Social mobility research has consistently demonstrated that a strong link exists between an individual's social class origins and their social class destination. Yet, in absolute terms, the relationship between class origins and destinations does appear to be weaker now than it was in the past. There has been a increase in the numbers of those of all class origins entering higher-level service class occupations, and a decrease in those entering manual employment. However, while this would appear to be evidence of a high degree of fluidity in the class structure, these patterns can largely be explained by changes in the occupational structure: the expansion of non-manual occupations while manual ones have contracted (Goldthorpe 1987:59). When these structural effects are controlled for by looking at relative mobility rates, it is clear that there has been virtual stability in such rates over time. A relationship between origins and destinations is still in evidence (Goldthorpe 1987; Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992). The relationship between class origins and destinations has therefore become widely established in social mobility research, and as a result, the emphasis is now moving towards explaining how these trends are created (Saunders 1995; Breen and Goldthorpe 1999).

Kate Purcell, Terence Hogarth and Claire Simm, Whose Flexibility?: The Costs and Benefits of ‘Non-Standard’ Working Arrangements and Contractual Relations, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1999, £13.95, 73 pp.

Ursula Huws, Nick Jagger and Siobhan O'Regan, Teleworking and Globalisation, Institute for Employment Studies Report 358, 1999, xiii+103 pp.

Many workers find themselves in increasingly vulnerable employment situations: the search for employment and for employment security is a constant concern which is heightened by employers' adoption of certain strategies for numerical flexibility. At the same time new telecommunication technologies are being used to change the nature of the labour process and the spatial organisation of work, as employers relocate work to more favourable environments with new, cheaper and more pliable workforces. In Whose Flexibility? the authors seek to discover what factors influence the use and selection of strategies for the enhancement of numerical flexibility, and what costs and benefits are associated with such strategies in the British context. In this thoughtful piece of research the authors do not view potential gains and losses merely in terms of financial savings. Their work is strengthened by the acknowledgement of the need to consider the impact on the ‘psychological contract’, that is the informal arrangements and commitments employers and employees might reasonably expect of each other, such as staying late to complete a job in return for flexibility with childcare.

Many people in Australia are concerned with the apparent trend towards the increased casualisation of the Australian workforce. In a recent paper published in this journal, for example, Campbell and Burgess (2001) reported on survey-based figures on the extent of casualisation collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Australia's central data collection agency. These data indicate that persons employed on a casual basis represented 26.9 per cent of the workforce in 1998, double the level sixteen years earlier.

Desmond King, In the Name of Liberalism: Illiberal Social Policy in the United States and Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, xiii+340 pp.

Sanford M. Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997, xii+345 pp.

These are two substantial and important books. They cover different terrain, but both make significant observations about the nature of social policy and the environment in which it is determined. Desmond King's work examines the framing of the notion of citizenship in the context of the American and British states' claims to be liberal and democratic polities. In particular he investigates the manner in which ‘out’ groups in these two societies have been, and continue to be, treated differentially. Sanford Jacoby's concern is to trace the history of welfare capitalism in the United States and to assess how the various paternalistic models of the workplace were affected by and, in turn, how they affected, the evolution of state provided welfare and the development of the organised labour movement.

In a recent article in Work, Employment & Society (Campbell and Burgess 2001), we examine the position of Australia in cross-national comparisons of temporary employment. Conventional analyses join together data on ‘temporary’ employment from varied OECD countries with Australian data on ‘casual’ employment. Australia appears in such analyses as a dramatic example of a high level and a rapid trend of growth in temporary employment, perched at the top of a ranking of these countries, just below the more familiar case of Spain. In assessing the value of such comparisons, we review both the distinctive category of casual and the distinctive practice of casual employment. We warn that the category of casual in Australia is not a direct equivalent to the categories used for temporary employment in other countries. Nevertheless, we conclude that a cross-national comparison incorporating casual employment is possible and indeed useful, e.g. in uncovering different dynamics behind national patterns of growth in non-permanent waged work.

Temporary employment agency working has increased dramatically in recent years. Labour Force Survey figures reveal that the number of workers employed on a temporary basis through agencies increased in the UK from 50,000 in 1984 to 250,000 in 1999, by which point temporary agency staff (temps) constituted 1.1 per cent of the employed workforce (Casey 1988: 490; Department of Trade and Industry 1999: 109). Studies which have considered UK employers' use of different forms of labour have revealed a range of reasons as to why firms seek recourse to employment agencies (McGregor and Sproull 1991; Hunter and MacInnes 1991; Cully et al. 1999). The 1998 UK Workplace Employee Relations Survey, for example, has indicated that of workplaces using agency staff, 59 per cent were doing so to provide short-term cover. Adjusting the workforce in line with demand was cited as a reason by 40 per cent of firms, and covering for maternity leave by 22 per cent of users (Cully et al. 1999:37).

Pepper Culpepper and David Finegold (eds.), The German Skills Machine: Sustaining Comparative Advantage in a Global Economy, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999, £56.00, xii+482 pp.

Peter Raggatt and Steve Williams, Government, Markets and Vocational Qualifications: An Anatomy of Policy, London and New York: Falmer Press, 1999, £16.99, x+220 pp.

These two books complement each other in their studies of vocational education and training (VET) policy. Current German policy debate, like English VET policy in the 1980s, is haunted by the ghost of the apparently perfect performance of German VET in the 1980s and its role in producing a high skills high wage economy. The benefits of paradise were always unevenly distributed to ‘outsiders’, but the rewards for German male skilled workers were impressive. I wonder though whether the almost universal approbation of the German VET system at that time, by policy makers and commentators from other countries, was at least partly influenced by the fact that it was a system where those interested in VET were themselves considered important. They were not pushed to the margins as so often happens elsewhere. Here was a system where those interested in VET were treated with respect.

Kenneth Lunn and Ann Day (eds.), History of Work and Labour Relations in the Royal Dockyards, London, Mansell, 1999, hardback £49.95, xxi+1200 pp.

David Howell, Respectable Radicals: Studies in the Politics of Railway Trade Unionism, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999, hardback £55, viii+1446 pp.

At a time when over a thousand dockyard jobs are threatened at Rosyth and there is growing evidence that whatever skilled workforce the railway industry once possessed is rapidly being eroded, it is vital to reflect on these important industries and the quality of their work and labour relations. Both railways and the Royal Dockyards represent special workplaces with their own norms, values and traditions. Employment in each occupies an uneasy occupational border country between the civilian and the military. In each loyalty was expected, whether it be to king and country or railway company and director. Royal Dockyard communities lived under the shadow of naval discipline and at times threat of impressment into the monarch's service. Similarly, early literature on the rail industry made frequent reference to the ‘railway army’, and newly established companies drew heavily on military personnel and organisational models in disciplining their nascent workforces. Staff were organised by ranks, each with their own uniform, and railway officers enjoyed messes and their rulebook was the equivalent of King's Regulations (Gourvish 1972; Revill 1989).

The UK, like most developed economies has an ageing population. In 1901 nearly one in seven were aged 50 and over but by 1997 this had doubled to one in three (ONS 1999) a trend that will continue over the next twenty years (Scase 1999:13). Accompanying this shift has been a burgeoning debate on the roles and involvement of older people in society and the economy (Laslett 1996; Phillipson 1998). Many of the themes in this debate, however, are contradictory. For example, self-definitions and cultural constructs associated with older people often emphasise growing old as liberating.

Howard Glennerster, British Social Policy since 1945. Second edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Hardback £55.00, paperback £15.99, xi+260 pp.

Janie Percy-Smith (ed.) Policy Responses to Social Exclusion. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000. Hardback £55.00, paperback £17.99, viii+244 pp.

Peter Taylor-Gooby (ed.), Risk, Trust and Welfare. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000. £16.99, xv+240 pp.

Exactly fifty years ago Richard Titmuss delivered his inaugural lecture as Professor of Social Administration at the London School of Economics, the first such appointment in any British University. His influence was considerable. As Wilding (1995:149) notes,

More than anyone else, Titmuss established social administration as a subject of academic study and as a worthwhile intellectual activity. He exerted an enormous influence on the subject in its formative academic years, and a more than marginal influence on the development of social policy in the world outside the academy.

Jane E. Ferrie, Michael G. Marmot, John Griffiths and Erio Ziglio (eds.), Labour Market Changes and Job Insecurity: A Challenge For Social Welfare and Health Promotion, Copenhagen, Denmark: WHO Regional Publications, European Series, No. 81, 1999, paper, Sw.fr. 52, xiii+252 pp.

Jens Lind and Iver Hornemann Møller (eds.), Inclusion and Exclusion: Unemployment and Non-Standard Employment in Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999, £37.50, x+230 pp.

John Vail, Jane Wheelock and Michael Hill (eds.), Insecure Times: Living and Insecurity in Contemporary Society, London: Routledge, 1999, £16.99, xii+234 pp.

Brendan Burchell, Diana Day, Maria Hudson, David Lapido, Roy Mankelow, Jane P. Nolan, Hannah Reed, Ines C. Wichert and Frank Wilkinson, Job Insecurity and Work Intensification: Flexibility and the Changing Boundaries of Work, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1999, paper, £13.95, v+74 pp.

Fernando G. Benavides and Joan Benach, Precarious Employment and Health-Related Outcomes in the European Union, Dublin: European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, 1999, EUR 16, xii+61 pp.

Labour market change – specifically increases in labour market flexibility, insecurity and precariousness – and its wider socio-economic impact is the common theme of all the texts considered here. Vail et al., Insecure Times explore the concept of insecurity within a broader theoretical frame, examining theories of capitalism, the state and various dimensions of social policy as well as labour market developments and employment policy. Lind and Møller's Inclusion and Exclusion focuses on the relationship between labour markets, their structuring and employment and welfare policies in four European countries. The focus here is on social inclusion and exclusion, and on the different policy responses which have been adopted or advocated in different societal and political contexts. Insecure Times and Inclusion and Exclusion will both give much food for thought to the general interest reader and to students of sociology and social policy, and their needs are discussed in the second part of this review below.

A. Danford, Japanese Management Techniques and British Workers, London: Mansell, 1998, hardback £55.00, xv+248 pp.

P. Garrahan and J. Ritchie, East Asian Direct Investment in Britain, London: Frank Cass, 1999, paperback £16.50, 242 pp.

A visitor touring in South Wales, by train or car, is quickly confronted by Wales' most easterly town, Newport. When arriving at Newport, the visitor passes one of the three integrated steel works of Corus Group (formerly British Steel). As the train leaves Newport, a huge new electronics complex looms, owned by LG, the Korean electronics combine. The fate of these plants represents a rather unique British manufacturing crisis. It seemed like the steel plant had won a reprieve from closure, but its longer-term future is now bleak. The LG complex, meanwhile, is an embarrassing white elephant. Built with enormous government subsidy it has been the source of national (Welsh) and national (UK) controversy over the levels of subsidy and the opportunity costs. While one plant in the complex, producing computer monitors, is up and running, the majority of the complex built to house semi-conductor manufacture has never been used. Moreover, with LG's semi-conductor interests worldwide being taken over by Hyundai (which has a similar plant lying idle in Scotland), utilisation of the plant in the near future seems a distant prospect.

Dorothy Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State and the Logic of the Market, University of California Press, 1999, £40.00, paper £14.95, xvii+444 pp.

Brian Owensby, Intimate Ironies: Modernity and the Making of Middle-Class Lives in Brazil, Stanford University Press, 1999, £27.50, ix+332 pp.

Stephen Alomes, When London Calls: The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1999, £35.00, paper £12.95, xiv+320 pp.

The studies that form the basis for these three books all take a historical and longitudinal approach, with varying foci, on processes which can be seen to be entwined with globalisation, marketisation and internationalisation as they explore identity formation in response to changing world and economic conditions. Within these global processes each book demonstrates the scope for individual action within three rather different institutional contexts. In this review I focus on a single theme to examine the manner in which the ties of family and personal networks impact upon the ability of these actors to forge their identities. I begin by providing an extremely brief introduction to each of the studies as a context for exploring how we can see the role of family networks and personal connections as significant influences on the experiences of the actors involved.