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This paper aims to argue that the principal components of the Resource‐Based View (RBV) as a theory of sustained competitive advantage are not a sufficient basis for a complete and consistent theory of firm behaviour. Two missing elements are value theory and accountability mechanisms.

The paper proposes a link between value theory and accountability using a Resource Value‐Resource Risk perspective as an alternative to the Capital Asset Pricing Model. The link operates first from the labour process, where value is created but is imperfectly observable by intra‐firm mechanisms of organizational control and outside governance arrangements without incurring monitoring costs. Second, it operates through contractual arrangements which impose fixed cost structures on activities with variable revenues.

The paper thereby explains how value originates in risky and difficult to monitor productive processes and is transmitted as rents to organizational and capital market constituents. It then reviews recent contributions to the RBV, arguing that the proposed new approach overcomes gaps inherent in the alternatives, and thus offers a more complete and integrated view of firm behaviour.

The RBV can become a coherent theory of firm behaviour, if it adopts and can integrate the labour theory of value, associated measures of risk arising from the labour process and mechanisms of accountability.

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.

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.

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.

This paper aims to extend the literature by applying labour process concepts to public service executive employment.

The article draws on the secondary literature to link labour process theory to public administration reform. First, it draws on the labour process literature to provide a summary of some key labour process concepts that will be used throughout the article. This includes Littler's framework for analysing work organisation, being structure of control, employment relationship and job design. Second, it draws on the public administration literature to outline the traditional mode of public sector employment relations, using labour process concepts to illustrate the traditional organisation of work. Third, it draws on the public management reform literature, to outline the key reforms that affected work organisation. In the final section, the article draws these literatures together and uses labour process concepts to analyse the positional power of department heads in the reformed environment. For simplicity and consistency, the examples focus largely on the Australian public sector – each Westminster system has adopted slightly different reforms at slightly different times, but there are enough similarities to allow generaliseability across systems.

The article argues that executives had a strategic position in the public service labour process, and public sector reforms were designed to reduce their positional power and knowledge. Politicians wrested control away from chief executives through strategies such as the division of labour, separation of conception and execution, deskilling, and changes to employment relations that destabilised traditional career paths and tenure. This is in contrast to the new public management rhetoric that the reforms would let managers manage – in reality they were provided more control over operational aspects of work, but lesser control over the intellectual and conceptual aspects of work which were now done elsewhere.

This paper is original in its extension of labour process concepts to a different and elite work group, being public sector chief executives.

The present paper attempts to integrate three streams of alternative approaches to provide a contingency‐based framework to understand the management control systems (MCS) that are operating in call centers. Specifically, the paper's aim is to analyse the work practices of call center employees from three different lenses: the radical approach using Braverman's labor process theory; the Foucauldian approach, which explains the governance of the self; and the naturalistic approach, which explains the governance of the built environment.

The data for the case study were collected by conducting interviews. The data were gathered to identify if the work experience of the call center operators reflects the Tayloristic principles of scientific management, whether their responses reflect evidence of internalizing norms and adjusting their selves to fit to the norm, and lastly whether their work conditions are shaped in the manner described above to facilitate control of their work lives.

Prior academic studies have relied on either one of the approaches and the author's contention is that neither of the theories in isolation can explain the complexities that characterize the contemporary call center operator's labor process.

The study of control and its resistance can add to the understanding of the modern workplace. Since the call center environment is unique, the results of this study may have limited generalizability.

Future researchers can extend the approach used in this research to areas other than call centers that may have similar overlapping paradigms. Such an endeavor will enrich the understanding of complex phenomena, where multiple theories may be espoused to explain a particular research question.

A significant contribution of this study is to recognize that there is concentration of limited control and power in the hands of those who are controlled. Such an understanding may revive the “emancipatory tradition” of labour process theory and though it may not lead to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, it may lead to the awareness that strategies aimed at improving the lives of workers within the capitalist political economy are desirable.

The purpose of this article is to examine how the labour process of further education lecturers has changed as a result of legislative reforms introduced in the early 1990s.

The paper draws on labour process theory and emergent perspectives on “the new public management” to provide theoretical frameworks. Evidence is derived from research carried out at three FE colleges in the English West Midlands involving interviews with managers and lecturing staff, documentary material and a survey of lecturing staff employed in the colleges.

Market‐based reforms in this sector have resulted in the intensification and extensification of work effort for lecturers. This paper argues that these changes have been driven by the ideological underpinning of the reform process. Individual and collective acts of lecturer resistance have been insufficiently strong to prevent change from occurring and worker alienation has increased.

The case study method renders generalisability of findings difficult. Comparative studies in other localities and sectors are needed.

The research indicates that the “new managerialism” – which has developed in the public sector – has created an increasingly alienated workforce and that the processes of change in many institutions have had negative outcomes.

The research demonstrates and application of labour process theory, supported by empirical evidence, as a means for examining the changing experiences of a group of public sector workers and assessing the effect of the “new managerialism” on workers' experiences.

Concerns the effects of world class manufacturing on the quality of working life of shop floor workers. Theoretically, it is grounded in the conflict between two opposing paradigms – the flexible specialisation thesis and labour process theory. Methodologically, it is based on qualitative data gathered in 1996 during in‐depth interviews with employees of a West of Ireland factory established in the use of world class manufacturing methods (fieldwork for a Masters degree minor dissertation). The results of the research indicate that the majority of world class manufacturing methods increase the intensity of work, without yielding proportionate compensation for workers. Based on these findings, the interpretation of world class manufacturing supported by labour process theory was found to be far more accurate a rendering than that promoted by the flexible specialisation thesis.

This paper aims to apply a mixed-methods approach to redefine essential work skill sets, propose components of these skill sets that are necessary for workers in the contexts of emerging market economies (EMEs), examine potential selection tools that should be applied across firms and explain implications for the labour process theory (LPT) of work.

During the first phase of this study, qualitative data was collected from methods, including semi-structured interviews with human resources (HR) experts from the Personnel Management Association of Thailand, top and HR executives and managers of firms across industries in Thailand. Non-participant observations were made during the pre-interview, interview and post-interview stages. Analysis of archival documents and Web-based resources was then conducted. The authors used the qualitative data obtained from the first phase to develop survey instruments for conducting quantitative research during the second phase of this study.

The empirical findings demonstrate that essential work skill sets are “soft skills” that help workers survive and thrive in the business arena in EMEs. These essential work skill sets have implications for the LPT of work in that they play an important role in transferring the power of negotiation from employers to workers in the labour market. Essential work skill sets here can be divided into eight skill domains: (1) ideation and system thinking, (2) information and digital literacy, (3) social skills with appreciation for diversity and inclusion, (4) communication and language, (5) creativity and innovation, (6) emotional quotient (EQ) for self-management and development, (7) growth/outward mindset and (8) cognitive skills for the job role. Within each essential work skill set, there are several skills that workers in the current world of work need to possess (42 skills in total). Additionally, potential selection tools include behavioural observation, behavioural-based interviews, STAR (Situation, Task, Action and Results) interviews, role plays, case studies and simulations, high-pressure interview questions, project assignments, assessment centres, in-depth interview questions and special methods, such as face reading and fingerprint reading. Top and HR managers across industries strongly agree that the eight essential work skill sets and 42 skills are necessary for workers to survive in the business arena in EMEs. They also strongly agree that talent selection tools, especially behavioural-based interviews, are used by their firms to select high-skilled job candidates in the labour market.

Because the eight essential skill sets proposed in this paper are based primarily on the qualitative data obtained from top/HR managers in firms across some industries, generalization to respondents across other industries or across other EMEs may be limited. It is possible that the context of other EMEs may be different from that of Thailand. In this regard, some of the essential work skill sets that are suitable in the case of Thailand may not be suitable in the case of other EMEs. Future studies should thus explore how institutional contexts of other countries/economies shape the definition of essential skill sets and their components, as well as potential selection tools that shall be applied to select high-skilled labour in those contexts.

This paper provides practical implications for top managers and/or HR managers of firms across various industries in EMEs. In particular, managers should internally train and develop their employees/workers to possess the eight essential skill sets: (1) ideation and system thinking, (2) information and digital literacy, (3) social skills with appreciation for diversity and inclusion, (4) communication and language, (5) creativity and innovation, (6) EQ for self-management and development, (7) growth/outward mindset and (8) cognitive skills for the specific job role so that their employees/workers can survive and thrive in the era of the brittleness, anxiety, non-linearity and incomprehensibility of the business world under pandemic conditions. Additionally, top managers and/or HR managers of these firms should apply the potential selection tools proposed in this paper to probe into job candidates’ past experience and behaviours to better predict such candidates’ success at work. In this regard, job candidates/workers should prepare themselves to possess these essential work skill sets so that they can be successful in the business arena and should understand potential selection tools that firms may apply to recruit and select them.

This paper provides social/policy implications for the government and/or relevant public agencies of Thailand and of other EMEs. These governments should encourage firms across industries to invest resources in training and developing their employees/workers to possess those essential work skill sets so that these employees/workers are industry-ready, leading to the alleviation of the problems of skill and mismatch in the labour market.

This paper contributes to the prior literature on human resource management (HRM), the comparative institutional perspective on employment systems based on the varieties of capitalism (VoC) framework and the LPT of work in the following ways: first, this paper fills in the research gap in the field of HRM that calls for studies that explore how the COVID-19 pandemic shapes essential skill sets and skills development among workers within firms (Cooke et al., 2021). Second, this paper provides implications for the LPT of work regarding how essential work skill sets are likely to return the power of negotiation from employers to workers in EMEs during the current situation. Third, the VoC framework tends to focus on only two types of economies, liberal market economies and coordinated market economies. However, this paper examines essential work skill sets and potential screening tools in the context of the underresearched country of Thailand, an EME. In fact, the Thai labour market is quite different from that of other EMEs labour markets, as it is impacted by an aging workforce. This paper contributes to the literature on comparative institutional perspectives on employment systems as it redefines essential work skill sets, proposes various components of these skill sets among workers and examines potential selection tools that are applied across firms located in EMEs.

The history of Organizational Development (OD) reveals a much older tradition of organizational science than the conventional wisdom would suggest. By the 1960s and 1970s OD became self‐confident and dynamic. This period was not only highly experimental but established the principles of OD for much of the twentieth century. By the end of the twentieth century new images of OD had occurred and much of the earlier thinking had been transformed. This review illustrates some examples under a series of themes that have had a major impact on the discipline of OD and on the wider thinking of organizational theorists and researchers.