The aim of this study was to explore the interrelationship between collective bargaining and pay equity. A qualitative case study methodology was used. Eighty-six interviews were conducted with union and management pay equity negotiators, labour lawyers, Pay Equity Commission Review Officers, and other informants. A collection of documentary evidence supplemented these interviews. The empirical work focused on explaining issues of structure, style and power in pay equity bargaining and the complex intertwinings of the structural properties of gender and class were considered crucial to an explanation of these. The key structural dynamic in the negotiation of pay equity was found to be the degree and effectiveness of a labour-feminist politic combined with employer/state commitment, which are themselves interconnected and represent the transformative face of gender and class power relations. The thesis, in providing a theoretically informed discussion of detailed case study material, contributes towards the debate on the effectiveness of collective bargaining as a vehicle for implementing equal pay policy. It also informs the debate on labour-management cooperation in labour relations, especially in public sector collective bargaining. Because legislated pay equity is bargained within a new set of legal parameters, the study may also aid our understanding of the relationship between collective bargaining and the law. Finally, the thesis attempts to unravel the interwoven complexities of gender and class power relations in the collective bargaining process.

This study focuses on three topics in the behaviour of small manufacturing firms using theories from industrial economics as theoretical benchmarks. The study takes as its starting point the perspective of the individual enterprise rather than that of an industry or a market. For the study a considerable amount of new data was collected by interviewing about 80 small business managers in Finland up to three times by the end of 1997. The first of the three parts of the study considers the adoption of an export strategy. The non-linear econometric model adopted suggests that the adoption of an export strategy in small firms is in particularly influenced by the language skills of entrepreneurs, and has become faster over time. The second chapter provides insights into the differentiation behaviour of industrial small firms. At the individual firm's level, vertical differentiation seems to have a special weight since horizontal differentiation is often limited by the requirement of technical compatibility, and because improving quality is perceived to incorporate lower risk than differentiation based on taste differences between customers. The third chapter studies exiting from export markets using the case-study method of research. There is no strong case for, or against, the export hysteresis in the data, and thus one can argue that the behaviour of the firms has been largely in accordance with the standard theory of a competitive industry. The lack of an explicitly export strategy and concentration on exports to one country seem to contribute to exit where the nature of exporting can be described as opportunistic. Overall, the firm-level study presented here suggests the relevance of further studies using models of diffusion of innovations to theorize small business exporting and to taking better into consideration of an individual firm's perspective in studies on product differentiation. Moreover, demand side influences on export hysteresis should be studied further.

This study explores workplace relations in the small-firm-dominated West Midlands clothing sector. Using a combination of direct observation, survey work and my status as an. 'insider', the thesis examines three major issues. Firstly, the processes involved in the negotiation of order in small firms. Secondly, the role of management in shaping work relations. Thirdly, the extent to which ethnicity is a significant factor in determining shopfloor behaviour. Despite the recent interest in industrial relations in small firms, the debates on management strategy and the various studies on 'ethnic enterprise', these issues have received little attention elsewhere. It is commonly believed that employers in this sector respond to the uncertainties of operating in a volatile market by casualisation and the intensive use of familial labour in the management of the firm. Although widespread, such practices were shown to be not entirely 'rational' and, in certain circumstances, important constraints upon management. The pressures emanating from the market were compounded by uncertainties on the shopfloor. Rather than managerial autocracy, the organisation of the workplace was characterised by informality, unpredictability and struggle. The contested nature of the workplace thus highlighted the contradictory position of management; having to accommodate market pressures on the one hand and the need to negotiate on the shopfloor on the other. Ethnicity further mediated shopfloor relations. The gendered basis of ethnicity, together with its capacity to 'work' to the advantage of minority women as well as migrant men highlighted the multi-faceted nature of the concept. Moreover, the relationship between ethnicity and the labour process is demonstrated. In conclusion, the findings establish the 'relative autonomy' of the labour process, the pattern of control in the West Midland clothing industry and provide concrete empirical support for the conceptualisations of management provided by Hyman (1987) and Edwards (1986).

The present thesis analyses the international activities of British start-up companies in high-technology industries. The research makes the following contributions. First, it is the first study that establishes the prevalence of internationally operating start-up companies in a particular country. Accordingly, we find that the majority of British high-tech start-ups have engaged in international activities within a few years since formation. Second, it consolidates the existing knowledge in the field of international entrepreneurship and subjects it to empirical testing. Third, it assesses the power of different theories in international business to explain the cross-border activities of start-up companies. We analysed the determinants of the decision to internationalise, the degree of internationalisation and the timing of internationalisation. Our results suggest that firm size has a positive impact on these dependent variables. However, the threshold value for a positive likelihood of initiating international sales is well below the median size of the population, therefore suggesting that scale-related barriers to internationalisation can be overcome quite easily. Internationalisation is positively influenced by the international experience of the founders, technology intensity and the innovativeness of the technology incorporated in the products. Internationalisation is negatively influenced by a product's degree of clientspecific customisation. External finance and transaction costs during the sales process did not impact on these dimensions of internationalisation. When looking at the choice of market entry mode, we find that the innovativeness of the technology incorporated in a product lead to a higher probability of involving intermediaries. While this is apparently at odds with theory, we argue that an intermediary is a mechanism for start-ups to overcome the "liability of alienness" and to gain legitimacy in foreign markets. Overall, the research lends support to a resource-based perspective of international entrepreneurship since the proxies for transaction cost-based arguments and the internationalisation process theory are of limited explanatory power.

This thesis deals with the concept of compliance. Its main argument is that the concept of formal compliance has shortcomings and therefore needs to be complemented with a concept of empirical compliance. At the heart of the concept of compliance is the relationship between rules and social practices. This relationship is conceptualized as involving a "gap", in the case of formal non - compliance, or as indicating the fulfilment of legal requirements in the case of formal compliance. Instead, as the concept of empirical compliance shows, rules and social practices can be linked through a process of integration. This changes our understanding of a concept of law. Formal concepts of law which are based on formal legal rules have to be modified in order to understand empirical compliance. An empirical concept of law which is based both on enforement officers' and the regulated companies' definitions of what is considered as normative in everyday practices has to be adopted. I discuss commercial aims, technology, information ani the formal law as normative contexts which shape a notion of empirical law. The thesis adopts a social construction approach by exploring how actors in the field establish and manipulate the various normative constraints under which they work. The research explores empirical compliance in the area of waste management regulation in the U.K. and Germany. It draws on qualitative data on the implementation of waste management regulation in the everyday practices of handling waste at two waste treatment plants and the day to day enforcement activities of two waste regulation authorities. The thesis focusses on the behaviour of staff on the lowest level of the organizational hierarchy in both the waste treatment plants and the waste regulation authorities. The main research techniques employed were observation and participant observation over a three months period with each of the four organizations involved in the research.

This thesis attempts to provide an explanation of how changes to subjectivity occur in TQM change programmes. Through an examination of the TQM and management of change literature, the thesis argues that existing analyses are limited in their presentation of changes to subjectivity by their dependence upon either neo-Marxist or postmodernist thought. Using three medium-sized, privately-owned manufacturing plants in the West Midlands the thesis uses grounded theory and phenomenological methodologies to construct a theory which explains how changes in subjectivity occur. The theory that is developed uses a combination of structuration theory and existentialist philosophy to understand how trust, distrust and angst mediate structural forces, organisational conditions and employee subjectivity. There could be several implications of this framework, but three are stressed. First, it is argued that habit, in the form of trust and distrust, allows a modelling of workers that is neither under- nor over-socialised. Second, it is argued that the traditional distinction made between attitudes and behaviours is unnecessary in a processual study. The distinction hampers our understanding of how change works in practice. This argument raises serious questions regarding the validity of notions such as 'acting out'. Thirdly, and consequently, the thesis argues that researchers' methodologies need to be much more sensitive to hard-to-measure intangibles than many are at present.

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.

No description available.

Work-home interference has been receiving increasing attention in the organizational behaviour literature. It is defined as a form of inter-role conflic t in which the demands of the work role and the demands of the home role are mutually incompatible. Existing research on work interference with home/home interference with work has focused on situational antecedents and attitudinal outcomes, with limited attention paid to gender- and disposition-based predictors, behavioural outcomes, and coping strategies associated with interference. Using a quantitative methodology, this thesis drew upon two separate samples of UK public sector employees, comprising 208 and 226 respondents respectively, to pursue three aims: 1) to examine the roles of gender and of personality in contributing to interference, as well as the potential for characteristics associated with one domain (e.g., home) to influence the degree of interference generated by the opposing domain (e.g., work); 2) to investigate the link between interference and extra-role work behaviours such as organizatio na l citizenship and workplace deviance; and 3) to extend existing knowledge of coping strategies for dealing with work-home interference. Findings indicated that gender moderated the effects of both home- and work-related characteristics on home interference with work, and that dispositional variables were capable of predicting work-home interference above and beyond the effects of situational characteristics. With regard to behavioural outcomes, work-home interference predicted increased workplace deviance amongst employees. Work interference with home was associated with greater employee participation in organizational citizenship behaviours, while the opposite was true for home interference with work. In terms of coping with interference, cognitive reappraisal was identified as the most effective strategy, and gender was found to moderate the effect of certain coping strategies on interference. Contributions of the thesis, major research and practical implications, and future research directions are discussed.

No description available.