Susan Corby and Geoff White (eds.), Employee Relations in the Public Services: Themes and Issues, London: Routledge 1999, £60.00, paper £19.99, x+238 pp.

Stephen Bach, Lorenzo Bordogna, Guiseppe della Rocca and David Winchester (eds.), Public Service Employment Relations in Europe: Transformation, Modernization or Inertia?, London: Routledge, 1999, £60.00, paper £20.99, xi+244 pp.

Any text on, or review of, labour regulation in the public sector has traditionally begun by remarking on the relative historical neglect of the subject compared to the allegedly more exciting world of its private-sector equivalent. State employment relationships have often been characterised by a number of relatively exceptional features, many of which have not tended to enthuse researchers. These traits include: the abiding, but complicating, role, of political contingency; highly bureaucratic and introverted institutional regulation; politically quiescent labour relations; and virtual absence of management as an independent actor. Additionally, many state workers are classed as public servants to whom restrictive and unpliable forms of legal status may apply, which can in turn affect such workers' scope to organise collectively.

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.

Julia O'Connell Davidson, Prostitution, Power and Freedom, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998, £45, paper £13.95, viii+232 pp.

Lin Lean Lim (ed.), The Sex Sector: the Economic and Social bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia, Geneva: International Labour Organisation, 1998, £19.00 paper, xiii+232 pp.

The huge expansion of the sex industry and corresponding growth of sex worker collectives on a global scale demand new directions in research. Both these books make an invaluable contribution by moving away from sociological preoccupations with identity and by addressing the issues of sex tourism and child prostitution as special cases of more general developments. Both also foreground the economics of prostitution. However, their conceptualisation of this is very different and in other respects too they could not be more dissimilar. One of O'Connell Davidson's main targets is radical feminism, as well as liberal sex workers discourse, yet in bringing marxism and other paradigms to bear on both, she produces an even more powerful indictment of prostitution. Her conceptual rigour is comparable to Truong (1990) but she actually focuses much more directly on prostitute–client transactions and the dynamics of male power than on the political economy and state in which they are embedded. Though her study is based on extensive empirical work in the UK, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, the research is used to elaborate the theoretical argument (cf. Shrage 1994) rather than being the object of analysis. In Lim's survey, by contrast, the comparative data is central to a comprehensive review of prostitution in Southeast Asia. While it lacks theoretical depth, its strengths are empirical detail and the way it highlights similarities and differences within four economies. It steers an intelligent path through the maze of highly charged debates on trafficking and child prostitution, paralleling some of the work being done by sex work activists (Kempadoo and Doezema 1998). Commissioned by the ILO, the survey is also itself symptomatic of a growing international recognition of prostitution as work.

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.