No abstract

The model of the `flexible firm' has gained a prominent role in shaping debate about labour market flexibility and employment restructuring in the 1980s. It argues that employers are increasingly segmenting their workers between a permanent `core' of full-time employees, and a `periphery' of part-time, temporary, subcontract and `outsourced' workers. The `core' provides `functional flexibility' through lowered job demarcations and multi-skilling, while the `periphery' provides `numerical flexibility'. This paper argues that these generalisations are based on very selective cases, and reviews evidence which shows that restructuring follows far more complex and uneven lines than this polarisation, which if anything is better reflected in the public sector, which the model omits. The `flexible firm' conflates employment developments due to sectoral restructuring, with `new' `manpower policies', masking the importance of continuities and qualitative changes within these. While registering the increasing vulnerability of many workers, the model fails to note that for many, this is not `new', nor that the dynamic of the eighties is attacking the strength of all workers, including the so-called `core'. Conceptually, the notion of `core' and `periphery' is confused, circular and value laden. The model is criticised for blurring description, prediction and prescription in an ambiguous futurology which slips between research reportage and `best practice' policy. Even here it is ambiguous, and dubious from management's own point of view. Finally, its concern with labour market flexibility is set within the current international climate of neo-classical revival, and the model's institutional interface between Government labour market polices and `leading edge' firms.

This article investigates the experience of low paid workers without union representation. It reports on the findings of a recent survey of 501 low paid, non-unionized workers who experienced problems at work. The results demonstrate that problems at work are widespread and, despite a strong propensity to take action to try to resolve them, most workers failed to achieve satisfactory resolutions. In the light of these results, we argue that the current UK Government definition of vulnerability is too narrow because our results suggest that a large proportion of low paid, unrepresented workers are at risk of being denied their employment rights. Therefore we question the ability of the UK's current system of predominantly non-unionized employment relations to deliver employment rights effectively and fairly.

This article examines gender, work and equal opportunities (EO) in five central eastern European (CEE) candidates to an enlarged European Union (EU): the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia. It demonstrates how capitalist transition has eroded women's Communist economic and social legacy, and considers implications for EO of the EU enlargement process. Analysis of decline begins with an outline of women's position under Communism, showing both similarities in gender inequality to those of capitalism, but also significant differences and advances. Post-transition is then examined in terms of the UN Gender Development Index, women's loss of social support, their decline in labour force participation and changes in employment and political representation. A limitation in available data is lack of information on unregulated employment and informal work - both major developments in CEE. The objective picture is then set against subjective responses to change - a key factor in gender EO prospects. Finally, developments in EO monitoring and enforcement agencies are reviewed, with the conclusion drawing these levels of enquiry together to assess the possibilities of EU enlargement as a spur to greater commitment to gender equality in CEE.

This paper examines the concept of `patriarchy' as a tool for analysing gender inequality, while signalling the problems which arise from a common confusion between its use as short-hand description and as explanation. It first enters a substantive critique of a theory of `patriarchy', highlighting its reductionism and circularity. It then broadens to the form of abstract structuralist theorisation used, and its flattening and mechanistic effect on analysis. As an alternative to a dualist approach to `structures of' capitalism as `patriarchy', it argues that gendering needs to be understood as integral to all social relations at the start. To unravel the mediations of this intermeshing, theory, rather than being abstract, needs to be embedded in the substantive empirical analysis of social process which might be called feminist historical materialism. The discussion finally considers why it is that a `grand narrative' of `patriarchy' survives amid the fashion of post-structuralist fragmentation, pointing to theoretical continuities of self-enclosed theorisation in abstract structuralism and in post-modernist sociology, as one dimension of explanation.