We have recently seen the rapid dissemination of new management techniques such as TQM to the developing world, mainly through joint ventures. This paper hopes to throw some light on the impact of TQM on the organisation of work and industrial relations in a leading company in Turkey, and how it is experienced by employees. The case study illustrates that the extension of modern management techniques to developing countries can benefit labour. It also suggests that workers and unions face new challenges for which they may not be well prepared.

The Low Pay Commission was established in July 1997, and produced its ‘First Report’ in June 1998. It formed part of a series of initiatives marking a new Labour Government in the UK, which included inter alia the White Paper ‘Fairness at Work’, setting out new state positions on union recognition and wide-ranging changes to the benefits system. This article provides an initial comment on this institution, focusing on context, process, and remit, and on relevance to broader debates on the meaning of ‘fair’ wages and economic ‘efficiency’. The first section explores the political economic context. The second compares and contrasts the Commission's deliberations and recommendations. Finally, an assessment is made of these recommendations and the implications for trade unions.

In the last two decades or so education and training have become central in the discussion of Britain's economic performance. There have been substantial changes in education and training policy (OECD 1995) and, at the same time, an expansion of participation in post-compulsory education. Both current and recent governments have aimed to raise work-based training through a mixture of persuasion and limited, selective, measures. Yet, there is considerable uncertainty about the extent to which the education and training system is enhancing skills in Britain or, for that matter, in many other countries. This paper concentrates on one dimension of the issue, namely work-based training statistics. There is uncertainty both over the amount of inputs into training and over its impact on skills. It argues that the uncertainty is, in part, the consequence of poor training statistics and that policy debate would benefit from improvements in the ways in which these statistics are compiled and interpreted.

The public sector workforce in the UK faces a number of challenges and pressures that are leading to an increasing fragmentation of employment. This paper reports evidence of one such pressure faced by nursing staff in the NHS – the recruitment of a new grade of unqualified nurse, the ‘health care assistant’ (HCA), onto local terms and conditions of employment. Drawing on case-study evidence, including pay data from a sample of nursing personnel records from two Trusts, this paper addresses two central issues. First, the recruitment of growing numbers of HCAs may increase wage inequality among nurses as managers are able to adapt local pay scales to the widening wage inequality external to the organisation. Second, the greater managerial autonomy associated with hiring HCAs on local pay scales may increase opportunities for managers to reassess traditional demarcations between qualified and unqualified nursing staff and to seek cost reductions through reducing the proportion of qualified staff employed.

David Cheal, New Poverty: Families in Postmodern Society, Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1995, £43.95, 209 pp.

David Donnison, Policies for a Just Society, London: Macmillan, 1997, £40, paper £12.50, 218 pp.

Joel Handler and Yeheskel Hasenfeld, We The Poor People: Work, Poverty and Welfare, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997, £25, 281 pp.

Joel Handler, The Poverty of Welfare Reform, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996, £16.50, paper £8.50, 177 pp.

Inga Persson and Christina Jonung (eds), Economics of the Family and Family Policies, London: Routledge, 1997, £47.50, 222 pp.

John E. Schwartz, Illusions of Poverty: The American Dream in Question, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1998, £16.95, 237 pp.

Britain's first Labour government for 18 years was elected on a mandate that placed the reform of welfare at the heart of its modernising ambitions (Labour Party 1997; Bennett and Walker 1998). The welfare system, the new government argued, was ‘plainly not working’ (Cm. 1998a). It had not kept pace with profound social and economic changes such as increased divorce and separation, rising numbers of lone parents, less secure employment and a widening pay gap. Moreover, it had actually contributed to growth in workless households, with worklessness going hand in hand with low income and social exclusion.

Few studies have directly compared men's and women's perceptions of paid employment; in the past, the sociology of paid work concentrated on men (Phelan et al. 1993). More recently, studies have included female as well as male employees but are often flawed by implicit assumptions about the importance of different social ‘roles’ for men and women. While paid work is seen as central to men's attitudes and behaviour both in and out of the workplace, for women personal characteristics and family circumstances are often deemed to be more important, with paid work conceptualised as an ‘additional’ role rather than an indicator of status, income and class position (Arber 1991; Feldberg and Glenn 1979). Sophisticated attempts to compare attitudes of men and women to paid work have been hindered by the gendered structure of the labour market. Statements about gender differences in general population samples are problematic because women and men occupy different jobs with varying conditions, rewards and demands. Thus, it is difficult to tell whether any observed ‘gender’ differences in perceptions of paid work are really ‘job’ differences (Lefkowitz 1994).

The focus of this paper is the transition of managers and professionals out of organisational employment into portfolio work. The interest in this individual transition is its resonance with wider debates about the changing nature of career. The demise of the traditional hierarchical career is widely predicted as is its replacement by a proliferation of more fluid and individual career choices, encompassed in the over-arching notion of the boundaryless career. The two studies on which this paper is based have taken an in-depth look at individuals who appear to exemplify this move out of organisational employment and into more independent working. The paper draws inductively on interviews with individuals who had left organisations to set up on their own. Hence the data is grounded in the accounts of individuals and seeks to explore their interpretations of their experiences. The paper focuses on participants' expectations of their new employment context and its realities. In considering the major implications of these findings, it questions dualistic conceptualisations of career and argues for theoretical frameworks based more on synthesis and linkage.

The second half of the twentieth century has seen a dramatic increase in female labour force participation in both developing and industrialised societies. Consequently, a growing number of social scientists have turnedattention to changes in the occupational distributions and status of economically active women (Cho and Koo 1983; Boserup 1970; Presser and Kishor 1991). In the present paper we aim to contribute to the growing literature on this topic by studying changes over time in the relative occupational status of Arab women in Israel.

Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl and Michael Stack (eds.), Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution, London: Verso, 1997, paper £15.00, vii+304 pp.

Giovanni Dosi, David J. Teece and Josef Chytry (eds.), Technology, Organization and Competitiveness: Perspectives on Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, £45.00, ix+345 pp.

Michael Dunkerley, The Jobless Economy? Computer Technology in the World of Work, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996, paper £11.95, viii+168 pp.

M. David Ermann, Mary B. Williams and Michele S. Schauf (eds.), Computers, Ethics and Society (2nd Edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, paper £15.99, viii+340 pp.

Robin Mansell and Roger Silverstone (eds.), Communication by Design: The Politics of Information and Communication Technologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, paper £14.99, xiv+278 pp.

The significance of technology shows no signs of giving up its claim to pre-eminence amongst recent book titles and this selection covers a wide variety of approaches from the ‘popular’ (Dunkerley) to the ‘radical’ (Davis et al.) to the ‘learned academic’ (Mansell and Silverstone, and Dosi et al.) to the textbook (Ermann et al.). The markets for these books are quite different but they all have something of value to say to the interested reader.

J. Rinehart, J. Huxley and D. Robertson, Just Another Car Factory? Lean Production and its Discontents, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, £11.95 paper,xi1+249 pp.

K. Moody, Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy, London: Verso, 1997, £14.00 paper, viii+1342 pp.

T. A. Kochan, R. D. Landsbury and J. P. MacDuffie, J. P. After Lean Production: Evolving Employment Practices in the World Auto Industry, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, £14.95 paper, x+1349 pp.

Lean production: after the rhetoric

‘I have tried to be objective but I do not claim to be detached.’ C. Wright Mills (cited in Rinehart, Huxley and Robertson [209]).

Alfred Sloan is reputed to have said that the problem with workers was that every time management solved the labour question, the workers changed the question. Sloan's exasperation could be taken as a cypher for management's failure to deal with consequences of social and economic change in the automotive sector before the Second World War. The irony here of course is that so much of this dislocating experience was and still is management driven in the first place.

Lowell Turner, Fighting for Partnership, Labor and Politics in Unified Germany, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998, paper £12.95, x+195 pp.

Lowell Turner (ed.), Negotiating the New Germany. Can Social Partnership Survive?, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997, paper £14.50, xi+271 pp.

A central characteristic of the German industrial relations system until the fall of the Berlin Wall had been its post-war stability and continuity. Indeed it was regarded not only as a significant contributor to Modell Deutschland, meaning the socio-economic and political stability which had marked Germany in the period up to 1990, but also as a model to be imitated and from which other national industrial relations systems might learn. The stability of the German industrial relations system depended on a number of interrelated factors. Firstly, there is a coherent legal framework of labour law giving distinct norms. Legislation defines the parties and outcomes to collective bargaining, the relationship of plant-level industrial negotiations between management and employee representative bodies, such as the works council, and there is an extensive codetermination legislation providing for employee participation. Secondly, employers' associations and trade unions enjoyed over many years a high degree of organisational concentration. The latter are based on the principles of industrial unionism and as these covered extensive industrial sectors the power relationship between trade unions and employers' associations were regulated at sectoral level. Finally, the German system has the distinctive characteristic of a separation of plant-level industrial relations from the sectoral level. The result of these features was to construct a system of industrial relations that demonstrated a high degree of consensus and social partnership, facilitated through mechanisms of consultation and mediation which avoided overt conflict.

The majority of government, professional body and industry rhetoric on the issue of women and S & E (the term which we use throughout to cover the sciences and applied sciences) has been about the low numbers of girls becoming qualified in science and of women entering the sciences (Glover and Fielding 1999). Little attention has been paid to the issue of what happens to women once they enter science. In other words, ‘getting in’ has been seen as the issue; ‘staying on’ and ‘getting on’ have received much less attention. Government policy seeking to increase the representation of girls and women in scientific education and employment has been set out in a series of reports. These include the Dainton Report 1968; the Finniston Report 1980; Realising Our Potential 1993; The Rising Tide 1994 (resulting in the setting up of the Women in SET Development Unit in the Department of Trade & Industry); Forward Look 1996. The Equal Opportunities Commission has involved itself in interventionist campaigns which seek to persuade girls to become scientifically qualified (Smail and Whyte 1983). The engineering profession has also voiced its concern about the low numbers of women; the Engineering Council has funded a Women into Science and Engineering (WISE) unit since the mid 1980s.

Alison Adam, Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine, London: Routledge, 1998, £45.00, paper £13.99, 216 pp.

Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert (eds), Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, London: Routledge, 1997, £45.00, paper £14.99, 264 pp.

Feminist research can be characterised by the key question which its practitioners habitually ask: ‘Who is doing what to whom here?’ By asking this provocative question, and by thinking through the answers, feminist researchers have been able to make the tacit, often taken-for-granted structuring work done through gender into a visible phenomenon open to discussion. In this way, feminist thinking has been able to make strategic and principled interventions in a number of apparently gender-neutral fields, doing much to expose exclusionary and inequable practices both historically and in the present.

The development of a managed National Health Service (NHS) has been a central element of government policy for a substantial part of the last two decades. Within months of taking office in 1979, the first Thatcher administration repudiated the idea of a centrally planned and administered NHS in favour of a declared policy of managed localism (Klein1995: 124–26; Pollitt 1993: 68–9). However, a somewhat more considered process of policy formation was soon set in train with the commissioning of the Griffiths enquiry and, following the acceptance of its conclusions in 1983, with the introduction of what was called ‘general management’. Since the middle of the 1980s, the management which Griffiths recommended (which allocates considerable decision-making independence to managers within a framework of prescribed budgets) has been consolidated and developed.

H. Barnes, P. Thornton and S. Maynard-Campbell, Disabled People and Employment: A Review of Research and Development Work, York: The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1998, £11.95.

A. Roulstone, Enabling Technology: Disabled People, Work and New Technology, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1998, £45.00, paper £14.99, 160 pp.

K. Simons, Home, Work and Inclusion: The Social Policy Implications of Supported Living and Employment Opportunities for People with Learning Disabilities, York: The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1998, £11.95.

Our understanding of ‘disability’ is inextricably linked to paid work. Since at least the industrial revolution to be defined as ‘disabled’ means to be either unemployed or underemployed. Only in times of war, when the ‘non-disabled’ workforce are deployed elsewhere, does this unfortunate state of affairs change significantly (Humphries and Gordon 1992; Oliver 1990, 1996). As a growing number of mainly disabled writers (UPIAS 1976; Oliver 1990, 1996; Barnes 1991, 1992; Hyde 1996; Oliver and Barnes 1998) have noted, without radical restructuring of social policy in general, and of the way work is organised in particular, there is little cause for optimism for the future.

Heather Trickey, Karen Kellard, Robert Walker, Karl Ashworth and Alison Smith, Unemployment and Jobseeking: Two Years On, London: HMSO/Department of Social Security Research Report no. 87, 1998, £38.00, viii+203 pp.

Mike Campbell, with Ian Sanderson and Fiona Walton, Local Response to Long-term Unemployment, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation/York Publishing Services, 1998, £12.95 paperback, v+58 pp.

These two reports are both concerned with the unemployed and their futures. One (carried out by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University for the Department of Social Security) tracks the movements of a representative sample of unemployed people and explains ‘success’ in the labour market in terms of a variety of personal characteristics and experiences. The other – commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and written by researchers from the Policy Research Institute at Leeds Metropolitan University – reviews policies to assist the long-term unemployed. In this review the first will be referred to as the DSS study and the second as the JRF report.

Mark Aldrich, Safety First: Technology, Labor and Business in the Building of American Work Safety 1870–1939, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997, £41.50, xx+415 pp.

Regina H. Kenen with Jenny McLeish and Daphne May, Pregnancy at Work: Health and Safety for the Working Woman, London and Chicago: Pluto Press, 1998, paper £12.99, xiii+271 pp.

Karen Messing, One-Eyed Science: Occupational Health and Women Workers, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998, $59.95, paper $22.95, xx+244 pp.

Much of the new scholarship on the body at work tends to ignore writing on occupational health and safety which has always been concerned with the body, albeit within problematic frameworks. These three books take various positions in relation to that literature. I would argue that Karen Messing's book is one of the most important books on occupational health and safety in the latter half of the twentieth century. Messing poses questions that are essential to re-orient the area of occupational health and safety, not only if it is to include women and their work, but also if it is going to be equal to the task of addressing work characterised by the service relationship unfolding before us. Dealing comprehensively with aspects of occupational health and safety from toxins to traumatic injuries, the book also takes seriously service occupations such as waitressing. For example there is a chapter called ‘Emotional stressors in women's occupations’.

Inga Persson and Christina Jonung (eds.) Women's Work and Wages, London: Routledge, 1998, £50.00. xiv+256 pp.

Jacqueline O'Reilly and Colette Fagan (eds.) Part-time Prospects: An international comparison of part-time work in Europe, North America and the Pacific Rim, London: Routledge, 1998, paper £17.99. xviii+286 pp.

Michael W. McCann Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994, £51.95, paper £15.25. xiii+358 pp.

Deborah Figart and Peggy Kahn Contesting the Market: Pay Equity and the Politics of Economic Restructuring, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997, paper £17.95, 225 pp.

As global economic competition undermines the ability of individual states to pursue independent economic strategies, there has been an apparent convergence in labour market policies across a number of countries. In response to economic recession, fiscal deficits and structural unemployment, an increasing number of governments have embraced neo-liberal solutions to these difficulties. Policies designed to improve the terms and conditions of employment have fallen into disfavour and been replaced by deregulatory measures aimed at creating more flexible and casualised labour markets. In the past two decades, many countries have experienced falling trade union membership, the decentralisation of payment systems and a declining public sector through privatisation. These developments are invariably presented by the politicians responsible for introducing them as both inevitable and beneficial. Yet despite global pressures, individual labour markets are shaped by a unique blend of historical, cultural and institutional factors which would seem to belie the imposition of uniform solutions.

Moira Gatens and Alison Mackinnon (eds), Gender and Institutions: welfare, work and citizenship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, £45.00, paper £15.95, xx+214 pp. Virgínia Ferreira, Teresa Tavares and Sílvia Portugal (eds), Shifting Bonds, Shifting Bounds: women, mobility and citizenship in Europe, Oeiras: Celta Editora, 1998, 3390 Portuguese Escudos, xvi+363 pp.

In a number of ways, these two volumes have common features: they are edited compilations that encompass a geographical focus in each case, Australia and Europe. They contain the overlapping themes of gender and citizenship in which the contributors explore divisions of labour and the contribution of equal opportunities/ affirmative action.