Many jobs feature tensions between workers’ own motivations, and the objectives imposed on them by management or economic imperatives. We call these tensions ‘meaning of work conflicts’. We ask whether trade unions can intervene in them, or whether they are simply too subjective to be a credible campaigning focus. We examine two professional groups in Britain and France, musicians and healthcare staff. Among musicians, workers tend to negotiate meaning of work conflicts themselves, seeing little role for unions in this process. This engenders legitimacy problems that unions have had to find ways around. By contrast, in the hospitals sector, there is more scope for unions to campaign over the meaning of work, thus potentially increasing legitimacy among staff and the public. The difference is explained by the more diffuse and fragmented nature of employer structures in music, and the more chaotic set of motivations found among music workers.

When the welfare state is under attack from neoliberal reformers, how can trade unionists and other campaigners build solidarity to defend it? Based on 45 qualitative interviews, this article compares campaigns to defend British health services and social security benefits between 2007 and 2016. Building on the macro-insights of comparative welfare-state literature and the more micro-level insights of studies on mobilisation, community unionism and union strategy, it examines the factors that help or hinder the construction of solidarity. This research finds that building solidarity is more difficult when defending targeted benefits than universal ones, not only because of differences in public opinion and political support for services, but also because the labour process associated with targeting benefits, namely the assessing and sanctioning of clients, can generate conflicts among campaigners.

Marxist scholarship has documented the implications of ‘neoliberal’ reforms to public services. This scholarship often considers these reforms as class projects which have disciplined working populations and created new opportunities for capitalist profit-making. But in this article, we shift emphasis to the internal dysfunction that shapes states’ pursuit of market-oriented policy agendas. We place closer focus on the specific levers through which marketising reforms are implemented, noting the conflicting pressures they unleash, and the cracks this may open through which a more democratic agenda can be advanced. Taking the French hospital sector as an example, we show how attempts to expand and intensify competition in public services have coincided with attempts to decentralise governance to the regional level. While ostensibly part of the same ‘reforming’ policy agenda, marketising policies have a strongly centralising logic which has in practice undermined efforts to develop meaningful regional planning. These institutional tensions have catalysed new political currents, as the relationship between public authorities and private sector actors has become more overtly conflictual. We argue that Marxist theorists of the state need to pay closer attention to the often dysfunctional relationship between different branches of the state, and that in the context of neoliberal public service reform, the tensions between central and regional states are particularly salient. We conclude that opponents of the marketisation of public services need to pay attention to the contested and ambiguous nature of ‘decentralisation’: while it is often a rhetorical cover for marketisation, there are opportunities for the left in demanding more meaningful and authentic forms of regional planning.

implemented, by whom, and what motivates its introduction and expansion across different country contexts. It distinguishes marketization from other phenomena such as neoliberalism and shows how market-making reforms run up against existing institution, how they impact democracy and voice, and how they are resisted. Their evaluation of the 'everyday life' of marketization goes beyond studies focusing on liberalisation policies and neoliberal ideas by examining the way processes of marketization are concretely implemented and experienced by the working class. This well written and insightful book will appeal to not only to researchers, but also anyone outside academia interested in the topic of marketization.The book is made up of two parts. The first part of the book (A theory of marketization), comprised of 3 chapters, sets out the authors' theory of marketization. In chapter 1 (The political economy of marketization), the authors present and explain the aims, research questions and theory for the book. Marketization, defined as 'the concrete administrative and organisational process that produces intensified competition based on price' (p. 24), requires governments or businesses to reorganise processes of exchange by commoditizing services, opening up to new 'sellers' and 'buyers', and encouraging frequent transactions. What motivates these changes is twofold. First, marketization is a tool that can be used to instil 'class discipline' by changing