Labour courts in Great Britain and Sweden: a self-service model v collective regulation

The institutions for adjudicating employment rights in Great Britain and Sweden are superficially similar – in both countries there are labour courts with lay judges and both countries are covered by European Union employment legislation. Beneath this surface, however, there are important differences. In Sweden there is collective regulation as the social partners (that is trade unions and employers organisations) continue to play a significant part in the labour court process. In contrast the social partners no longer play a role in the adjudication of employment rights in Great Britain, which provides an individualistic, self-service model. This article traces these changes in Great Britain, and the lack of them in Sweden, before offering theoretical explanations for the differences

Faithful and disappointing : reflections on the idea of Idola

In this brief article, reviewing Dustin Cauchi’s photomontage Idola, photography is seen as a medium caught in the short interspaces between life and art. Prompted by Larkin’s poetic distillation of photography as ‘faithful and disappointing’, the nature of these idola’s (non)faithfulness to life are examined with thoughts of performative elements and deception, and the nature of these fidelities is explored. The idola are further considered as eide, ‘the presentation to itself of being or the thing’, or, as with Hegel’s definition of art, as a sensuous manifestation of an idea. It is in this disappointment that they are faithful, and the realisation of the problematic nature of the illusion of proximity/immediacy that lies underneath the surface of such photographic instances is given its due consideration.peer-reviewe

Visualizing the news: mutant barcodes and geographies of conflict

This paper outlines emerging research concerned with visualizing online news archives. The authors make a distinction between the use of visualization for data journalism and the evolution of reporting on current affairs over extended periods of time

Gender and the labour market in South East England. Volume 2: employers’ policies and practices

This research on gender and the labour market in South East England was funded by the South East of England Development Agency/European Social Fund. In volume 1 we set out the context: theoretical explanations for gender equality, the legal framework and organisational factors. Moreover, using a range of published data, we answered the first of our research questions: how does the labour market position of women in the government region of the South East of England compare with that of both men in the South East and that of women in Great Britain/United Kingdom? In this volume we turn our attention to our other research questions: • What policies and practices do employers in South East England adopt in respect of gender equality? • What barriers do employers and women employees in South East England identify in respect of gender and employment

Does it work? evaluating a new pay system

This report focuses on the evaluation of the impact of new pay systems in large, unionised multi-site organisations by the organisations themselves. Evaluation of the effectiveness of a pay system, however, does not take place in a vacuum and relates to the aims and objectives of the pay system concerned. Moreover, evaluation is not an end in itself. It is, therefore, relevant to consider if any further steps were taken as a result of evaluation. Accordingly our research questions were: • What were the aims and objectives of organisations when introducing new pay arrangements? • What data did organisations collect and review to inform their evaluation? • What steps have organisations taken as a result of their evaluation? We re-appraised our data from 10 NHS trusts in England which had introduced some innovations in pay and grading in the 1990s. Additionally, we looked at seven multi-site unionised organisations outside the NHS in both the public and private sectors, which had recently made changes to their reward systems, carrying out interviews and inspecting documents. The main output is a template for the evaluation of Agenda for Change by NHS organisations

Women write back : strategies of response and the dynamics of European literary culture, 1790–1805

Salvador Dali’s Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire adorns the front cover of Stephanie M. Hilger’s book, providing an oblique though fitting visual foretaste of what is to come. Under the gaze of an ambiguously marginalised slave girl in the left of the picture, the bust of Voltaire ‘‘disappears’’ or, rather, is disclosed to be not a solid, discrete object, but a space—a ruinous gap in once-monumental architecture, in fact—animated by a motley human gathering. There is, then, something transformative, indeed rather subversive, about the slave girl’s gaze. Yet, there is another gaze that must also be taken into consideration, namely that of the person viewing the painting who takes in the whole scene, viewing the girl’s subjective gaze objectively, comprehending at a distance the revisionary and appropriative mechanisms at work. It is this latter perspective that Hilger, with admirable skill and compelling clarity, seeks to open up in relation to women authors writing in the fraught social and political period immediately following the French Revolution.peer-reviewe

Blake, Yeats, Larkin : nihilism and the indifferent consolation of Post-Romanticism

It was during the Irish Civil War, sometime between 1922 and 1923, that W.B. Yeats, ensconced in Thoor Ballylee, the Norman tower that served both as a romantic, Samuel Palmer-esque symbol of the poet-scholar’s separate, elevated fixedness above the mundane, hurly burly world of his fellow man, as well as an actual stone and mortar defence against intrusions from the outside world, composed a sardonically barbed renunciation in verse of both poetic transcendence and the possibility of any sort of tide-stemming defence against what he saw as a general devaluation of values.peer-reviewe

Now : a Post-Romantic countertextuality of the contemporary

In this essay James Corby questions the dominant future-oriented nature of the ethical turn of theory and philosophy in the final decades of the twentieth century and its aesthetic influence. Focusing in particular upon the ethical position of Jacques Derrida, Corby argues that the desire to avoid the closure of the contemporary and to preserve the possibility of difference by cultivating a radical attentiveness to that which is ‘to come’ often risks a too complete disengagement from the present, leading to an empty and ineffectual ethical stance that actually preserves the contemporary situation that it seeks to open up. Corby makes a case for this theoretical investment in the possibility of a non-contemporary (typically futural) rupture as being understood as forming part of a far-reaching romantic tradition. In opposition to this tradition he sketches a post-romantic alternative that would understand difference as an immanent, rather than imminent, matter. He argues that this should be considered congruent with a countertextual impulse oriented not towards a revelatory futurity, but, rather, towards the possible displacements, dislocations, and transformations already inherent in the contemporary. The final part of the essay develops this idea, positioning countertextuality as the articulation of alternative contemporaries. In this regard, the literature of the future is not ‘to come’, it is already here. The challenge is to recognise it as such, and this means being prepared to modify and change the conceptual apparatus that guides us in our thinking of literature and the arts.peer-reviewe

The Hegel dictionary

Glenn Alexander Magee’s Hegel Dictionary is published as part of the recently launched and still expanding series, Continuum Philosophy Dictionaries, which already includes volumes devoted to luminaries such as Sartre, Gadamer, and Derrida, with many more titles on the great and the good of so-called ‘Continental’ philosophy about to go to press. Though the title of the book is unlikely to mislead anyone, it is perhaps worth stating that such works are “dictionaries” in a rather figurative sense, and that perhaps a more accurate way of thinking about them is as alphabetically ordered reference books. If anything, this only heightens their appeal. Who could not imagine a situation when, reading Hegel, one would benefit from hav- ing to hand a collection of concise, accessible and yet scholarly entries dealing with key Hegelian terms and concepts, his major works, and the philosophical figures that make up the intellectual milieu of which he is a part? For many readers of Hegel, though, this is not something that has to be imagined, as it has been a reality since the publication of Michael Inwood’s Hegel Dictionary (Black- well) almost twenty years ago. What those readers will no doubt be wondering is whether there is any reason to acquire a second Hegel Dictionary?peer-reviewe