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The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of setting access restrictions to legislative drafting records – specifically in New Zealand.

Various international archival institutions and other offices which create legislative drafting records were contacted to see what access restrictions were placed on any legislative drafting files that they held. The information provided by these institutions, together with written theoretical information regarding public access and legal professional privilege, was the basis for the research.

There is no standard approach to allowing public access to legislative drafting records across the institutions researched. The level of accessibility varies, as does the period of restriction. In New Zealand legislative drafting records are considered to be protected by legal professional privilege and therefore are restricted unless the privilege is waived.

The main form of communication used to contact the various institutions was e‐mail. A large number of institutions and offices from which information was requested did not reply, and some that did reply did not provide answers specific to legislative drafting records. The research is therefore limited to the information that was received.

There is very little published information available regarding legislative drafting records and public access to them. These records are unique due to debate over whether or not they are, or should be, covered by legal professional privilege. Because of the unique nature of these records, there is no common or widely available precedent to follow when applying access restrictions to them.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how different actors interacted to influence local labour legislation in the case of the collective bargaining regulations in Guangdong Province, China, using long-term observation and in-depth interviews.

This paper uses the case study method to investigate the process of local labour law-making in China. First, the primary data focus on a series of in-depth interviews conducted in 2014. In Guangdong Province, the author collected the thoughts of three well-informed provincial and municipal-level trade union officials, one government official, five scholars and lawyers, four enterprise union chairs and three labour activists. Second, these interviews are triangulated with legislative documents and the author’s observation of three public meetings. Held at various times from 2011 to 2014, these meetings were organized to discuss different legislative drafts on collective bargaining.

The six-year process of adopting collective bargaining legislation in Guangdong presents a complex picture as different actors joined the process at different times and engaged in different ways. Labour strikes were a crucial force in drawing the attention of both the local and central governments and functioned as a means to repeatedly make collective labour relations a policy “issue” for the government, particularly in 2010. Another actor – the local official trade unions – played a decisive role by not only putting the “issue” into the decision-making agenda, but by also providing policy alternatives based on workers’ bargaining practices. At the same time, business associations, using slow economic growth as an excuse, exerted their economic leverage to pressure for suspension of the first two rounds of legislation. Nevertheless, the new political leadership assuming office in 2013, using an adoptive but restrained logic, pushed for the enactment of the compromise regulation.

Guangdong Province and its emerging collective labour regimes are not representatives of China, but they are at the frontier of the labour field. Thus, this case study was an example of the “most dynamic” interaction with the “most participative” actors and perhaps the “most pro-labour” of China’s official trade unions.

This paper is original and draws special attention to the dynamic process of the local law-making and the rationales of different actors in China.

The purpose of this paper is to seek to illuminate some of the dynamics of globalization that enable capital to advance its interests.

The paper uses theories of globalization focusing upon the “race‐to‐the‐bottom”. Such theories draw attention to the way major businesses are using their power to secure advantages, often by playing‐off one nation state against another. Increasingly, offshore financial centres (OFCs) are becoming key players in this race. The paper uses a case study relating to the enactment of limited liability partnership (LLP) in Jersey, a UK Crown Dependency. The legislation was financed and developed by the UK firms, Price Waterhouse and Ernst & Young in collaboration with a network of advisers.

The paper sheds light on the resources deployed by major accountancy firms to secure conditions necessary for the smooth accumulation of private wealth and power. Accountancy firms used OFCs or microstates to reposition the state‐capital relationship in globalization and reconfigure the UK auditor liability laws. The paper also highlights the importance of the state to capital and globalization.

In common with major capitalist enterprises, accountancy firms rarely provide background material to explain how they advance their interests. Inevitably, this limits the analysis. Nevertheless, the case study shows some trajectories that have enabled accountancy firms to advance their economic interests.

The paper shows that accountancy firms are able to use novel tactics to advance their interests and that national regulation cannot easily be understood without consideration of the wider international context.

Accounting researchers have rarely focused upon the use of offshore financial centres by major accountancy firms to advance their interests. It also shows that the local and the global are intertwined.

The purpose of this paper is to inspire a different way of thinking about digitalization and organizational change by theorizing simultaneity as an alternative to the otherwise dominant root metaphor of sequence in the literature on digitalization and organizational change.

The theoretical argument is based on a reading of central contributions to the literature on digital technology and organizational change, and particularly inspired by the work positing a constitutive entanglement of technology and organization. We argue for an extension of this line of thinking with a reading of Latour’s notion tonalities. The relevance of the theoretical argument is demonstrated through an illustrative empirical example of the phenomenon digital-ready legislation.

The paper identifies sequence as a root metaphor in the organization and digital change literature. It develops a simultaneity view and illustrates its relevance through the example of digital-ready legislation, pinpointing how technological, organizational and legal elements are attuned to one another at the same time rather than in sequence.

The sequentiality view has dominated the change management research, which has travelled from research into practice. The simultaneity view has the potential to offer a new approach to planning change, with a focus on the simultaneous alignment of, e.g. legal, organizational and technological elements.

The paper offers an alternative to dominant views on digitalization and organizational change, drawing on an overlooked notion in Latour’s scholarship, namely tonalities. This has potential to qualify the entanglement thesis and develop simultaneity as a new metaphor for understanding digital change.

The purpose of the paper is to discuss the factors that would increase or decrease the prospects to use research evidence in legislation in a developing country.

Both qualitative and quantitative research methods were used to identify the gaps in ability to utilise research evidence among policymakers. A combination of expert analysis of five policy brief formats, 13 self-administered semi-structured interviews with policymakers, focus group discussion and literature analysis informed data collection.

The incentives and motivations for research-based legislation are classified into three categories: those that concern legislators and researchers, those that concern legislators only and those that concern researchers only.

The work discusses the need for policymakers to make decisions based on facts. The findings are a reflection of a long interaction the author had with policymakers and researchers in Uganda.

The goal of this chapter is to respond to the theoretical inquiries by scholars who are interested in how the public–private partnership (PPP) models adapt to China’s context where political power dictates economic strategies. We also want to provide suggestions to policy designers who aim to promote a sustainable investment environment for domestic and international investors. We review the literature that explains the upside and downside of PPP projects in contemporary China. (1) We classify the trajectory of PPP evolution into four phases, i.e., emergence, growth, recession and revival. (2) We note that private companies take a disadvantageous position in the partnership compared with governments and state-owned enterprises because of a lack of specialized legislation, unequal competition between private companies and state-owned enterprises and the opposition from the civic society. (3) We identify political risks as the most influential risks. Political risks also lead to the misallocation of other risks between public and private parties that contributes to the high failure rate of China’s PPP projects. Based on these findings, we recommend governments to draft specialized legislation, stabilize the political environment and provide favourable subsidies to local governments to limit the risks involved in PPP projects. We also advise private enterprises and state-owned enterprises to focus on negotiating over task and risk division with governments when they make decisions to participate in PPP projects. This full review of studies on PPP development in China provides reliable recommendations to scholars, governments and enterprises.

This paper aims to explain the development of the social economy by analyzing when, why and how the community interest company (CIC) legal structure was established in the UK. The CIC legal structure was designed for social enterprise to ensure that company assets are committed to public benefit in perpetuity.

This research paper uses archival data and semistructured interviews to analyze the historical development of the social economy, emergence of social enterprise and the establishment of the CIC legal structure.

The historical analysis describes why and how the idea for the CIC emerged from practitioners and explains how collaboration between practitioners, lawyers, civil servants and politicians established the CIC as a new legal structure for social enterprise.

The analysis explains how practitioners influenced policy development and demonstrates how practitioner influence can be usefully incorporated into policy development.

The CIC legal structure advanced the social economy by creating an institutionally recognized brand identity for social enterprise that locks assets to public benefit in perpetuity.

The paper presents a detailed empirical account of the establishment of a new legal structure for social enterprise and applies theoretical concepts to develop an integrated account of social economy advancement.

There exist many forms of discrimination. Different societies have developed varying approaches to the problem but most have evolved some legal prohibition. Of course there are many other ways in which the problem of discrimination can be tackled and this article will touch on some of those. However here the principal concern is with the law both as a tool for redressing disadvantage and as a social signal of the seriousness with which inequality is viewed.