There has been overwhelming interest in the numbers of jobs attributable to the formation and growth of new small firms but comparative silence about their working practices. We offer two novel, inter-linked approaches to thinking about work and employment in small firms. Firstly, we use a methodological approach which takes a household level analysis as a starting point, making gender a foundation stone. Secondly, we use an institutional perspective which focuses on power and power relations. From quantitative and qualitative empirical work with micro-businesses in business services we show that family work can be a vital resource. Yet there can also be severe costs, particularly for the many women who participate in business alongside their husbands as co-owners, employees and unpaid helpers. Gender divisions of labour are, typically, reproduced in traditional fashion. Even when business owners bring in employees from outside the family, relations within the micro-business are not fully market relations. Conflicts arise as business/owners and their employees struggle to manage these partially decommodified relations. The micro-business service sector actually represents a return to traditional ways of organising business by integrating business and household so that the traditional embedding of business and family of in-between pre-modern institutions is reinvented.

Participant observation was undertaken at Button Co., a small manufacturing firm operating in the clothing sector. The paper explores the impact of external structures on shopfloor control and the ways in which skilled dyers, and less skilled despatch workers, were able to shape the effort bargain and practise fiddles. It shows a particular varient of small firm dynamics. Large retailers were important to the success of Button Co. but its broad customer base and niche market meant that it was not subject to a simple large/small firm dependency relationship. Control was fluid rather than imposed. Relations with large firms did impact upon the shopfloor, but not in a determinate way. Informal negotiation between directors and workers over throughput and quality occurred on a daily basis: as such, it provides some support to the view that the process of negotiating orders described by Ram (1994) is not ethnically specific.

The changing nature of work is often supposed to be of consequence for interest formation and political alliances between social classes. Three hypotheses are tested: classes converge due to the deskilling of white-collar work or the upskilling of blue-collar work; lower white-collar workers essentially share the conditions of manual workers; the gender dimension cross-cuts the class dimension. Empirical analyses are carried out on the Swedish Level of Living Surveys in 1968, 1974, 1981 and 1991. The major trend is towards an upskilling, though jobs have not become less monotonous. There are signs of class convergence, e.g., in wages and authority, but sharp differences remain. While class divisions exist for both men and women, gender differences within classes are substantial for physical working conditions and market capacity. For several indicators, lower white-collar workers are exposed to similar conditions as manual workers while men in the highest stratum stand out as the consistently most privileged.

The ‘temp’ industry is one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the United States, though relatively little is known about the operations of its key institutional agents – the temp agencies themselves. In the paper, the restructuring of the temp industry and the role of temporary help agencies as ‘labour market intermediaries’ is critically examined. It is argued that not only is the industry growing at a rapid rate, it is also polarising, as some agencies ‘restructure down’ into the lowest-paid and most exploitative niches of the labour market – where employment instability is a daily phenomenon, while others ‘restructure up’ into increasingly long-term relationships – including ‘on-site’ management deals and ‘insourcing’ agreements – with major corporate clients. Likewise, ‘temping’ is not only becoming more commonplace, but the labour-market and workplace experiences of temporary workers are becoming increasingly heterogeneous. It is apparently in the nature of the industry that both these developments are scarcely ‘visible’, as restructuring down is often associated with ‘backstreet operators’, undocumented workers and unregulated work, while restructuring up draws agencies into increasingly seamless, reflexive and internalised relationships with corporations. The paper traces some of the labour market and organisational implications of these restructuring practices through an examination of the long-established but newly-vibrant temp industry in Chicago.

The proposal to introduce a national minimum wage in Britain has drawn attention to the importance of general systems of wage determination and wage protection for gender equity. Two-thirds of the likely beneficiaries of a national minimum wage are likely to be women and the U.K. government has even identified its minimum wage policy as one of its major measures to promote gender equality. Such awareness of the relationship between wage systems and wage trends is, however, still relatively rare, not only within U.K. debates but also within policy debates across the European Union. As the labour market of every EU country can be shown to be gender segregated, it is extremely unlikely that both differences in systems of wage determination between countries and changes to wage structures would not have consequences for the relative pay of women and men.

Studies of social mobility, in common with sociology in general, should reflect the parameters and concerns of the societies in which they are based. Hence, issues such as the ‘equality of opportunity’ debate, the role played by fundamental changes in political regimes at the end of the Second World War and at the demise of the socialist regimes in eastern Europe, and the effects of high rates of immigration have been built into the basic designs of national mobility studies. This article was sparked by the realisation that rates of unemployment in Northern Ireland, and in the western world generally, rose in the 1980s to levels not experienced since the 1930s. At the time of fieldwork for the Irish mobility study in late 1973/early 1974, male unemployment in Northern Ireland stood at approximately seven percent and was falling (Government of Northern Ireland 1976). By the mid-1980s, however, over twenty-six per cent of male employees in Northern Ireland were claiming unemployment benefit (Department of Economic Development 1984) and the percentage of those claiming benefit was rising.

In 1994 the Office for National Statistics (ONS, then OPCS) com-missioned the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to conduct a wide ranging and zero-based, independent review of official socio-economic classifications (SECs). The first phase of this review concluded that government SECs were still required, but that the existing ones should be replaced by a single, revised, occupationally-based SEC with an explicit conceptual rationale (see Rose 1995a). Subsequently it was decided that this revised SEC should measure employment relations, thus adopting the conceptual base of the class schema produced by John Goldthorpe and his colleagues (see Rose 1996; Rose and O'Reilly 1997: Ch.1; Goldthorpe 1997). However, while validation studies conducted on data collected in the 1980s have concluded that this conceptual base is fundamentally sound, it might be argued that the ‘flexible’ labour market and the emergence of post-Fordist organisations raise questions about whether this is still the case.

The case presented by O'Reilly and Rose for a new scheme of social classes is clearly and persuasively argued; one might almost be convinced of the need for a system of classes. This is not the final word on the new scheme, but the basic ideas seem clear so we may consider its characteristics. The remarks that follow are deliberately critical, focussing on weaknesses of what may be expected to be an important and influential scheme.

Rose and O'Reilly, in their article elsewhere in this issue (1998) and in their recent book (1997), give an account of their construction of a revised set of social classes, a social classification. In this comment I propose to show that they do not achieve what they set out to do, that their attempted justification of their procedure is flawed, that their dependence on definition in terms of economic contractual relations fails to take account of social processes and therefore, and most importantly, that a conceptualisation of British society in terms of social classes is inadequate. Therevision exercise depends, substantially and quite explicitly, on the work of Goldthorpe 1 , so I shall concentrate on the relations between the latter's contribution to the book (Chapter 3 on conceptual and operational issues: Goldthorpe 1997), their own contribution to that volume (Chapter 5 on criterion validation: O'Reilly and Rose 1997) and the present article.

The main problem, as we shall see, is the idea of a social classification. Nothing in the analyses considered demonstrates the existence of social classes; rather the situation is one of a set of criteria that are fairly well inter-related - though not sufficiently well to define a single service relationship/labour contract continuum - and that vary, or are differentially applied, by position in a broader social hierarchy.

I am grateful to Blackburn and Prandy for their responses to the book Constructing Classes (Rose and O'Reilly 1997) and the paper ’Changing Employment Relations...?’ The former reported on progress made by mid-1997 in producing a new official social classification schema for the U.K. As such it offered only an interim version of the proposed new schema. The WES paper, using this interim schema, was intended only as a modest contribution to the debate on labour market ‘flexibility’ and its supposed effects. As is made clear in the conclusions to the paper, we do not regard the data presented there as providing anything other than prima facie evidence that, notwithstanding recent labour market changes, classes can still be distinguished using employment relations criteria. I readily concede that neither the individual level survey data used in the paper nor its very simple analyses could possibly provide conclusive evidence.

U. Huws, S. Podro, E. Gunnarsson, T. Weijers, K. Arvanitaki and V. Trova (1996). Teleworking and Gender, University of Sussex, Brighton: Insititute for Employment Studies, Report 317, paper £22.00, 78 pp.

U. Huws, with S. Podro, E. Gunnarsson, T. Weijers, K. Arvanitaki and V. Trova (1997). Teleworking: Guidelines for Good Practice, University of Sussex, Brighton: Insititute for Employment Studies, Report 329, paper £20.00, 37 pp.

H. Katz (ed.) (1997). Telecommunications: Restructuring Work and Employment Relations Worldwide, Ithaca and London: ILR Press (Cornell University Press), $49.95, 401 pp.

The telecommunications industry has undergone massive change over the last two decades, raising questions about ownership, state intervention, technological change and future patterns of work. Historically, telecommunications companies have been part of the service sector, usually state-owned, and a highly regulated part of the modernising project of the twentieth century. However, beginning in the late 1970s with the elaboration of the neo-liberal political project, telecommunications companies became the object of government attention. They were subject to state re-regulation, as the industry internationalised, and patterns of work organisation began to change. As a consequence of this process of change, it is no longer clear where the boundaries of the industry lie, as telephony and related services become part of a broad-based computing, inform-ation and telecommunications industry (CIT). At the end of the twentieth century, CIT symbolises the advent of the service and consumer society, replacing the emblematic place of the automobile industry in mass production society.

Desmond King, Actively Seeking Work? The Politics of Unemployment and Welfare Policy in the United States and Great Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, £39.95, paper $14.25, xvi1331 pp.

Robert MacDonald (ed.), Youth, the ‘Underclass’ and Social Exclusion, London: Routledge, 1997, paper £13.99, xii1228 pp.

Both of these books deal with issues central to the programme of ‘New Labour’. In their very different ways they have significant contributions to make to the current debate (such as it is!) about welfare to work. MacDonald's collection takes us into the territory of the intellectual debates around the ‘underclass’ that underpin ‘New Labour's’ moral panic about welfare dependency and their crudely Protestant worship of ‘waged labour’ at any price. King's book is different, focusing quite specifically on work-welfare policies in Britain and the U.S. from the 1900s to the 1990s, immediately prior to the dawn of ‘New Labour’.

Maryse Gaudier, Women in the 1980-95 Period: Constraints and Opportunities, Geneva: Institut international d'etudes sociales, Série bibliographique no. 18, 1997, 22.50 Swiss francs, xvii1196 pp.

Teresa Rees, Mainstreaming Equality in the European Union: Education, Training and Labour Market Policies, London: Routledge, 1998, £45.00, paper £14.99, xix1260 pp.

Jill Rubery, Mark Smith, Colette Fagan and Damian Grimshaw, Women and European Employment, London: Routledge, 1998, £50.00, xvii1351 pp.

Each of these books examines the situation of women from a different perspective and asks different questions. Gaudier is primarily concerned with what women themselves are doing and writing; Rees has made a detailed examination of policy making on education and training at the EU level; Rubery et al. are concerned with every aspect of women's position in European labour markets. All are studies which go beyond individual nation states, taking either an international or a European perspective. All are also in some sense reference books as well as texts in that they have useful discreet sections of information or analysis which can be easily accessed. They deal predominantly with the period 1980-1995 and taken together provide some important insights into the complex and contradictory processes which create ‘women's situation’ in the nineties.