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In 2015, one university student in KC – a small town in regional Australia – unknowingly launched a resistance movement and national debate on modern wage theft. We apply labour process theory to analyse accounting's role in this case.

We study multiple instances of wage theft in one Australian town. This case site reveals how wage theft can emerge in a developed economy with well-established legal and institutional constraints. We use Thompson's “core” labour process theory to analyse accounting's role via two interrelated dialectics: (1) structure and agency and, (2) control and resistance.

Accounting was “weaponised” by both sides of the controversy: as a tool of employer control and as a vehicle for student resistance. Digital technologies enabled employee resistance to form unconsciously and organically. Proponents mobilised informally, with information and accounting the ammunition.

Wage theft affects industrialised as well as developing economies, especially “precarious” workers. We show how accounting can conceal exploitation, but also how – with the right support – accounting can help vulnerable workers enforce their rights and entitlements.

The paper uncovers novel dynamics of exploitation and resistance at work under contemporary economic and technological conditions. Labour process theory can provide a more dialectical perspective on accounting's role in these dynamics, including the emancipatory potential of informal and opportunistic counter-accounts.

This study takes the position that the vitality of academic libraries is grounded in the working experiences of its librarians. It suggests that a full understanding of problems facing contemporary information professionals in the post-industrial workplace requires an analysis of the labouring aspects as well as the professional nature of their work. The study of changes in the academic library work experience thus depicts the state of the library, and has implications for other intellectual workers in a social environment characterized by expanding information technologies, constricted economic resources, and the globalization of information production. Academic librarians have long recognized that their vocation lies not only in the classical role in information collection, organization, and dissemination, but also in collaboration with faculty in the teaching and research process, and in the contribution to university governance. They are becoming increasingly active in the protection of information access and assurance of information quality in view of information degradation on the Internet and various compromises necessitated by interaction with third party commercial information producers.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

The purpose of this paper is to examine perspective of “gendered labour process” to explore the aspectsof managerialism, which utilize gender as a control measure to achieve its ends. The paper seeks to integrate gender and labour process theory and contribute to studies on gendering of organizations that focus on organization logic as well as integrated studies of labour process theory and gender.

The paper utilizes thematic analysis as the method for analysing the interviews of senior managers in an information technology service organization in India, to identify managerial ideologies and practices.

A gendered labour process perspective could reveal the institutional orders that systemically discriminate or exclude women in organizations, rather than gender ideologies alone.

Rather than focussing on gender sensitization alone, as is the case with the gender diversity initiatives, it may be fruitful to revisit work design and work organization, to identify and implement changes, so that women’s marginalization and exclusion from certain workplaces could be minimized.

A view of gendered labour process could aid public policies aimed at enabling women to continue their employment without disruptions.

The paper attempted to integrate gender and labour process theory by delineating the organization logic that deploys gender as a means of managerial control.

Regarding human resource and labour relations management, academia focuses mainly on cities; however, rural areas are an integral part of China's economic structure. This study focuses on the movie projection industry in China's rural areas and explores how human resource practices (HRPs) are transformed and the labour process is reconstructed in digital transformation.

We adopt a case study of a rural movie projection company. The company's HRPs reconstructed the labour process of movie projection, and they have been promoted as national standards. Data were collected from in-depth interviews, files and observations.

Rural movie projection companies combine high-performance and paternalistic HRPs in the media industry's digital transformation. HRPs and digital technology jointly reconstruct the labour process. First, the HRPs direct labour process practices towards standardisation. Second, the digital supervision platform guides the control style from simple to technical, placing projectionists under pressure while increasing management efficiency. Third, rural movies made using digital technology have disenchanted rural residents. Accordingly, the conventional relationships between the “country and its citizens,” “individuals themselves,” and “models and individuals” have been removed, and a new relationship between “individuals themselves” is formed thanks to the novel HRPs.

This research plays a crucial role in exposing researchers to the labour process of rural movie projection, which is significant in China but often ignored by Western academia and advances the Chinese contextualisation of research on labour relations.

The 50th anniversary of Fox's Beyond Contract and Man Mismanagement coincides with another vital contribution to the sociology of work from 1974: Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital. This article analyses these two scholars' complementary approaches to job design and the extent to which Fox's ideas influenced subsequent labour process thought.

The article's methodological approach is a historiographical reading of Fox and Braverman's thought in the context of their times and later scholarship.

The article demonstrates that despite some noteworthy overlap with Braverman concerning scientific management, Fox's insights were marginal to later iterations of labour process analysis. It delves into the reasons for this relative neglect, providing an understanding of the dynamics at play.

This paper's value lies in its combined industrial relations and labour process historiography. It offers a fresh perspective on Alan Fox's relationship to the latter field of study.

This paper aims to explore and analyse how shifting frontiers of control emerge and change the labour process so that restrictions to output become diminished, subsequently affecting organisational performance.

Multiple case study design. Interviews with 104 respondents. Analysis of productivity statistics in order to test for the statistical significance of the closedown effect. Single multiple regression analysis of the comparative strength, of the closedown effect, between cases.

Shifting frontiers of control arise during the closedown process, a control system characterised by markedly unrestricted autonomy for the workers as the management frontiers of control abate. This provides an operative space for informal work practices, innovation and emerging new industrial relations, accounting for the higher levels of output.

A multiple case study of three different manufacturing organisations, with comparably long closedown periods. The authors do not analyse the sustainability of the increase in output or the generalisibility of the closedown effect to other industries.

It is possible to anticipate improved productivity if shifting frontiers of control are rapidly replacing the old. If management abandons the old control mechanisms, previous to the closedown decision, and provides operative space for workers' initiatives and informal leadership during the closedown process, it is possible to expect good performance, enabling a scope for extended closedown periods.

This is the first study that analyses the comparative strength of the closedown effect and how restricted work practices change under the process of closedown.

The critique of the neo‐classical theory of the labour market has been growing in strength in recent years. Two main strands can be identified. The American traditions emphasise the role of the production process of firms or industries, either in terms of its task requirements (Doeringer and Piore 1971), or the mode of labour process control (Edwards 1979). The British tradition emphasises the role of trade unions and the character of the industrial relations system (Rubery 1978; Nolan 1983). By looking at one industry — construction — and thereby controlling for production process and industrial relations system, this article suggests that firm type, in interaction with the product market, is also an important factor in generating non competing labour markets.

The question of power, long indispensable to organizational analysis, remains the elusive but essential key to understanding the employment relation within the contemporary capitalist context. Taking up this question, this chapter critically examines two of the more prevalent approaches toward work organizations – neo-institutionalist theory and labor process analysis – and engages a third, less widely utilized approach: Foucault's theory of governmentality. By weighing the strengths and weaknesses of familiar analytical traditions and providing insight into an emergent theoretical approach, we offer some observations and suggestions that might enrich the study of work, power, and organizations in the coming years.

The purpose of this paper is to consider existing debates within the sociology of work, particularly the re-emergence of labour process theory (LPT) and the “collective worker”, in relation to resistance at work. Through presentation of primary data and a dialectical discussion about the nature of ideology, the paper offers alternative interpretations on long-standing debates and raises questions about the efficacy of workplace resistance.

The design of this methodology is an ethnographic study of a call centre in the North-East of England, a covert participant observation at “Call Direct” supplemented by semi-structured interviews with call centre employees.

The findings in this paper suggest that resistance in the call centre mirrors forms of resistance outlined elsewhere in both the call centre literature and classical workplace studies from the industrial era. However, in presenting an alternative interpretation of ideology, as working at the level of action rather than thought, the paper reinterprets the data and characterises workplace resistance as lacking the political potential for change often emphasised in LPT and other workplace studies.

The original contribution of this paper is in applying an alternative interpretation of ideology to a long-standing debate. In asking sociology of work scholars to consider the “reversal of ideology”, it presents an alternative perspective on resistance in the workplace and raises questions about the efficacy of workplace disobedience.