This article focuses on the responses of British trade unions to the arrival of Polish workers since the 2004 enlargement of the European Union. It is argued that existing definitions and explanations of UK trade union engagement with migrant workers do not capture the strategies that have been...

This article presents an individual’s experience of a strike lasting one year and nine months. It brings to readers’ attention the unrecognized work that is involved in maintaining a strike – the continuous organization of ‘working’ the strike, ongoing...

In Britain a new generation of worker co-operatives have emerged that differ from earlier phases of co-operative development in that they have been formed primarily to create jobs in response to the high level of unemployment. All the major political parties favour co-operative development and...

The authors of this paper argue that worker co-ops need to be valued as an improvement in the quality of working life, yet all too often they and the agencies which support them are caught up in a “numbers game†of trying to maximise the number of jobs created in order to justify...

Theorists of work and employment (W&E) practices should more seriously engage with literatures concerning how space is constitutive of social praxis. Rather than simply serving as a stage upon which social life is played out or being merely a reflection of social relations, the construction of...

It has been suggested that moves towards Just In Time systems of production bring with them a fundamental change in the nature of the buyer-supplier relationship. New long-term, high-trust relationships are supposed to replace a win:win for the old win:lose equation. Equally, the new flexibility...

The contention in this article is that an integrated approach can be used to analyse industrial relations in small firms and to investigate the image of industrial harmony. This integrated approach, incorporating the dialectical relationship between structural forces and human agency, is...

Local authority intervention in the local economy has proliferated in recent years and is not, as much work suggests, confined to large Labour controlled authorities coping with inner city problems and/or declining heavy industry; a wide variety of economic development initiatives are being...