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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent and impact of customer-oriented norms on employment relations in voluntary sector social care, within the context of personalisation. Self-Directed Support (SDS) is premised on the notion that customer-led care enhances autonomy among service users and therefore improves quality of life, and additionally, gives employees more discretion in their work. However, by attempting to improve quality of service without additional funding – and in many instances, with funding cuts – it can be argued that SDS is in practice effectively attempts to achieve "more-for-less." This paper examines the effect of this dynamic on employment relations, using the organisation as the unit of analysis. Design/methodology/approach: This paper examines the existing literature on personalisation and SDS, and positions it alongside the sociology of service work. Particular focus is given to Korczynski's notion of Customer-Oriented Bureaucracies (COB). Data collection took place in four comprehensive case studies, comprised of fifty-five semi-structured interviews overall and a benchmarking survey of each. Findings: Findings demonstrate that the influence of customer-oriented norms only affected certain features of the employment relationship, and tended to result from pressures other than service users, such as organisational strategy or funding constraints. In consequence, none of the individual case studies fit the description of COB in its absolute form. Instead, what can be observed is a strong pattern of influence across specific dimensions of the employment relationship. In relation to policies and procedures, the impact of customer-oriented norms was experienced in 70% of instances, 83.3% of incidences pertaining to terms and conditions, and 85.7% of incidences pertaining to work organisation. Research limitations/implications: The data itself is limited to fifty-five interviews across four case studies, and so only gives a "snapshot" of employee relations within the sector. Further research would be advantageous to address these issues geographically and temporally. Practical implications: Firstly, it contributes academically to existing bodies of literature on both voluntary sector social care and the sociology of service work. Secondly, it provides practitioners with analysis of the issues that accompany personalisation, and how adopting customer-oriented norms impacts the employment relationship. Thirdly, it demonstrates to legislators and commissioners that existing shortfalls in funding are compensated for by the above-and-beyond efforts of those who work in the sector, and that this is an increasingly untenable situation. Social implications: This paper sheds much needed light onto employment relations in the doubly under-researched areas of voluntary sector social care in Scotland. It attempts to aid employee relations pertaining to the often low paid social care workforce, and the care of service users who include the most vulnerable in society. By identifying potential issues pertaining to employee relations, it seeks to avoid future disruptions to service provision which could have adverse effects on organisations, employees, and service users. Originality/value: This paper makes a theoretical and conceptual contribution by utilising the sociology of service work as a means of better understanding employment relations in voluntary sector social care. It compares the impact of customer-oriented norms across four distinctly different service provision types Furthermore, the segmenting of findings across three key areas of employment relations allows for a systematic analysis which pinpoints the presence and extent of customer-oriented norms and their influence on the employment relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer a defence of, and framework for, comparative research in industrial and employment relations, based on a long-term engagement with the social contexts under study. We locate 'slow' research strategies in relation to predominant approaches and establish a number of basic precepts of slow comparativism as a practical methodological approach. We aim to provoke a discussion among those conducting comparative research on work and employment about how truth claims are generated. We also seek a basis by which those conducting slower forms of comparativism, through what we term 'implicit ethnographies', can find better ways of developing and defending their modes of research within an often hostile academic political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents updates on labor, economics and industrial relations studies as of July 1954. A number of research projects dealing with industrial and labor relations are described in the Thirty-Fourth Annual Report of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Small one-industry labor markets, the economic characteristics of the urbanized Negro work force and the measurement of area changes in employment are the focus of research activities in industrial relations at the Washington University. The general categories under which research at the Industrial Relations Center in the University of Chicago, Illinois are listed. Allan M. Cartter of Duke University's Department of Economics and Business Administration is making a study on the "Impact of Industrial Expansion on Southern Wage and Employment Patters."

Work performed under cash-for-care programmes is based on a relationship between several parties, including, at a minimum, the workers providing the services, the care recipients and the public authorities that manage and fund these programmes. Labour law studies have pointed out that the labour relations regulation is not adapted to this type of non-standard employment relationship since it has been founded on the norm of the integrated firm and bilateral employer–employee relations. Based on a case study of a cash-for-care programme in Quebec, Canada (i.e. the Service Employment Paycheque plan), our socio-legal analysis confirms the weak protection of collective labour rights provided to Service Employment Paycheque plan workers. It also describes how the application of the legal regulation of labour relations to this organizational model fails to take into account the power exercised by the public authorities and demonstrates the impact of this failure in terms of precarization of work and its gendered devaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the concept of immaterial labor is dialectically related to the cycle of material labor in the production and reproduction of capital and bourgeois society. The article reflects on how this affects the dynamics of social classes and their struggles in contemporary capitalist society. Immaterial labor, like its manual counterpart, is also subject to capitalism’s essential contradictions as well as its processes and tendencies. Various authors, including Latin American Marxists, are drawn upon to explore further this historical process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's organizations are challenged with attracting, developing, and retaining high-quality employees; thus, many firms seek to improve their recruitment and selection processes. One approach involves using realistic job previews (RJPs) to communicate a balanced view of the organization. The authors explored the effects of organizational culture (hierarchy, market, clan, and adhocracy), recruitment strategy (RJP vs. traditional), and personality (horizontal and vertical individualism-collectivism) on attraction to Web-based organizational profiles using a sample of 234 undergraduate students in a mixed two-factor experimental design. Results indicate that the clan culture is viewed as the most attractive. Traditional versus RJP recruitment produced higher levels of organizational attraction. Finally, predicted relationships between the personality framework of horizontal and vertical individualism- collectivism and organizational attraction were supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how employees express dissent to management about the same issue on multiple occasions across time (i.e., how they practice repetition). Employees completed a survey instrument reporting how often they used varying upward dissent tactics, how often and for how long they raised the same issue, and how they perceived their supervisors responded to their concerns. Results indicate that employees relied predominantly on competent upward dissent tactics but that they adopted less competent and more face-threatening tactics as repetition progressed. In addition, employees' perceptions of their supervisors' responses to repetition related to the overall duration of repetition but not to the frequency with which employees raised issues or the amount of time that elapsed between dissent episodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work-life research tends to privilege the organization-employee relationship, with the family's role largely relegated to providing emotional and material support to the employee and adapting to organizational requirements. Systems oriented research, however, points toward a larger role for the family, including mediating the employee's relationship with the organization as well as direct organizational interactions. This study uses Weick's model of organizational sensemaking to examine, through the analysis of employee and family interview accounts, how a global high-tech organization and its employees' families enact one another as environments. Three dynamics of mutual enactments- two cooperative and one competitive-were identified, along with implications for work-life integration research and practice, for more traditionally programmatic work-life accommodations, and for families' management of their relationships to employing organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in the career landscape require commensurate revisions in career development (CD) to ensure it meets the needs of both employees and employers in this era of multidimensional career paths. Drawing on a model from the past, we propose building a strong career culture based on the relational approach to CD. Implementing a relational strategy can save money and stretch resources, but it requires practitioners to take on new roles and responsibilities. We describe those roles and provide examples of three relational CD initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1989, the Japanese carmaker Toyota established in Burnaston (UK) their first European transplant. Expected to become one of the most efficient auto factories in Europe and to be as successful as the American transplants set up by the company during the 1980s, Toyota Motor Manufacturing UK (TMUK) has failed to fulfil these expectations, cumulating in 10 years of production losses of more than £600 million and since 1999 falling into a serious crisis, which has put into question the internal compromise between the actors of the firm. The article traces back the trajectory of TMUK from its foundation up to the present crisis. It shows how the crisis emerged progressively from the initial short- comings of the hybridized employment relationship of the transplant, and how it deepened under the difficult economic conditions faced by the company on the European market. The article also introduces an alternative theoretical approach based on the notion of the `productive model' developed by the GERPISA international research network, which aims to deconstruct the functionalist idea of a unique and superior Japanese model transferable everywhere and by everybody, and to re-establish the Japanese transplants as full historical objects and as social and political organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both redundancy of functions and learning to learn relate to Human Resource Management. In practice the employment relationship goes further than this, for it also includes the balancing of work, care and family. This is part and parcel of any objective of durable employment seen from a lifetime perspective. The work-life balance is an element in the social quality of employment relationships. On the other hand, both minimum critical specification and requisite variety relate directly to the design of jobs and tasks, and the degree of employee involvement. This article puts these aspects under the heading Human Resource Mobilization. They echo the issues of job design and employee involvement in job design. Thus, this article focuses on two issues. First on management, and links the demands of flexicurity to those of human resource development. The second focuses on mobilization and links the demands of conditional job design with those of employee involvement. The discussion will start with an outline of the development of the concept of adaptability, then relate it to the debate around the so-called Green Paper published by the European Commission in 1997 and highly influential in shaping expectations in relation to a new and modernized work organization.

The article provides data on research institutions and associations in the field of industrial relations and the labor market. The Center for Economic Performance (http://cep.lse.ac.uk/) researches the links between globalization, technology and the labor market. The Institute for Social Research (www.isr.umich.edu/home/) has a goal of fostering social research and information dissemination. The Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School (www.law.harvard.edu/programs/lwp/index.html) considers work and society from an economic and legal standpoint.