Employer Strategy and the Labour Market

The rapid pace of industrial restructuring and the emergence of new employment policies have focused attention on the role of employers in determining the quantity and quality of employment. This book draws on important new data from the ESRC's Social Change and Economic Life Initiative to test, modify, and challenge much of the current academic literature on the determinants of employer policy and how these influence employment structures and individual employment opportunities. The book begins with an authoritative synthesis of the influential debates on labour market segmentation, flexibility, post-Fordism, deskilling, the gendering of work, and the 'new' industrial relations. Ten substantive chapters then extend these debates in several directions. They make significant progress on three fronts: first, they suggest that the determinants of employer policy are both complex and strongly related to product market conditions; secondly, they find that employee attitudes and perceptions are critical to the implementation and effectiveness of employer policy; and, thirdly, they explore the interdependency between internal employment policies and external labour market conditions and begin to develop an integrated approach to internal and external labour markets.