We are very pleased to introduce the next volume in this book series, Understanding Work and Employment Relations. Following on from Cecile Guillaume’s monograph Organizing Women: Gender Inequalities in French and British Trade Unions, Labour Conflicts in the Digital Age by Donatella della Porta, Riccardo Emilio Chesta, and Lorenzo Cini is the second text to be published in the series.

This series has been designed as a space for both monographs and edited volumes to highlight the latest research and commentary in the academic field of employment relations. The series is associated with the British Universities Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA), which marked 70 years of existence in 2020. The series seeks to draw on the expertise of the membership of BUIRA and contributions to its annual conference, as well as employment relations academics from around the world. Employment relations is a mature field of study and continues to be of relevance to academic and practitioner audiences alike. BUIRA recognizes the broad nature of the field of employment relations, and acknowledges that the field of study is constantly developing and evolving. BUIRA regards employment relations to be the study of the relation, control, and governance of work and the employment relationship. It is the study of rules (both formal and informal) regarding job regulation and the ‘reward-effort bargain’. These issues remain relevant today, in an era where the standard employment relationship has become increasingly fragmented due to employers’ pursuit of labour flexibility, and we see the continued expansion of the gig or platform economy. Employment relations (and adjacent research areas including human resource management and the sociology of work) is taught widely in universities around the world, most commonly in business and management schools and departments. The field of study is multidisciplinary, encompassing law, politics, history, geography, sociology, and economics. Human Resource Management (HRM) has a tendency to focus uncritically on management objectives, without exploring issues of work and employment in their wider socio-economic context, and has its disciplinary roots in psychology, whereas employment relations retains a strong critical social science tradition. As scholars in this area we feel that there is a need for regular, up-to-date, research-focused books that reflect current work in the field and go further than standard introductory texts.