Purpose – Much current academic writing focuses on the changing nature of work in the services sector, particularly with regard to the implementation of new technological processes. Bringing attention back to a traditional industry, coal mining, the paper aims to consider the impact of...

The paper draws on a qualitative case study of workplace industrial relations in an inner-city secondary school identified as 'failing' and subsequently closed. It considers the way unionized teachers and their representatives interpret, influence and resist the impact of centralized managerial...

The growth of service work has introduced the customer as a third party to the employment relationship. Yet dominant images of customer relations portray docile service workers offering de-personalized care to sometimes aggressive but otherwise not much more agential customers. This paper seeks...

This article proposes the lens of moral economy as a useful ethical framework through which to assess HRM practice, with a particular focus on the strategic use of contingent work (‘non-standard’ employment practices including temporary, agency and outsourced work). While contingent work...

Purpose – The purpose of this short paper is to introduce the special issue and outline its major themes. Design/methodology/approach – The control-resistance literatures are described, and the necessity for field-led empirical accounts is amplified, as a precursor to introducing the...