Collection: Organisation Studies Collection
As a taster of our publishing on Organisation Studies, we put together a collection of free articles, chapters and open access titles. If you are interested in trying out more content from our Business, Management and Economics Collection, Work in the Global Economy journal or Global Social Challenges themes, ask your librarian to sign up for a free trial.
Organisation Studies Collection
The question of labour turnover has been variously examined across labour and organization studies, but it has not been studied systematically in relation to international migration. In this book we tackle the question of labour turnover (the churning of workers in and out of workplace organizations) from the perspective of migrant labour. Here we build on the critical strands of labour and migration studies to shift our gaze to the social composition of labour (Wright, 2002), focusing on the specific drivers and subjective and social dynamics that link the phenomenon of labour instability to international migration. We consider the relationship between labour migration and turnover as emblematic of the wider effects of the intersectional differentiation of work and employment on workers’ lives and action for change in capitalist societies. Since the pioneering work of Hirschman (1970), the act of workers quitting their job, described as labour mobility or exit, has indeed been countered to worker voice and presented as an individualistic, opportunistic behaviour taken autonomously by workers, as opposed to engaging in labour collective voice over effort bargaining (usually expressed through trade union representation). The tendency to see turnover as a primarily individualistic behaviour can be found especially in the field of industrial relations, which privileges collective forms of action in the workplace, whether or not institutionally mediated by trade unions (see Smith, 2006; Beynon, 1973). In the field of organization and management studies, scholars have tended to favour a functionalist approach both to the question of turnover and the role of migration in flexible labour markets revolving around costs and efficiency issues for employers, while employment studies have concentrated on the impact of labour mobility on collective bargaining in the workplace.
Retail has never existed in a vacuum.
This interdisciplinary volume explores how English commercial, co-operative and charity retailing were shaped by and in turn influenced their social and political environments, from the local and the global, between the late-nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries.
Historians, sociologists, archivists and heritage professionals engage with current debates on the rise of modern business and the decline of the high street, class and credit, professionalisation in the voluntary sector, migration and the end of empire.
This will be a key resource to better understand retail and community in an era defined by social change, shedding new light on the enduring centrality of community relationships to modern retailers.
The idea for this book was originally formulated in March 2020, when, surprised by the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus, we realized there was a unique opportunity to document the impact of the pandemic on people working in various parts of public welfare. The chapter introduces the focus of our field studies on workers who were acting in the shadow of the pandemic – that is, in areas of welfare that are not usually associated with professions and occupations fighting COVID-19 ‘on the front line’. As social scientists who had studied the Swedish public welfare sector for many years, we saw an opportunity to follow challenges and changes in work tasks and working conditions for teachers and healthcare professionals, as well as librarians, day-care staff, government investigators, municipal administrators and many other public sector workers.
At the heart of the sociology of work is the analysis of how work is organized. This is the core focus of this chapter. Key dimensions of work organization are outlined: division of labour, labour process, co-worker relations, control and individual job mobility (career). This allows the chapter to build up to consider different overall types of work organization. Here, a key contrast is shown between work organization along craft principles and Taylorized work organization. Debates are examined regarding how best to characterize work organization in contemporary service work, knowledge work and platform work.
This chapter outlines and discusses the emergence of ‘new actors’ within industrial relations. Such actors include civil society organizations, law firms, employment agencies, employer forums and other bodies outside a traditional focus on employers, workers and unions, and the state. The chapter contextualizes these actors with the traditional actors involved in the management of the employment relationship. The label ‘new’ can be applied to such actors (which can be individuals, organizations, institutions or movements), which either did not used to have much of a role within traditional industrial relations or did have one but were neglected. Therefore, the chapter argues that these ‘new actors’ play an increasingly significant role in the employment relationship.
