Roger Penn – författare

During the 1980's, British trade unionism confronted its greatest challenge, and suffered its greatest reverses, since the inter-war period. After a decade of rapid growth, the unions experienced a steep decline in membership, and a virtual marginalization in national political affairs. By 1990, a united, self-confident, social movement as well as a powerful industrial bargainer, often seemed more closely akin to a demoralized collection of special interest groupings.This book addresses a number of fundamental questions raised by the record of these years. It examines the reasons for membership loss and the implications for trade union influence in the workplace. It looks at the steps the unions took in reaction to the membership problem and the difficulties they confronted doing so. It also looks at whether this period can be seen as making a fundamental break with the past, resulting in irretrievable loss by British trade unionism of its former important position in British society and the British workplace, or whether the past decade has been but a temporary recession and the future can still see revived movement.

This book reinterprets the British class structure and its evolution from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1980s. It provides a detailed empirical study of the growth of trade unions, and development of earnings differentials and patterns of class inter-marriage during this period, and uses this material to reassess theoretical questions of class consciousness, the notion of the 'traditional working class', and the ideas of a 'labour aristocracy'. A particular feature is that this book is part of the development of a mode of sociological analysis intended to be compatible with economic theory. Its primary focus is on the relationship between skilled and non-skilled manual workers. This 1984 suggests that an internal division of the manual working class on the basis of skill has been a persistent feature of economic relations since the late nineteenth century. It goes on to show, however, by the extensive analysis of inter marriage, that this economic division has not been translated into equivalent social boundaries.

In this major work, leading economists, sociologists and psychologists present their original research into changes in the job structure of Britain in the 1980s. Combining large-scale sample surveys, personal life-histories and case studies of towns, employers and worker groups, their findings give sometimes surprising answers to questions debated by social and economic observers in all advanced countries. Does technology destroy skills or rebuild them? How does skill affect the attitudes of employees and their managers towards their jobs? Are women gaining greater skill equality with men, or are they still stuck on the lower rungs of the skill and occupational ladders? The book also takes up neglected issues and challenges and discredits the widely held view that new technology has de-skilled the workforce. The authors exemplify many new techniques for researching skills at work: as an economic resource; as a motor of occupational change; and as a basis for personal careers and identity. It provides an authoritative set of conclusions on skill trends and their implications as it draws an authoritative new map of skill-change in British society.

This new four-volume collection tracks the development of statistical methods for continuous, or interval-scale data. Examples of such data occurring in the social sciences include indicators of educational attainment (for example, GCSE scores) and psychometric measures of intelligence. Framed by a new contextualising introduction, the volumes are organised thematically, covering key areas to enable a well-rounded and comprehensive understanding of the discipline: Volume One: Statistical Foundations for the Analysis of Continuous DataVolume Two: Basic Principles for the Statistical Modelling of Continuous DataVolume Three: Multivariate Analyses of Continuous DataVolume Four: Statistical Modelling of Multivariate Continuous Data