New Worlds of Work

Ulrich Jürgens is researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and adjunct professor at Institute of Political Science at the Free University Berlin. Until his retirement, he was head of the Research Group "Knowledge, Production Systems, and Work" at the WZB. He has been carrying out extensive international comparative research in the fields of industrial relations, work organisation and personnel policy, systems of innovation, and industrial policy. He is a member of the Euro-Asia Management Studies Association (EAMSA), and of the Steering Committee of the GERPISA International Network of the Automobile.Martin Krzywdzinski heads the project group "Globalization, Work, and Production" at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). He studied political science at the Free University of Berlin and at the Université Paris VIII (1996-2002), completing his doctorate at the Free University of Berlin (2007). He is a member of the steering committee of the international automobile research network GERPISA. His field of interest is the sociology of work, covering such areas as production systems, work organization, and employment relations, as well as the development of multinational corporations and global value chains.

Overall, this is a particularly useful book for teachers of comparative employment relations, especially given the scarcity of empirical investigations of ER in companies and plants from the BRIC countries. I will certainly use chapters from this book in the teaching of my comparative ER courses.