Austerity was presented as the antidote to sluggish economies, but it has had far-reaching effects on jobs and employment conditions.With an international team of editors and authors from Europe, North America and Australia, this illuminating collection goes beyond a sole focus on public sector work and uniquely covers the impact of austerity on work across the private, public and voluntary spheres.Drawing on a range of perspectives, the book engages with the major debates ...

This book focuses on zero hours and on-call work as an extreme form of casual and precarious employment. It includes country studies of the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK, New Zealand and Ireland, where there has been increasing concern about the prevalence of such work, and working time uncertainty, as well as varying levels of public policy debate on regulation. The book incorporates a comparative review of zero hours work based on the findings of the country studies. This pays particula...

Breaking new ground and drawing on contributions from the leading academics in the field, this notable volume focuses specifically on industrial relations. Informative and revealing, the text provides an overview of the industrial relations systems of nine regions (North America, South America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand, Asia, Africa, and India) and is divided into two distinct sections covering:regional variations in global in...

From Recipients to Donors examines the emergence, or re-emergence, of a large number of nations as partners and donors in international development, from global powers such as Brazil, China and India, to Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, to former socialist states such as Poland and Russia. The impact of these countries in international development has grown sharply, and as a result they have become a subject of intense interest and analysis.This unique book explores the range of o...

This book analyses the rapidly increasing role of African states, leaders and other political actors in international politics in the 21st Century.In contrast to the conventional approach of studying how external actors impacted on Africa’s international relations, this book seeks to open up a new approach, focusing on the impact of African political actors on international politics. It does this by analysing African agency – the degree to which African political actors have room t...

European Labour Law explores how individual European national legal systems, in symbiosis with the European Union, produce a transnational labour law system that is distinct and genuinely European in character. Professor Brian Bercusson describes the evolution of this system, its national, transnational and global contexts and its institutional and substantive structures. The collective industrial-relations dimension of employment is examined, and the labour law of the EU as manifested in,...

In the past ten to twenty years the global political economy picture has dramatically changed with the emergence of the economies of Brazil, Russia, India and, notably, China (BRICs) as big players and competitors of the advanced economies in the West and Eastern Asia. The book comparatively analyses institutional change in the BRICs.This book examines the BRICs by analysing their institutional development, their main continuities and changes, and their differences. It provides a c...

*** Winner of the Myrdal Prize for Evolutionary Political Economy ***The last few years have seen the spectacular failure of market fundamentalism in Europe and the US, with a seemingly never-ending spate of corporate scandals and financial crises. As the environmental limits and socially destructive tendencies of the current profit-driven economic model become daily more self-evident, there is a growing demand for a fairer economic alternative, as evidenced by the mounting campaig...

‘Global governance’ has become a key concept in the contemporary study of international politics, yet what the term means and how it works remains in question.Governing the World: Cases in Global Governance takes an alternative approach to understanding the concept by exploring how global governance works in practice through a set of case studies on both classical issues of international relations such as security, labour and trade, and more contemporary concerns such as the enviro...

This volume provides a short and accessible introduction to the organization that serves as the primary coordinator of the work of the UN system throughout the developing world –the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The book:traces the origins and evolution of UNDP, outlining how a central UN funding mechanism and field network developed into a more comprehensive development agencyevaluates the UNDP’s performance and results, both in its role as system co...

The European Union is a leading actor in international development, providing more than half of the world’s foreign aid, but also a unique case, combining the characteristics of a bilateral and a multilateral donor. Despite the general acknowledgment that policy coordination substantially improves both the effectiveness of foreign aid and the visibility of the EU in the international arena, Member States have consistently resisted any intrusion into what they consider a key area of their n...

Economic globalisation and universal human rights both have the aspiration and power to improve and enrich individuals and communities. However, their respective institutions, methods, practices and goals differ, leading to both detrimental clashes and beneficial synergies. In this book, David Kinley analyses how human rights intersect with the trade, aid and commercial dimensions of global economic relations, taking the view that, while the global economy is a vitally important civilising...