Suchergebnisse

This article takes as its theme the global restructuring of capital and its impact on worker organization. It argues for a reassertion of class in any analysis of global solidarity, and assesses the opportunities and barriers to effective global unionization. Rooted in the UK experience, the article analyzes the impact of the European social dimension on trade unions, before taking the discussion into a global dimension. It concludes by suggesting that there are reasons for cautious optimism in terms of solidarity building, despite difficult historical legacies and the common replacement of action with rhetoric.

Discursive deference in the governance of science and technology is rebalancing from expert analysis toward participatory deliberation. Linear, scientistic conceptions of innovation are giving ground to more plural, socially situated understandings. Yet, growing recognition of social agency in technology choice is countered by persistently deterministic notions of technological progress. This article addresses this increasingly stark disjuncture. Distinguishing between "appraisal" and "commitment" in technology choice, it highlights contrasting implications of normative, instrumental, and substantive imperatives in appraisal. Focusing on the role of power, it identifies key commonalities transcending the analysis/participation dichotomy. Each is equally susceptible to instrumental framing for variously weak and strong forms of justification. To address the disjuncture, it is concluded that greater appreciation is required—in both analytic and participatory appraisal—to facilitating the opening up (rather than the closing down) of governance commitments on science and technology.

This article argues that the malaise that has characterised Britain's trade unions since the late-1970s can be located in an international context that also provides possibilities for renewal. It suggests two chronological phases in the response to decline, and then analyses the current debates in relation to partnership and organising. The paper concludes with an assessment of ideas of community unionism and their applicability in the UK.

William Morris is a neglected theorist of the labour process debate which has often abandoned itself to the minutiae of work at the expense of the broader analysis initiated by Harry Braverman. Morris's writings on work are central to a socialist critique of the labour process. His analysis is necessarily located within nineteenth century debates and reflects the contradictions of his own life as an employer, communist activist and romantic medievalist. Nevertheless his influence was pervasive on the socialist critique of work that emerged in the twentieth century and his argument is firmly rooted in a Marxist class analysis that continues to have resonance today.

The use of physical interventions in the management of aggressive and violent behaviour continues to divide opinion and practice. In learning disability services, it is acknowledged that any physical intervention must be non‐aversive and considered as part of an overall programme which emphasises positive alternative behaviours. The author considers this understanding in the light of recent research and experience.

BRITAIN AT WORK (Cully et.al.1999) is the fourth in a series of surveys of workplace industrial relations that began in 1980 (Daniel & Millward, 1983, Millward & Stevens, 1986, Millward et. al. 1992) and follows an interim report published in 1998 (Cully et.al.). Each survey has gathered information from managers and employee representatives at over 2000 workplaces employing 25 or more workers. Britain at Work is inevitably an important piece of empirical work in an indispensable series which the new survey has further developed by including companies with between 10 and 24 employees and surveying, although not interviewing, the workers themselves. To ignore it would be folly but to rely on its own interpretation of itself would be equally foolish. Indeed the authors themselves suggest that 'some readers will arrive at different interpretations of the survey results - if they did not it would be a dull read indeed' (xvi).