The Evolution of the Modern Workplace

William Brown is the Master of Darwin College and Professor of Industrial Relations at Cambridge University. He was previously Director of the ESRC's Industrial Relations Research Unit at the University of Warwick. He was a foundation member of the Low Pay Commission, which fixes the UK's National Minimum Wage. He is a member of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) Panel of Arbitrators, and was an independent member of the ACAS Council. In 2002 he was awarded a CBE for services to employment relations. Alex Bryson is a Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. He was previously Research Director at the Policy Studies Institute where he has worked for nineteen years. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Bryson's research focuses on industrial relations and labour economics. Recently he has been applying techniques common in the evaluation literature to problems in industrial relations. He has published his work in many books and journals, including the British Journal of Industrial Relations, Economica, Human Relations, Industrial and Corporate Change, Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, the International Journal of Human Resource Management, the Journal of Labor Research and the Scottish Journal of Political Economy. In 2005 he became an editor of the British Journal of Industrial Relations. In 2005-2006 he was the Wertheim Fellow at Harvard Law School and the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2007-2008 he was a member of the Sector Skills Development Agency's Expert Panel. John Forth is a research fellow at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). He was involved in the design and primary analysis of the 1998 and 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Surveys (WERS). Keith Whitfield is Professor of Human Resource Management and Economics and Associate Dean for Postgraduate Studies at Cardiff Business School and Director of Cardiff University's Research and Graduate School in the Social Sciences. He was the ESRC's Academic Consultant and member of the Steering Group for the fifth Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS), and is a founding member and on the Steering Group of the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Methods and Data.

• List of figures; List of tables; List of abbreviations; List of contributors; Preface; 1. Researching the changing workplace William Brown and Paul Edwards; 2. Competition and the retreat from collective bargaining William Brown, Alex Bryson and John Forth; 3. Trade union decline and the economics of the workplace David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson; 4. Employee representation Andy Charlwood and John Forth; 5. Voice at the workplace: where do we find it, why is it there and where is it going? Paul Willman, Rafael Gomez and Alex Bryson; 6. From industrial relations to human resource management: the changing role of the personnel function David Guest and Alex Bryson; 7. High involvement management Stephen Wood and Alex Bryson; 8. Conflict at work: the changing pattern of disputes Gill Dix, Keith Sisson and John Forth; 9. Employees' experience of work Francis Green and Keith Whitfield; 10. Equality and diversity at work Andrew Pendleton, Keith Whitfield and Alex Bryson; 11. The changing use of contingent pay at the modern British workplace Shirley Dex and John Forth; 12. Foreign ownership and industrial relations Tony Edwards and Janet Walsh; 13. The public sector in transition Stephen Bach, Rebecca Kolins Givan and John Forth; 14. Legal regulation and the changing workplace Linda Dickens and Mark Hall; 15. Conclusion: the evolutionary process William Brown, Alex Bryson, John Forth and Keith Whitfield; Technical appendix John Forth and Alex Bryson; Bibliography; Index.

'At the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, it is an opportune time to ask how and why, in coping with the environmental changes of markets and legal constraints, British employment relations as a species has been transformed in the past quarter century. William Brown and his colleagues have provided a globally relevant and truly insightful picture based on WIRS/WERS.' Takeshi Inagami, University of Tokyo and the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training (JILPT)