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The article reviews the book, "Politics and Public Debt: The Dominion, the Banks, and Alberta's Social Credit," by Robert L. Ascah.

This paper offers and tests a model for national union adoption of information technology (IT). Data come from a mail survey of national unions that were active in the US in 1997. Consistent with the model's predictions and prior research on union innovation, results indicate that rationalization and size are key predictors of IT adoption. Results also suggest a role for decentralization, employer use of information technology, and prior innovation. IT adoption may be one of the most important areas of union innovation in decades, and may have substantial impacts on union outcomes and possibly on the nature of unions. Understanding the nature and causes of IT adoption by unions may provide insight on the changing nature of unions and their roles in the future.

Is there a Canadian labour film? After a century of film production in Canada, the answer is uncertain. Canadian workers do appear in a variety of documentary and feature film productions, but their presence often arises from the incidental processes of documentation and fictionalization. There is also a more purposeful body of work focused on the concerns of labour history, but its promise remains relatively underdeveloped. Although film has become one of the dominant languages of communications at the end of the 20th century, the practice of visual history stands to benefit from closer collaboration between historians and filmmakers.

The article reviews the book, "The Discipline of Teamwork: Participation and Concertive Control," by James R. Barker.

Analyzes Supreme Court of Canada's decisions of the 1980s and 1990s that collective bargaining is a not a fundamental right under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In 1947. Bora Laskin, the doyen of Canadian collective bargaining law, remarked that "Labour relations as a matter for legal study … has outgrown any confinement to a section of the law of torts or to a corner of the criminal law. Similarly, and from another standpoint, it has burst the narrow bounds of master and servant." That standpoint was liberal pluralism, which comprises collective bargaining legislation administered by independent labour boards and a System of grievance arbitration to enforce collective agreements. After World War II, it came to dominate our understanding of labour relations law such that, according to Laskin, reference to "pre-collective bargaining standards is an attempt to re-enter a world that has ceased to exist." But this picture is only partially true. Instead of replacing earlier regimes of industrial legality, industrial pluralism was grafted on to them. Moreover, it only encompassed a narrow, albeit crucial, segment of workers; in the mid-1950s "the typical union member was a relatively settled, semi-skilled male worker within a large industrial corporation." More than 65 per cent of Canadian workers at that time, a large proportion of whom were women and recent immigrants, fell outside the regime. This paper broadens the focus from collective bargaining law to include other forms of the legal regulation of employment relations, such as the common law, minimum standards, and equity legislation. In doing so, it examines the extent to which liberal pluralism regime was implicated in constructing and reinforcing a deeply segmented labour market in Canada. It also probes whether the recent assault on trade union rights may be the trajectory for the reconstruction of a new regime of employment relations.

The article reviews the book, "La confiance : approches économiques et sociologiques," edited by Christian Thuderoz, Vincent Mangematin and Denis Harrisson.

The article reviews the book, "The Human Face of Industrial Conflict in Post-War Japan," edited by Hirosuke Kawanishi.

The article reviews the book, "Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered," by Jack Metzgar.

This essay explores the current state of the field of Industrial Relations. The first part of the essay traces the emergence of IR out of the general concern with the 'labour question" to form a distinct field of study and research in the Angio-American countries. The second part argues that the field has been plagued by a profound crisis of relevance in the 1980s and 1990s, registered by a decline in its importance within universities, a shrinking of its academic associations, a loss of interest on the part of its traditional audience, increased isolation from other disciplines, and a theoretical incapacity to come to grips with the sweeping changes that have occurred in labour markets, the workplace, and the wider political economy. This situation is leading to a redefinition of the field as "Employment Relations." In the third part of the essay, this drift towards Employment Relations is criticized for moving the field more squarely into the area of managerial science, for leaving it incapable of analyzing future waves of collective mobilization, and for its continued adherence to a geographically and historically constricted conceptual foundation. A better strategy, it is suggested, would be to go beyond employment by reconceptualizing the field in terms of "work relations."

An analysis of theories and practices of diversity management, as illustrated in the case of the Netherlands, shows that they are too narrowly focused on redressing imbalances experienced by ethnic minorities and bridging cultural differences between majorities and ethnic minorities in the workplace. Agencies in the field of diversity management have fallen back on a limited and standardized stock of methods that ignore the specificity of organizational dynamics and largely operate in isolation from existing equity policies. The influence of diversity management has thus remained quite superficial. A contextual approach would broaden both the body of thought and the repertory of methods of diversity management, and strengthen its political and social relations. Such an approach would respond to its most challenging tasks; fostering social justice, enhancing productivity, and breaking the circle that equates cultural difference with social inequality.

The article reviews the book, "Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity," by Amy Bentley.

The article reviews the book, "Franchir le mur des conflits," by David S. Weiss, translated by Jean Boivin.

The article reviews the book, "Contracting Masculinity: Gender, Class, and Race in a White-Collar Union, 1944-1994," by Gillian Creese.

The author reflects on the impact of Debouzy on his own work in movement history and offers observations on the shifting terrain of social history. this includes increased emphasis on race, gender, and cultural identities as well as efforts to reach a wider audience.

Analysant la mobilité sociale dans le gouvernement de Québec sous le Régime français, ce mémoire aborde la propriété seigneuriale en tant qu'illustration de la promotion sociale dans la vallée du Saint-Laurent au XVIIe et au XVTIIe siècle. Cette analyse, portant sur une soixantaine d'individus aux origines modestes, issus notamment de la paysannerie, ayant accédé à la propriété seigneuriale, se veut une contribution a l'étude de la promotion sociale en Nouvelle-France. Quatre parties constituent l'essentiel de ce mémoire. L'origine de ces individus et les modes d'élévation sociale sont étudiés dans une première servant de cadre contextuel et de présentation sociodémographique. Les trois chapitres suivants visent à répondre plus directement à la problématique de l'étude, à savoir l'impact socio-économique de la propriété seigneuriale chez ces seigneurs aux humbles origines. La durabilité de la propriété seigneuriale, ainsi que le fait d'y résider ou non et le peuplement de la seigneurie sont les éléments étudiés dans le deuxième chapitre. Le troisième chapitre aborde la question du prestige tributaire de la seigneurie, en s'intéressant aux appellations attribuées aux seigneurs, de méme que les fortunes seigneuriales, pour connaître l'incidence économique de la propriété seigneuriale. Dans un dernier temps, le quatrième chapitre met en relief les alliances matrimoniales des familles seigneuriales, également révélatrices du possible impact de la possession d'une seigneurie. Au sein de cette société française d'Ancien Régime, transplantée sur les rives du Saint- Laurent, d'importantes mutations s'opèrent. L'une de ces transformations est perceptible par la plus grande possibilité de mobilité sociale, quasi inexistante en France. Par l'analyse des destins d'hommes dont la naissance ne laissait en rien présager un tel parcours, ce mémoire vise a comprendre l'enjeu de la propriété seigneuriale pour de tels individus ainsi que ses répercussions.

The article examines the evolution of Quebec's three major trade union federations--the Federation des travailleurs et travilleuses du Québec, the Centrale des syndicats nationaux, and the Centrale des syndicats du Québec--on the question of Quebec sovereignty since 1960. In the course of the four decades since the emergence of the modem sovereignty movement, the three federations adopted increasingly sympathetic attitudes and eventually became stalwarts of the sovereignty coalition. In the process Quebec labour activists shed their fears about the economic repercussions of sovereignty and espoused the notion of a sovereign nation-state, mainly because they came to see it as a way to implement social-democratic and labour-oriented policies.

Analyzes the anti-labour stance of the Vancouver Sun and how this affected the newspaper's coverage of business and labour issues. The bias became especially pronounced after Hollinger (Conrad Black) assumed ownership. The article is an excerpt from a larger report by Newswatch Canada that also discussed the Sun's coverage of provincial elections and the poor.

The article reviews the book, "Ravenswood: The Steelworkers' Victory and the Revival of American Labor," by Tom Juravich and Kate Bronfenbrenner.

The author reflects on his involvement with the Ontario Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton, Ontario. Discusses historians' efforts to reach a wider audience, the use of artifacts and primary sources, and the competing arenas of historical interpretation. Concludes that working people could be involved with planning, development and organization of a presentation, and that presentations should be, at least to some extent, empowering.