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The following excerpt is taken from a public lecture given by Marjorie Griffen Cohen, Professor of Economics and Chair of Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University (SFU), entitled "Economic Fundamentalism and its Threat to Democracy."The address, part of the 1998 President's Lecture series at SFU, examined the ascendency of neoliberalism — "economic fundamentalism"— in the post-World War II period and its impact on the political, economic, and social institutions that "supported the ideas of equality and democracy in industrialized countries." In this passage, Cohen sketches a "political approach" to countering the erosion of the welfare state and what she calls the "marketization" of social and economic life. --Editor's introduction

By the early 20th century, the changes taking place in western industrial capitalist nations prompted an adaptive shift in the socioeconomic delineation of human bodies, and in scientific theories about how they worked and how they could be put to work. Just as the rising social sciences borrowed from medicine to convey images of social malaise, medicine increasingly appropriated an industrial vocabulary to conceptualize bodily health. Depicted variously as a machine, a motor, a factory in itself, the human body absorbed industrial symbolism. Modem industry demanded an intensification of labour that made bodily efficiency paramount. The corresponding definition of health also shifted, from emphasis on physical endurance, which could be secured by simple replacement of outworn workers, to optimum labour efficiency, which had to be actively instilled in all workers, present and future. Scientific management programs were easily integrated with regulatory medical notions concerning the human body and human nature, as science, medicine and technology combined forces to promote a machine ethic that equated modernity, progress, efficiency, and national health. This paper considers the relationship between changing conceptualizations of the human body, developing medical influence and state regulation of health, and attempts to "Taylorize" the labour process in early 20th century Canada.

The article reviews the book, "Forging Business-Labour Partnerships : The Emergence of Sector Councils in Canada," edited by Morley Gunderson and Andrew Sharpe.

The article reviews the book, "Formations of Class & Gender," by Beverley Skeggs.

The article reviews the book, "Unions and Workplace Reorganization," edited by Bruce Nissen.

The article reviews the book, "Un métier et une vocation. Le travail des religieuses au Québec de 1901 à 1971," by Danielle Juteau and Nicole Laurin.

The article reviews the book, "The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945," by Cindy Hahamovitch.

The individual decision making of the Energy and Chemical Workers' Union rank and file members in their choice to support or oppose a 3-way merger with the Paperworkers' Union and the Communications and Electrical Workers' Union is examined. Two theories, one economic and one behavioral, are used to explain member voting preferences. Results demonstrate that both instrumental and image considerations need to be taken into account when predicting the outcome of a union merger vote.

The article reviews the book, "Tous à l'école. État, communautés rurales et scolarisation au Québec de 1826 à 1859," by Andrée Dufour.

In recent years, there has been a trend in many countries toward a decentralization of collective bargaining structures. Two methods are employed to provide a deeper analysis than previous studies of the forces that determine bargaining structure. First, a framework is built to analyze bargaining structure by integrating previous theoretical and empirical work on the topic. Second, the framework is applied to 4 bargaining unit level case studies in the US' pulp and paper industry. By examining the dissolution of 2 centralized bargaining structures and union attempts to reestablish centralization through ratification voting pools in 2 others, the relative importance of economic, tactical and organizational factors in the continued decentralization of US paper industry bargaining is revealed.

The article reviews and comments on the following two books: Alan H. Jeeves and Jonathan Crush's "White Farms, Black Labor: The State and Agrarian Change in Southern Africa, 1910-1950" and Jonathan Crush and Charles Ambler's "Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa."

The article reviews the book, "Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South, by Mark M. Smith.

Far more attention has been paid to Walton & McKersie's (1965) distributive and integrative models of bargaining than to their strategies in a mixed bargaining situation; in particular the emphasis has been on developing cooperation in the form of the integrative or mutual gains approaches. A paper reexamines the mixed bargaining model and, drawing on a case study, identifies a number of features of negotiation which enable the parties to overcome the difficulties associated with the strategy. It is suggested that the mixed bargaining model is more appropriate in the industrial relations context than approaches which focus on cooperation.

The article reviews the book, "Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957," by Penny M. Von Eschen.

The article reviews the book, "What Do We Need a Union For? The TWUA in the South, 1945-1955," by Timothy J. Minchin.

The article reviews the book, "Major Douglas and Alberta Social Credit," by Bob Hesketh.

In this paper I challenge the prevailing theoretical framework [of study in industrial relations] that marginalizes women by examining how unpaid work on and off the job is and is not analyzed in the literature and by demonstrating its importance to issues as central to the discipline as wages, job allocation, and industrial conflict. In the section entitled, "Unpaid Work on the Job," I argue that the concept of the "effort bargain"— how unpaid work is currently studied in industrial relations — obscures pay discrimination against women because it is more likely to implicitly recognize as work the tasks associated with jobs traditionally performed by men than many of the tasks associated with jobs performed by women. Under the heading, "Unpaid Work in the Household," I argue that unpaid work in the home determines, in part, how paid work is allocated and, in particular, how the social construction of women as non-workers/wives and mothers by researchers naturalizes women's place in the secondary labour market and reifies men's access to "breadwinner jobs." Finally, I conclude by arguing that incorporating unpaid work into the study of industrial relations is necessary to move women from the margins to the centre of discourse. --From author's introduction

The article reviews the book, "Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Organized Guide to Films about Labor," by Tom Zaniello.

Workplace change in 2 subsidiaries of a multinational pharmaceutical corporation is examined. One affiliate is located in the UK, the other in South Africa. It is shown how variations in subsidiary relations with corporate headquarters reflect differences in the strategic power and resources of subsidiaries, as well as differences of a local nature. These differences are reflected in variations in the scope, pace, and content of workplace change.

Interrogates the currents of scholarly inquiry into the Italian emigration of the 19th and 20th centuries. Argues for a woman-centred, gendered, and proletarian history of this diaspora, and suggests new areas of investigation.