Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
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What I need to discuss in greater detail, for the purposes of this book, is working-class formation. After all, the key theoretical argument put forward in it for the analysis of strikes is that they facilitate working-class formation. So far, I have not addressed this issue. In this context, it is worth turning to Althusser, who argues that there are roughly two different conceptions of working-class formation, which differ in terms of their sequencing.
This chapter seeks to convey the growing coherence in the reforms being advanced across the policy and administration of social security and employment services, but also how the particular partisan preferences of the Conservatives hampered development of a more comprehensive system of labour activation.
A more repressive approach to claimants moved to the fore, alongside the championing of enterprise and employability as the means to better organise the state’s role in managing the labour reserve. A strident socially conservative discourse also disparaged unemployed and non-employed claimants, but more repressive activation measures remained exclusive in targeting unemployed claimants.
Employment programmes were remade to encode a focus on individual employability, and as the decade progressed ministers embarked on a renewed push to control unemployed benefit claimants by imposing new requirements to engage in active job search (Peck, 2001). Accompanying these developments was a reconfiguration of the governance of employment programmes with the roll out of employer-dominated Training and Enterprise Councils (Jones, 1999). With these reforms a conservative and emergent market-liberal orientation permeated labour market policy and governance.
In Part I of this volume, I argued that there is a normative foundation for labour studies, which consists in the assumption that class domination is an obstacle to human flourishing. Furthermore, I problematized how scientific knowledge production is implicated in capitalist class domination, and I criticized the proponents of the PRA for not sufficiently recognizing the relevance of class relations in their attempts to develop a framework for empirical research. I argued that it is impossible to assess whether union activities improve the lot of workers without considering how they affect class relations of forces. All of this calls for firmly linking global labour studies in general, and strike research in particular, with class theory. This is what I do in this part of the book. Drawing upon authors writing about class theory from a Marxist angle and about questions of ontology, epistemology and methodology from a critical realist perspective, I take a somewhat irreverent approach. I build an argument that is my own, but that is still indebted to ideas that I have inherited from these other authors. I proceed in this part by systematically developing the concept of class. In this chapter, I discuss the ontological question of what kind of entity it refers to. I contrast two different conceptions, one centred on socioeconomic resources, and the other on identity, and explain how far they subscribe to a form of material and ideational reductionism, respectively. As an alternative, I present a critical-realist, materialist conception of class that highlights its intransitive dimension and the fact that it is an effect of the organization of work.
Governments around the world have been managing the Great Crisis by adopting the politics of austerity. Public spending cuts tend to have drastic effects on workers because they usually translate into social wages being slashed. They are often particularly harmful to people employed in the public sector who may be faced with redundancies, worsening working conditions and direct wage cuts. Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that large, disruptive strikes have been occurring frequently in non-industrial settings in recent years. Complementing Silver’s point that labour unrest travels when industries relocate, it can be observed that in many countries, militancy in the public and service sectors has been pronounced, sometimes more pronounced than in manufacturing. In various contexts, public and service sector unions take a leading role in their respective labour movements – and the workers involved do not conform with Hyman’s image of the striker from the 1970s, that is, the White, middle-aged male miner. In this chapter, I map labour disputes from around the world that have been taking place in the public and service sectors during the conjuncture of crisis. I take inspiration from my colleagues Franziska Müller, Simone Claar, Manuel Neumann and Carsten Elsner, who have mapped African renewable energy policies (Müller et al, 2020) – and from Silver’s approach in Forces of Labor (2003), where she uses a dataset based on newspaper coverage of strikes to identify patterns of labour unrest. Mapping should here be understood in a metaphorical sense, that is, as a qualitative research technique that creates systematic but heavily simplified and ‘flat’ representations of multi-dimensional objects, which are mostly linguistic. For example, mapping can take the form of a table where large numbers of cases are grouped according to patterns. Due to the simplicity of these representations, mapping is well-suited for producing the contextualizations that incorporated comparisons require. It allows one to cover geographical areas with large extensions.
This book provides an account of the evolution of social security and employment policy and governance in Britain between 1973 and 2023. It explains how this remaking of policy and governance shaped, and was shaped by, the transformation of the labour market and power of claimants and workers.
Advancing a class-centred explanation the text situates contemporary working age active labour market policy as the contingent outcome of a long struggle over curtailment of labour autonomy and the challenges arising from policy ‘success’ for securing social cohesion, state legitimacy and better economic conditions for growth.
As I focus on processes of class formation outside manufacturing, it makes sense to examine how the division of labour across sectors has been developing around the globe. I want to assess whether my focus on service and public sector work is justified – and whether my research heuristic captures relevant developments. The ILO is collecting and aggregating data on the size of the three sectors of the global economy – agriculture, industry and services – which can be used for this purpose. The figures refer to the number of people employed or self-employed in each sector. Undoubtedly, there are questions worth asking about the validity of the ILO data. The categories used are based on the empiricist assumption that the sectoral location of any worker can be read off from the ‘main activity’ of the business unit where they work. Following the logic of the ILO, the high-level asset manager working for a hedge fund, the independent business lawyer advising her for hefty fees and the janitor cleaning both of their offices and earning the minimum wage are all working in the service sector. And a similar point can be made about reliability. Data are gathered from all corners of the world and from a great number of sources. Nevertheless, I contend that the ILO figures still have a use value if one is clear about the fact that they provide a very rough sketch and not a fine-grained picture. The data are available in the form of absolute and relative numbers.
Karl Marx famously argued that the historical emergence of the working class as a collective actor resulted from acts of resistance against the continuous extension of the working day, which occurred in the context of the Industrial Revolution and was driven by capitalist competition. In an age where parts of the world experience sustained processes of deindustrialization, this raises the question of what happens to working classes when the factory gates are shut for good. It is possible to address this issue by resorting to strike research and focusing on the service and public sectors. Accordingly, the research question addressed in this book is this: What are the class effects of non-industrial strikes – or how far do they contribute to working-class formation? The author addresses it by taking three steps. First, he shows that the existing global labour studies literature insufficiently engages with class theory; second, he addresses this shortcoming by conceptualizing class and class formation from a critical-realist and materialist angle; and third, he conducts an incorporated comparison of non-industrial strike action around the globe in the age of the Great Crisis by (a) mapping 387 strikes in the service and public sectors from 56 countries and autonomous territories and (b) by zooming in on the railway strikes in Germany, the junior doctors’ strikes in Britain and the general strikes against austerity and the feminist general strikes in Spain.
Karl Marx famously argued that the historical emergence of the working class as a collective actor resulted from acts of resistance against the continuous extension of the working day, which occurred in the context of the Industrial Revolution and was driven by capitalist competition. In an age where parts of the world experience sustained processes of deindustrialization, this raises the question of what happens to working classes when the factory gates are shut for good. It is possible to address this issue by resorting to strike research and focusing on the service and public sectors. Accordingly, the research question addressed in this book is this: What are the class effects of non-industrial strikes – or how far do they contribute to working-class formation? The author addresses it by taking three steps. First, he shows that the existing global labour studies literature insufficiently engages with class theory; second, he addresses this shortcoming by conceptualizing class and class formation from a critical-realist and materialist angle; and third, he conducts an incorporated comparison of non-industrial strike action around the globe in the age of the Great Crisis by (a) mapping 387 strikes in the service and public sectors from 56 countries and autonomous territories and (b) by zooming in on the railway strikes in Germany, the junior doctors’ strikes in Britain and the general strikes against austerity and the feminist general strikes in Spain.
Considering my findings so far, it is only plausible to assume that there is a broader trend towards or against class formation if it also possible to show, with the help of more fine-grained case studies at the national levels, that strikes have expansive effects. If this does not turn out to be the case, one can indeed argue that the Castellsian claim holds. I start my case studies with Germany, which is still a country with a comparably strong industrial base: More than a quarter of the workforce is employed in the sector. It is not just that industrial employment is significantly higher than in Britain and Spain, but exceeds the European and the global averages, which were 22.1 and 21.7 per cent, respectively, in 2020 (see Figure 5.1). If one presumes that there is a strong link between the prevalence of industrial work and strike activity, Germany should be at the forefront of labour struggles. But this is not borne out by the numbers. Indeed, the country has the lowest figures of the three countries, Britain is in the middle, and Spain comes out on top (see Figure 5.3 and Table 5.3). And in recent years, strike activity has been more pronounced in the service and public sectors than in industry in Germany, at least in terms of the absolute numbers of strikes (Frindert et al, 2022: 4). It is more plausible to assume that the figures for strike incidence reflect the dominant regimes of labour relations in the three countries, which correspond to the three varieties of capitalism (see Behrens et al, 2004: 19). After all, coordinated market economies are known for corporatist labour relations, which are designed to prevent confrontations through consultation and negotiation.
The gender pay gap is economically irrational and yet stubbornly persistent.
Focusing on the UK finance industry which is known for its gender pay disparity, this book explores the initiatives to fix gendered inequities in the workplace. Rachel Verdin crafts a unique framework, weaving extensive organizational data with women's lived experiences. Interviews uncover gaps in pay transparency, obstacles hindering workplace policies and the factors that are stalling progress for the future.
This is an invaluable resource that offers key insights into gender equality and EDI measures shaped by legal regulations as well as corporate-driven initiatives.
