Invisible labour : home–school relations and the front office

When school front offices are mentioned in research on schools and their relations with the community, it is often to describe how parents/carers and the public are treated officiously and/or inappropriately. In professional development materials, schools are urged to improve communication, and occasionally directed to consider the practices of the front office staff. Yet when schools send out information to parents/carers, the school office is usually the place to which all queries are directed. However, there is almost no detailed research that looks at what actually happens in this place. In this paper we draw on a small-scale commissioned research project which began to fill this gap. In seeking to reread our data and push further on analysis, we have come to realize that those who work in school front offices are women whose physical and emotional labour is not only rendered largely invisible in a wide range of literatures relating to home-school relations but is also inadequately recognized through recruitment practices, professional development and remuneration. We suggest that there needs to be further research into the high energy, multitasking, nurturing work that goes on in school front offices.

Higher education and the labour market in Oman

This study aimed to investigate whether there is a mismatch between higher education and the labour market in Oman, the types of this mismatch that exist, and the reasons for this mismatch as they appeared from statistics and interviewees' responses ( the higher education providers, principals from the public sector, and employers from the private sector)

TQM and labour productivity in Jordanian industrial companies

Reports on research to determine the degree of application of total quality management (TQM) philosophy and practices in industrial corporations in Jordan. Uses primary and secondary empirical data to examine the link between TQM and labour productivity. Survey responses were classified into two groups: high-TQM implementation and low-TQM implementation. Found that mean labour productivity measurements for high-TQM companies were significantly higher than for low-TQM companies over the period 1993-1998. Also, mean growth rates of labour productivity measurements for companies with high-level TQM were higher than for those with low-level TQM during this period. Regression analysis demonstrated a statistically significant positive relationship between TQM and labour productivity.

Demystifying the supply of capital and labour in a nation’s economic chain

Public capital has been considered to be the wheels of economic activity in a nation or region. The reverse effect, the contribution of economic growth to public capital, is also worth analysis. The non-structural vector auto-regression (VAR) approach is performed for the Australian economy using yearly data for the 1960-2008 period. The optimal lag is investigated to build the VAR model that is then tested for stability. The impulse response function is further employed to examine the response of one economic variable to the innovation of others and to determine the lagged terms for the maximum absolute value of the other variables’ responses. The results will provide historical evidence for the federal and regional governments of Australia to estimate the effects of these production variables, in particular, the effect of infrastructure spending on the gross domestic product.

Running on empty : 'modernising' the British and Australian labour parties

Australia's cultural cringe towards Britan does not just focus on the monarchy. Many in the ALP and the media pay undue deference to Tony Blair's so-called new Third Way. This book shows why the ALP needs to reassess its own history and examines the complex reality of how it compaes with the British Labor Party.

The Brazilianisation of youth transitions in Australia and the UK?

A central theme of Beck’s argument in The Brave New World of Work (2000) is that labour markets in the developed world are taking on some of the core characteristics that have been associated with less developed labour markets such as employment insecurity, informality and precarity. A process he refers to as Brazilianisation. In this paper we consider whether Beck’s thesis can help us understand changes in youth transitions in Australia and the UK by developing a comparative analysis of processes of casualisation in the youth labour markets of the two countries. We assess the extent to which precarious labour market biographies have become entrenched and represent modern forms of engagement with the labour market. While evidence is presented to suggest that young people’s labour market experiences have been affected by a trend towards greater casualisation, we argue that the changes are having the greatest impact on those in the weakest positions: in both countries women are more likely to be affected than men and casualisation is most evident in the lowest skilled occupations.

Abstract ethics, embodied ethics : the strange marriage of Foucault and Positivism in labour process theory

In this paper, I draw jointly upon a Foucauldian ethical discourse and the example of the so-called `Manchester school' of Foucauldian labour process theory (LPT) to question the political/ethical aspirations and effects of critical management studies. Specifically, I question the ethics and effects of LPT researchers' relationships with those they/we research. I organize the discussion around four Foucauldian ethical themes or feelings. I thread these ethical themes throughout the paper to argue that, though Foucauldian LPT may be understood to abstractly resonate with these themes, its contribution is seriously undermined through the authors' lack of attention to ways of embodying this ethics in relations with the researched. By not embodying these commitments, the marriage between Foucault and LPT risks being read more as a marriage of convenience than commitment. And, further, a marriage that reproduces a politically problematic `modernist/positivist' self-other separation or divorce between researcher and researched.