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
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.
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.
