Flexibility, quality and competitiveness are all hallelujah words in current debate about national economic per formance. The achievement of more flexibility or higher quality or greater competitiveness, it is said, will help the UK become a more successful economy. At the same time increased...

This article examines the human resource management problems currently facing UK higher education institutions, particularly in relation to academic staffing. It outlines the structural characteristics of employment in HE which shape the demand for labor and influence personnel policies....

This article surveys the potential impact of skill on productivity. It opens with a review of the utility of productivity as a measure of systemic economic performance, and then goes on to explore the oft-assumed close and strong relationship between skills and productivity. The importance of...

The autumn 1988 issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy considered the UK's deficiencies in vocational education and training (VET). It was there that Finegold and Soskice first popularized the notion of the 'low skills/low quality' equilibrium. This Assessment introduces a range of...

Flexibility, quality and competitiveness are all hallelujah words in current debate about national economic per formance. The achievement of more flexibility or higher quality or greater competitiveness, it is said, will help the UK become a more successful economy. At the same time increased...

The British government's policy towards expanding higher education is based on two beliefs--that it is necessary for an improvement of economic performance, and that it can increase access to better jobs by those from lower socio-economic backgrounds. This article examines these two beliefs. The...

This article examines two inter-related issues. First, the tendency for UK skills policies to act as a substitute for other social and economic measures. Second, the problem of current conceptualisations of skills policy creating narrowly-drawn, technicist interventions that are frequently...