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The purpose of this paper is to place empirical research on New Zealand employers’ attitudes to collective bargaining and legislative change within the context of the long running debate of flexibility.

A cross-sectional survey design using a self-administered postal questionnaire, covering private sector employers with ten or more staff and including employers within all 17 standard industry classification. To explore particular issues, an additional in-depth interviews were conducted of 25 employers participating in the survey.

It is found that employers support overwhelmingly recent legislative changes though there are variations across industries and firm sizes. There is also considerable variation in terms of which legislative changes are applied in the workplace. Despite fewer constraints on employer-determined flexibility, there was a rather puzzling finding that most employers still think that employment legislation is even balanced or favouring employees.

Cross-sectional survey findings of New Zealand employer attitudes to legislative changes are few and provide valuable data for policy makers, unions, employers and employment relations researchers. The paper also contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of pressures to increase employer-determined flexibility in many western countries.

Organisations have to respond to a range of legislative and policy initiatives intended to promote equal employment opportunity for women. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the mix of legislation and policies in Australia: anti‐discrimination and equal opportunity legislation, equal pay, work and family and managing diversity policies.

Legislation, industrial relations changes and policies relating to pay equity, non‐discrimination on the grounds of sex, affirmative action and equal opportunity, including work and family policies and managing diversity approaches are reviewed in the context of changing labour conditions and social trends.

Organisations are presented with a range of policies from which to choose and the result is variety in the extent and type of equity programs which produce variable outcomes for women in the workplace.

While this paper deals in particular with Australia, the pattern of multiplicity of approaches is common to other Western countries. As organisations choose among a variety of approaches in implementing an equal opportunity programme, the outcomes for women will vary.

The paper offers insight into equal employment opportunity legislation and policies within the Australian context.

Two key developments exert an important influence on the nature of human resource management (HRM) in South Africa (SA). The first is two seemingly conflicting imperatives, sometimes and arguably wrongly juxtaposed: that of developing a high-growth, globally competitive economy with fuller employment and the sociopolitical imperative of redressing past structural inequalities of access to skilled, professional, and managerial positions, as well as ownership opportunities. The first development is the related influences of globalization and multinational corporations (MNCs), information technology, and increased competition, which have become very prominent in postapartheid SA. South Africa has a dual labor market, with a well-developed formal sector employing some 8.5 million workers in standard or typical work and a growing informal labor market. In the case of the formal, knowledge-based economy, the World Wide Web, and increasing communication that the Internet has made possible, has influenced changes at the organizational level. A second development is that these changes and changing patterns of employment are having a dramatic impact on HR policies within organizations. In a knowledge-based economy, organizations rely on knowledge that is embedded deeply in the individual and in the collective subconscious. It is the property of an individual and cannot be taken away from that person (Harrison & Kessels, 2004). He or she would agree to put it in the service of the collective whole, which is known as organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). In technology-driven advanced firms in SA, there are several themes among the various models of citizenship behavior: helping behavior, sportsmanship, organizational loyalty, organizational compliance, initiative, civic virtue, and self-development (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Paine, & Bachrach, 2000). Many of these themes overlap with the common competencies demanded by advanced MNCs. Thus OCBs rest upon a recognition of mutuality of interest and of responsibility between the organization and the individuals. Increasing globalization and worldwide competition and the knowledge-based economy have their greatest impact on business strategies, process, and practice involving, among others, management of human resources. In this chapter we examine factors influencing the management of human resources in SA and their impact on human resource practices in organizations.

The aim of this article is to explore the influence of precarious (temporary) employment on employability and career development.

The article draws together primary and secondary research material.

Findings indicate that there are both positive and negative perspectives with regard to temporary employment and career development for both the workers themselves and the user firms.

Implications arising are that policy development/research is required to investigate potential interventions that could be introduced.

These are in line with the article's suggestion of adopting transitional labour market strategies. These major transitions are between education and employment; (unpaid) caring and employment; unemployment and employment; retirement and employment; “precarious” and permanent employment.

The article outlines two facets of precariousness associated with temporary work in relation to the worker and the user firm. It also presents a newly devised three‐stage typology of skill and skill acquisition that is relevant to the topic.

Researchers of legislative behavior have attempted to explain the decisions of legislators for some time. Public choice scholars have argued that legislators will “sell” political favors in exchange for some from of interest group payment that is thought to benefit the legislator's electoral ambitions. Yet, legislators do not appear to receive the full value of their political favor in these exchanges. That is, the value of the policies offered appears to exceed the price paid by interest groups in the form of campaign contributions, speaking honoraria and other material payments. This imbalance has led some scholars to discount theories that explain legislative behavior motivated by material gain. However, to the extent that legislators value post‐elective employment opportunities, interest groups have an incentive to use the offer of future employment as a payment for present legislative influence. In this sense, perhaps a large portion of the difference in payments can be accounted for in the post‐elective employment careers of elected politicians. In this paper, I explore and explain this theory using a political market model and attempt to identify several attributes that I believe will be common among “prospect‐legislators” whose behavior is principally motivated by concerns with post‐elective life.

The purpose of this paper is to examine experiences of harassment within the context of precarious work, which in Canada is shaped by subnational legislative frameworks.

A narrative inquiry approach to data collection and analysis was adopted. The paper draws from 72 interviews conducted with workers in precarious jobs from various industries in three cities in the Canadian province of Ontario, as well as 52 employment standards officers (ESOs) from 15 local Ministry of Labour offices in every region across the province. Placing workers’ stories in counterpoint to those of ESOs brings them into conversations about the law to which they would normally be left out.

The main finding of this paper is that harassment and employment standards (ES) violations are interrelated phenomena experienced as abuses of power and as tactics of control occurring within a context that is shaped by legislative frameworks.

This paper demonstrates that for workers in precarious jobs legislative frameworks and labor market practices in Ontario do not provide adequate redress for harassment and ES violations. In so doing, legislative frameworks render invisible the power imbalances within the employment relationship and obscure the interrelatedness of harassment and the wider erosion of workplace norms.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an assessment of employment equity, Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) and associated human resource management policies in South Africa. Polices and practices, and progress in representation of formerly disadvantaged groups are evaluated.

The paper comprises a general review using descriptive primary and secondary data and qualitative organizational factors.

The pace of representation and diversity at organisational levels is incremental rather than transformational. Conclusions for policy makers and organizational leaders are drawn, taking into consideration socio‐historical, political and demographic context of this jurisdiction.

The paper's findings and conclusions are pertinent for public and organizational policy and practice.

Reviews the positive role of the state in promoting women’s employment since the founding of Communist China in 1949. Identifies patterns of gender inequality which exist throughout the process of employment such as recruitment and retirement. Against this backcloth, analyses major reasons for the occurrence of this gender discrimination, which range from inadequate social security for childbearing and ineffective legislative monitoring mechanisms to gender bias in the employment legislation itself. Concludes that recent radical economic and social reforms in China have disrupted the context within which a level of equal opportunity has been achieved in the past few decades and demands a new legal framework under which greater equality between men and women in employment can be achieved.

This paper explores how the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSARG) securitizes internal security, cultural identity and welfare system through refugee policy instruments. It also aims to explore the roles of members of the Legislative Council (Legco) and Chinese newspapers in the securitization process.

The author analyzed 6 landmark verdicts, 342 related documents of the Legco, 2,386 news coverages and 408 editorials/ column articles from 6 selected Chinese newspapers from 2005 to mid-2019. While documents of the Legco were collected from the Legco archives, news reports, editorials and column articles were gathered on Wisenews with the keywords, namely, refugees, asylum seekers, torture claims and non-refoulement claims.

The author argues that the advanced comprehensive security approach helps to comprehend the securitization process in Hong Kong. The HKSARG, Legco members of the pro-government camp and pro-government Chinese newspapers perform as securitizing actors who regard refugees as an existential threat to the referent objects, i.e. internal security, cultural identity and welfare system.

There are two significant limitations, namely, the coverage of newspapers and the absence of poll data. This paper merely selected six Chinese newspapers, which do not cover English newspapers and some other Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong. It may neglect some important data. Additionally, owing to the absence of longitudinal poll data, the author chose not to examine the related materials.

This paper intends to be the first study to provide a longitudinal examination of the transformations of current refugee policies in Hong Kong.

This chapter assesses public administration in Paraguay. It argues that the country's public administration and public personnel structures have been shaped by a predominance of informal decision-making norms, patron–client relations, exceptional legislative interference in what elsewhere tend to be executive prerogatives, and weak accountability mechanisms of a state largely captured by a small oligarchy. In this context, administrative reform has been mostly instigated by external actors—donors and international financial institutions—and only achieved incremental progress in, in particular, the modernization of public finance institutions during periods of economic crises or political change when external demand coincided with domestic pressure. Except for some “pockets of efficiency,” Paraguay thus remains a benchmark case of a neopatrimonial state in a formally democratic Presidential system, in which informal patron–client relations trump formal bureaucratic structures—albeit one in which the legislature has exceptional influence over administrative matters and public sector jobs are exceptionally dominant in clientelist exchanges of state resources.