhard Bachmann (eds), Trust within and Between Organizations, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998, £45.00, xiii+334 pp.

Patrick Maclagan, Management and Morality. A Developmental Perspective, London: Sage, £45.00, paper £14.99, vii+212 pp.

Trust seems a useful test-case for business morality. According to Fukuyama it is the opposite of contractual relations, as it is ‘based on commonly shared norms . . . about deep “value” questions like the nature of God or justice, but it may also encompass secular norms, like professional standards and codes of behaviour.’ (Fukuyama 1995: 26).