Understanding Work and Employment

Peter Ackers is Reader in Employment Relations at Loughborough University Business School. Co-author of New Development in Employee Involvement (Employment Department 1992) and co-editor of The New Workplace and Trade Unionism (Routledge 1996), he has published widely in academic journals and edited collections on industrial relations, the sociology of work, and labour history.Adrian Wilkinson is Professor of Human Resource Management at Loughborough University Business School. Co-author of New Development in Employee Involvement (Employment Department 1992), Core Personnel and Development (1996), Managing with TQM (1998), and co-editor of Making Quality Critical (1995), he has published widely in academic journals and edited collections on industrial relations, HRM, and TQM.

This is a collection which every labour historian should read. These eighteen essays offer a succinct summary of recent scholarship and challenge us to think deeply about contemporary discussions of work and the labour markets. They also provoke us to consider the utility and value of historical study in such debates ... This important collection identifies a number of points at which historians can usefully intervene in current discussions on employment relations.

• PART I: DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ; PART II: COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES ; PART III: FUTURE DIRECTIONS: ISSUES AND ARGUMENTS