Labour and Business in Modern Britain (1989) examines the history of labour relations in British business using important empirical research. The study of ‘labour process’ and the dynamics of the labour market are key, and each chapter stands alone as an investigation of an important episode, an important industry, or an important theoretical question refracted through an historical problem.
Originally published in 1992, this book examines the development of employers' human resource management and industrial relations policies in Britain. It adopts a broad historical perspective, beginning with the inheritance from the nineteenth century and ending with an analysis of human resource management policies. It focuses on how managers organise the employment relationship, how they control work relations, and how they deal with trade unions and industrial relations. The author examines these in the context of the market within which the firm operates, and the strategy, structure and hierarchy of industrial enterprise. The book shows that historically British employers tended to adopt market-based strategies rather than internal ones.
By bringing together and critically engaging with accounts of certain themes in business and labour history, and utilizing original research, this book aims to widen understanding of industrial society and provide a background to further study and research in the area management and labour relations history.
Managing the Modern Workplace is a collection of interdisciplinary essays tackling issues of private and public management and its effects on productivity and workplace relations in modern Britain. It challenges received views on the politics of post-war labour, and brings fresh insights into the study of both private and public sector workplaces.
A new edition of the leading textbook on the economic history of Britain since industrialization. Combining the expertise of more than thirty leading historians and economists, Volume 2 tracks the development of the British economy from late nineteenth-century global dominance to its early twenty-first century position as a mid-sized player in an integrated European economy. Each chapter provides a clear guide to the major controversies in the field and students are shown how to connect historical evidence with economic theory and how to apply quantitative methods. The chapters re-examine issues of Britain's relative economic growth and decline over the 'long' twentieth century, setting the British experience within an international context, and benchmark its performance against that of its European and global competitors. Suggestions for further reading are also provided in each chapter, to help students engage thoroughly with the topics being discussed.
This collection reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English books, from those who worked in the book trade to those who composed, selected, collected and annotated books. Women gathered rags for paper production, invested in books and oversaw the presses that printed them. Their writing and reading had an impact on their contemporaries and the developing literary canon. A focus on women's work enables these essays to recognize the various forms of labour -- textual and social as well as material and commercial -- that women of different social classes engaged in. Those considered include the very poor, the middling sort who were active in the book trade, and the elite women authors and readers who participated in literary communities. Taken together, these essays convey the impressive work that women accomplished and their frequent collaborations with others in the making, marking, and marketing of early modern English books.
New Labour's electoral success of the late 20th century was due in no small part to its grasp of media communication. This book reminds us that the importance of the mass media to Labour's political fortunes is by no means a modern phenomenon.
This work provides a systematic assessment and evaluation of the modernization of the British Labour Party in light of its landslide victory in 1997. It also represents an attempt to locate Labour's modernization in terms of the distincitive political economy of contemporary British capitalism and the impact of globalization, the evolution and transformation of the British State in the post-war period, the legacy of Thatcherism, and the specifics of electoral strategy and competition in contemporary Britain.
Written at a critical juncture in the history of the Labour Party, Speak for Britain! is a thought-provoking and highly original interpretation of the party's evolution, from its trade union origins to its status as a national governing party. It charts Labour's rise to power by re-examining the impact of the First World War, the general strike of 1926, Labour's breakthrough at the 1945 general election, the influence of post-war affluence and consumerism on the fortunes and character of the party, and its revival after the defeats of the Thatcher era. Controversially, Pugh argues that Labour never entirely succeeded in becoming 'the party of the working class'; many of its influential recruits - from Oswald Mosley to Hugh Gaitskell to Tony Blair - were from middle and upper-class Conservative backgrounds and rather than converting the working class to socialism, Labour adapted itself to local and regional political cultures.
Modern Britain focuses on two major periods of British history; the interwar period, and postwar Britain. The authors compare and contrast developments in the two periods, dealing with the themes of: * growth and welfare * industry * labour * social policy * the economy Combining a narrative with a conceptual and analytic approach,Modern Britain provides an end-of-century review of progress and decline and an essential background to current polemics and major issues of concern. Clearly structured and written, this is an invaluable textbook for students of twentieth century British history.
