Progress Towards Gender Democracy in UK Unions 1987–2012

This article provides a detailed chronological account of the extent of overall change in women's representation in UK unions' structures of democracy and in unions' adoption of gender equality (GE) strategies over a 25‐year period (1987–2012). The findings reveal huge progress towards gender proportionality and towards getting women's concerns on the union agenda. The evidence strongly suggests that at least in part this progress can be attributed to the wide range of GE strategies increasingly adopted over the period. However, the article exposes persistent gaps and warns against regarding the union gender democracy project as finished business.     

Should Women Care Less? Intrinsic Motivation and Gender Inequality

Gendered values, norms and preferences shape the intrinsic motivation to provide care for others. This article situates an analysis of this motivation within the broader literature on gender inequality, explaining why it has costly consequences for women in both the home and the labour market, even as it provides considerable personal satisfaction and social benefit. Further movement towards gender equality may depend on the success of political and cultural efforts to ‘de‐gender’ normative obligations to care.     

The Role and Impact of Trade Union Equality Representatives in Britain

Drawing on data from the first national survey of trade union equality representatives, this article assesses the role and impact of equality representatives in Britain. While the majority of equality representatives report having had a positive impact on employer equality practice, the analysis also suggests that equality representative effectiveness might be enhanced via the introduction of statutory rights to time off. In addition, it points to the need for unions to include equality on the bargaining agenda, attract new representatives to the role, and ensure that equality representatives have the confidence and skills to represent members effectively within grievance procedures. It also suggests an important role for the government in encouraging employers to engage in meaningful dialogue with equality representatives.     

Selling the Case for Gender Equality: Deregulation and Equality Bargaining

This article explores the implications of deregulation for gender equality. Comparative, outcomes-based analyses suggest that deregulated systems are characterized by inequality. A critical case study of British Gas is used here to evaluate the prospects for equality bargaining, that is the use of voluntary, joint regulation to further equality, in the wake of radical deregulation. Responsibility for equality in the workplace is found to have been privatized. The state as regulator has stood back and managers have reclaimed equality policy within managerial prerogative. Action on inequality has become conditional upon the existence of a business case, an approach that is insufficient for the task. Some re-regulation is required to help bargainers exploit fully the potential of joint regulation for equality.     

Gender Pay Gap,Voluntary Interventions and Recession: The Case of the British Financial Services Sector

State institutions and trade unions put pressure on the British financial services sector to reform its gendered practices and reduce its gender pay gap following both the recession and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) Inquiry (2009). This article considers the effect of these pressures by comparing the gender pay gap pre‐, during‐ and post‐recession periods. Using Labour Force Survey data, the article finds a marginal pay gap reduction in the post‐recession period, a reduction that was greater in financial services than in the rest of the economy. However, the financial services pay gap remained resilient and substantially higher at the top of the earnings distribution. Union membership and collective bargaining were shown to reduce the pay gap including for women members with children. In contrast, countervailing factors, including ethnicity and post‐recession longer working hours, contributed to the pay gap. The study reveals the limitations of voluntary interventions against a resilient gendered culture.     

Bargained Equality: The Strengths and Weaknesses of Workplace Gender Equality Agreements and Plans in France

‘Bargained equality’ reflects wider characteristics of French employment relations whereby state‐driven collective bargaining is a major mode of regulation but is based on weak workplace bargaining cultures outside the largest firms. This article focuses on duties on French employers to bargain on gender equality. It presents findings of a project evaluating workplace agreements and plans on gender equality, based on a sample of 186 agreements submitted in 2014–2015, in 10 sectors, and in‐depth interviews in 20 companies. Despite a rise in formal compliance due to stronger enforcement since 2012, our analysis shows that most companies submitting plans or agreements do not systematically address quantitative measurement of pay or other gender gaps. As well as sectoral differences, the analysis also identifies ‘generational effects’: processes of change which occur as collective agreements expire and are replaced are dependent on local dynamics of bargaining. Based on this analysis, we argue that attention should be paid to the resources available to local bargaining actors, in order to promote an equality agenda.     

Generating Equality? Equal Pay,Decentralization and the Electricity Supply Industry

Despite the existence of effective equal pay legislation in the UK since 1975 aimed at eradicating pay discrimination, women are still in receipt of only 79.5 per cent of the hourly earnings received by men (EOR 1994b). Whitehouse (1992) claims that a centralized collective bargaining model is more likely to lead to equality for women in the labour market than a liberalized individualistic model. The model was tested at an aggregated level for 13 OECD countries. This article provides a case study which charts a trade union claim for equal pay over a period often years (1984–94), which may be seen as an examination of the Whitehouse proposition at a disaggregated level. The paper highlights the barriers to equality bargaining and analyses the case study to identify the criteria necessary for achieving equality.     

Communicating equally

Round Table on Telecommunications and Equality, organized by the Institute for Economic and Social Research into Telecommunications (IREST),¹Paris, France, 25 June 1979     

Trade Unions,Union Learning Representatives and Employer‐Provided Training in Britain

This article provides an empirical assessment of the relationship between trade union recognition, union density, union learning representatives (ULRs) and employer‐provided training in British workplaces using linked employer–employee data from the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey. The results suggest that the relationship between union recognition and training is, at best, weak. We find no consistent relationship between union density and training or between the presence of ULRs and training. We do, however, find some evidence of greater equality in the distribution of training in ULR workplaces than in other workplaces.     

Behind Migrant and Non-Migrant Worktime Inequality in Europe: Institutional and Cultural Factors Explaining Differences

Migrants often work longer hours than their non-migrant counterparts. In this article, we examine reasons behind this inequality, arguing that institutional working time configurations at the country level have impact on worktime inequality. Our cross-country comparative study uses data from the European Labour Force Survey. We focus on France, Sweden, Austria and the UK as archetypal examples of working time configurations and breadwinner models in Europe. Our findings indicate that institutional and cultural factors play a role in working hour differences between migrants and non-migrants. We conclude that more centralized worktime regulation and bargaining foster equality, and we suggest several avenues for future research.     

New technology, innovation and training: an empirical study of selected British firms

This article is based on a survey of manufacturing sites, and the relation between production innovation and skills provision strategies encountered therein. It discusses the ways in which trends towards process integration and product flexibility are encouraging moves away from the traditional dependence on 'off-the-shelf'skills recruitment and towards a greater emphasis on training, often of a flexible and cross-disciplinary type.     

Advertising budgeting practices of industrial advertisers

This article reports the findings of a recent large-scale survey of British industrial advertiser budgeting practices. The article lends support to recent research suggestions from the United States that industrial advertisers have begun to move away from rules of thumb budgeting towards more sophisticated techniques. The trend to increasing sophistication is most marked amongst large industrial advertisers.     

An assessment of the equality of access and no-regulation approaches to next generation networks

The European Commission believes that for the regulation of next generation fixed telecommunications networks the continuity approach is preferable to the equality of access approach and the no-regulation approach. According to the European Commission, (i) functional separation eliminates discrimination and promotes competition, but should only be used as a measure of last resort because it involves various complex trade-offs, whereas (ii) the no-regulation approach fosters investment, at the cost of sacrificing competition. The article agrees that functional separation involves complex trade-offs but disputes the assertion that functional separation necessarily eliminates discrimination and promotes competition. In addition, the article also establishes conditions under which the no-regulation approach does not reduce competition.     

Explaining servitization failure and deservitization: A knowledge-based perspective

The literature on servitization suggests that manufacturers benefit from moving towards solution provision and closer integration with customers. Yet, empirical evidence indicates two notable deviations from this accepted wisdom: servitization failure and deservitization. This conceptual article seeks to explain these observed deviations by developing a knowledge-based perspective on servitization. Drawing on literature on knowledge-based theory, organizational search, organizational learning, and organizational capabilities, the article analyses the interorganizational structure of production between the solution provider and its customer. Reconceptualizing the integrated solution offering as a bundle of knowledge components, a coherent theoretical framework is developed for understanding servitization. This framework provides insight into the antecedents and consequences of servitization and offers multiple explanations for servitization failure and deservitization. The knowledge-based perspective also points towards several new avenues for future research on servitization.     

Tackling one-sidedness in equality and diversity research: Characteristics of the current dominant approach to managing diverse workgroups in Iran

The primary aim of this paper is to investigate whether equal opportunity and diversity pronouncements, both internally through organizations’ own administrative policies or externally through imposed governmental legislations, benefit those who are the main subject of such initiatives (i.e., employees). While a majority of current research on equality and diversity has been dominated by writings on developed and specifically Western nations, this paper tackles such one-sidedness in previous research and takes the current understanding further by providing employee perspectives on equality and diversity in employment to encompass less developed nations with a particular focus on Iran. Using a qualitative research approach data were collected from employees across two construction and manufacturing industries. Based on the analysis of the data, we found, first, shared religious beliefs and language to be envisaged as playing a crucial part in establishing the ethnic minority workers’ affiliation to a workgroup; second, the prospects for implementing declared equality and diversity polices to fade away as the employee began to work; and third, the adoption of diversity and equality policies to be primarily driven by (1) the dire state of the economy, and (2) the need for a mechanism to fit only the management priorities.     

Structural equality at the top of the corporation: Mandated quotas for women directors

We propose a concept of structural equality as a compromise between competing policy preferences of equality and individual liberty to address a stunning property of the governance of corporations, namely, the paucity of female directors on corporate boards. An argument for imposing a quota for women directors on boards is the need to disrupt structural impediments to permit endogenous mechanisms to sustain female recruitment beyond a critical mass. Using estimates from the Norwegian experiment, we apply an agent‐based model to American board data to show that modest numerical quotas generate well‐connected networks of women directors who attain equality in their centrality and influence. The analysis demonstrates the utility of computational social science for identifying policies that generate alternative and possible worlds of greater structural equality. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Unequal Japan: Conservative Corporatism and Labour Market Disparities

The majority of the literature on the increasing labour market disparities in Japan has attributed the trend to changing market circumstances or new government policies. However, this article claims that widening income disparities, especially between regular and non-regular workers, are more deeply rooted in the nature of Japan's policy-making mechanism. Combining industrial actors' conservative orientation towards dual labour markets and their corporatist interactions for policy making, this article argues that Japan's disparity problem has originated from its ' conservative corporatism '. The article presents the manner in which conservative corporatism has widened the disparities in employment security and welfare benefits.     

Then and Now: Disability Legislation and Employers' Practices in the UK

Using a longitudinal research design, this article considers employers' human resource management practices in respect of disability equality: in 1995 under the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act and in 2003 under the Disability Discrimination Act. The article analyses whether there has been a change to employers' practices and whether or not this change is associated with increased employment of disabled persons. The findings show that proactive HR measures to encourage disabled employment, including positive discrimination, had a significant impact on disabled employment in 1995, whereas HR measures centring on managerial responsibilities and making adaptations had a similar result in 2003. We argue that, for optimum effectiveness, HR departments should employ the full range of HR measures that are available, including positive discrimination, and that this approach should be underpinned by a range of enforcement measures.     

The race for telecommunication technology: The USA v Japan

Innovations in information technology are driving the USA and Japan into greater interdependence and reduced competition. However, the policies of the two countries towards supplying global telecommunications networks and towards their export earnings are diverging. This article examines the policies and history of both US and Japanese business and government towards investment in communications and computer technologies. Deregulation has been an important influence in both countries. The Japanese have responded to fierce US protectionism and competition by fundamentally changing their production strategy and turning to more offshore operations, involving many adjustments for Japanese management.     

Empirical approaches to understanding technology transfer

Technology transfer has received considerable attention from both practitioners and academicians over the past few years, yet little progress has been made towards establishing a solid conceptual framework for the topic based on empirical evidence. This article reviews the limited amount of multivariate empirical literature on 'transfer processes in technological change' existing, discusses the major findings, and suggests directions for future research.