Shop stewards’ leadership, left-wing activism and collective workplace union organisation

Providing an account of the dynamic interrelationship between shop steward leadership and membership interaction, Ralph Darlington focuses particular attention on the much-neglected crucial role that left-wing political activists can play in shaping the nature of collective workplace relations

Labour power and labour process : contesting the marginality of the sociology of work

This article opens by suggesting that the decline in the sociology of work in the UK has been overstated; research continues, but in locations such as business schools. The continued vitality of the field corresponds with material changes in an increasingly globalized capitalism, with more workers in the world, higher employment participation rates of women, transnational shifts in manufacturing, global expansion of services and temporal and spatial stretching of work with advanced information communication technologies. The article demonstrates that Labour Process Theory (LPT) has been a crucial resource in the sociology of work, especially in the UK; core propositions of LPT provide it with resources for resilience (to counter claims of rival perspectives) and innovation (to expand the scope and explanatory power of the sociology of work). The article argues that the concept of the labour power has been critical to underpinning the sustained influence of labour process analysis

In search of the sociology of work: past, present and future

This paper traces relations between the study of work and the evolution of British sociology as an academic discipline. This reveals broad trajectories of marginalization, as the study of work becomes less central to Sociology as a discipline; increasing fragmentation of divergent approaches to the study of work; and — as a consequence of both — a narrowing of the sociological vision for the study of work. Our paper calls for constructive dialogue across different approaches to the study of work and a re-invigoration of sociological debate about work and — on this basis — for in-depth interdisciplinary engagement enabling us to build new approaches that will allow us to study work in all its diversity and complexit