U. Huws, S. Podro, E. Gunnarsson, T. Weijers, K. Arvanitaki and V. Trova (1996). Teleworking and Gender, University of Sussex, Brighton: Insititute for Employment Studies, Report 317, paper £22.00, 78 pp.

U. Huws, with S. Podro, E. Gunnarsson, T. Weijers, K. Arvanitaki and V. Trova (1997). Teleworking: Guidelines for Good Practice, University of Sussex, Brighton: Insititute for Employment Studies, Report 329, paper £20.00, 37 pp.

H. Katz (ed.) (1997). Telecommunications: Restructuring Work and Employment Relations Worldwide, Ithaca and London: ILR Press (Cornell University Press), $49.95, 401 pp.

The telecommunications industry has undergone massive change over the last two decades, raising questions about ownership, state intervention, technological change and future patterns of work. Historically, telecommunications companies have been part of the service sector, usually state-owned, and a highly regulated part of the modernising project of the twentieth century. However, beginning in the late 1970s with the elaboration of the neo-liberal political project, telecommunications companies became the object of government attention. They were subject to state re-regulation, as the industry internationalised, and patterns of work organisation began to change. As a consequence of this process of change, it is no longer clear where the boundaries of the industry lie, as telephony and related services become part of a broad-based computing, inform-ation and telecommunications industry (CIT). At the end of the twentieth century, CIT symbolises the advent of the service and consumer society, replacing the emblematic place of the automobile industry in mass production society.

Desmond King, Actively Seeking Work? The Politics of Unemployment and Welfare Policy in the United States and Great Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, £39.95, paper $14.25, xvi1331 pp.

Robert MacDonald (ed.), Youth, the ‘Underclass’ and Social Exclusion, London: Routledge, 1997, paper £13.99, xii1228 pp.

Both of these books deal with issues central to the programme of ‘New Labour’. In their very different ways they have significant contributions to make to the current debate (such as it is!) about welfare to work. MacDonald's collection takes us into the territory of the intellectual debates around the ‘underclass’ that underpin ‘New Labour's’ moral panic about welfare dependency and their crudely Protestant worship of ‘waged labour’ at any price. King's book is different, focusing quite specifically on work-welfare policies in Britain and the U.S. from the 1900s to the 1990s, immediately prior to the dawn of ‘New Labour’.

Maryse Gaudier, Women in the 1980-95 Period: Constraints and Opportunities, Geneva: Institut international d'etudes sociales, Série bibliographique no. 18, 1997, 22.50 Swiss francs, xvii1196 pp.

Teresa Rees, Mainstreaming Equality in the European Union: Education, Training and Labour Market Policies, London: Routledge, 1998, £45.00, paper £14.99, xix1260 pp.

Jill Rubery, Mark Smith, Colette Fagan and Damian Grimshaw, Women and European Employment, London: Routledge, 1998, £50.00, xvii1351 pp.

Each of these books examines the situation of women from a different perspective and asks different questions. Gaudier is primarily concerned with what women themselves are doing and writing; Rees has made a detailed examination of policy making on education and training at the EU level; Rubery et al. are concerned with every aspect of women's position in European labour markets. All are studies which go beyond individual nation states, taking either an international or a European perspective. All are also in some sense reference books as well as texts in that they have useful discreet sections of information or analysis which can be easily accessed. They deal predominantly with the period 1980-1995 and taken together provide some important insights into the complex and contradictory processes which create ‘women's situation’ in the nineties.