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The purpose of this article is to provide conceptual provocation in the context of collective expertise on the identification of time‐space constraints – a conceptual provocation that pushes understandings of routines and practices and the tensions that exist around schedulability and social efficiency when the collective dimension of all social action is ignored by social policy, be it in the developing or developed context.

The article examines time‐space constraints in three distinctive environments – low‐income children in urban Ghana, women's space in the North West Frontier province of Pakistan and low‐income elderly sick within the National Health system of the UK. A case study approach is taken.

The analysis draws attention to the impact of mobility constraints on dignity and social functioning in policy environments that maximise rather than address and redress such constraints.

A time‐space constraint approach leads towards more fundamental practices of process investigation rather than a parading of apparent patterns of outcomes, and this in turn leads towards a practice of process correction. There are significant policy implications from this research.

Identifying time‐space constraints represents a woefully neglected element of the development discourse, and it is time for the correction of this neglect with detailed analysis of time‐space constraints across the range of social action. This paper addresses this.

The affluent worker study has held sway as one of the most important works, if not the most important work in British sociology over the last decade. Its findings remain unchallenged in the literature to date. Many analyses of industrial behaviour, political behaviour, family behaviour and “community” behaviour take the findings as the starting point of their investigation. For British sociology the findings of the Affluent Worker have foundation status. This paper sets out to fault the claims of prototypicality and typicality made for the affluent workers of Luton by the study team.

Both critics and proponents of globalisation tend to assume that it is a uniform process leading to a flattening of the cultural terrain. In contrast, this paper, using examples from Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan and Canada, demonstrates a more complex interaction between traditional cultural practices and modern communication forms. The new information technologies enable universal access to authentic local voice. Archiving social and cultural practices has historically been the business of museums, universities, and indeed oral traditions of song and poetry. New information technologies provide for cultural continuities and reflexivities: they enable the routine archiving of social and cultural practice at a minimal cost through hypertext, Web pages and universal access. The “globalisation of culture”, so often discussed, needs to be reframed with reference to this highly overlooked indigenous capability to archive own culture. This paper attempts to provide such a reframing.

This article aims to explore the use of new information communication technology by the Malaysian labour movement. New information communication technologies are undoubtedly globalising, but these same technologies can also be used by labour to retrieve and re‐achieve a more equitable balance between labour and capital. The low transaction costs of the new information communication technology, and the universal reach of these same technologies, provide the labour movement with a critical new tool for organising and bargaining. Malaysia provides us with a useful example of this new context.

The authors e‐interviewed Malaysian labour activists and reviewed Malaysian labour and human rights web sites to develop a framework in which the discussion of global counter‐coordination by labour could be situated. This article provides case material from Malaysian web sites to demonstrate the importance of this technology in labour advocacy within Malaysia and in its connection with the outside world. These demonstrations of connectivity support the proposition of the paper that the new information technology affords the opportunity for the development of global union practices.

The article finds that the Malaysian labour movement is aware of the power of global relay that the technology provides it with and harnesses this power in its interaction with the state.

The level of electronic activity by the labour movement may be under‐recorded in this assessment, as the resources were not available to determine the volume of electronic mailing which takes place within the Malaysian labour relations environment.

This article provides the international labour movement with a perspective of the new information communication technology, which can have practical consequences for action: meta‐coordination structures are required at the level of information exchange.

This article draws attention to the “power of global relay” as a new feature in the politics of labour. This insight requires further theorisation and should be of interest within a range of disciplines concerned with critical approaches to change and power.

This paper aims to examine the significance of information communication technology (ICT) for Balkan labour. Drawing on the heuristic of “distributed discourse”, this paper aims to explore virtual forms of communication and interaction. The paper aims to examine the privileged role of ICT in the: formation of autonomous trade union structures and channels of communication; evasion of the territorial structures of the nation‐state and the construction of virtual communities of international labour solidarity; and authoritative transmission of models of industrial relations practice and of capitalist modernity in virtual space.

The authors conducted in‐depth interviews, followed up by further discussions, with officials and researchers from unions in the Balkan region. IR academics in Serbia and Montenegro were also consulted, as were union web sites and those of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Serbia, Association of Free and Independent Trade Unions of Serbia. The purpose of the dialogue was to build an empirically grounded framework for understanding the limits and possibilities presented by the new distributed communications technologies of the internet for labour in the era of globalisation. This article provides qualitative data to allow reflection on the possibilities inherent in ICT for the reinvigoration of trade unionism and labour mobilisation in this era of rampant neoliberalism, particularly in the area of trade union democratisation and accountability.

The article finds that key figures within the Balkan labour movement are conversant with the potential of ICTs. It is also apparent that the construction of cyber‐unionism at the official level is subject to the authoritative force of neo‐liberal imperial governance. However, this is a regime of policing that is indexed and auditable through the very distributed communication technologies which can affect forms of meta‐governance beyond the control of institutions.

The findings, based on the interrogation of qualitative data are provisional hypotheses and an invitation to further research on the space‐time dimensions of trade unionism in the age of globalisation.

This paper highlights the situated character of ICT utilisation. While ICTs can be implicated in the reproduction of extant organisational forms and politics, this article provides the international labour movement with a viewpoint from which to build ICT strategies and appropriate organisational structures that recognise the limitations of centralised representation and control.

This paper represents fresh and contemporary data on the use of the internet by Balkan labour. By interrogating the qualitative data an invitation to further research on the space‐time dimensions of trade unionism in the age of globalisation is presented.

This paper investigates how the learning trajectory of corporations utilising information and communication technologies has been matched by the labour movement and social movements associated with it.

The paper investigates new communication dynamics of labour in the international setting. It then focuses on a broader and richer set of online practices by labour by drawing on material placed on the world wide web by members of and advocates for the Braceros (the strong arms) – migrant Mexican workers. These practices follow on a history of effective use of the new information communication technologies by the Zapatista movement in Mexico.

The paper places these activities in the context of globalisation and the global movement of capital and labour. It argues that the practices of online communication associated with the Braceros can be harnessed to move beyond the reactive shadowing of capital by labour. Instead innovative and proactive forms of monitoring policies and critiquing outcomes become possible.

Internet‐based counter‐coordination allows the construction and diffusion of a different understanding of the nature and consequences of the current mode of globalisation.

The paper demonstrates the ways in which information and communication technologies can be used to engage in thematic mapping and construction of memory by labour and provides an example of the electronic sampling and indexing of material.

This paper aims to describe global trends and policy responses with respect to the social sustainability of urban mobility which, put simply, refers to whether the benefits and costs of transport and travel services (mobility) and the spatial organisation of facilities and services (accessibility) are equally and equitably distributed in a society or community. Considering urban transport provision from a social sustainability framework raises critical issues of policy goals and purpose, not least of which is the consideration that policies aimed at stemming or reducing urban mobility should not accentuate existing inequities and inequalities in accessibility. It also raises issues of reshaping urban decision-making structures to better integrate the end-user, where the end-user includes both those who are presently included in mobility and accessibility provision and, most importantly, those who are presently and have been previously excluded.

Comprehensive research into the global policy literature and urban practice around socially sustainable urban mobility under the auspices of an international agency.

The databases and methodologies around social sustainability have not been sufficiently developed to permit ready operationalisation. The use of electronic technology and user feedback – which such technology makes possible – has not been adequately harnessed to develop the necessary methodologies for the measurement of social sustainability with respect to urban mobility.

The development of improved social sustainability methodologies will increase the probability of the building of pro-poor infrastructure.

The development of improved social sustainability methodologies will proved improved frameworks for evaluating the social responsibility of transport options.

The development of participatory methodologies and evaluatory frameworks will lead towards more cohesive and better integrated cities, that is more socially sustainable cities.

This paper makes the case that the participatory research necessary to the evaluation of transport projects, schemes and networks as socially sustainable has not yet been undertaken. It brings together a set of global evidence to make the case that current discussions of the social sustainability currently take place in an evidence and policy vacuum.

The purpose of this paper is to examine innovative union use of the internet in the 2000s and to see whether the major union innovations in the USA and UK mark the advent of “open source” union structures.

Reviews two important innovations, www.workingamerica.org and www.unionreps.org.uk Examines how they may fit with the open source union design.

Both the AFL‐CIO and US union efforts to develop open source union forms and the TUC and UK union efforts to improve services to workers and members through the internet mark the advent of the open source union form. The two countries have different approaches to this innovation, which reflect the differing problems faced by unions in the USA and UK. In both countries, unions will have to find the appropriate mix of on‐line and off‐line activities to create stable open source organizations.

No other paper has examined union use of the internet in terms of creating the new open source union form.