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In the face of significant declines in union membership and organizing, a variety of strategies for union renewal have been identified. Views differ, however, concerning how far these strategies should be seen as mutually supportive. This article explores this issue drawing on research findings that shed light on the challenges that unions face in recruiting and organizing voluntary sector workers employed in the provision of outsourced public social care services in the UK. It concludes that unions, at least in certain contexts, can potentially utilize a combination of the strategies identified, but that the effective adoption of such an approach requires them to successfully address a number of difficult s trategic challenges.

While recent decades have witnessed a growth in the outsourcing of public services in Britain, the post-1997 UK Labour governments have sought to put in place mechanisms aimed at encouraging long-term collaborative contracting relationships marked by less reliance on cost-based competition. This article explores empirically how far these mechanisms have achieved their aims and thereby acted to protect the employment conditions of staff, and links this exploration to debates concerning the employment implications of organizational reforms within public sectors internationally. It concludes that in terms of bringing income security to the voluntary sector and stability to employment terms and conditions these efforts have been unsuccessful, and consequently casts doubts on more optimistic interpretations of the employment effects of organizational restructuring in the British public sector.

Goffman's concept of cooling out the mark (Goffman, E., "On cooling the mark out: some aspects of adaptation and failure", Psychiatry: Journal of the Study of Interpersonal Relations, Vol. 15 No. 4, 1952, pp. 451‐63) is proposed as helpful for understanding self‐regulating groups' attempts to pacify transferring colleagues who are facing admission failures. A longitudinal study of an air traffic control company is used to examine what happens to the status and operation of a long‐standing group‐regulated cooling out process when the rejection of applicant colleagues suddenly increases following the onset of mass job moves. Groups saw the tradition of using cooling out to obscure trainee complaints about admission decisions as less important than publicising failure by pressing management to address their new staffing problems. The pressures surrounding the decline of cooling out were also found to weaken the common basis of these groups' established occupational identity. Specialized occupational and group constructions emerged that linked identity and task on the basis of unit location, specialist operational skills, and even desirable age profiles. The conclusion drawn is that while the very act of turning away from the cooling out tradition may undermine the process of self‐regulation, it may, paradoxically, represent a necessary step in the transformation of the group from one type of self‐regulated identity to another.

Despite increasing research interest in the psychological contract, little is known about how employees' contractual beliefs alter during major organizational changes. Using a sample of air traffic control workers who have been used to stable work roles over long periods, examines employees' contractual responses to enforced job change. As job change approached, contractual acceptance or violation was engendered by sensemaking appraisals of management decisions, the meaning given to premove uncertainties, and perceptions of victimization. Following job change, sense‐making continued and eventually yielded either a calculative assessment of the employment relationship or feelings of sustained violation. While sustained violation was accompanied by visible expressions of resistance against management, such acts represented a desire to reinstate the established employment relationship. Conversely, workers who accommodated the personal outcomes of management breaches became less committed to a contractual relationship, and resolved to exploit management weaknesses and omissions. These divergencies reflected how the contractual meanings given to single breach events were kept separate from panoptic assessments of management's entire body of behaviour during the reorganization.

The Robens committee on Safety and Health at Work recognised the cardinal importance of worker co‐operation with management if workplaces were to be made safer places and believed that worker involvement would help overcome the apathy which it felt was the primary cause of accidents at the workplace. The Health and Safety at Work Act apparently accepted the views of the Committee and created a statutory framework for individual and collective involvement in health and safety issues at the workplace. The Safety Representatives and Safety Committees Regulations subsequently made under the Act provided for the appointment of safety representatives by recognised trade unions possessing a variety of rights and functions. In doing so, however, they may arguably have owed more to the philosophy which conceived the Employment Protection Act's provisions for promoting the improvement of industrial relations and extension of collective bargaining than the Select Committee's desire for total workplace involvement.

International audience ; The use of steroids as growth-promoting agents in food production is banned under European Union legislation. Detecting the abuse of testosterone, nandrolone, boldenone, oestradiol and progesterone is complicated by the fact these steroids are known to be endogenous in certain situations. In this study, the concentrations of characteristic metabolites of each of these steroids have been quantified in populations of untreated steers and heifers. Steroid concentration population data were then used by a statistical model (the Chebyshev inequality) to produce threshold concentrations for screening and confirming the abuse of these steroids in steer and non-pregnant heifer urine. In addition to thresholds based on testing one animal (a '1 out of 1' approach), new methods based on testing multiple animals from a herd (an 'y out of n' approach) allowed threshold concentrations to be significantly reduced and hence false compliances to be minimised. In the majority of cases, the suggested thresholds were found to be capable of confirming the abuse of endogenous steroids in steers and heifers. In the case of oestradiol abuse in the female, however, confirmation based on a threshold is not possible and alternative methods such as gas-combustion-isotope ratio mass spectrometry are required. In addition to the steer and heifer populations, a small number of pregnant animals were also tested, yielding insights into the biosynthetic pathways of some of the steroids.

This article explores empirically the economic validity of the relatively limited approach to the regulation of employment protection pursued in the UK over the last three decades and within the European Union more recently. It does so by comparing the UK's manufacturing labour productivity performance with those of three countries – France, Germany and Sweden – that possess more stringent employment protection laws. The findings reveal that while productivity growth in the UK was superior to France and Sweden, it was lower than in Germany. More generally, the study's findings fail to support the existence of a straightforward negative relationship between regulatory stringency and productivity growth.

This paper explores empirically the economic validity of the relatively limited approach to the regulation of employment protection pursued in the UK over the last three decades and within the European Union more recently. It does so by comparing the UK's manufacturing labour productivity performance with those of three countries – France, Germany and Sweden – that possess more stringent employment protection laws. The findings reveal that while productivity growth in the UK was superior to France and Sweden, it was lower than in Germany. More generally, the study's findings fail to support the existence of a straightforward negative relationship between regulatory stringency and productivity growth.