English language skills requirements for internationally educated nurses working in the care industry: barriers to UK registration or institutionalised discrimination?

Editoria

“Others-in-Law”: Legalism in the Economy of Religious Differences

Religious legalism encompasses a wide range of attitudes that assign religious meaning to legal content or to legal compliance. The phenomenology of religious legalism is assuming a significant role in various contemporary debates about legal pluralism, accommodation of religious minorities, religious freedom, and so forth. This article revises this conception and the commonplace equation of Judaism and legalism. It suggests that we ought to regard both as part of the economy of religious differences by which religious identities are expressed and defined as alternatives. The common ascription of religious legalism to Judaism (and Islam) is criticized here through a historical analysis of the law-religion-identity matrix in three cultural settings: late ancient Judeo-Hellenic, medieval Judeo–Arabic, and post-Reformation Europe

Work in Britain’s informal economy: learning from road-side hand car washes

The UK has over 10,000 Hand Car Washes (HCWs). This article examines two research questions; what do HCWs reveal about the informalization of employment? and what is the prospect of regulation of them? Setting HCWs in a theoretical framework shows that they are part of a growing industry It is becoming an increasingly familiar and visible part of the economy, and is able to use informalization in employment where control of labour costs is a key factor. Employers make a strategic choice to engage precarious and vulnerable usually migrant labour securing further competitive advantage at the cost of pronounced labour exploitation and long hours – the tendency towards informalization. Therein a low-cost business model disciplines competition to usurp higher productivity mechanized car washing

Re-Working Mobilities: Emergent geographies of employment-related mobility

Over the last decade, an increasing number of geographers and other social science researchers have deployed the insights of the new mobilities paradigm to study work, labour, and employment. These insights include attention to the meanings, practices, and politics of work‐related movement as well as to multiple spatial and temporal scales and types of im/mobility for and at work. In a review of this literature, we find five different vantage points on “re‐working” mobility: articulations of labour migration with other forms of mobility; geometries of power in the daily journey to work; embodiment and affect in work‐related movement; mobility and labour across the life course; and co‐mobilities of workers, ideas, and things. We argue that on whole, a mobility lens offers a “critical phenomenology” of the dynamic relations between the everyday lifeworlds and broader political, social, and economic contexts of both paid and unpaid work. This is especially important as work involves ever more complex patterns and experiences of mobility and is more deeply entwined with the mobilities of other domains of social life. We conclude by considering the rich implications of “re‐working mobilities” for methodological diversity and for animating both mobilities studies and labour studies as critical geographical endeavor