Exploring the role of employer forums – the case of Business in the Community Wales

Collective employer representation in the United Kingdom has changed in fundamental ways in recent decades. Collective bargaining has declined and instead, we have seen the emergence of a significant new form of collective organization, the employer forum, which promotes good corporate behaviour and typically focuses on issues of equality and diversity, social policy and community engagement. This paper examines this new form of collective action through a case study on Business in the Community Wales. It also compares this employer forum with traditional employers’ associations in order to establish what is significant and distinctive about employer forums

Reconsidering private sector engagement in subnational economic governance

One consequence of the economic downturn and pressure for public sector reform is a renewed focus upon private sector engagement (PSE) within subnational economic governance. Yet past attempts to promote PSE within urban and regional development policy and governance have been routinely characterised by the partial and uneven involvement of business interests. Adopting a strategic–relational approach, and building upon insights from the developing literature on business–society relations, this paper critically examines how PSE unfolded in a specific spatial and temporal context, through empirical investigation of the evolution of the City Growth Strategy as realised within two areas in London. This analysis explores the difference between policy script and business performance and identifies key dimensions of material self-interest, nonmarket-based rationales, and divergent private/public discourses as critical to the selective nature of emergent PSE strategies and tactics. Critically, these issues remain largely unaddressed within current moves to put in place a private sector led subnational agenda, with clear consequences for understanding its likely impact across differentially constituted urban and regional contexts

Understanding the Under-Attainment of Ethnic Minority Students in UK Higher Education: The Known Knowns and the Known Unknowns

In UK higher education, differences in academic attainment between White students and ethnic minority students are ubiquitous and have persisted for many years. For instance, it has been known for more than 20 years that the academic attainment of ethnic minority students at the first-degree level is poorer than that of White students. Roughly half of the disparity in attainment between White students and non-White students is attributable to differences in their entry qualifications. Nevertheless, the academic attainment of ethnic minority students remains poorer than that of White students even when the effects of their entry qualifications and other variables have been statistically controlled. An explanation put forward by Ogbu (1978, 1983, 1987) based upon the experiences of people from different ethnic minorities in the US does not fit the UK situation. Any differences in the experience of higher education between White and ethnic minority students are not sufficiently large to explain the dramatic differences in their academic attainment. Researchers have yet to identify the factors that are responsible for the ethnic differences in attainment that remain when differences in entry qualifications have been taken into account