This paper examines how particular structural pressures external to the firm can combine with the internal micro-dynamics of workplace relations and conflict to create a mode of labour regulation which corresponds to a ‘Japanese style’ teamworking rather than alternative, more autonomous models. It draws on both quantitative and qualitative case study research data of the introduction of job reforms at a brownfield autocomponents factory in South Wales. The paper investigates three key facets of the reform process. First, how the external factors of industrial restructuring and the forging of new customer—supplier relations between firms shape managerial priorities and organisational outcomes. Second, how the microdynamics of workplace relations, in particular, the different interests and actions of managerial, white collar and shopfloor employees, have a direct bearing on the final composition of teamworking. Third, in response to the lack of attention given to the views of those who are most affected by job reforms, the paper provides a systematic analysis of the disempowering impact of teamworking on shopfloor workers' labour processes.

There has been overwhelming interest in the numbers of jobs attributable to the formation and growth of new small firms but comparative silence about their working practices. We offer two novel, inter-linked approaches to thinking about work and employment in small firms. Firstly, we use a methodological approach which takes a household level analysis as a starting point, making gender a foundation stone. Secondly, we use an institutional perspective which focuses on power and power relations. From quantitative and qualitative empirical work with micro-businesses in business services we show that family work can be a vital resource. Yet there can also be severe costs, particularly for the many women who participate in business alongside their husbands as co-owners, employees and unpaid helpers. Gender divisions of labour are, typically, reproduced in traditional fashion. Even when business owners bring in employees from outside the family, relations within the micro-business are not fully market relations. Conflicts arise as business/owners and their employees struggle to manage these partially decommodified relations. The micro-business service sector actually represents a return to traditional ways of organising business by integrating business and household so that the traditional embedding of business and family of in-between pre-modern institutions is reinvented.

Any management discourse, such as Total Quality Management (TQM), has power effects that can transform individuals into subjects who secure some sense of their own identity through participating either as managers or employees in the practices it embraces. The central argument of this paper, however, is that despite these power effects, TQM is not nearly as effective or rational in controlling employees as its gurus exhort or its critics fear. These arguments are explored empirically through a case study of a major UK retail bank. In particular we illustrate how power and identity relations can intervene to undermine feedback to employees and prevent the upward flow of information to management necessary to ensure that TQM operates effectively. These dynamics are seen to reflect the cost conscious and short-term profit demands endemic within British industry. Just as these ‘bottom line’ considerations have limited the effectiveness of management innovations in the past, they have also created problems for the TQM programme in our case study here. No doubt this will continue to be the case with future management innovations not least because organisational life is always ‘messy’, given its political character. In the form of both career competition and opportunities for resistance to the totalising demands of TQM this paper provides further evidence of the political obstacles to effective innovation.

Participant observation was undertaken at Button Co., a small manufacturing firm operating in the clothing sector. The paper explores the impact of external structures on shopfloor control and the ways in which skilled dyers, and less skilled despatch workers, were able to shape the effort bargain and practise fiddles. It shows a particular varient of small firm dynamics. Large retailers were important to the success of Button Co. but its broad customer base and niche market meant that it was not subject to a simple large/small firm dependency relationship. Control was fluid rather than imposed. Relations with large firms did impact upon the shopfloor, but not in a determinate way. Informal negotiation between directors and workers over throughput and quality occurred on a daily basis: as such, it provides some support to the view that the process of negotiating orders described by Ram (1994) is not ethnically specific.

This paper sets out to investigate whether the recent wave of organisational restructuring has contributed to the further decline of the internally promoted manager or produced a new model of managerial employment in large organisations. Our research, which is based on in-depth case studies of eight major British-based employers, finds no evidence of the kind of transformational change associated with the introduction of a new model. Instead, we find that the traditional model of managerial employment has been eroded rather than replaced. The most notable changes include less job security – especially for those older than fifty – more emphasis on ‘managing your own career’, fewer opportunities for upward promotion, and an increased emphasis on lateral career moves. We conclude by arguing that this restructuring adds further impetus to the decline of the internally promoted middle manager.

The changing nature of work is often supposed to be of consequence for interest formation and political alliances between social classes. Three hypotheses are tested: classes converge due to the deskilling of white-collar work or the upskilling of blue-collar work; lower white-collar workers essentially share the conditions of manual workers; the gender dimension cross-cuts the class dimension. Empirical analyses are carried out on the Swedish Level of Living Surveys in 1968, 1974, 1981 and 1991. The major trend is towards an upskilling, though jobs have not become less monotonous. There are signs of class convergence, e.g., in wages and authority, but sharp differences remain. While class divisions exist for both men and women, gender differences within classes are substantial for physical working conditions and market capacity. For several indicators, lower white-collar workers are exposed to similar conditions as manual workers while men in the highest stratum stand out as the consistently most privileged.

The ‘temp’ industry is one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the United States, though relatively little is known about the operations of its key institutional agents – the temp agencies themselves. In the paper, the restructuring of the temp industry and the role of temporary help agencies as ‘labour market intermediaries’ is critically examined. It is argued that not only is the industry growing at a rapid rate, it is also polarising, as some agencies ‘restructure down’ into the lowest-paid and most exploitative niches of the labour market – where employment instability is a daily phenomenon, while others ‘restructure up’ into increasingly long-term relationships – including ‘on-site’ management deals and ‘insourcing’ agreements – with major corporate clients. Likewise, ‘temping’ is not only becoming more commonplace, but the labour-market and workplace experiences of temporary workers are becoming increasingly heterogeneous. It is apparently in the nature of the industry that both these developments are scarcely ‘visible’, as restructuring down is often associated with ‘backstreet operators’, undocumented workers and unregulated work, while restructuring up draws agencies into increasingly seamless, reflexive and internalised relationships with corporations. The paper traces some of the labour market and organisational implications of these restructuring practices through an examination of the long-established but newly-vibrant temp industry in Chicago.

The election of 1994 radically changed the environment within which management chose its labour control policies. Prior to the change of government in 1994 plant practices were shaped by the fact of substantial protection against foreign competition, widespread illiteracy, and a set of laws and policies that offered few protections for individual workers or organised labour. Since the change in government the political and legal environment has substantially changed. In this paper we report on management practices before and after the political changes in South Africa in a set of plants in a part of the country where many of the current difficulties of the South African economy exist in a fairly extreme form.

The proposal to introduce a national minimum wage in Britain has drawn attention to the importance of general systems of wage determination and wage protection for gender equity. Two-thirds of the likely beneficiaries of a national minimum wage are likely to be women and the U.K. government has even identified its minimum wage policy as one of its major measures to promote gender equality. Such awareness of the relationship between wage systems and wage trends is, however, still relatively rare, not only within U.K. debates but also within policy debates across the European Union. As the labour market of every EU country can be shown to be gender segregated, it is extremely unlikely that both differences in systems of wage determination between countries and changes to wage structures would not have consequences for the relative pay of women and men.

This paper sets out to examine the reliability of data on men's and women's past experiences of unemployment spells which has been gained by asking individuals to recall these spells and the dates of their occurrence. Surveys seek individuals' history data either to gain information about the initial conditions of respondents, or to examine these histories in their own right. It is much less expensive to collect data about individuals' histories by asking them to recall their experiences than it is to collect the same data from a panel survey over many years. However, important questions arise concerning the reliability and validity of data collected by the recall method. Reviews of the tests carried out on recall data show that there are some important lessons to learn, particularly when individuals are being asked to recall experiences short in duration and low in importance (Dex 1995). Validity is difficult to assess. This paper seeks to extend the body of knowledge about the reliability of recall data on individuals' unemployment histories by providing empirical data on two large-scale surveys which collected similar data on unemployment histories from large numbers of British adults in the early 1990s; Wave 2 (1992) of the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) and the 1994 Family and Working Lives Survey (FWLS).

Although research in both Britain and the US shows that, in general, wives do by far the largest proportion of domestic work, even where they are employed full time (Berk, 1985; Coverman 1983; Geerken and Gove 1983; Gershuny et al. 1986; Pleck 1985; Robinson 1980; Warde and Hetherington 1993), research also suggests that only a minority see this situation as unfair (Barnett and Baruch 1987; Benin and Agostinelli 1988; DeMaris and Longmore 1996; Hill and Scanzoni 1982; Layte 1996; Lennon and Rosenfield 1994; Pleck 1985; Rosen 1987; Yogev 1981). How do we explain the paradox of contributions being known to be unequal but not seen as inequitable? Two theoretical explanations have been put forward. The first from a 'resource bargaining', or social exchange perspective (Blood and Wolfe 1960; Heer 1963; Hiller 1981; Safilios-Rothschild 1970; Thibaut and Kelley 1959) views the division of domestic labour as part of an exchange relationship where power derived from 'resources' dictates outcomes and one's sense of equity. The second using what has come to be termed 'symbolic exchange' (Berk 1980, 1985; Coltrane 1989; West and Zimmerman 1987) views partners' gender ideologies as more important in defining the perceived equity of outcomes. Whereas social exchange theory views the process through which domestic work is divided in terms of gender-neutral economic or quasi-economic exchange (Brines 1993: 303), symbolic exchange theory views the division of domestic work as a form of cultural as well as economic production that has a definite gendered logic.

Studies of social mobility, in common with sociology in general, should reflect the parameters and concerns of the societies in which they are based. Hence, issues such as the ‘equality of opportunity’ debate, the role played by fundamental changes in political regimes at the end of the Second World War and at the demise of the socialist regimes in eastern Europe, and the effects of high rates of immigration have been built into the basic designs of national mobility studies. This article was sparked by the realisation that rates of unemployment in Northern Ireland, and in the western world generally, rose in the 1980s to levels not experienced since the 1930s. At the time of fieldwork for the Irish mobility study in late 1973/early 1974, male unemployment in Northern Ireland stood at approximately seven percent and was falling (Government of Northern Ireland 1976). By the mid-1980s, however, over twenty-six per cent of male employees in Northern Ireland were claiming unemployment benefit (Department of Economic Development 1984) and the percentage of those claiming benefit was rising.

Peter Corrigan, The Sociology of Consumption: An Introduction, London: Sage, 1997, £45.00, paper £14.99, viii+197 pp.

Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell (eds), The Shopping Experience, London: Sage, £45.00, paper £15.99, ix+212 pp.

Jukka Gronow, The Sociology of Taste, London: Routledge, 1997, £45.00, paper £12.99, xiv+199 pp.

Celia Lury, Consumer Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996, £45.00, paper £13.95, vii+273 pp.

Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997, £45.00, paper £12.95, 230 pp.

In 1994 the Office for National Statistics (ONS, then OPCS) com-missioned the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to conduct a wide ranging and zero-based, independent review of official socio-economic classifications (SECs). The first phase of this review concluded that government SECs were still required, but that the existing ones should be replaced by a single, revised, occupationally-based SEC with an explicit conceptual rationale (see Rose 1995a). Subsequently it was decided that this revised SEC should measure employment relations, thus adopting the conceptual base of the class schema produced by John Goldthorpe and his colleagues (see Rose 1996; Rose and O'Reilly 1997: Ch.1; Goldthorpe 1997). However, while validation studies conducted on data collected in the 1980s have concluded that this conceptual base is fundamentally sound, it might be argued that the ‘flexible’ labour market and the emergence of post-Fordist organisations raise questions about whether this is still the case.

The case presented by O'Reilly and Rose for a new scheme of social classes is clearly and persuasively argued; one might almost be convinced of the need for a system of classes. This is not the final word on the new scheme, but the basic ideas seem clear so we may consider its characteristics. The remarks that follow are deliberately critical, focussing on weaknesses of what may be expected to be an important and influential scheme.

Ruth Milkman, Farewell to the Factory: Auto Workers in the Late Twentieth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, £35.00, paper £12.95, xiii+234 pp.

Åke Sandberg (ed.), Enriching Production: Perspectives on Volvo's Uddevalla Plant as an Alternative to Lean Production, Hampshire: Avebury, 1995, £49.95, vii+459 pp.

Diemut Elisabet Bubeck, Care, Gender, and Justice, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, £30.00, viii+281 pp.

Jean Gardiner, Gender, Care and Economics, London: Macmillan, 1997, £42.50, paper £15.99, xiv+273 pp.

Rose and O'Reilly, in their article elsewhere in this issue (1998) and in their recent book (1997), give an account of their construction of a revised set of social classes, a social classification. In this comment I propose to show that they do not achieve what they set out to do, that their attempted justification of their procedure is flawed, that their dependence on definition in terms of economic contractual relations fails to take account of social processes and therefore, and most importantly, that a conceptualisation of British society in terms of social classes is inadequate. Therevision exercise depends, substantially and quite explicitly, on the work of Goldthorpe 1 , so I shall concentrate on the relations between the latter's contribution to the book (Chapter 3 on conceptual and operational issues: Goldthorpe 1997), their own contribution to that volume (Chapter 5 on criterion validation: O'Reilly and Rose 1997) and the present article.

The main problem, as we shall see, is the idea of a social classification. Nothing in the analyses considered demonstrates the existence of social classes; rather the situation is one of a set of criteria that are fairly well inter-related - though not sufficiently well to define a single service relationship/labour contract continuum - and that vary, or are differentially applied, by position in a broader social hierarchy.

I am grateful to Blackburn and Prandy for their responses to the book Constructing Classes (Rose and O'Reilly 1997) and the paper ’Changing Employment Relations...?’ The former reported on progress made by mid-1997 in producing a new official social classification schema for the U.K. As such it offered only an interim version of the proposed new schema. The WES paper, using this interim schema, was intended only as a modest contribution to the debate on labour market ‘flexibility’ and its supposed effects. As is made clear in the conclusions to the paper, we do not regard the data presented there as providing anything other than prima facie evidence that, notwithstanding recent labour market changes, classes can still be distinguished using employment relations criteria. I readily concede that neither the individual level survey data used in the paper nor its very simple analyses could possibly provide conclusive evidence.