This thesis is primarily an anthropological and historical study of transformations of labour regimes in Macedonia within the context of a changing political economy. This process can largely be situated in the “transition” from a socialist to a market-based economic model; a process which was never only about transforming the “economic” but touched upon every intimate aspect of people's lives. It is through these changes, and the reconceptualization of what work ought to be about, that we can explore larger questions of class identity, alienation, morality, personhood and the operations of power and social reproduction in contemporary Macedonian society. As such, this thesis is offered as a contribution to the traditional, yet, in the case of Macedonia, under-researched, themes of social and economic anthropology. My primary fieldsite and object of investigation, is the small township of Shtip, in eastern Macedonia, where I investigate the changing role and social status of industrial workers in the national economy, and the everyday working lives of garment labourers in one of Shtip's largest garment factories. The historical chapters of this thesis analyse the making of an industrial working class within socialist Yugoslavia, and the subsequent attempts at unmaking the values, social relations and forms of personhood, that grew up within the specifics of Yugoslav socialism. I approach “class” through the indeterminate interplay of social, cultural and economic factors, and highlight the enduring cultural importance of embedded, relational forms of personhood. As I move towards more current events, and particularly the ethnographic chapters, I focus more strongly on the responses of industrial workers to such changes. I deal not only with specific practices, but also with questions of the “imagination”, or how workers, experience, and reflect on these wider changes in ways that keep open the possibility of rearranging social relations at the work place, and beyond. In doing do, I propose that struggles over the definition of personhood, rather than class conflict, are at the forefront of debates about what work ought to be about. Also, I suggest that the outcome of these struggles has not been to challenge subordination and social inequality in itself, but to challenge the specific kinds of inequality and subject categories introduced by the transition to a neoliberal market economy (Dunn 2004).

This thesis explores the migratory experience mainly of Tunisian and Romanian workers in the agricultural informal economy of Sicily (Italy), based on observation and 30 semi-structured interviews. Starting from the reasons behind the decision to migrate and the expectations towards their migratory experience, this thesis argues that family’s needs are central motivational factors for the majority of the people who were part of my study and that the migratory experience tends to transform conventional gendering and parenting roles. The thesis also investigates the strategies used by Tunisian and Romanian migrants to enter the Italian territory and to be recruited in the agricultural sector. My data suggested that social capital (or the lack of it) and social networks are essential resources to enter the Italian territory and its labour market and to remain active within it. Furthermore, the thesis claims that the interaction between the widespread informal employment in Southern Europe and discriminating forms of citizenship creates a paradoxical situation where newly European Romanian workers have more opportunity to negotiate with employers within the informal economy, whereas non-European people must seek contractual work within the formal labour market to justify their immigration status, making them more vulnerable to exploitation by deceitful employers. For this reason an imaginary continuum line has been developed in the last two chapters of the thesis to highlight how discriminatory citizenship status interacts with the informal labour economy of the agricultural sector of Sicily, exacerbating unequal power relations and labour exploitation. By stretching the concept of the ‘camp’ developed by Agamben (1998), the informal economy will be considered as a dimension where people’s rights are severely undermined. The thesis nonetheless asserts that recognition of human dignity and human rights offer a form of utopian critique that might be considered positive as it stands outside the limitations of national forms of citizenship and points to more inclusive ideas of global citizenship.

The aim of my thesis is to investigate workers’ reactions to transnational market reform in a Soviet-era factory in the Republic of Moldova. The thesis finds that there are varying, blurred responses of contestation and consent to market modernisation in the context of one factory, the Rezina Cement Plant of Egrafal Group Ltd., one of Moldova’s first major European transnational-corporate (TNC) private enterprises. Language plays a critical role in workers’ responses, since language is important to Egrafal Ltd.’s goal of market integration and capitalist labour reform. However, corporate language expectations frequently clash with the language that was previously embedded in Moldova’s industrial workscape. As a result, the thesis argues that workers adopt, resist or modify factory reforms through what I call linguistic styles or situational performative modes linked with ideas of modernity, markets and mutuality. The thesis goes on to argue that employees’ spatial status location in the plant, irrespective of job skill and income, corresponds to employees’ differing linguistic modalities and differing tendencies towards protest and accommodation in response to factory restructuring. Workers in the top strata of the factory’s Administration Building speak multiple languages, long for cosmopolitan lifestyles and benefit from high integration into corporate-market structures. Many achieved job mobility in the plant since socialism and now accommodate to capitalism and corporate styles through linguistic codeswitching. The middle strata of ethno-linguistic minorities in Administration’s laboratory and the lower strata on the shop floor lack corporate-backed linguistic capital and are on the fringe of modernisation; both are highly job insecure and protest capitalist change by way of what appears to be traditional language usage, but is in fact a contemporary response to liberal-economic change. This finding leads the study to conclude that workers’ fragmented linguistic-based reactions to market reform do not entail real protectionist collectivism, as Polanyi would have envisioned (Polanyi 1944, 150), nor enduring moral-economic protest along the lines of E.P. Thompson (1971). This is for the very reason of workers’ competing modernist longings and job insecurity – alienating workers from each other whilst drawing them back to local ties – which effectively keeps workers in perpetual oscillation between markets and mutuality.

Η εργασία αυτή παρουσιάζει μια εμπειρική ανάλυση για τις επιπτώσεις της μετανάστευσης στα οικονομικά μεγέθη της Ελλάδας. Εξετάζουμε τις επιπτώσεις για την απασχόληση, την συμμετοχή στο εργατικό δυναμικό, την ανεργία και τους μισθούς. Ανάλογες μελέτες έχουν γίνει και σε άλλες χώρες και τα αποτελέσματα δείχνουν να μην υπάρχει σημαντική επίδραση της μετανάστευσης σε αυτά τα μεγέθη. Χρησιμοποιήσαμε τρεις μεθόδους εκτιμήσεων, με σκοπό να συγκρίνουμε τα αποτελέσματά μας με την διεθνή βιβλιογραφία και να πάρουμε πιο αμερόληπτες εκτιμήσεις. Τα αποτελέσματά μας συμφωνούν με τα γενικά ευρήματα της βιβλιογραφίας και δείχνουν ότι και στην Ελλάδα οι επιπτώσεις της μετανάστευσης είναι μικρές γενικά, στο σύνολο της οικονομίας. / This paper presents an empirical analysis about the consequences of immigration in the economy of Greece. We examine the repercussions for the employment, the participation in workforce, the unemployment and the wage. Proportional studies, in other countries show that does not exists important effect of immigration in these sizes. We used three methods of estimates, so we can compare our results with the international bibliography and take more unbiased estimates. Our results agree with the results of the international bibliography and they show that in Greece the repercussions of immigration are also small, in its entirety of the economy.

In the last century, and especially with the development of European market integration, economies in Europe experienced a deep restructuring of their agricultural sector. The structural shift away from the primary sector activities, with the reallocation of labour across sectors, is an important engine of economic development. Nonetheless, the patterns and drivers of structural change in the New Member States (NMS) have differed in nature, speed and intensity from those of the EU-15. More importantly, the high incidence of farm employment and family workers in some of the NMS, despite low levels of agricultural training and labour productivity, suggests that farming, particularly in the least developed regions, might be the only viable solution for obtaining a minimum standard of living, especially for those who lack the human capital for 'better' employment opportunities. Against this background, the aim of this research is to investigate the driving forces behind agricultural labour adjustments and, thus, shed light on the facilitators of, and barriers to, labour mobility. The analysis focuses on the linkages between farm and non-farm sectors and explores the determinants of agricultural employment and inter-sectoral labour mobility in six selected Member States (MS): France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Using national and European micro-level data from labour force and agricultural business surveys, the econometric analysis employs various discrete choice modelling techniques on cross-section and panel data. The key message from this research is that skills mismatch, due to inadequate levels of education and vocational training, and labour market characteristics appear to be the most important impediments to the inter-sectoral and spatial mobility of labour. The mixed evidence in the results across MS reflects the heterogeneous organisational and production structures, implying different constraints or prospects for farm survival and hence different capacities to release and absorb labour. Hence, in order to ensure an efficient allocation of labour and a smooth transition across sectors, investments in human capital and the diversification of rural areas constitute crucial rural development policies. Nonetheless, a one-size-fits-all policy is not appropriate for the wide diversity of rural areas and labour markets across MS. Instead, more targeted and diverse measures should be implemented in order to meet particular needs.

This thesis uses data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS), the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and a small scale survey on student entrepreneurship conducted by the School of Business and Economics at Swansea University, in assessing entrepreneurial intentions and transitions into self-employment. Analysis of entrepreneurial motivations has largely been confined to 'push' versus 'pull' factors. Very few studies, if any, have analysed individual-specific factors associated with entrepreneurial motivations. In addressing this issue, the analysis documents the extent to which there is heterogeneity amongst the self-employed on the basis of the motivations that they report for choosing self-employment. Multivariate regression analysis is employed using a method to control for self-selection into self-employment. Background characteristics such as gender, educational attainment, housing tenure and region of residence are found to be important factors influencing entrepreneurial motives. Relative to males, females are less likely to show entrepreneurial intent and subsequently participate in self-employment, however little is known about precisely why this is. Using decomposition analysis, the gap in entrepreneurial intent probabilities is examined across gender. Attitudes towards risk are found to be a major factor associated with the gap in average levels of entrepreneurial intentions between males and female students, accounting for very nearly half of the total gap. Within Wales there seems to exist a widespread perception that the younger population views entrepreneurship less positively than their counterparts elsewhere in the UK. The analysis examines whether differences in entrepreneurial intention probabilities between Welshdomiciled and non-Welsh domiciled students can be explained by a range of demographic factors, family characteristics and psychological traits. Family and other background influences are found to be important contributors to the non-Welsh and Welsh gap, while differences in risk attitudes appear to provide the largest single component of the intentions gap between the two groups. Entrepreneurs may differ from non-entrepreneurs in terms of a range of personal characteristics, family and social background and personal resources. Cognitive or behavioural factors may also be important in determining who becomes an entrepreneur. Data from the BHPS indicates that unrealistic optimism is significantly and positively associated with the probability of being both self-employed and an aspiring entrepreneur. Furthermore, unrealistic optimism is found to be persistent and a factor affecting duration in selfemployment.

This thesis consists of three essays which provide a detailed empirical investigation of the returns to education, gender wage gap and public-private wage differential in Bulgaria, Serbia, Russia and Tajikistan - countries that have received little attention in the literature. The studies are based on rich data sets which allow the most up-to- date analysis of the specific labour market outcomes. All three essays go a step further than the existing empirical literature since in each one the quantile regression results showed a much broader picture than the ones based on central tendency measures such as Ordinary Least Squares (OLS). The first essay looks at what had happened to the returns to human capital in Bulgaria over the period from early 1986 pre-transition to 2003. The study also contributes to the literature by estimating returns to education across the entire wage distribution, providing further evidence from Serbia, Russia and Tajikistan. Moreover, it deals with endogeneity and sample selection biases in a quantile regression framework. The second essay estimates gender wage gaps in the selected countries by applying a decomposition method that simulates marginal distributions from the quantile regression process. The study seeks to extend the popular Machado and Mata (2005) distributional approach by addressing the 'index' number problem suggested by Neumark (1988) and Oaxaca and Ransom (1994 and 1998). The gender wage gap decomposition is performed for each quantile of the earnings distribution by using the pooled wage structure as a non-discriminatory structure and giving a much richer picture of the influence of the covariate and coefficient effects. The third essay provides a comprehensive empirical study on the public-private wage differential in Bulgaria, Serbia, Russia, and Tajikistan. The study seeks to understand whether the differential in the public-private sector payment is explained by differences in workers characteristics or the difference in the returns to these characteristics. The endogenous sector choice is also considered. The study further analyses what has happened to the public sector hourly earnings differential at different points in the conditional earnings distribution and over time by adapting the Donohue-Heckman time-wise decomposition.

Debate about European labour market flexibility enhancing reforms and lack thereof has a tendency to be dominated by economics arguments. This thesis advances the debate by going beyond the economics arguments to ask the political science question: what explains the political ability (or inability) to enact flexibility enhancing reforms in European countries from the early 1980s to the global recession of 2008? Answering the question, this thesis argues that the ability to enact reforms is best explained by a combination of traditional political-economy pressures for reforms and political-electoral motivations of party leaders in government. The argument is supported by a longitudinal analysis of European and country specific reforms using mixed-methods – i.e. quantitative and qualitative research – and employment protection legislation (EPL) as a proxy for reforms, the latter being warranted because of EPLs political salience as a reform target prior to 2008. First, a quantitative cross-country reform-hazard analysis arrives at significant economic and political explanations for reforms, which include a country’s social model, unemployment rate and economic growth. Then, a qualitative analysis of the trajectory of EPL and functionally linked labour market reforms combines the quantitative results with a broader political understanding of reforms for Germany, the UK and Denmark as country cases where reforms were enacted, and France as a case where only limited or contradictory EPL reforms were put in place during the period covered by this thesis. The thesis adds robustness to the literature showing most pre-2008 global recession reforms were at the margin, targeting non-regular employment parts of European labour markets. However, overall, the thesis provides a political understanding of the European reform trajectory, suggesting that economic arguments rarely on their own stand up as determinants of reforms. The implications for future research are that the enactment of flexibility enhancing reforms should be treated more explicitly as the outcomes of political decisions and less as reactive steps to economic predictions or political economy pressures for reforms, even if the latter continues to play a role in bringing reforms onto the political agenda.

Almost 250 years ago, ‘gang-masters’ – those who mediated between rural employers and roving bands of migrant workers - were vividly brought to life within the pages of Marx’s Capital. By contrast the modern-day phenomenon of how paid-for labour market intermediaries – temporary staffing agencies and their rural ‘gangmaster’ counterparts – construct transnational workforces remains remarkably undocumented, let alone theorised. Similarly, although a burgeoning literature sheds light on the increasing privatisation of international migration flows, the precise role of profit-seeking ‘recruiters’ within a broader migration industry remains underexposed. This thesis explores how - and why - agencies recruited migrant workers from his or her home countries and placed them in temporary employment in the UK. In response to the apparent growing significance of temporary staffing agencies in facilitating migration into the UK from the EU8 countries of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as from beyond the EU, the research was funded by an ESRC CASE studentship. Evidence was gathered from qualitative interviews conducted with representatives of agencies in the UK, in Poland, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as with a range of respondents from government departments, labour organisations, regulatory bodies, and journalists in all four countries. The multi-scale fieldwork sites were selected in order to offer a comparative analysis of variable institutional and regulatory settings. Within the following pages I argue that agencies in both the origin countries, as well as in the UK, made markets in the recruitment and supply of temporary migrant workers; selling migration to recruits, and migrant workers to client employers in the process. Activities of agencies were highly embedded within the precise institutional and regulatory regime that resulted from the interaction between that in place in the origin country as well as that in the UK. The thesis seeks to contribute empirically and conceptually to a growing literature which exposes the behaviour of temporary staffing agencies within national labour markets as well as the migration industry literature which looks at the behaviour of actors which transport workers between national labour markets.

Search and matching models such as those of Mortensen and Pissarides (1994) and Pissarides (2000) have come under criticism in recent years. Analysis of the model by Shimer (2005) and others has focussed in particular on the models’ inability to generate sufficient volatility in variables such as the unemployment and vacancies rates, and the vacancyunemployment ratio. Newer models have sought to ameliorate these empirical issues by changing the model – for example by adding wage rigidity or by amending the specification of the costs of search. In Chapters 3 and 4 of this thesis, we re-address some of these issues using the method of indirect inference. The method allows us to formally test the hypothesis that data was generated by a particular model under a given set of parameter values. It therefore offers a statistically founded replacement for the somewhat arbitrary moment-by-moment comparisons found in much of the existing literature. We apply the method to Shimer’s analysis of the Mortensen Pissarides model, and concur with his analysis that, under his chosen parameters, the model fails to fit the data. We also apply the method to the model used in Yashiv’s (2006) paper, which argues using moment comparisons that the standard model can be improved by adding convex search costs. In contrast, we find that the augmented model is rejected under formal indirect-inference tests. The aggregate search and matching literature has also generated an empirical debate about the relative importance of labour market flows, expressed in terms of the hazard rates of labour market transition faced by workers. Many studies decompose changes in steady-state unemployment in terms of the contributions of various hazard rates. This thesis also extends this literature so as to model the contributions of hazards for two distinct and contiguous geographical areas – those of Wales and the rest of the United Kingdom, using Labour-Force-Survey panel data. We find some evidence that in this regard, the UK hazards are weighted towards the hazards “out of” unemployment, whereas for Wales the hazards “into” and “out of” unemployment are of approximately equal importance. We also find however that the results are sensitive to whether or not the data are smoothed, and whether a steady-state is imposed.