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This paper contributes to debates on the intersections between organizations, the body, and reproduction by exploring how the non‐reproductive female body is discursively (re)constructed by organizations which provide fertility treatment, such as private clinics and fertility magazines. Organization studies has neglected the non‐reproductive body, despite a fair amount of research on its reproductive counterpart, especially pregnant and maternal bodies. Equally, these discussions privilege the employment relationship – for example, how women are enjoined to manage their bodies at work – whereas we concentrate on the marketplace, or the field of fertility treatment, and the organizations therein. These organizations, while focused on reproducing bodies, also influence, compound, and challenge notions of the bodies they are involved with. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis of texts produced by UK fertility organizations, we present three discourses of the non‐reproductive female body that (re)generate subject positions where the absence of reproduction is a medical condition, an emotionally distressing experience, and something that needs to be cared for. Our argument suggests how the texts can operate as a form of Foucauldian governmental biopower, emphasizing how they hail the infertile female subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the labour processes and working conditions of wood engravers in France and England during the 19th century as the process of production of the illustrated periodicals became increasingly industrialized. It argues that the bulk of 19th century wood engravers should be considered as one of the first classes of proletarians in the mass media industry. The paper first looks at the general socio-economic conditions from which 19th century wood engravers emerged as proletarians. Second, it examines wood engraving workshops, wood engravers' working conditions, their training and type of production. Lastly, it discusses the hierarchical relations between editors-publishers and wood engravers, the wood engravers economic conditions, their socio-cultural attitudes towards their work and the control exercised on them in the labour process. With the industrialization of the production of illustrated periodicals, wood engravers formed a class of waged workers who owned no means of production, had little autonomy or creativity in their work and sold their labour power to fabricate illustrations. Workshops operated as factories, training apprentices to mechanically reproduce fragmented segments of illustrations in an assembly-line type of labour and based on a rigid hierarchy in which engraver-apprentices were at the bottom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the theory and evidence of the effect of finance, ownership, and corporate governance on labour and employment, with special reference to the socalled 'market-outsider' or liberal market economies. The main finance, ownership, and governance characteristics of these economies are described and briefly compared with those in so-called co-ordinated market economies. A set of predictions of the impact on labour management and employment are outlined. Evidence is presented from comparative studies and from within-country studies, especially of the United Kingdom. It is found that predictions are not clearly borne out, and the paper identifies a set of factors to explain this. These include dispersed ownership, the nature of corporate law, and the public visibility of listed companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent opening under the 30-year rule of official papers concerning the Industrial Relations Act 1971 makes it possible to reappraise the conventional view of this short-lived statute and also more general implications of the process of policy making at a time of acute political crisis. The papers shed new light on the relationship between the government and the judiciary, in particular the President of the National Industrial Relations Court, Sir John Donaldson. They provide empirical evidence of how the judicial and political arms of government dealt with social and industrial upheavals and they prompt reflections on the nature of the separation of powers in the United Kingdom's constitutional arrangements. It is argued that, in examining the nature and extent of judicial independence, constitutional law scholars have hitherto concentrated on executive influence on the judiciary and tended to ignore the extent to which judges may secretly influence politicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the importance of organising workers in the low-paid services sector if British trade unions are to secure themselves for the future. After outlining the scale of the challenge and the new efforts being made to promote organising by unions, the paper looks at the hotel industry in more depth. A case study of a union campaign to win union recognition at the Dorchester Hotel in London is used to highlight the limitations of workplace-focused campaigns in this sector. Drawing on the lessons of experience in North America, the paper then argues that anextra-workplace, occupational and/or sectoral approach may well secure better results. In so doing, workplace issues could be recast as matters of economic and social injustice, widening the scale of any campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the social relationships of wage labour formed or stabilized in British merchant shipping in the course of 'off-shoring' employment in the late-19th century. It argues that Asian wage-workers were mobilized for employment on British merchant vessels as 'coolies', i.e. nominally free but mediated labouring subjects who could only be stabilized through legal, penal, social, debt, or other forms of coercion. Once introduced 'coolie' relations were not confined to Indian crews. They also affected wage labour relations more generally in British shipping. While occurring against the backdrop of anti-colonial struggles, the seafaring coolie's transformation into maritime worker was closely mediated by employers and the colonial state and produced hybrid outcomes. The creation of the modern seafaring 'coolie' and the nature and context of his transformation into a 'worker' thus shed interesting light on wage labour relations in the modern and contemporary global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes Otto Kahn-Freund's advocacy of the British ‘collective laissez-faire’ system of regulation of industrial relations, in which regulation proceeded autonomously of the state. It suggests that a weakness of collective laissez-faire as a normative principle was its failure to make adequate provision for the furtherance of the public interest. It links this failure to a more general reluctance, on the part of Kahn-Freund, to conceive of the state as representative of the public interest. And it seeks to explain this reluctance with reference to Kahn-Freund's experiences of living and working as a labour court judge in the Weimar Republic, and of moving to the UK as a refugee from Nazism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]