This paper examines professional work and professional careers and the extent to which professionals face change, uncertainty and risk in their careers. The key issue is whether the power and privilege of the professions is being undermined. It draws on research from Manchester's business and financial sector including accountancy, law, actuarial work and corporate finance. Interviews with senior partners and managers in a range of organisations indicate that important changes in the professions are taking place including diversification, inter-professional competition, organisational change and specialisation. There has also been a change in relationships with clients and an intensification of work. Interviews with junior professionals show that job mobility is high in the early career although most envisaged staying with one organisation for the majority of their careers. Hours of work were long but not necessarily seen as onerous. They were well remunerated in commanding high salaries at a relatively young age with the prospect of greatly enhanced rewards in the future. Few had experiences of redundancy and none of unemployment although the consensus of opinion was that the professions are no longer a job for life. Perceptions of insecurity were greater than experiences of it. It is argued that the privilege and power of the professions can only be understood in the context of the organisations in which they are employed and the political economy in which those organisations operate. Increased economic competitiveness has led to changes in professional work but professionals continue to enjoy advantaged careers in the labour market.

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.

There is increasing evidence of a widespread recognition within the British trade union movement of the need to change. Amongst the directions of change being considered is adoption of the ‘organising model’ borrowed from the United States. MSF was probably the first major British union to go down this path, thereby promising to transform itself from an organisation that had pioneered the conservative ‘servicing model’ to one in the forefront of promoting a radical alternative. This transformation is far from unproblematic and this article examines the tensions and difficulties encountered through a study of NHS membership organisation two regions. In the process of the examination, the article highlights the inadequacies of approaches to union decline that either regard it as an inevitable result of objective circumstances or believe that new policies to counter decline can be adopted by managerial fiat and without recourse to widespread discussion among members to build a consensus.

Class structure and class formation are two crucial aspects of class. The former relates to differences in market positions and the latter concerns social factors such as interaction, mobility and class action. This paper is based on Swedish data covering the period from 1975 to 1995. Analysis reveals a persistent class hierarchy and that there is no trend towards declining class differences regarding market position. The situation is better described as being in a state of non-linear flux. However, one persistent trend is discernible; class explains less and less of the variance in wage income. Looking at class formation there is a decline over time in class-homogeneity. Most Swedes are mobile in the sense that they end up in a class position different from their father's. A growing majority of all marriage is also class mixed. However, although classes generally lack homogeneity, social boundaries still exist, i.e., tendencies for immobility and class homogeneous marriage. In relation to the Ô‘class-is-dying’ hypothesis, the results generally indicate the continuing relevance of class, although the view of classes as homogenous social groups is increasingly troublesome over time.

Recent National Health Service (NHS) structural and policy changes have brought with them shifts in the ideals, pace, and physical location of work, with significant consequences for staff. Hospital nurses have experienced increased devolution of managerial responsibility and are under pressure to effect a faster throughput of more acutely ill patients and simultaneously contain service costs. Community nurses have experienced similar pressures, with those providing mental health and learning disability services radically reconceptualising the nature of their work to support non-institutional living (Adams et al. 1998). Nurses' work pressure has been further exacerbated by the removal of student labour due to educational changes (United Kingdom Central Council for nursing, midwifery and health visiting (UKCC) 1986). This has resulted in a lower ratio of qualified to unqualified nurses in the NHS and a static number of qualified nurses compared with a previous upward trend of approximately 4 per cent annually since 1976 (Buchan et al. 1998).

The continuing expansion of women's employment has increasingly focused attention on the question of how the caring work traditionally carried out by unpaid women will be accomplished. In particular, how can caring responsibilities be combined with a long-term career? In this paper, we assess the significance of the national context through a comparison of the biographies of career bank managers, male and female, in Britain and Norway. We find that although the (considerably) more family-friendly policies of the Norwegian state do have a positive impact, particularly in somewhat exceptional cases, nevertheless in general in both countries, individuals have difficulties in combining employment with caring and no examples of a ‘two career’ household were found in either country. These findings emphasise the continuing tension between market forces and social reproduction, which has been exacerbated by the erosion of the ‘male breadwinner’ model of family caring and has yet to be resolved in a satisfactory manner.

The past two decades have seen a significant shift in the industrial relations climate throughout Europe. More widespread use of individual contracts and the proliferation of non-standard forms of employment – in particular fixed-term and temporary contracts – have led many commentators to question whether or not loyalty to trade unions and collectivism in general is in serious decline. The workforce in Finland has experienced particularly profound changes over the past decade, due to the economic collapse of the early 1990s which saw unemployment levels soar to over 18 per cent. The purpose of this article is to discuss the challenges of individualisation to the Finnish workforce's attitude to trade unions and collective action, on the basis of questionnaires sent to trade union members. The data collected was supplied by responses from members of Finland's three main trade union confederations.

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).

The paper explores whether key oil and gas companies are expressing awareness of the work–family debate and reports findings from an ongoing three-year study, funded by the ESRC, which provides an account of the work-family interface in relation to the oil and gas industry. Although this paper is informed by our research as a whole, it draws on a specific subset of our data, namely in-depth interviews with human resource personnel in eighteen oil and gas companies (see Table 1). Companies determined who should be interviewed and this varied depending on size, internal functional design (e.g. geographical location of senior staff), and the extent to which the research was seen to be of value. In eight companies, the interviews were conducted with the most senior human resources manager, while in others the personnel interviewed had titles such as ‘employee relations manager’ or ‘support services manager’. American, Canadian, Italian, French, Norwegian and British-owned firms are included. Interviews lasted between one and one-and-a-half hours.

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.

The past two decades have witnessed a trend towards the use of fixed-term and part-time contracts in higher education in the UK, where over a third of routine academic work is now carried out by staff on fixed-term contracts (Ainley 1994). As Kogan et al. (1994: 53) have noted, this increased casualisation of academic labour has been driven by the need for universities and colleges to reduce labour costs. The move towards a more ‘flexible’ and cheaper workforce is largely a response to governmental resource restrictions and the need to cope with increased student numbers (Kogan et al. 1994). In order to cope with financial pressures, universities have increasingly sought to diversify their funding and become more entrepreneurial in attracting income from sources other than the government (Wasser 1990; Ziman 1991). External research grants and contracts play an increasingly important role in the finances of many institutions, with a concomitant rise in the number of researchers employed on fixed-term contracts.

Why do labour market participants with similar capabilities hold different attitudes and perceptions about normal and atypical forms of employment? This is a particular problem for even the most appropriate models of labour market segmentation. Despite claiming to explain variations in the quality of employment/distribution of job rewards, segmentation models have rarely paid attention to the type of labour contract and have instead drawn a contrast between well paid stable employment and poorly paid unstable employment, whether arising across entire industries or within the individual firm (Hunter and MacInnes 1991:53). Attempts to categorise the labour market by employment contract, such as a disadvantaged ‘casual’ sector, are made problematic in the face of studies which have shown workers preferring self-employment or some other temporary contractual status over direct employment throughout a wide range of employment sectors (Hunter and MacInnes 1991; Granger et al. 1995).

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.

The recent syntheses of research on training at work or the education-work relationship have underlined the difficulty of defining their boundaries (Tanguy 1986; Jobert et al. 1995; Raffe 1995). Different themes demarcate the domain including professional integration, training (educational policy, institutional framework and training programmes) and qualifications. The analytical treatment of the subject is also different in Germany, Great Britain and Italy, because each country experiences specific economic circumstances and institutional modalities particular to their respective education systems (Jobert, Marry and Tanguy 1995). Our approach confirms these diagnostics from another direction.

The recent article by Mizen, Bolton and Pole (1999) is a welcome addition to the literature on child labour in contemporary Britain. We agree with the authors that academics have neglected this issue for too long. They are correct to highlight the need for a fuller understanding of children's motivation to work. However, there are a number of points in the article with which we disagree. In responding to it, we hope to stimulate debate on a range of issues on child labour which need to be addressed.

As part of what Mizen and his colleagues refer to as the ‘Paisley Group’ we would suggest that their interpretation of research, including our own, is debatable. In addition, their review is somewhat selective as it excludes some enlightening texts. Our main concern is to question their suggestion that research is heading into a cul de sac.

This paper examines the establishment of National Health Service (NHS) podiatric surgery as a challenge to the dominance of medicine and its control over the provision of foot surgical services. The practice of surgery by non-medically qualified podiatrists and its integration within mainstream NHS service provision is evaluated as possible evidence of the diminishing authority of medicine in determining the scope and boundaries of paramedical practice and in successfully resisting encroachment from other ‘health professions’. The centrality of medical power in the organisation of healthcare has characterised much of the existing sociological literature on the health professions, most evident within the professional dominance perspective (Freidson 1970a, 1970b). This approach, and its variants, particularly highlight the autonomous control of medicine over its knowledge base, clients and clinical activities, in addition to its hegemonic position in relation a range of subordinate healthcare occupations (Freidson 1970a, 1970b; Johnson 1972; Larkin 1983, 1988, 1993, 1995; Wolinsky 1993).

Christel Lane and Reinhard Bachmann (eds), Trust within and Between Organizations, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998, £45.00, xiii+334 pp.

Patrick Maclagan, Management and Morality. A Developmental Perspective, London: Sage, £45.00, paper £14.99, vii+212 pp.

Trust seems a useful test-case for business morality. According to Fukuyama it is the opposite of contractual relations, as it is ‘based on commonly shared norms . . . about deep “value” questions like the nature of God or justice, but it may also encompass secular norms, like professional standards and codes of behaviour.’ (Fukuyama 1995: 26).

Kathleen Barker and Kathleen Christensen (eds.), Contingent Work: American Employment Relations in Transition, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1998, paper £14.95, viii+350 pp.

S. A. Herzenberg, J. A. Alic and H. Wial, New Rules for a New Economy: Employment and Opportunity in Postindustrial America, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1998, $26.50, xiii+216 pp.

Without question work systems in the United States are undergoing a far-reaching transformation that is altering the terms, conditions and perceptions of employment. The breaking down of career ladders, growth of outsourcing, and rise in the number of workers holding ‘non-standard’ work contracts suggest that employers are adopting a variety of strategies to organise and manage work. But while there is general agreement that workplace transformation is underway, there is little consensus about what it means. The two books reviewed here are welcome additions to a growing body of research that is aimed at documenting change in work systems, and addressing the public-policy implications of this change. Both volumes are written for policy analysts as well as for academic researchers. The result is an approach that will be accessible to readers with more general interests in employment policy.

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.

Andrew Herod (ed.), Organizing the Landscape. Geographical Perspectives of Labor Unionism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, £15.95, xix+372 pp.

Eric Lee, The Labour Movement and the Internet. The New Labour Internationalism, London: Pluto Press, 1997, £14.99, xi+212 pp.

Gregory Mantsios (ed.), A New Labour Movement for the New Century, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998, $24.00, xix+353 pp.

Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World. Unions in the International Economy, London: Verso, 1997, £14.00, 342 pp.

Peter Waterman, Globalization, Social Movements and the New Internationalisms, London: Mansell, 1998, £55.00, 302 pp.

Torn by internationalization of finance and production, unable to adapt to networking of firms and individualization of work, and challenged by the degendering of employment, the labor movement fades away as a major source of social cohesion and workers' representation (Castells 1997: 354).

The new unionism

More or less all the books under review refer to a ‘new labour internationalism’ as a significant break from the dominant post-war trend of nation-statist unionism. Thus for Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World, ‘If capitalism is now more global than ever, so too is the working class it begets’ (308). The transnational nature of contemporary capitalism is seen to point towards new international trade-union strategies but also the old notion of an international working class. In a similar vein, Edna Bonaich argues that ‘Rapidly globalizing capital obviously calls forth the need for a global labor movement’ (Journal of World Systems Research 1998: 3). In all of this we see a certain degree of inexorability with capitalism ‘begetting’ social classes, and an ‘obvious’ development of a global labour movement. We should probably recall an earlier debate in the late 1970s around the ‘new international division of labour’ and the call for workers' organisations to mirror the growing transnational corporations (TNCs). Then as now we cannot base our assumptions on any inevitabilisms. Having said that, this time around there does seem to be considerable pressure and more favourable disposition towards the creation of transnational labour strategies.