The worsening income disparity in Singapore is threatening the legitimacy of the Developmental State. In the attempt to address the widening income gap, the government has prescribed "productivity enhancement and skills upgrading" as the primary means towards building an inclusive society. Against this backdrop, this case study examined the upward mobility of low-wage workers in the unarmed private security sector by interrogating the interactions among the state, employers, and workers. The study drew upon Bourdieu's Praxeological analysis to investigate the causal mechanism underlying their actions and rationale and the reasons embedded in their reciprocal relationships in their interpretation and facilitation of upward mobility of low-wage workers. The findings revealed the existence of institutional and circumstantial conditions that have impeded the upward mobility of lowwage employees in the security sector. These conditions reflect a deep set of culturally- and historically-constructed dispositions of a developmental state such as economic primacy, pro-business mindset and self-reliance. The very same attitudinal, institutional, and circumstantial factors that have contributed to Singapore's economic success have also led to the immobility of low-wage security workers. As shown in this study, the uncovering of the visible and the invisible forces that have impeded the upward mobility of low-wage workers highlights the need to explain the hidden predispositions embedded within the actors' interactions. Finally, the thesis argues that an multi-disciplinary macro-mesomicro integrated approach of analysing the relational positioning of actors can enhance the Praxeological analysis by providing a balanced, yet critical, evaluation of a socio-economic phenomenon leading to a practical course of actions to improve current practices.

While there is strong evidence that longstanding systemic weaknesses in the British economy continue to lead to negative strategic, skills and employment outcomes across much of British industry, there has in recent years been a notable lack of empirical research in the skills and employment relations fields aimed at examining the potential for upskilling or 'employment upgrading' to be achieved for general workers. It is apparent that issues of political economy and in particular the relationship between institutional contexts, competitive performance and skills/employment outcomes at sector level have been largely neglected. This thesis seeks to partly fill this gap by presenting data from a comparative case study of the English and Irish dairy processing industries, the central focus of which was an examination of the consequences for company strategies, employee skills, employment and wage levels of the overriding emphasis on the promotion of competition and efficiency and the lack of a strong industrial policy in the former, and in contrast the existence of a strategic and resource intensive industrial policy in the latter. This research provides an ideal opportunity to address two issues of current theoretical concern, namely the potential for an industrial policy to facilitate upskilling and debates regarding the advantages and disadvantages of different 'varieties of capitalism'. In general terms, the industrial policy context in England was found to inhibit investment in product development and in particular moves by processors in to higher value, advanced market niches, with negative consequences for employee skills and comparatively low wages resulting. However these outcomes were to some extent mitigated by the presence in the UK industry of a number of high-investing foreign multinationals who undertook very substantial new product development, thereby facilitating some notable upskilling for production workers. In Ireland, while significant limitations in both the nature and extent of impact were identified, the 'benign' industrial policy context was found to support processors in moving into advanced product markets, and consequently underpinned the creation of substantial opportunities for upskilling alongside a high standard of living for production operatives. However skills outcomes at workplace level were found to be heavily contingent on a number of different factors, with upskilling not found to be either an automatic or likely consequence of a move up market. In addition, the fact that vocational training in the industry continued to be of a predominantly informal, on-the-job nature was found to create significant tensions and lead to dissatisfaction on the part of production operatives. This research demonstrates the general value of the adoption of a supportive/strategic industrial policy in terms of the potentially positive consequences resulting for strategy, skills and employment outcomes. However it also highlights how the potential of such a policy to facilitate upskilling is limited, being heavily influenced/determined by the structural makeup and key characteristics and trends within particular sectors and product markets. In addition, the need to address broader systemic issues relating to work organisation, the labour process and the nature of vocational training systems is emphasised. More broadly, the findings highlight the problematic nature of the central theoretical conclusion and policy recommendation from the varieties of capitalism literature, that liberal market economies like the UK should accentuate the deregulated/fluid nature of capital, labour and product markets and focus attention on activities/sectors dominated by 'radical' as opposed to 'incremental' innovation; and in contrast arguably demonstrate the need for and potential of the development of thick institutional structures and substantial industry support measures, even in 'traditional' sectors such as dairy.

Using theoretical and empirical approaches, this thesis asks whether skilled and unskilled labour complement or substitute one another in production. We primarily investigate whether an increase in the proportion of workers with skills would raise or lower demand for those who remain unskilled. A secondary issue is the role of factor prices in labour demand. To study the role of factor prices, we estimate labour demand elasticities and Alien elasticities of substitution between capital and up to five occupations in South Africa. We supplement firmlevel data with household survey information and confirm theoretically that the elasticities can be estimated from a cost function under non-constant returns to scale. We show that separable disaggregated inputs can be used to find aggregate elasticities: more skilled and less skilled aggregates are p-complements, so a fall in skilled wages would lead to a rise in demand for less skilled labour. Disaggregated estimates suggest unskilled workers are p-complements with semi-skilled workers but p-substitutes with skilled/artisanal labour. We investigate the effects of a rise in skill supply on the relatively unskilled by estimating Hicks elasticities of complementarity and factor price. Aggregated estimates suggest more skilled and less skilled labour are q-complements, so an exogenous rise in the supply of skilled labour would raise demand for less skilled labour. Disaggregated estimates suggest skilled/artisanal and unskilled labour are q-complements while semi-skilled and unskilled labour are q-substitutes. The results allow for imperfectly elastic product demand and rigid wages. Using an endogenous growth model, we show technological progress is skill-biased in the South if it is in the North, resulting in rising wage inequality in developing countries. Assuming skilled and unskilled labour are perfect substitutes, we model expanded educational access as it adds relatively educated cohorts to the labour market. A rising skill composition causes accelerated skill-biased technological change and wage inequality. Relaxing the assumption of perfect substitutability, a one-off rise in skill supply only raises wage inequality if the elasticity of substitution is high, higher than existing empirical estimates.