Search results

This paper presents an historical reconstruction of the radicalisation of Alan Fox, the industrial sociologist and a detailed analysis of his early historical and sociological writing in the classical pluralist phase.

An intellectual history, including detailed discussion of key Fox texts, supported by interviews with Fox and other Biographical sources.

Fox’s radicalisation was incomplete, as he carried over from his industrial relations (IR) pluralist mentors, Allan Flanders and Hugh Clegg, a suspicion of political Marxism, a sense of historical contingency and an awareness of the fragmented nature of industrial conflict.

Recent academic attention has centred on Fox’s later radical pluralism with its “structural” approach to the employment relationship. This paper revisits his early, neglected classical pluralist writing. It also illuminates his transition from institutional IR to a broader sociology of work, influenced by AH Halsey, John Goldthorpe and others and the complex nature of his radicalisation.

The 50th anniversary of Fox's Beyond Contract and Man Mismanagement coincides with another vital contribution to the sociology of work from 1974: Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital. This article analyses these two scholars' complementary approaches to job design and the extent to which Fox's ideas influenced subsequent labour process thought.

The article's methodological approach is a historiographical reading of Fox and Braverman's thought in the context of their times and later scholarship.

The article demonstrates that despite some noteworthy overlap with Braverman concerning scientific management, Fox's insights were marginal to later iterations of labour process analysis. It delves into the reasons for this relative neglect, providing an understanding of the dynamics at play.

This paper's value lies in its combined industrial relations and labour process historiography. It offers a fresh perspective on Alan Fox's relationship to the latter field of study.

The paper aims to provide an understanding of how the transfer of progressive human resource management (HRM) practices may or may fail to render multinational enterprises (MNEs) institutional entrepreneurs creating change in job quality and decent work to underprivileged workers in the low-pay retail sector in Japan.

The paper draws on survey questionnaire data and interviews with workers and management in a foreign retailer in Japan.

The findings suggest that even where MNEs may provide some measurable material improvements in job quality, in this case equal pay for equal work, the total outcomes are nevertheless shaped by institutional context and constraints. In this case, the improvement in pay was intertwined with flexibility demands that were possible to meet for some workers but not others. In particular, women with care responsibilities and competing demands on their time were not able to experience “decent work” in the same way as others.

The study had a relatively low response rate, due to lack of discretion over time experienced by workers in Japan, as well as limited data on program outcomes, with interviews conducted with a small number of participants.

The study suggests that spaces and opportunities exist for MNEs to diverge from dominant practices in given host country locations and exercise a level of agency as emissaries of decent work but successful outcomes require a very thorough understanding of individual worker experiences within the institutional constraints of given environments.

The study offers insights into the complexities of initiatives by MNEs to contribute to the provision of decent work, particularly for workers in underprivileged positions including women in low-pay sectors such as retail, as firm-level practices lead to variable outcomes when filtered through local institutions.

The study brings together a focus on firm-level practices that inform much of the international HRM and international management scholarship with an emphasis on the experiences of workers, which is pursued in the sociology of work, to investigate whether MNEs can be actors in the realising of the Sustainable Development Goals around decent work.

Doctoral programs play a crucial role in promoting innovation and technology transfer in universities. To design these programs effectively and with a co-design perspective, it is essential to consider all stakeholders involved in the process, including teachers, students and employers. The main objective of this study is to enhance postgraduate programs to improve students' employability.

This empirical study was conducted over a three-year period and employed semi-structured interviews as its primary research methodology. In the first phase, 21 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with managers from various sectors. The second phase involved 20 interviews, and the final phase of the study included 18 interviews with the same managers from previous phases.

The study's main results revealed that the international networks, language proficiency and analytical skills of doctoral students were highly valued by employers. The main findings come from companies with doctoral students. Therefore, the skills were identified during the learning experience of the PhD graduates in the companies.

The study's results can guide improvements in postgraduate program curricula and design to enhance students' employability.

This research presents a novel approach to its findings. On the one hand, the study's conclusions may provide valuable insights for business agents, encouraging them to hire PhD students. On the other hand, it aims to drive necessary changes that promote more PhD students' focus on non-academic careers, creating significant value for research and innovation in the private sector.

This paper aims to quantitatively explore the trends and patterns of the existing literature in the gig economy.

Using a total of 1,707 documents retrieved from the Scopus and Web of Science databases, bibliometric analysis using R-Biblioshiny and VOSviewer software was performed to map the studies in the gig economy.

The paper provides information on the most productive authors, countries and journals, as well as the emerging themes in gig research. It highlights the most prolific authors, with a notable presence from the USA and the UK, which are also the countries with the most publications and citations. China has also emerged prominently, both in terms of the number of publications and its involvement in thematic clusters and trending topics. Through co-word analysis and thematic clustering, the study provides information about emerging themes in gig economy studies, such as labor, technology, management and precarity. The results provide insightful information for comprehending the effects of gig labor in the contemporary workforce.

This study provides a comprehensive overview of the scholarly literature related to the gig economy, exploring the key insights by highlighting the evolving trends in gig research.

By mapping thematic clusters, tracking research evolution and identifying trending topics, it provides a unique perspective on the field's development and emerging areas of focus. It serves as a valuable means for addressing the challenges and opportunities presented by the gig economy.

The article considers the utility of a pluralist perspective in the context of current debates around UK corporate governance reform. Oxford School pluralism advanced both a description of how industrial relations (IR) operated in practice plus a prescription for how it should operate. Whilst economic conditions are different today, a pluralist framing provides not only a useful way of understanding interests in firm governance (description) but also a solid grounding for a pragmatic reform agenda (prescription).

Drawing from key texts in the field, the article considers core concepts within pluralist discourse and discusses their relevance to contemporary policy debates.

The article provides a short outline of recent economic and political developments and considers how a pluralist framing helps explain firm-level interests, challenging the dominant narrative of shareholder primacy. It then asks what policy interventions might flow from this analysis of capital and labour investments, and how feasible they are in the current UK context. This allows a discussion of levels of analysis (evident in materialist theories such as “radical pluralism” and the “disconnected capitalism thesis”). Finally, it reflects briefly on the links between corporate governance and wider patterns of inequality, suggesting the pluralist position is consistent with a Durkheimian sociology focusing on the potential in state-led regulatory interventions to tackle anomie and strengthen social solidarity.

The article brings together literature from what are often treated as relatively discrete areas of enquiry (employment relations and corporate governance) and also considers the public policy implications of these connections.

This study investigates the origins and elaboration of the managerial “unitary” frame of reference associated with Alan Fox, focusing on unionised firms: the industrial relations context, intellectual roots, elaboration, adaptation by other writers, and international applicability.

Tracing the above requirements through contemporaneous sources.

Fox’s designation of the unitary frame needs to be understood in its 1960s’ context, particularly the promotion of “productivity bargaining”, and its furthering through management training and education. Fox’s specific contribution is identified. Subsequent UK writers have underplayed the importance of the legal dimension of managerial authority, especially relevant in the US context, while other extra-economic factors bolster the managerial unitary frame in authoritarian societies such as China.

The use of Fox's neglected 1960s’ writings; tracking how Fox developed the unitary frame concept and how it was funnelled into the narrow parameters of non-unionism by subsequent writers; identifying its applicability beyond the UK (with the USA as a historical example and China as a contemporary one).

Leadership is an essential contributor to employee creative self-efficacy, and past research suggests a positive relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy. However, the relationship is complex and contingent upon moderating variables, and this research examines the moderating effect of role clarity by drawing on social exchange theory and social cognitive theory.

Data collected from a survey among 116 emergency room employees is used to test the research model using moderated ordinary least squares regression.

The results confirm a positive relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy and suggest a U-shaped relationship between role clarity and creative self-efficacy. Furthermore, role clarity positively moderates the relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy.

The sample used for this research mainly consisted of highly educated employees within a specific setting. Future research is needed to study if the relationships found in this research can be generalized to other organizational settings.

This research suggests that leaders can support employees' creative self-efficacy through servant leadership, particularly when coupled with high role clarity.

Rapidly changing work environments are characterized by decreased role clarity, so attention is needed to its moderating role on the relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy.

This paper aims to examine whether information technology (IT) managers’ virtual listening, as rated by their high-tech employees, affected turnover behaviour beyond a new constellation of variables, some of which have never been researched as antecedents of turnover behaviour, particularly during a pandemic or crisis. Namely, the main aim, among others, is to answer the research question: does IT employees’ perception of the quality of their supervisors’ virtual listening in the pandemic and crisis era, when employees and managers work remotely, will negatively affect turnover behaviour? If yes, in which constellation of antecedents the virtual listening effecting on turnover behaviour?

Logistic regression analysis was conducted to test the hypotheses via SPSS 26 and PROCESS (Model 6). The variance inflation factor was calculated to test multicollinearity. Interaction was tested using the Hayes and Preacher PROCESS macro model. The researchers also used the J-N technique test (Johnson–Neyman via process). The supplemental analysis used also PROCESS MACRO (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA, 2023) Model 4 and Bootstrap test.

The findings show that perceptions of supervisors’ virtual listening quality as rated by their employees moderated the relationship between organisational deviance as a type of organisational misbehaviour (OMB) and turnover behaviour and had the strongest effect on turnover behaviour beyond other key predictors (organisational deviance as a type of misbehaviour, turnover intention, job satisfaction, embeddedness and alternatives in the labour market). Alternatives to current work moderated the association between the perception of managers’ virtual listening behaviour as rated by their employees and turnover behaviour. Specifically, when alternatives in the labour market were high or medium, the perceived quality of managers’ virtual listening reduced turnover behaviour. Finally, the perception of the IT employees supervisors’ virtual listening moderated the relationship between organisational deviance and turnover intention among high-tech employees.

Evaluating supervisor listening in the high-tech firm may have value in terms of its relationship to outcomes such as retaining employees, turnover intention and especially turnover behaviour. The effect on turnover behaviour and of that new constellation of antecedents on turnover behaviour when people work remotely was not researched yet and important for the post COVID-19 era. Additionally, in contrast to most studies of turnover, this study also focus on the positive aspects of turnover and especially turnover behaviour to organisations in general and especially to high-tech firm and not just the negative aspect as was researched until now. Another contribution is the finding that when employees perceived their managers’ virtual listening quality as high, the effect of deviance as a type of OMB on turnover behaviour was positive. Namely, the listening as a moderator and turnover assisted in making the organisation cleaner from inappropriate behaviour. Additionally, when alternatives in the labour market are high or medium, perceived quality of virtual listening of managers as rated by their employees can reduce turnover behaviour. This virtual listening–turnover relationship and the moderator of alternatives to current work had not previously been found in the turnover literature and this is also significant a contribution to the turnover and withdrawal literature.

The paper discusses how the management of a sports and fashion company, which we refer to as NULMA, successfully applied the neo/normative control technology “karma organisation” and gained employee engagement. Whereas other studies have documented employee resistance to organisational cultures when used for managerial control, our case demonstrates resistance to management practices that employees find inconsistent with the dominant karma culture.

The study is based on a six-year longitudinal organisational at-home ethnography conducted by one of the authors using methods of both participant and non-participant observation, semi-structured interviews and collaborative production of secondary data in the case organisation.

While our research shows that management can successfully apply neo/normative control which employees accept and support, we further show that employees mobilise the same values to resist management when it fails to deliver on the commitments and promises of the organisational culture.

The study contributes to the literature on organisational culture and, in particular, neo/normative control by theorising employee resistance as being by “accident”, by which we mean an inherent negative potentiality co-invented and released by managers establishing a “karma organisation”. Our theorising culminates in a discussion of the study’s implications for research and practice.