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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.

This chapter is about the modern, Western education system as an economic system of production on behalf of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) and globalization towards a single, global social space around market capitalism, liberal democracy and individualism.

The schooling process is above all an economic process, within which educational labour is performed, and through which the education system operates in an integrated fashion with the (external) economic system.

It is mainly through children’s compulsory educational labour that modern schooling plays a part in the production of labour power, supplies productive (paid) employment within the CMP, meets ‘corporate economic imperatives’, supports ‘the expansion of global corporate power’ and facilitates globalization.

What children receive in exchange for their appropriated and consumed labour power within the education system are not payments of the kind enjoyed by adults in the external economy, but instead merely a promise – the promise enshrined in the Western education industry paradigm.

In modern societies, young people, like chattel slaves, are compulsorily prevented from freely exchanging their labour power on the labour market while being compulsorily required to perform educational labour through a process in which their labour power is consumed and reproduced, and only at the end of which as adults they can freely (like freed slaves) enter the labour market to exchange their labour power.

This compulsory dispossession, exploitation and consumption of labour power reflects and reinforces the power distribution between children and adults in modern societies, doing so in a way resembling that between chattel slaves and their owners.

In this chapter, we develop and present the Multi-Perspective Multilevel Model of emotional labor in organizations. This model is based on three perspectives: (1) a service requirement, (2) an intra-psychic process, and (3) an emotional display, each involving five levels of analysis: within-person, between persons, in interpersonal exchanges, in groups, and across the organization as a whole. Our model is differentiated from earlier characterizations of emotional labor in that we propose that the phenomenon begins with energy generation instead of energy depletion; and is neither a one-way nor a one-by-one service episode. We further proffer that the intra-psychic processes embedded in emotional labor represent a form of social self-regulation that impacts across multiple levels within service organizations. We conclude by discussing the implications and limitations of our model for emotional labor research.

Over the past thirty years or so, a body, albeit a somewhat disarticulated body, of evidence on the work of managers has accumulated. The field of study which has given rise to this evidence is, from time to time, subject to ‘internal’ criticisms by some of its own practitioners (Luthans and Davis 1980, Marples 1967, Mintzberg 1973, Stewart 1983) whose main contention, predictably, is that the studies do not, methodologically or analytically, always live up to their self‐imposed project. The studies in short are upbraided for what they have imperfectly done. In an earlier paper (Hales 1986) I sought to extend and add to these criticisms of studies of managers' work. I argued that the studies fail to distinguish, within the vague term ‘managerial work’, between: first, ‘management’ as a process and ‘managers’ as a particular category of agents; second, managerial work as a totality and managerial jobs as clusters of that (and other) work; third, what managers are required to do (role definition) and what they actually do (role performance) and fourth, the outputs and purpose of managerial work (managerial tasks and responsibilities) versus the inputs and practice of managerial work (managers' behaviour and activities). These ambiguities are, I suggested, symptomatic of a rather narrow empiricist approach and failure adequately to theorise the ‘management’ which managers are, apparently, doing. In this way, I wanted to arrive at, rather than merely assert, the proposition that the activities of managers cannot be adequately understood without setting them, empirically and theoretically, in a wider context.

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.

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.

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.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

First contract arbitration (FCA) provisions are posed as a solution to the difficulties of negotiating a first contract for newly certified bargaining units. FCA is a longstanding, and no longer controversial, element of Canadian labor legislation. FCA provisions now exist in six Canadian jurisdictions and four distinct FCA models have developed (the exceptional remedy or fault model, the automatic access model, the no-fault model, and the mediation intensive model). In the United States the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) included a highly contested proposal to amend the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to include an FCA provision similar to the Canadian automatic access model. This chapter offers a balanced assessment of FCA evidence from Canada addressing the main objections to FCA in the EFCA debates. Individual case level data from jurisdictions representing each of the four FCA models is examined. The evidence demonstrates that although FCA is widely available in Canada, it is an option that is rarely sought and, when sought, rarely granted; that parties involved in FCA are able to establish stable bargaining relationships; and, that this process does not, as critics charge, simply prolong the life of nonviable bargaining units. This chapter concludes by suggesting that the practice under Quebec's “no-fault” model and British Columbia's “mediation intensive” model merit consideration for adoption elsewhere. These models position the FCA process as a mechanism fostering collective bargaining and voluntary agreements, rather than treating it as a remedy for dysfunctional negotiations and as part of the unfair labor practice framework.

Drawing upon a political economy approach, this article aims to analyze the transformations in the labor market within the context of contemporary capitalism, focusing on the phenomenon of financialization.

Financialization is defined as a distinct wealth pattern marked by a growing proportion of financial assets in capitalist wealth. Within financial markets, corporate performance is continuously assessed, in a process that disciplines management to achieve expected financial results, with consequences throughout corporate management.

We find that this phenomenon has implications for labor management, resulting in the intensification of labor processes and the adoption of insecure forms of employment, leading to the fractalization of work. These two mechanisms, added to the indebtedness of workers, constitute three elements for disciplining labor in contemporary capitalism.

We argue that these forms of discipline constitute a subsumption of labor to finance, resulting in an increase in labor exploitation. This formulation of the relationship between financialization and changes in the realm of labor also contributes to understanding the unrealizing potential of social free time in contemporary capitalism.