How relevant are human resource (HR) practices in economies undergoing significant economic transition from a command to a market-based system? Using data drawn from a large sample of Chinese establishments, the authors investigate the spread of a range of Western-style HR practices in China and...

Highly formalised models of union behaviour have been developed and are widely used within neoclassical economics. This approach is justified by the argument that most goals pursued by unions can be reduced to a wage (or wage-equivalent)--employment trade-off. However, the strong assumptions...

The publication of John Kelly’s Rethinking Industrial Relations (1998) spawned a growing interest among researchers in exploring how social movement (SM) theory can be used to inform union research, particularly in the context of revitalization/renewal debates. Our starting proposition is that...

China’s economic transition has, on the face of it, presented the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) and its affiliated “grassroots” branches with a crisis similar to that experienced by unions in many other countries in the same period. Not only did membership decline, but the...