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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.

This research aims to examine non‐union and union representative arrangements at the Eurotunnel call centre and assesses their effectiveness in representing the needs of employees.

The research examines these issues over a five‐year period using a series of employee surveys, interviews and focus groups. This period has also allowed a review of consultation arrangements before and after union recognition and an examination of the outcomes from such arrangements.

The evidence suggests that the non‐union voice structures at Eurotunnel are used as devices for information and communications rather than true consultation mechanisms or bargaining agents. However, the challenge for the trade union at the Eurotunnel call centre is that what can be regarded as a success in some aspects (increased trade union membership and presence) has not resulted in a change in attitudes towards unions by a majority of Eurotunnel employees. This could be seen as one of the major challenges for union‐employer partnership arrangements.

Generalising the findings of this case to other call centres in non‐union workplaces and firms can be problematic, given the unique ownership and structure of Eurotunnel.

These results would suggest that, while trade unions may provide greater voice than non‐union arrangements, the strength of voice is dependent on the legitimacy and effectiveness of trade unions in representing employees' interests at the workplace. Potentially it could have far‐reaching implications for employers, unions and government policy regarding the structures needed for providing effective consultation and representative structures.

Uniquely, it highlights the potential limitations and dangers for employers and unions in not addressing the needs and expectations of workers in any workplace.

Using management and employee data from the 1998 workplace employee relations survey, this article attempts to trace “fragments of HRM” within the hospitality industry (HI) on a comparative basis with all industries and services (AIS) in Great Britain. Four themes are explored: how the management of HRM is organised and practised, “individualism” and “collectivism”, participation and involvement, and other “sophisticated” HR practices. The impact of HRM on employees is assessed. HRM in the HI is found to be very different, thus providing an extreme example of the “retaining control/cost control” approach to management, and a graphic illustration of very “hard” HRM in practice. While HI employees are much more content with their lot than their counterparts in AIS who are subject to rather more “favourable” HRM policies and practices, other indicators imply that there is also dissatisfaction. Qualitative research is necessary to understand whether employees really do enjoy being “kicked hard”. Management might reap greater benefits by adopting more developmental, “soft” HRM practices.

Based on a representative survey of German subsidiaries in the UK, their parent companies and a comparative analysis to the Workplace Employee Relations Survey 1998, the article examines the impact of nationality of ownership on employee relations (ER) in German multinational companies (MNCs) operating in an Anglo‐Saxon setting. It also assesses whether in light of heightened international competition and the problems in the German ER model, there has been a weakening of the home country effect over time. The study finds little evidence of a home country effect in relation to ER structures but reveals a pronounced country‐of‐origin effect in the ER approach and style. There is also evidence that German MNCs have responded to the globalisation pressures of the 1990s by a heightened emphasis on the country‐of‐origin collective approach in their UK subsidiaries, whilst at the same time developing comprehensive direct human resource management employee involvement schemes to complement, rather than substitute collective ER.

There is an increasing concern on the quality of jobs and productivity witnessed in the flexible employment arrangements. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between various flexible employment arrangements and the workplace performance.

Home-based working, teleworking, flexible timing and compressed hours are the main employment types examined using the Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS) over the years 2004 and 2011 in Great Britain. The workplace performance is measured by two outcomes – the financial performance and labour productivity. First, the determinants of these flexible employment types are explored. Second, the ordinary least squares (OLS) method is followed. Third, an instrumental variable (IV) approach is applied to account for plausible endogeneity and to estimate the causal effects of flexible employment types on firm performance.

The findings show a significant and positive relationship between the flexible employment arrangements and the workplace performance. Education, age, wage, quality of relations between managers-employees, years of experience, the area of the market the workplace is operated and the competition are significant factors and are positively associated with the propensity of the implementation of flexible employment arrangements.

The insights derived from the study can have various profound policy implications for employees, employers and the society overall, including family-work balance, coping with family demands, improving the firm performance, reducing traffic congestion and stress among others.

It is the first study that explores the relationship between flexible employment types and workplace performance using an IV approach. This allows us to estimate the causal effects of flexible employment types and the possible associated social implications.

The international trend in the growth and incidence of “non‐standard employment”, and its highly gendered nature, is well documented. Similarly, interest in employee involvement or participation by academics and practitioners has seen the emergence of a rapidly growing body of literature. Despite the continued interest in each of these areas, the literature is relatively silent when it comes to where the two areas intersect, that is, what the implications are for employee participation in the growth of non‐standard employment. This paper seeks to redress this relative insularity in the literature by examining some broad trends in this area in Australia. The literature lacks one clear, accepted definition of “non‐standard” employment. For ease of definition, and because of the nature of the available data, we focus on part‐time employment in this paper. The paper analyses data from the Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey of 1995 (AWIRS 95). It tests the hypotheses that part‐time employees enjoy less access to participatory management practices in the workplace than their full‐time counterparts, and that this diminishes the access to participation in the workplace enjoyed by female workers in comparison with their male colleagues, since the part‐time workforce is predominantly feminised. These hypotheses were strongly confirmed. This has major implications for workplace equity, and for organisational efficiency.

It is apparent from existing research in the UK that little is known about how forms ofnon‐union employee representation (NER) are composed, their independence from managerial influence, the “representativeness” of such bodies, and their accountability. In addition, little has been documented about the impact of such structures on either the managerial objective of securing consent to organisational change or the employee objective of influencing managerial decisions. This research will attempt to address these issues by examining NER structures in the UK and, in particular, assessing their effectiveness in representing the needs of employees through an examination of representative arrangements at Eurotunnel. Overall, the evidence suggests that most NER structures are used as devices for consultation and communication rather than as bargaining agents. While it can be argued that consultation, not bargaining, may indeed be their objective, it nevertheless questions the legitimacy of such bodies as true alternatives to unions. This presents the issue of whether state‐sponsored NER forms with provisions for resources and training could improve the effectiveness of NER forms in representing employees’ interests at the workplace. As the Eurotunnel example and previous evidence have indicated, while NER structures can be used as mechanisms for more effective means of communication and consultation, their effectiveness as bodies representing the interests of employees in filling the lack of representation is questionable.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of innovative workplace practices in a sample of manufacturing establishments.

The sample comprises manufacturing establishments located in Italy and a comparable sample extracted from the British Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS). The paper controls for sector, size, skill quality and industrial relations.

Job rotation and technical training are positively associated with current performance in both samples. On average, British establishments are more productive: the different endowment in terms of workplace practices, skills and industrial relations accounts for 40 per cent of the gap, while the different efficacy of the endowment on performance accounts for the remainder.

In both samples the introduction of team working implies a relatively important advance along the reorganisation process, which was undertaken in the early stages of reorganisation in British establishments but much later in Italian firms. Linking the progression of the reorganisation to non‐convexities in supermodular production functions may be an interesting line of future research.

This paper uses a matched workplace‐employee data set to examine the extent to which individuals’ experiences of work and experiences of practices at work, as measured by selected indicators of worker wellbeing, are explained by the nation state of the head office of the workplace. Seven dimensions of worker wellbeing are identified and examined. The paper establishes that employees have different experiences if employed in a workplace in which the head office is located in France, Germany, Japan or the USA relative to the reference category of being employed in a workplace which is UK‐owned.

Discusses the long existing and confusing problems of establishing the relationship of who is, and who if not, a dependent worker. Reflects developments which have occurred in British law as it affects the employment field, plus an evaluation and analysis of some of the different types of employment relationships which have evolved by examining, where possible, the status of each of these relationships. Concludes that the typical worker nowadays finds himself in a vulnerable position both economically and psychologically owing to the insecurity which exists.