This article explores the development of concepts related to the 'quality of employment' in the academic literature in terms of their definition, methodological progress, and ongoing policy debates. Over time, these concepts have evolved from simple studies of job satisfaction towards more comprehensive measures of job and employment quality, including the ILO's concept of 'Decent Work' launched in 1999. This paper compares the parallel development of quality of employment measures in the European Union with the ILO's Decent Work agenda and concludes that the former has advanced much further due to more consistent efforts to generate internationally comparable data on labour markets, which permit detailed measurements and international comparisons. In contrast, Decent Work remains a very broadly defined concept, which is impossible to measure across countries. We conclude by proposing three important differences between these two scenarios that have lead to such diverging paths: the lack of availability of internationally comparable data, the control over the research agenda by partisan social actors, and a prematurely mandated definition of Decent Work which is extremely vague and all-encompassing 1 .
Artículo de publicación ISIThis article examines the impact of the International Labour Organization’s concept of Decent Work on development thinking and the academic literature. We attempt to answer the question of what makes a development initiative successful by comparing the decent work approach to the United Nation Development Programme’s Human Development concept (in conjunction with the human development indicator). We consider that the latter has been one of the most successful development concepts ever to have been launched, while the impact of decent work by comparison has been limited. Our hypothesis relating to the question of what makes a development initiative successful has three fundamental components: first, a solid theoretical foundation has to justify the launch of a development concept. A second vital factor is the availability of sufficient national and internationally comparable data that enables researchers and policy makers alike to apply the concept, preferably by means of a synthetic indicator. Third, the political will and institutional structure of the development institution that launches a concept is a key factor, particularly if data availability is limited as countries then have to be persuaded to generate new data
a b s t r a c tThis paper presents the first findings of an ongoing multi-national research project between universities in Brazil, Chile and the UK funded by the UK Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) and the Department for International Development (DFID). The Choices project seeks to analyse contextual understandings and practices of ethical consumption in Chile and Brazil. In a further step, it explores how ethical consumption and public procurement can be associated and used to foster sustainable development. The paper presents the outcomes of the first stage of the project, an extensive literature review considering the developing trends towards "ethical", "sustainable", "responsible" and "conscious" consumption in both countries. Chile and Brazil are former developing countries, and although they both now have growing ethical consumption movements, we argue that these are shaped by the specificities of each country's political, economic and institutional trajectories. In one case, Chile, ethical consumption has arisen from market forces, with lead actors being companies, consultancies and citizen and consumer organizations. Brazil, on the other hand, provides also a very interesting case for studying how ethical consumption is embedded in another Latin American context: it has a larger state sector and a domestic market size to give the state, and thus the consecutive centre-left governments, great regulatory power, since it can control firms' access to this market. Both cases showed the increasing role of corporate social responsibility discourses and practices interfacing with concepts of ethical consumption. As a consequence, the paper identifies a risk of firstly, "greenwash" and "whitewash" by large companies and secondly, of having small producers struggling to market their products.
Much of this research, however, has focused mainly on exploring ethical and sustainable consumption discourses and practices in European and North American countries, leaving questions of how ethical consumption is interpreted and practiced in other parts of the world comparatively underexplored. Furthermore, countries in the so-called global South, where they are featured at all, are often seen as "backward" or "catching up" with practices in the global North. Ethical consumption in the global South is often portrayed through what might be described as a "deficit model" 1 : a discourse that defines ethical consumption discourse and practices from the global North (mainly US-UK) as the standard and then seeing how well (or not) people from other contexts measure up to that level (and then often bemoan the deficit in between). This is ironic given that by most measures, current lifestyles in the global North are far less sustainable than the global South. For instance, the per capita Co2 1 Our thanks to Dorothea Kleine for summarising our joint thinking in this term.
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