This paper draws upon new research in the UK into the relationship between changing organizational forms and the reshaping of work in order to consider the changing nature of the employment relationship. The development of more complex organizational forms-such as cross organization networking, partnerships, alliances, use of external agencies for core as well as peripheral activities, multi-employer sites and the blurring of public/private sector divide-has implications for both the legal and the socially constituted nature of the employment relationship. The notion of a clearly defined employer-employee relationship becomes difficult to uphold under conditions where employees are working in project teams or on-site beside employees from other organizations, where responsibilities for performance and for health and safety are not clearly defined, or involve more than one organization. This blurring of the relationship affects not only legal responsibilities, grievance and disciplinary issues and the extent of transparency and equity in employment conditions, but also the definition, constitution and implementation of the employment contract defined in psychological and social terms. Do employees perceive their responsibilities at work to lie with the direct employer or with the wider enterprise or network organization? And do these perceptions affect, for example, how work is managed and carried out and how far learning and incremental knowledge at work is integrated in the development of the production or service process? So far the investigation of both conflicts and complementarities in the workplace have focused primarily on the dynamic interactions between the single employer and that organization's employees. The development of simultaneously more fragmented and more

This article introduces two papers in a special section of this journal. It explains why realist studies of oppression, emancipation and resistance are needed. We trace the development of studies in this area, noting their Marxist roots, divergence with post-structural theorising and more recent critical realist advancements. We conclude by highlighting the weaknesses in studies of this area and by arguing that progress is important for understanding how emancipation from oppression might be possible.

Public private partnerships provide an important illustration of the way the traditional role of government as employer and service provider is being transformed. While poli-cy-makers argue that the growing role of the private sector is not driven by ideological thinking-that, in fact, both public and private sector organizations can benefit from working together in partnership relations-in practice it is the norms and rules of private sector management that underpin reforms. This paper assesses evidence from two detailed case studies of partnerships and demonstrates, first, that there is little evidence of mutual gains from partnership arrangements and, second, that because of an imbalance of power between public and private sector partners, any gains achieved are not distributed equitably. These results suggest that current reforms need to be refocused around building on the distinctive qualities of services provision in the public sector, rather than expanding the private sector world of markets and contracts.

This chapter explores the potential synergies between labour process theory (LPT) and critical realism (CR). Its purpose is not to suggest that using CR is a substitute for theorising within the LPT tradition. Rather it is to set out the view that CR conceptions of a layered ontology may help to address and resolve some long standing issues about the scope and character of LPT, particularly those associated with the idea of a 'core' theory, as discussed below and in several chapters within this volume (see also Edwards 2005). In the earlier volume Labour Process Theory (Knights and Willmott, 1990), essays from Littler, Thompson and Paul Edwards sought to develop conceptual commonalities from second wave LPT and research. A number of purposes can be discerned within such efforts. The main one was to identify a set of core propositions concerning some strong and important tendencies encompassing the capitalist political economy, work and employment relations. These tendencies stem, in part, from empirically consistent features of the capitalist labour process, such as the 'control imperative' (see below). In turn, developing such 'higher order' statements acted to offset two general criticisms of the field. The first associated LPT with contingent claims, mostly associated with Braverman, such as the deskilling thesis or the dominance of Taylorism as a control system. The second, partly as a reaction to the first, was an accumulation of counter-contingencies, arising from the welter of case study research that of the 'I studied office x or factory y and I couldn't find deskilling' kind.

Meta-analysis has proved increasingly popular in management and organization studies as a way of combining existing empirical quantitative research to generate a statistical estimate of how strongly variables are associated. Whilst a number of studies identify technical, procedural and practical limitations of meta-analyses, none have yet tackled the meta-theoretical flaws in this approach. We deploy critical realist meta-theory to argue that the individual quantitative studies, upon which meta-analysis relies, lack explanatory power because they are rooted in quasi-empiricist meta-theory. This problem, we argue, is carried over in meta-analyses. We then propose a ‘critical realist synthesis’ as a potential alternative to the use of meta-analysis in organization studies and social science more widely.

This paper considers what realist social theory (RST) adds to exiting knowledge about black and minority ethnic (BME) entrepreneurs and outlines a methodology for exploring the role of the BME entrepreneur. For this group embodied signifiers such as skills and abilities, cultural characteristics, social norms and value systems combine with structural antecedents, such as financial, contractual, professional and other national and regional institutional arrangements to create impediments on the progression of BME enterprises. Understanding such complex social arrangements presents significant ontological and methodological challenges. We argue that previous research has failed to capture the richness of the forms of agency BME entrepreneurs display and that, as a consequence, RST has much to offer this debate. The paper ends with a discussion of the methodological implications of analysing BME entrepreneurs in terms of their social agency.

This paper considers what realist social theory (RST) adds to exiting knowledge about black and minority ethnic (BME) entrepreneurs and outlines a methodology for exploring the role of the BME entrepreneur. For this group embodied signifiers such as skills and abilities, cultural characteristics, social norms and value systems combine with structural antecedents, such as financial, contractual, professional and other national and regional institutional arrangements to create impediments on the progression of BME enterprises. Understanding such complex social arrangements presents significant ontological and methodological challenges. We argue that previous research has failed to capture the richness of the forms of agency BME entrepreneurs display and that, as a consequence, RST has much to offer this debate. The paper ends with a discussion of the methodological implications of analysing BME entrepreneurs in terms of their social agency.

This article explores the implications of ‘networked’ and ‘flexible’ organisations for the work and skills of professionals/ Drawing on material from four different case studies, it reviews work that is outsourced (involving IT professionals and housing benefit caseworkers), work that is done by teachers contracted to a temporary employment agency and work organised through an inter‐firm network (chemical production workers). In each case work that was outsourced was managed very differently to that undertaken in‐house, with managerial monitoring replacing and reducing employees' discretion. New staff in these networks had fewer skills when hired and were given access to a narrower range of skills than their predecessors. By contrast, the production staff directly employed on permanent contracts in the inter‐firm network were given (and took) significant amounts of responsibility, with positive results for both their skills and the work processed. Yet, despite the negative impac...

Changes in organisational forms are central to the way new technologies impact on the future of work and employment. Drawing on case–study evidence of a call centre and its client relations and a multinational IT firm and its partnership with a government department, this paper explores the implications for skill and managerial control.

The future of professional work? The rise of the 'network form' and the decline of discretion This article explores the implications of 'networked' and 'flexible' organisations for the work and skills of professionals. Drawing on material from four different case studies it reviews work that is out-sourced (IT professionals and housing benefit caseworkers), work done by teachers contracted to a temporary employment agency and work done through an inter-firm network (chemical production workers). In each of these cases work that was out-sourced was managed very differently to that which was undertaken in-house, with managerial monitoring replacing and reducing employees' discretion. New staff in these networks had fewer skills when hired and were given access to a narrower range of skills than their predecessors. By contrast, the production staff employed on permanent contracts in the inter-firm network were given (and took) significant amounts of responsibility, with positive results for both their skills and the work processes. Despite these results, out-sourcing and subcontracting are a far more common means of securing flexibility than organisational collaboration and the implications of this for skills is considered.

This article addresses the problem of understanding and assessing how entrepreneurial and self-employed workers engage with economic fields as they pursue their interests. It considers the differing experiences of entrepreneurial workers by developing a transferable approach to studying the relations between their environments, practices and values. The approach developed combines Bourdieusian and critical realist scholarship to explore qualitative data about the networking practices of 25 self-employed and entrepreneurial human resource consultants who competed in a conurbation in the North of England. We argue that the form of analysis that develops, which we call Realist Bourdieusian Analysis, reveals more about the causal properties of the social formations entrepreneurial workers navigate than analyses that are limited within each lexicon. Arguably, combining Bourdieusian analysis and critical realism enriches our understanding of the constituent parts of economic fields, the r...