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Solitudes of the Workplace focuses on experiences of marginalization, uncertainty and segregation created by the hierarchical structures of categories in universities and by gendered identities. Studying a wider range of women’s roles in universities than prior research, the experiences of support staff, senior administrators, researchers, non-academic administrators, and contract teachers are added to those of faculty and students. The essays show how attempts to introduce new knowledge are manoeuvered and the resistance this process can encounter, as well as the ways in which institutional policies can blur and change identities. Addressing longstanding issues such as the entanglement of gender and the assessment of merit, attention is also given to how new identities are claimed and successfully projected. Essays presenting workers' points of view reveal the confusion that occurs when official policy and everyday knowledge conflict, when processes like tenure and other status changes create troublesome realities, and when it becomes routine to experience status denigration. Within the social order of the university and its existing boundaries, gender issues of past decades sometimes surface, but all too often remain an unspoken presence. Solitudes of the Workplace is a revealing look at the isolating experiences and inequities inherent in these institutional environments. --Publisher's description.

The aim of this paper is to conduct an exploratory analysis of the wider economic and social conditions associated with larger informal economies. To do this, three competing perspectives are evaluated critically which variously assert that cross-national variations in the size of the informal economy are associated with: under-development (modernization perspective); high taxes, corruption and state interference (neo-liberal perspective), or inadequate state intervention to protect workers (political economy perspective). Analyzing the variable size of the informal economy across 33 developed and transition economies, namely 28 European countries and five other OECD nations (Australia, Canada, Japan, New zealand and the USA), the finding is that larger informal economies are associated with under-development as measured by lower levels of GNI per capita, employment participation rates, average wages and the institutional strength and quality of the bureaucracy, higher levels of perceived public sector corruption, lower levels of expenditure on social protection and labour market intervention to protect vulnerable groups, but also restrictions on the use of temporary employment contracts and TWAs. The outcome is a tentative call to combine a range of tenets from all three perspectives in a new more nuanced and finer-grained understanding of how the cross-national variations in the size of the informal economy are associated with broader economic and social conditions. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for theory and policy, including the need for further analysis of the different impacts on the size of the informal economy of a wider range of indicators of modernization, corruption, taxation and types of state intervention.

Fréquemment, les chercheurs ont conceptualisé le conflit travail-famille de façon bidirectionnelle : l’étude des effets de la vie professionnelle à l’endroit de la vie de famille (appelé conflit travail-famille) et celle des effets de la vie de famille à l’égard de la vie d’emploi (appelé conflit famille-travail). Toutefois, les résultats inhérents aux recherches basées sur cette conceptualisation se sont avérés controversés. Autrement dit, très peu d’effort a été déployé afin de différencier entre les effets des différentes formes de ce conflit. Pourtant, Greenhaus et Beutell (1985) en ont proposé une conceptualisation multidimensionnelle, en ajoutant aux deux dimensions directionnelles trois autres supplémentaires liées au conflit de temps, d’effort et de comportement. Ainsi, notre recherche répond à la question générale suivante: la conceptualisation multidimensionnelle du conflit travail-famille est-elle plus efficace pour cerner la réalité de ce phénomène que la conceptualisation bidirectionnelle ? À partir d’un échantillon de 375 sujets provenant du personnel infirmier d’un centre hospitalier, nous avons privilégié une conceptualisation multidimensionnelle dudit conflit (Greenhaus et Beutell, 1985), et ce, afin d’identifier les effets spécifiques aux diverses dimensions de ce conflit. Pour ce faire, nous avons utilisé l’analyse en termes des cartes autoorganisatrices de Kohonen (SOM), cartes qui sont basées sur un réseau de neurones résultant de la méthode d’apprentissage non supervisée (Kohonen, 2001). Les résultats de l’analyse neuronale indiquent qu’il y a six formes de conflit. Deux d’entre elles paraissent générer des effets similaires à ceux obtenus selon la conceptualisation bidirectionnelle (conflit à haute intensité versus conflit à basse intensité), tandis que les quatre autres formes apparaissent engendrer des effets spécifiques, justifiant la nécessité d’appliquer la conceptualisation multidimensionnelle préconisée. En outre, l’analyse de variance appliquée aux données a révélé plusieurs différences significatives entre les six formes de ce conflit et des variables externes liées à des facteurs explicatifs dudit conflit, ainsi qu’à ses conséquences. Cette nouvelle taxonomie, basée sur la conceptualisation multidimensionnelle des conflits travail-famille, contribue à une meilleure compréhension de l’interférence entre la sphère de la vie familiale et celle de la vie professionnelle, en identifiant les formes spécifiques du conflit travail-famille au niveau desquelles une ou plusieurs sources de conflictualité sont en action. Des avenues de recherche et des implications managériales sont déduites à la lumière des résultats enregistrés.

Although the literature on comparative capitalism has been expanded to encompass the Mixed Market Economies (MMEs) of the Mediterranean world and other less mature institutional arrangements, it can be argued that more attention needs to be accorded to internal diversity within capitalist archetypes and the nature and path of change. In focusing on the latter, this paper explores changes in Industrial relations (Ir) regulation and practice in Greece which, since the onset of the economic crisis, has shifted towards lighter regulation; however, liberalization has not meant convergence with the mature Liberal Market Economy (LME) model and its presumed associated complementarities. Based on current developments and advances in the literature on comparative capitalism, this study explores the process and dynamics of institutional change, and the long continuities that set Greece apart from both ‘disorganized’ LMEs and other MMEs. This encompasses issues such as the composition of elites, the nature of institutional path dependence and change, and the uneven and partial nature of what constitutes institutional functionality. Whilst the Greek system is commonly condemned as dysfunctional, it satisfies specific economic interests. Being impelled in one direction by a progressive movement from below, it is driven in another by external pressures, and, at home, by “unpatriotic” elites, who have little interest in stronger regulation, and may well be served by weaker governmental capabilities. As local economic elites seek to reposition themselves within the system in order to cope with shifts in the capitalist economy, it may result in them further narrowing their focus onto their own immediate concerns accommodated through economic liberalization. Smaller, marginal, players may be pushed further out of the system and/or actively choose to withdraw, the attempts of the present government to ameliorate the shocks of liberalization notwithstanding. This vests the organized labour and other civil society associations with great historic importance.

This latest collection in our State Trials series, the fourth, looks at the legal issues raised by the repression of dissent from the outset of World War One through the 1930s and the Great Depression. Topics covered include enemy aliens, conscription and courts-martial in World War I, the trials following the Winnipeg General Strike, sedition laws and prosecutions generally and their application to labour radicals in particular, the 1931 trial of the Communist Party leaders, and the religious-political dissent of the Doukhobors. All regions of the country are covered, and special attention given in one essay to Quebec’s repression of radicalism. The volume focusses attention on older manifestations of contemporary dilemmas: what are the acceptable limits of dissent in a democracy, and what limits should be placed on state responses to perceived challenges to its authority. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Labor and the Locavore: The Making of a Comprehensive Food Ethic," by Margaret Gray.