Framing Work Unitary, Pluralist and Critical Perspectives in the 21st Century

This book presents a broad-ranging survey of contemporary writing about work and employment. It identifies three broad traditions of research and commentary on work - the unitary perspective, the pluralist perspective and the critical perspective - and describes the contemporary output of these traditions; i.e. it surveys current research and argument found within these traditions. The book also surveys debate between these traditions, and the second part of the book presents a detailed account of debate over four current issues. These issues are employee participation, customer culture, equality and diversity and the impact of the global financial crisis. The source material for the book comes from the UK, USA and other countries and the arguments contained within it have international relevance. The book provides an overview of recent work on the employment relationship and the debate and controversy that can be seen in this area of study. Framing Work will be of interest to academics researching and writing about employment and to advanced students in Industrial Relations, Human Resource Management, Organization Studies, and Sociology.

1 - Introduction
2 - Unitary Perspectives on Work
3 - Pluralist Perspectives on Work
4 - Critical Perspectives on Work
5 - Debating Participation
6 - Debating the Customer
7 - Debating Equality
8 - Debating the Crisis
9 - Conclusion

Edmund Heery is Professor of Employment Relations at Cardiff Business School and an expert in UK Industrial Relations. Much of his research has dealt with trade unions. He has led projects on union organizing, union responses to contingent work, the changing role of the TUC, the involvement of unions in Amnesty International, and union policy on equal pay and work-life integration. More recently, Edmund has been involved in research on the role of civil society organizations in representing working people and is undertaking research on the UK's Living Wage. Among Edmund's publications are Union Voices: Tactics and Tensions in UK Organizing (Cornell University Press, 2013) (with Mel Simms and Jane Holgate), Reassessing the Employment Relationship (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011) (with Paul Blyton and Peter Turnbull), and A Dictionary of Human Resource Management (Oxford University Press 2016) (with Mike Noon).