Japanese manufacturers have reconstituted the Japanese management and production system in Australia at different levels of success since the late 1960s (Hutchinson and Nicholas 1994, Nicholas and Purcell 2001, Purcell et al. 1999). Three of the essential elements of the Japanese system,...

The Chinese labour market has undergone an extensive restructuring in the last four-and-a-half decades, following the start of the economic reforms, and the open door policy for foreign investment in 1978, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. The nature of employment contracts, labour market...

Economic development presumes not only the existence of formal institutions such as property rights and the rule of law under which behave economic agents, but also certain norms or social values that promote exchange, savings and investments. In this context, we discuss cultural dimension of...

The focus of this paper is the labour practices that are identified with Japanese management style and their functioning in Australian subsidiaries of Japanese MNEs. The context of their functioning is the changes in labour and management relations in Australia. The data used in this paper was...

Departing from a stable industrial relationship, supported by logic of economic massification and the correspondent legal framework, it is our objective to approach the new industrial relations environment, emerging from the modifications on the enterprise organisation models, towards the new...

This is a discussion of research findings on the interaction of the Japanese firms with Australia’s locational factors that affect their investment decisions in Australia. The paper argues that there is a convergence as well as divergence among the sixty-five companies from three industrial...

The effects of the 1992-93 Income Policy Agreements on wages and wage differentials are analysed. In the last decade, both the aggregate real wages and their differentials among individual remained constant. Thanks to the effectiveness of the new Government target inflation, the national...

This paper analyzes differences in the effects of employee representations between family firms and non-family firms. First, managers from non-family firms have a more favorable response towards unions as organizations than managers from family firms. Managers from family firms tend to regard...

This article analyses the role of deviations from higher level collective agreements adopted in firm-level bargaining to regain higher labour mobility, net positive employment effects and a resurgence of labour productivity. Using Italian firm level data, after performing preliminary pooled...

This paper evaluates a study by Robert Crandall that empirically examines the shift in manufacturing employment and output from the so-called “Rust Belt” states – the states from Wisconsin to New York – to the South and West [the “Sun Belt”]. Crandall finds that differences in labor...