Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to discuss how the so‐called “modernisation” agenda has triggered changes in the structure and management of the UK public sector. The concern of the paper is with how such changes have impacted on the labour process of lecturers in the English...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore control and resistance in the UK further education (FE) sector by examining senior college managers’ attempts to engineer culture change and analysing lecturers’ resistance to such measures. Design/methodology/approach – Data were derived...

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to examine how the labour process of further education lecturers has changed as a result of legislative reforms introduced in the early 1990s. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on labour process theory and emergent perspectives on “the...

Reports on the UMIST‐Institute of Management five‐year study into the changing experiences of UK managers and the impact of organizational change. Examines the patterns of actual working hours generally and by managerial level before going on to explore the reasons managers give to explain...

The paper is based on a five year, UMIST‐Institute of Management study into the changing nature of the quality of working life and seeks to uncover differences in the incidence and impact of organizational change on the perceptions and experiences of managers in the public sector, the private...

Based on a sample of senior managers from West Midlands businesses, quantifies the level of executive stress in a regional setting. Identifies significant levels of stress generally but also reveals that stress is patterned across industrial sectors and by firm size. Also identifies and...

Examines the attitudes of senior, predominantly male staff to women managers in a specific industrial setting ‐ namely the West Midlands region of the UK ‐ using data derived from the Price Waterhouse West Midlands Business Survey. The survey is unique in that it is focused on eliciting the...

This is an empirically based study of changes in the FE lecturer labour process driven by college managers under pressure from central state targets and funding controls. Two elements of labour management are considered: close observation and professional development. The dialectical dynamic of...

This paper examines changes in labor management of workers in UK emergency services under a regime of budget cuts and neoliberal state strategies. It takes an extreme case study, the emergency services, as an example of the limits of privatization and of the need, nonetheless, to re-assert...