The Management of Pay as the Influence of Collective Bargaining Diminishes.

The management of pay in Britain has changed substantially in recent years. The paper starts with a theoretical discussion of the extent to which individual employers can exercise discretion in the management of their employees' pay. It then examines the ways in which pay is used to secure productive effort. An analysis of the influence of trade unions leads on to an examination of the diminishing influence of collective bargaining in British pay determination. The implications of this are discussed for employer pay strategies, within and between firms, and internationally. It concludes with the consequences of diminishing trade union influence for the distribution of pay.wage determination; collective bargaining; remuneration management; bargaining structure; income distribution; trade union effects; employer pay strategy

A Power-Critique of Academic Rankings : Beyond Managers, Institutions, and Positivism

The bulk of research on academic rankings is policy-oriented, preoccupied with 'best practices', and seems incapable of transcending the normative discourse of 'governance'. To understand, engage, and properly critique the operation of power in academic rankings, the rankings discourse needs to escape the gravity of 'police science' and embrace a properly political science of ranking. More specifically, the article identifies three pillars of the extant research from which a departure would be critically fruitful - positivism, managerialism, institutionalism - and then goes on to outline three aspects of rankings that a critical political analysis should explore, integrate, and develop into future research from the discourses of critical theory - arkhe, dispositif, and dialectik.Peer reviewe

Critical Theory from Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago : Style, Technique, and Ideologiekritik

The Gulag Archipelago has been treated consistently as a conservative indictment of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. When subsumed into his later writings, this perception has reinforced amongst progressives an enduring portrait of Solzhenitsyn-the-man as a backward-looking anti-modernist and reactionary. I advocate a return to the text itself in isolation from Solzhenitsyn’s corpus, and in a manner more cognizant of the political practices latent in its prose. In its style and structure, certain specific techniques can be found where the search for formal methodology has left previous commentators on the Left disappointed. The place of Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus in the history of political thought is here reassessed on the basis of its style, pointing to its potential contribution to critical theory and to its relevance for critical social analysis today.Peer reviewe

Stratifying Academia : Ranking, Oligarchy, and the Market-Myth in Academic Audit Regimes

This historical materialist analysis places rankings into the imperatives both to govern and to accumulate, and positions academic ranking in particular as the telos of a more general audit culture. By identifying how rankings effect not merely a quantification of qualities, but a numeration of quantities, we can expose how state governments, managerial strata and political elites achieve socially stratifying political objectives that actually frustrate the kind of market-rule for which rankings have been hitherto legitimised among the public. The insight here is that rankings make of audit techniques neither simply a market proxy, nor merely the basis for bureaucratic managerialism, but a social technology or 'apparatus' (dispositif) that simultaneously substitutes and frustrates market operations in favour of a more acutely stratified social order. This quality to the operation of rankings can then be connected to the chronic accumulation crisis that is the neoliberal regime of political economy, and to the growing political appetite therein for power-knowledge techniques propitious for oligarchy formation and accumulation-by-dispossession in the kind of low-growth and zero-sum environment typical in real terms to societies dominated by financialisation. A dialectical approach to rankings is suggested, so that a more effective engagement with their internal and practical contradictions can be realised in a way that belies the market-myths of neoliberal theory.Peer reviewe

Controlling Academics : Power and Resistance in the Archipelago of Post-COVID 19 Audit Regimes

Government response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic promises to entrench austerity politics deeper into the organization of academic life, and audit regimes are the likely means of achieving this. Redoubled efforts to understand the operation of audit as a strategic technology of control are therefore clearly a priority. A distinctly anthropological literature has emerged over recent years to analyse and understand audit culture in academia, but what seems to be missing are analyses capable of bringing the disparate techniques experienced in academic audit together into coherent technologies, and identifying how these technologies thereby constitute a distinct audit regime within the broader audit culture. While the anthropological literature implicitly calls for further historical and conceptual exploration of the rationality to these techniques, what is required is the translation of our understanding of audit rationality into a presentation of the concrete techniques of control as they are experienced, so that more effective counter-conducts and resistances can be conceived. This article indicates how an excursion into the Soviet Gulag, and the political technology of the 'camp' that is its principal apparatus, can reveal not merely how the techniques of audit operate, but also indicate how those techniques might be engaged tactically in the academic setting. This kind of analogic analysis can allow us to understand audit in ways more promising for resistance to its idiomatic power, replacing demoralized and helpless resignation with inspirational exempla. Politically, the article argues that 'techniques of the self' are not only necessary to engage audit techniques through particular kinds of counter-conduct, but how these counter-conducts are contributory to the organized and concerted kind of resistance that we so desperately desire. The practice of tukhta is singled out and introduced as an illustrative means for combining survival strategies with the development of critical rationality in praxis.Peer reviewe

Suitable databases for process-centred environments do not yet exist

this paper we argue that, despite the substantial number of proposed new database systems, a suitable database system for software developmentenvironments and especially process-centred environments does not yet exist. Wedos