Globalization and Precarious Forms of Production and Employment: Challenges for Workers and Unions

This important and cross-disciplinary book explores globalization alongside precarious forms of production and employment, and how these factors have impacted on workers and trade unions.

The contributors, all leading scholars in their field, investigate central issues including: the role and behaviour of transnational corporations; flexibility, insecurity, individualized and precarious work; individual and collective responses; and ideological forms and justifications. Using rich, diverse examples and case studies they also explore a full range of industries and sectors including agriculture, manufacture, services and state employment, encompassing both mature capitalist economies and global outsourcing to less developed regions.

This innovative and timely book provides a multidisciplinary analysis that advances underdeveloped theories and will stimulate further debate and contributions on the roles of states, employers and workers’ organizations, as well as ideology and democracy. It will strongly appeal to academics who work, study or research the interrelated fields of global economy and international sociology, globalization, management, human resource management, employee and industrial relations, sociology of work, and international political economy.

Edited by Carole Thornley, Senior Lecturer, Keele Management School, Keele University, UK, Steve Jefferys, formerly Director, Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University, UK and Beatrice Appay, Senior Research Fellow, CNRS, France