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This paper examines the development of an antecedent model of social partnership, the social “accord” employed by the Labor Government in Australia during the period 1983‐1996. The specific focus of the paper is upon the implementation of the Training Reform Agenda (TRA) in Australian manufacturing. The TRA was designed to provide for the upskilling of existing employees and the enhanced vocational preparation of new employees. This was a joint objective of government, business and union policy and one designed to encourage the growth of high‐wage, high‐skill industries. The achievement of this objective was, however, limited. Social partnership, in the case of the TRA, proved to be a way of legitimating a work change process which delivered greater gains to employers than it did to unions and employees. The partnerships formed under the aegis of the TRA had a limited lifespan and represented a contingent form of relationship between the partners, rather than a seachange in relations.

This chapter examines the relationship between health service restructuring and the health care experiences of women from rural and remote areas of Canada. Data were collected from 34 focus groups (237 women), 15 telephone interviews and 346 responses from an online survey. Access to services, care quality and satisfaction are salient themes in these data. Problems include: travel, shortage of providers, turnover in personnel, delays associated in accessing care, lack of knowledge of women's health issues and patronizing attitudes of some health care providers. Health care service restructuring has led to deterioration in service availability and quality. Key areas for policy development need to address health care access and quality improvement issues, including increasing access to more (particularly female) providers who are sensitive to women's health issues.

This article explores the industrial relations factors associated with the adoption of teamworking and allied new working practices. A survey of trade union representatives in the UK steel industry reveals evidence that managers are less likely to introduce teamworking when they have to negotiate with trade unions. However, contrary to expectations derived from the existing literature linking teamworking with co‐operation, more conflict with unions was reported in workplaces where managers had introduced teamworking. In particular, when teamworking involved abandoning the distinction between process and maintenance work, conflict developed over health and safety and training issues. Union representatives were also more critical where managers sought teamworking for narrowly defined economic reasons, although union attitudes towards teamworking overall did not appear an important obstacle. However, formal agreements protecting workers, involving job security and redundancy provisions, did encourage cross‐functional working and teams adopting more responsibilities.

Is labour's decline permanent, or is it merely a temporary weakening, as Beverley Silver suggests in her recent book, as the labour movement is unmade and remade in different locations and at different times? The article aims to examine this question in South Africa, one of the newly industrialised countries of the 1960s and 1970s, now largely bypassed by new manufacturing investment destined for countries such as India and China.

The paper concentrates, through six case studies, on the growing non‐core and peripheral zones of work and examines the impact of the restructuring on labour.

The evidence presented is ambiguous. While there have been significant innovative union organising experiments, it may be that the structural weakening of labour has been too great and that the new sources of power are too limited, to permit effective reorientation.

It is concluded that significant progress will only be made if there is a concerted effort to commit resources and above all to develop new associational strategies that recognise the potential for symbolic power as an alternative to the erosion of structural power of workers and the unions that represent them. Unless such a shift is made the crisis of labour movements internationally may be better understood as a permanent crisis than the temporary one Silver suggests.

The paper identities the potential for new strategies to develop and sustain associational and symbolic power that might compensate for weakened structural power and facilitate a remaking of the labour movement under new conditions.

Businesses worldwide are beginning to explore new areas of workplace change. Gone are the days of changing an element in one department and expecting results throughout the entire firm. The latest trend is the high performance work system. The implementation of such a system is not based around one department, but focuses on firm‐wide change. Key elements are workplace restructuring, retraining of workers and adding new technology. It has been found that by improving the flow of information through workplace redesign, using state of the art technology and empowering employees by training them to be daily decision makers, productivity and overall quality of production increases significantly. The implementation of a high performance work system can be risky and costly but the US Government is currently developing ways to aid companies so that they can take advantage of the benefits that can result from the implementation of such a successful system.

This concluding chapter not only summarises the key discussions and arguments of the preceding chapters but also reflects on organisational, managerial, supervisory, behavioural, social and cultural factors shaping the miners’ reactions to the restructured and formalised deep-level mining work processes and their unofficial job tactic of making a plan (planisa). The chapter provides suggestions on how the positive aspects of planisa could be harnessed and negative aspects addressed towards efficient, productive and safer organisational, managerial, supervisory and operational practices at the rock-face down the mine.

This two part paper represents an attempt to enumerate and analyse recent instances of work system design experiments in terms of the outcome measures sought or reported in those studies. ‘Work system design experiments’ is intended to include only experiments dealing with sets of interrelated jobs, as opposed to those experiments solely manipulating either jobs which are dealt with individually, or changes in such things as work environment, or management climate. The literature comprising experiments in work system design contains a wide range of general end results variables, but, however, suffers from the associated fact that these numerous outcome measures are frequently poorly conceived or operationalized, and are not easily compared with one another from study to study.

Whilst remaining in the public sector the Post Office has undergone massive changes in terms of its general orientation and structure over the last decade, the latest phase of which is having major implications for workplace management‐labour relations and trade union organisation. Meanwhile, the future prospect of privatisation poses further immense challenges. This paper has the objective of contributing to an understanding of the restructuring of work and industrial relations which has been taking place within the Royal Mail — the letters arms of the Post Office — over the last few years, focusing in particular on the relationship between management organisation and strategies and the dynamics of workplace trade unionism.

Work restructuring in the interference of the global and the local is discussed with distribution as starting point of analysis. The distribution sector in The Netherlands is introduced as a local part of a global context in which outsourcing becomes more and more general practice. Logistic chains, in which both production and distribution are incorporated are indicated as a promising level of analysis in gaining more insight in the dynamics of the process of work restructuring. The argument is illustrated by the analysis of the chain of orchid plants.

The focus on excessive corporate leverage as a key factor influencing bank loan delinquency has come into sharp focus in recent times. However, not much analysis has been undertaken on the factors driving corporate distress in emerging economies. Focusing on India as a case study, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of a particular category of corporate debt restructuring (CDR) proposed by the Indian central bank over the last decade in leading an attempt to address bank loan delinquencies, the authors assess the factors influencing the quantum of restructured debt at the corporate level over the time period 2003–2012.

Besides univariate analysis, the authors use logit regression techniques to analyze the factors driving CDR outcomes in India.

The results suggest that firms that successfully exit the debt restructuring process are more profitable and less levered and spend a longer time in such restructuring. Little net equity enters these restructured firms, while there is some evidence of equity stripping, particularly in firms with greater promoter control.

To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the early studies that employ micro-level data to make a comprehensive assessment of the factors driving CDR for a leading emerging economy.