The sudden death of Harvie Ramsay from a brain haemorrhage on 24 April this year at the age of fifty-one greatly shocked and saddened his many friends and colleagues in the academic world and elsewhere. It has also deprived us of someone who had contributed so much to the areas of research and writing covered by this journal, for which he had been a member of the Editorial Board, and who still had so much to contribute.

The recent diffusion of ‘lean production’ work practices and various forms of team-working in manufacturing industry has revived old arguments about the likely decline of production supervisors. These issues are here submitted to empirical scrutiny through a detailed comparison of the skills and utilisation of supervisors in the British, German and American engineering industries. The threatened demise of supervisors is found to be exaggerated yet again for three main reasons. Firstly, supervisors' jobs have generally become more demanding and complex due to greater diversity in the product mix and more stringent quality and delivery targets. Secondly, in Britain and the US (although not in Germany) the average span of responsibility of supervisors has remained stable in recent years. Thirdly, there is evidence in all three countries that, far from making supervisors ‘redundant’ in any way, the development of new work practices such as team-working can actually help to restore the influence of supervisors in strategic decision-making – by ‘freeing’ them from their traditional immersion in the day-to-day details of shopfloor management.

Redundancy, delayering and other forms of organisational change have become increasingly prevalent over the last ten years. Some of the worst-hit industries during the recent years have been the former public utilities, the financial services sector and manufacturing. This paper is based on the results from the first three years' data from a five year UMIST-Institute of Management research programme which has been designed to explore the changing nature of managerial work in the UK and the impact of organisational change on managers' sense of loyalty, morale and motivation. It has been shown in the past (Sahdev and Vinnicombe 1998; Worrall, Cooper and Campbell 1999) that redundancy is seen a particularly damaging form of change on survivors and that redundancy often fails to achieve the objectives on which it was justified, leaving many unintended consequences. This article discusses the effects of organisational change on surviving managers where redundancy has been used, compared with organisations where redundancy has not been used. The results suggest that if redundancy is to be continually pursued as a method of change, managers should be aware of the damaging implications not only to individuals but to the culture of the downsized organisation.

There is an important literature suggesting that the consumer has become a key focus of identity and figure of authority in contemporary society. Within this literature, however, there is little consideration of the role that the identification with the customer could play in management control within production, nor of the ensuing potential contradictions. This paper examines these issues in front line call centre work. Control in this setting is theorised as being informed by dual logics of customer-orientation and bureaucratisation. The paper shows the important use of norms of customer identification in control. It also highlights two levels of contradictions in the use of these norms. First there is the contradiction between continuing bureaucratic control and the attempts to develop normative control. Second, there are contradictions within the development of customer-related normative control. Specifically, the definition of the customer as the focus for normative commitment is a contested terrain, with systematic and significant differences existing here between call centre workers and management.

Whilst hotel management's rhetoric encourages staff to provide the best possible service by satisfying customers' needs, front line staff find themselves bearing the brunt of any abusive and sexual behaviour from customers. This article analyses the experience of harassment of hotel workers by customers. The specificities of the hotel space, the elusive sexuality that exists within the hotel, and the issue of ethnicity in relation to imbalances of power between the staff and the guest are all discussed using examples of harassment of hotel workers in a variety of workplaces and work roles. The article also explores how hotel workers deal with incidents of harassment, the complex ways in which they resist, and management reaction to harassment of their workers.

This is a case study of the use of subcontracting within BT plc the UK's largest telecommunications firm. The 1990s have witnessed significant quantitative and qualitative changes in the utilisation and management of subcontracting within BT. The deregulation, or rather the shift in regulation, of the employment relationship represented by movement from bureaucratic hierarchical forms of organisation to subcontracting introduces several sources of uncertainty into the process of ensuring an adequate supply of labour and inducing the desired contribution within production. This study examines whether the regulation of labour in terms of supply and performance can be reconciled through subcontracting mechanisms. In this case the experience of deregulation of the capital-labour relationship threw up unforeseen outcomes. The problems that arose from the reliance upon a labour source that was ostensibly beyond the control of the firm inspired initiatives that essentially represented the partial reregulation of the capital-labour relationship.

Since the beginning of the 1980s significant academic interest has focused on the process of capitalist restructuring, although opinion is divided as to the nature of this. Some commentators have suggested that Fordism is being displaced as the dominant mode of production (Hirst and Zeitlin 1991) by flexible specialisation, said to be ‘a strategy of permanent innovation’ (Piore and Sabel 1984: 17), which developed in response to increasingly volitile product markets, intense competition, and rapidly changing customer demands. Some critics of this approach have argued that the evidence presented to support the emergence of flexible specialisation is not conclusive (Pollert 1988; Rowley 1994; 1996; Tomaney 1990; Williams et al. 1987), whilst others have observed that flexible specialisation theory, being wholly concerned with product markets and production technologies, overlooks other influences upon corporate practices (Berggren 1992; Vallas and Beck 1996; Schoenberger 1997). It has also been noted that flexible specialisation theorists have over simplified the dynamics of capitalist development (Hyman 1988).

A decade after the fall of communism scholars widely agree that the transformation process of democratisation and marketisation in central eastern Europe (CEE) has left unions (new and independent and successors to the official communist unions alike) with little power to influence political and economic decision-making (Ost 1997; Thirkell et al. 1998). Typical explanations invoke economic factors such as privatisation, the restructuring of the economy and of firms, and the depressed labour market. They also highlight an increasingly hostile environment for unions created by a majority of the new private owners, which is supplemented by ‘distancing’ governments following neo-liberal policies (Pollert 1998). However, I argue that these factors as explanations for union weakness are not entirely convincing. For example, management behaviour and the political context clearly influences the power resources of unions but cannot entirely determine the position and policies of individual unions.

In The Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies (Oxford University Press, 1999) Gøsta Esping-Andersen presents a classic example of an empirically grounded historically materialist analysis of welfare capitalism, in the tradition of Polanyi, Marshall and others. He argues that its architecture needs to be re-thought because of the changing nature of postindustrial economies and that this requires us to think in terms of ‘welfare regimes’ comprising the market, the state and the family. When the welfare state finally reached its mature institutional expression, as late as the 1960s and 1970s, it addressed the risks which had typically been faced by families in the ‘Golden Age’ of capitalism in the long post-war boom. This meant protecting prime age men employed in Fordist industries earning family wages from spells of unemployment and older men from decreased earning power. Protecting the male breadwinner was also meant to protect those dependent upon him. The bulk of income transfers were thus focused on old age pensions and unemployment insurance. There was little in the way of service provision: ‘familialism’ left reproductive work such as child or elder care to the unpaid work of women in families.

Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers, She Works, He Works. How Two-Income Families Are Happy, Healthy and Thriving, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998, paper £9.95, xii+260 pp.

Francine Deutsch, Halving It All. How Equally Shared Parenting Works, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999, paper £15.50, 327 pp.

Richard Layte, Divided Time. Gender, Paid Employment and Domestic Labour, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999, xiv+190 pp.

These three books each focus on the way heterosexual couples manage the household and caring work of family life along with paid work, and each were published in the last years of the twentieth century. The other millennium bug (the infectious tendency to reflect back over the century) inevitably means that here I locate their findings within the body of British evidence on the distribution of household and caring work between women and men during the twentieth century.

Rosemary Crompton, Women and Work in Modern Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, paper £9.99, xi+155 pp.

Sylvia Walby, Gender Transformations, London: Routledge, 1997, paper £13.99, x+245 pp.

Sue Hatt, Gender, Work and Labour Markets, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997, paper £16.99, xi+200 pp.

Ann Brooks, Academic Women, Buckingham: Open University Press, paper £18.99, xii+174 pp.

Is the condition of women in society improving or getting worse? The answer of course is both.

I was particularly struck by this statement – the publisher's blurb on the back jacket of one of the reviewed books – since it seems to capture perfectly the ambivalence about patterns of change which has dominated recent research on the topic of gender inequality and the labour market. We stand at the turn of a century which has seen significant and far-reaching change in the lives of women and men, and which – in the last thirty years – has generated a wealth of scholarship on gendered patterns. Yet it seems to me that the conclusions that can be drawn about both the nature of key changes and the current state of gender difference are still far from clear. The complexity of the patterns that are being uncovered undoubtedly offer a difficult challenge to theories of gender inequality and gender differences yet, paradoxically, a period of great theoretical caution seems to be underway.

R. Asplund, P. Sloane and I. Theodossiou (eds.), Low Pay and Earnings Mobility in Europe, Cheltenham and Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 1998, £55, xix+334 pp.

Abigail McKnight, Peter Elias and Rob Wilson, Low Pay and the National Insurance System: A Statistical Picture, Manchester: EOC, 1998, no charge, 71 pp.

These two studies bear a less close relationship to each other than might at first appear from having the words ‘Low Pay’ in both titles. The common ground is all about the dynamics of the labour market: it asks primarily about the persistence of low pay, where people have come from if not previously in low pay and where they go to, not just in terms of wages but also in employment status. The difference derives from the fact that the measure of earnings in the Asplund et al. study is almost exclusively about low hourly wages. McKnight et al. deal with who has low weekly earnings, i.e. below the NI Lower Earnings Limit (LEL). Hence here the population of study is much more about part-time work and persistence/dynamics of hours than hourly wages. It is also therefore centred on women. It is an encouraging feature of the book that all but one of the chapters do cover women. All too often work on mobility and dynamics has focused on men because they are less complex. In this review I will first concentrate on what the studies suggest about Britain, and then broaden out to comparative issues.