This paper presents a detailed case study of a non-union company that adopts a comprehensive HRM approach. Recent accounts of such workplaces identify benefits for employees inducing a perceived lack of need for union membership. This paper reveals a rather different picture in a case where some of the gains for employees proved illusory. Managerial strategy was geared towards attitudinal compliance, work intensification and the suppression of any counter-balancing trade union activity. The costs of compliance were high and management were exceptionally harsh upon individuals who could not or would not fit in. Workers resistance was more evident than in previous work suggesting they are not easily seduced by ‘human relations’ practices.

Using case study evidence from an investigation of ‘quality’ initiatives and working practices in three offices within a District of the Benefits Agency (BA), this article examines the contradictory role of new public management on employees. Decentralised management, performance related pay, teamwork philosophies and the promotion of a ‘customer’ culture reflect a move away from a traditional civil service bureaucratic form of organisation. However, the implementation of change within local settings has brought about variations in local management approaches, work organisation and staff perceptions. The consequences of these are explored and we consider whether the BA’s attempts to empower staff have been thwarted by a progressive intensification of workloads. Our research, by illustrating the importance of variations in local settings, warns of the dangers of evaluating institutional and employment change in the public sector as if it were the result of a coherent and consistent neo-liberal re-structuring strategy. Moreover, it examines reasons why some change initiatives have been unsuccessful. Finally, we identify a recent shift in emphasis within the BA which presages a move away from service quality to economy and draw some initial conclusions about the future impact on employment in this sector.

The aim of this paper is to assess the validity of the ‘empowerment thesis’: the belief that new forms of work organisation are overturning traditional managerial structures and returning control to employees. Specifically, the project seeks to explore the role of ‘empowering’ forms of work organisation (in particular Total Quality Management, team-based work and consultative committees) and of occupational hierarchies, respectively, in influencing levels of employee autonomy. Data from the 1995 Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (AWIRS95) are used to construct quantitative indicators of ‘empowering’ forms of work organisation, hierarchy and employee autonomy. Associations between the variables are measured. The analysis shows no association between ‘empowerment’ and employee autonomy. There are, however, clear relationships between employees' positions within occupational hierarchies and their levels of control over their work. Therefore, the empowerment thesis is rejected. A provisional explanation for the failure of empowerment to enhance employee autonomy can be found in the fact that organisational power resides primarily in organisational structures. Contrary to claims of the emergence of the ‘post-bureaucratic organisation’, hierarchical structures remain central to the majority of contemporary organisations, and the impact of other changes to work organisation must be understood in this context.

The economic reforms of the late 1970s in China have raised general living standards particularly in the coastal urban areas. At the same time, however, they have increased unemployment and widened inequalities. This article examines these issues in Guangzhou, one of the cities where market principles dominate, by looking at workers' actual living standards as well as how they perceive them. Clearly workers in private and semi-private industries have benefited from the economic reforms while employees of state owned industries feel betrayed and left behind. This has both social and political implications.

The notion of complementarity to analyse the relation between paid work and housework has had a limiting, and possibly misleading, influence upon understanding the persistence of inequality in the home. Through our interviews with a group of male shift working process workers, from three manufacturing firms, we explore their perceptions of their roles and relations at work and in the home. We focus upon their experience and interpretation of gendered role activity – themselves as breadwinners and their wives as homemakers. We explore their attitude to and experience of paid work, and their involvement in housework. We begin by considering the difficulties associated with defining housework, and measuring men’s and women’s levels of activity and responsibility. We consider what being a ‘breadwinner’ means to the process workers, and how they translate this into their responsibility to enable their wives to be at home caring for their children. Then we focus upon one part of housework – laundering. Through this activity we explore the persistence of the unequal division of housework, despite changes in paid work, and highlight ways in which this inequality is sustained. We conclude that ambiguity, paradox and uncertainty undermine the dichotomous ordering of gendered relations, and that the balance and equity implied in the notion of complementarity provides an inadequate explanation of the gendered distribution of housework.

In the last two decades or so education and training have become central in the discussion of Britain's economic performance. There have been substantial changes in education and training policy (OECD 1995) and, at the same time, an expansion of participation in post-compulsory education. Both current and recent governments have aimed to raise work-based training through a mixture of persuasion and limited, selective, measures. Yet, there is considerable uncertainty about the extent to which the education and training system is enhancing skills in Britain or, for that matter, in many other countries. This paper concentrates on one dimension of the issue, namely work-based training statistics. There is uncertainty both over the amount of inputs into training and over its impact on skills. It argues that the uncertainty is, in part, the consequence of poor training statistics and that policy debate would benefit from improvements in the ways in which these statistics are compiled and interpreted.

The second half of the twentieth century has seen a dramatic increase in female labour force participation in both developing and industrialised societies. Consequently, a growing number of social scientists have turned attention to changes in the occupational distributions and status of economically active women (Cho and Koo 1983; Boserup 1970; Presser and Kishor 1991). In the present paper we aim to contribute to the growing literature on this topic by studying changes over time in the relative occupational status of Arab women in Israel.

J. Rinehart, J. Huxley and D. Robertson, Just Another Car Factory? Lean Production and its Discontents, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, £11.95 paper,xi1+249 pp.

K. Moody, Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy, London: Verso, 1997, £14.00 paper, viii+1342 pp.

T. A. Kochan, R. D. Landsbury and J. P. MacDuffie, J. P. After Lean Production: Evolving Employment Practices in the World Auto Industry, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, £14.95 paper, x+1349 pp.

Lean production: after the rhetoric

‘I have tried to be objective but I do not claim to be detached.’ C. Wright Mills (cited in Rinehart, Huxley and Robertson [209]).

Alfred Sloan is reputed to have said that the problem with workers was that every time management solved the labour question, the workers changed the question. Sloan's exasperation could be taken as a cypher for management's failure to deal with consequences of social and economic change in the automotive sector before the Second World War. The irony here of course is that so much of this dislocating experience was and still is management driven in the first place.

H. Barnes, P. Thornton and S. Maynard-Campbell, Disabled People and Employment: A Review of Research and Development Work, York: The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1998, £11.95.

A. Roulstone, Enabling Technology: Disabled People, Work and New Technology, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1998, £45.00, paper £14.99, 160 pp.

K. Simons, Home, Work and Inclusion: The Social Policy Implications of Supported Living and Employment Opportunities for People with Learning Disabilities, York: The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1998, £11.95.

Our understanding of ‘disability’ is inextricably linked to paid work. Since at least the industrial revolution to be defined as ‘disabled’ means to be either unemployed or underemployed. Only in times of war, when the ‘non-disabled’ workforce are deployed elsewhere, does this unfortunate state of affairs change significantly (Humphries and Gordon 1992; Oliver 1990, 1996). As a growing number of mainly disabled writers (UPIAS 1976; Oliver 1990, 1996; Barnes 1991, 1992; Hyde 1996; Oliver and Barnes 1998) have noted, without radical restructuring of social policy in general, and of the way work is organised in particular, there is little cause for optimism for the future.

Mark Aldrich, Safety First: Technology, Labor and Business in the Building of American Work Safety 1870–1939, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997, £41.50, xx+415 pp.

Regina H. Kenen with Jenny McLeish and Daphne May, Pregnancy at Work: Health and Safety for the Working Woman, London and Chicago: Pluto Press, 1998, paper £12.99, xiii+271 pp.

Karen Messing, One-Eyed Science: Occupational Health and Women Workers, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998, $59.95, paper $22.95, xx+244 pp.

Much of the new scholarship on the body at work tends to ignore writing on occupational health and safety which has always been concerned with the body, albeit within problematic frameworks. These three books take various positions in relation to that literature. I would argue that Karen Messing's book is one of the most important books on occupational health and safety in the latter half of the twentieth century. Messing poses questions that are essential to re-orient the area of occupational health and safety, not only if it is to include women and their work, but also if it is going to be equal to the task of addressing work characterised by the service relationship unfolding before us. Dealing comprehensively with aspects of occupational health and safety from toxins to traumatic injuries, the book also takes seriously service occupations such as waitressing. For example there is a chapter called ‘Emotional stressors in women's occupations’.