Economic and Industrial Democracy

The growth of global economic activity has resulted in a worldwide increase in migration. Despite the growing interest in migratory labour flows, there remains little detailed empirical research about the labour relations practices experienced by immigrant workers. In this article, three general areas are examined from data collected in the Republic of Ireland: (1) what are the experiences of non-Irish national workers employed in different sectors of the economy; (2) do trade unions facilitate the integration of migrant workers in the Irish labour market; and (3) what are the strategies undertaken by trade unions in response to the challenges of immigration? Ethnographic and qualitative research methods were employed to address these broad research objectives. The evidence shows that many immigrant workers have experienced a system of near-serfdom that perpetuates social, economic and cultural exclusion on a large scale. The conclusion argues that an emerging `glocalization' of the world economy creates a labour market dynamic underpinned by neoliberal policies of the nation-state. The evidence suggests that traditional views of migration and industrial relations theory are found wanting when seeking to explain the concerns of migrant workers. A number of implications arising from this are then discussed.

This article examines why and how management of a department of the British civil service (`the Agency') has sought to use new information and communication technologies (ICTs) to change the organization of a complex form of administrative casework. In contrast to optimistic Information Age arguments that new workplace technologies will tend to benefit workers as well as employers, it is shown that Agency management have sought to use the new ICTs to increase their control over staff. This has involved the reorganization of some telephone work into a call centre for the first time. It is shown that the aim of increasing control has been not only to intensify work, but also to establish a technical basis for a broader restructuring of terms and conditions of employment that it was hoped would involve a reduction in the costs and place-bound nature of Agency labour. The article identifies a number of political and technical factors that have constrained managers from realizing the control they originally sought, so compelling them to preserve a complex form of call working and related employment conditions that they had originally intended to radically change. The article concludes with a discussion of how the new technical systems within the Agency have altered power relations between managers and staff, how government is hoping to use such technologies to cut costs across all civil service departments, and where resistance to such change may come from.

The article aims to shed light on teamwork in Finland, where many institutional factors mould employees' experiences of it. Representative survey data from Finnish workplaces are analysed from the frameworks of contextual, positive and critical accounts on teamwork. A qualitative analysis of the role of centralized income agreements and the quality of the industrial relations gives evidence to support the contextual accounts. The results of the survey tell how the experiences of effective teamwork are related to the degree of autonomy of the teams, employees' discretion, the possibility to utilize one's skills and the quality of social relations within the team, and thus support positive accounts. On the other hand, the results of the survey relate the team members' experiences of working harder than non-members, supporting critical accounts.

The aim of this article is to discuss the growth of workers' cooperatives within the context of recent industrial restructuring in Brazil. Based on the analysis of empirical cases, it seeks to assess whether, and to what degree, this kind of self-management results in workers' gains in autonomy and the democratization of workplace relations, or if this process of economic restructuring has merely left these workers in a more precarious employment situation.

A central aspect of labour process theory is the recognition that management must institute controls over the workforce to maximize levels of labour output. Yet, these controls are never complete and employees maintain some ability to actively determine the level of engagement in their work. This article examines the manner in which control is manifest within teams in two different organizations. The article demonstrates that within these two case study organizations, teams develop differently, primarily due to the processes in which the atypical team is engaged. The different processes result in the atypical team having a greater level of control over its members' primary processes and, in addition, greater control over what they do when not engaged in their primary task.

Comparative studies of work organization indicate that learning-oriented forms are more widely applied in the Scandinavian countries than is generally the case in Europe. This is often ascribed to the cooperation between the labour market parties and the national political authorities, and the corresponding modification of market forces through welfare and employment policies. It can be argued that this interpretation is too general. An issue like work organization is not affected by the macro-political order of society alone, but also by what more specific initiatives are taken to promote organization development at the workplace level. In this article a number of bi- and tripartite efforts to promote learning-oriented forms of work organization are presented and discussed from the perspective of the question: Is there a Scandinavian model for workplace development and what are its characteristics? It is seen that while the various efforts differ widely in terms of strategy they have some elements in common, in particular the function of building trust between management and workers on the local level.