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The article reviews by the book, "West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London's Industrialized Marshland, 1839-1914," by Jim Clifford.

The article reviews the book, "I Am Not a Tractor: How Florida Farmworkers Took on the Fast Food Giants and Won," by Susan L. Marquis.

The article reviews the book, "Not for Long: The Life and Times of the NFL Athlete," by Robert W. Turner II.

The article reviews the book, "Woman Enough: How a Boy became a Woman and Changed the World of Sport," by Kirsten Worley and Johanna Schneller.

This article introduces a special issue critically investigating contemporary formations of digital game labor, with a focus on the political-economic forces, social inequalities, and technological dynamics mutually shaping these formations. Accounts of game industry practices have been at the forefront of efforts within media studies to document and theorize conditions and transformations of labor under digital capitalism. The study of digital game labor has tended to cluster around four areas of inquiry: below-the-line labor, the creative labor of game development, player-production, and game labor politics. Providing empirically informed portraits of diverse contexts and experiences of gamework, this issue interrogates multiple dimensions of precarious work and social exclusion within an industry whose playful self-image can make it a resistant object of labor-centered analysis. The contributors to this issue promote a research orientation that is attentive to how work in the digital game industry might be made more accessible and sustainable.

Recent research within employment relations has identified how employer collective organizations continue to thrive in countries featuring different institutional characteristics. In the UK, we identify 447 membership-based Employer Organizations (EOs) active within employment relations and human resource management. The volume of organizations identified prompts our research question: what explains the changing role and activities of UK EOs? Country-level studies of EOs continuation use a range of theoretical frameworks to analyze how these organizations have adapted to institutional and economic change, but the most effective mode of analysis is debated. Our contribution is to apply Schmitter and Streeck’s identification of logics driving the behaviour of employer collective organizations, previously applied to coordinated market economies as defined by the Varieties of Capitalism framework, to the UK’s liberal market economy. The article explores the extent to which liberalization prompted new behaviour within UK EOs. Some studies argue that EOs in coordinated market economies adapt by prioritizing logics driving influence over those linked to membership. We explore how the UK’s changing political economy spurred evolution in the application of logics and find that the opposite happened. EOs once used participation within collective bargaining agreements and the governance of tripartite bodies to prioritize the logic of influence but these institutions decayed. It might have been expected that such decay would have caused a withering of EOs but they reconstituted themselves instead. The declining salience of the logic of influence prompted employer bodies to focus to a greater degree on the logic of membership by offering a broader range of member-focused services. Our findings indicate that employer collective bodies can react to liberalization with adaptation, not extinction. We also argue that our methodology could shed light on EOs behaviour in North America.

Le contexte de la sexologie est unique au Québec, notamment en raison de la formation, du contexte de pratique, de même que de la récente réglementation. La création de l’Ordre professionnel des sexologues du Québec en 2013 marque un moment décisif pour la reconnaissance de la profession de sexologue. Bien que certains chercheurs se soient intéressés à cette profession au Québec et ailleurs, aucune étude ne semble avoir exploré de manière précise la question de l’identité professionnelle des sexologues. Pourtant, certaines études indiquent que la construction de leur identité professionnelle poserait certaines difficultés. Cette recherche exploratoire vise à répondre à la question suivante : Quels sont les obstacles à la construction de l’identité professionnelle des sexologues? Cette recherche se base principalement sur le modèle de la socialisation professionnelle de Dubar (2010) et a été effectuée par l’entremise de 25 entrevues individuelles auprès de diplômés du baccalauréat en sexologie, détenant ou non d’autres diplômes. Les résultats indiquent que le principal obstacle à la construction de l’identité professionnelle réside dans le fait que l’identité collective demeure toujours en cours de définition en raison du caractère récent de la profession et de la réglementation, de même qu’à cause de la diversité du champ de pratique. Les résultats de l’étude procurent une meilleure compréhension des processus contribuant à la construction de l’identité professionnelle des sexologues : ils peuvent fournir des éléments de réflexion tant au milieu académique qu’à ceux de la pratique.

The article reviews the book, "Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence," by Kristen R. Ghodsee.

The article reviews the book, ""Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth": The First International in a Global Perspective," edited by Fabrice Bensimon, Quenton Deluermoz, and Jeanne Moisand.

Par le biais d’une analyse thématique d’éditoriaux de La Presse sur près de 35 ans, soit de 1980 à 2015, nous montrons comment s’est graduellement construit, au Québec, un discours qui prône une augmentation constante de la rémunération des médecins, alors même que, parallèlement, les infirmières recevaient un traitement asymétrique. Notre analyse s’inscrit dans la continuité des recherches sur les facteurs ayant influencé l’évolution de la rémunération des travailleurs à partir des années 1980.

Cette recherche examine comment les institutions contribuent, à travers un processus d’expérimentation, au développement d’une gestion des talents (GDT) au niveau régional, la faisant passer ainsi d’un bien privé à un bien collectif. Ce passage s’opère par la création d’agences, de règles formelles et informelles, ainsi que de réseaux par les parties prenantes qui cherchent à développer et attirer des talents pour l’ensemble d’un écosystème.

The aim of this study is to examine the empirical question of how the provision of work-life benefits is associated with wages, promotions, and job satisfaction. This is an important question for industrial relations scholars and one that, as yet, has no definitive answer. In order to answer this question, we employ both economic theory and methods. Specifically, the economic theories being tested are the compensating wage differentials theory and the efficiency wage theory. To test the efficacy of each theory, we use econometric techniques using longitudinal data from the most recent Workplace and Employee Survey of Canada. We use regression to unpack the effects of work-life benefits on various employment outcomes and employ instrumental variables to mitigate against reverse causality. We find broad support for the efficiency wage theory. Alternatively stated, we find that increases in benefits are not associated with decreases in wages and other employment outcomes. If bundled correctly, work-life benefits are positively associated with increased wages, a greater number of promotions, enhanced employee morale in the form of job satisfaction, and improved employee retention. These results suggest that the provision of work-life benefits is not a zero-sum game for employers and employees. On the contrary, it appears that both parties to the employment relationship can benefit from work-life benefits.

The article reviews the book, "Radical Ambition: The New Left in Toronto," by Peter Graham and Ian McKay.

The article reviews the book, "Industrial Relations in Singapore: Practice and Perspective," by Oun Hean Loh.

The article reviews the book, "Les services essentiels au Québec et la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés," by Jean Bernier.

Multinational corporations are undeniably the driving force of globalization and regional economic integration. A convenient institutional framework (Hall and Soskice, 2001) to apply when comparing multinationals from different host countries is the well-travelled road of dividing capitalist economies into coordinated market economies (CMEs) and liberal market economies (LMEs). This article aims to elucidate the tensions between centralized human resources practices and labour union avoidance usually exhibited by multinationals from so-called Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) when they expand into coordinated ones (CMEs). Specifically, it examines the recent acquisition of the German retail giant Galeria Kaufhof by the Canadian multinational Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). The article shows that HBC has settled into an uneasy acceptance of the CME institutions, while its investment motives vacillate between a long-term, market-enlargement strategy and a short- to medium-term one, based on the rapidly increasing real estate value of its downtown flagship stores. The article encourages researchers in IR to retain three principal conclusions for the literature and for further study. First, without predetermining outcomes by looking at host-country or home-country effects alone, institutionalist frameworks do present a convenient backdrop for conceptualizing movements of multinationals across jurisdictions. Secondly, concepts such as bricolage, recombining of institutional elements and institutional entrepreneurship, stemming from the institutional change literature, should routinely figure in one’s analytical toolbox, in any attempt at non-deterministic institutional analysis. Finally, sector-level actors, such as trade unions and employers’ associations, can play an essential role in any successful adaptation of collective bargaining institutions in the context of globalization by developing, maintaining and carefully utilizing their repertoire of strategic capabilities.

The article reviews the book, "Dix concepts pour penser le nouveau monde du travail," edited by Daniel Mercure and Mircea Vultur.

We examine the ways in which two major and related governmental institutions of China, the Communist Party of China (CPC) and government controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), exert different effects on the attitudes and behaviour of people toward the environment. Our motivation is to see which institution is more effective in making individuals ‘aware’ of environmental issues, expressing a ‘willingness to pay’ to alleviate the problems, and ultimately to ‘act’ on the issue by altering their behaviour. Based on theories of planned behaviour and social learning, we hypothesize that membership in the CPC as well as in the ACFTU fosters an ‘awareness’ of environmental problems and a ‘willingness to make a sacrifice’ to protect the environment, but that members of the ACFTU are more likely than members of the CPC to act on the issue by altering their behaviour. We test our hypothesis based on a nationally representative sample (n = 3112) from the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS). Our results indicate that both the Party and the union have positive effects on ‘awareness’ and ‘willingness to pay’, but the union effect is generally stronger and only it (and not the Party) affects individual behaviour toward protecting the environment. Unions in China are generally regarded as having little or no independent power to organize workers and engage in free collective bargaining. Their role is to foster harmony between workers and employers and to co-opt grassroots actions, wildcat strikes and the growth of independent unions, all in the interest of fostering stability and growth. While this is undoubtedly the case, our results are consistent with an emerging view of a more variegated picture of Chinese trade unions that highlights some more positive elements, in our case, fostering ‘actions’ to improve the environment in China.

The article reviews the book, "Hard Work Conquers All: Building the Finnish Community in Canada," edited by Michel S. Beaulieu, David K. Ratz, and Ronald N. Harpelle.

We are honoured to take over as the editors of RI/IR. Our new responsibility, formally assumed in September 2018, weighs heavily on us. We know that the journal is special. Since 1945, it has carved out a reputation for being at the vanguard in presenting research concerning work, employment and the labour market, as well as for being transcendent in how it delivers its product. RI/IR distinguishes itself from its rivals in the way it brings together professionals from disparate cultural, linguistic and epistemological backgrounds. Much like Canada itself, the journal serves as a reminder that diversity is a strength and that respect for difference, far from being a matter of jaundiced tolerance, is in fact a critical precursor of greatness. Aside from its role as a broad church of ideas, methodologies and ideological orientations, RI/IR has provided a platform for francophone scholars to showcase their work alongside their Anglophone peers. / Nous sommes honorés d’assumer le rôle de directeurs de la revue Relations industrielles/Industrial Relations (RI/IR) et nous mesurons pleinement l’importance de cette nouvelle responsabilité, dont nous sommes formellement investis depuis le mois de septembre 2018. Notre revue est particulière, nous le savons. Depuis 1945, elle s’est forgé une réputation avant-gardiste grâce à la publication de travaux de recherche novateurs sur le travail, l’emploi et le marché du travail, tout en se surpassant dans sa façon de diffuser son produit. RI/IR se démarque de ses concurrents par sa capacité à rassembler des professionnels de diverses origines culturelles, linguistiques et épistémologiques. Tout comme le Canada, la revue rappelle, par son essence même, que la diversité est une force et le respect de la différence, loin d’être une tolérance amère, constitue un précurseur essentiel de la grandeur. Au-delà de son rôle d’incarner un large spectre d’idées, de méthodologies et d’orientations idéologiques, RI/IR offre aux chercheurs francophones une plateforme qui leur permet de présenter leurs travaux à côté de leurs homologues anglophones. --Introduction