Robin A. Price

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at CQUniversity, Brisbane campus

This article considers skill requirements in retail work, drawing on the example of high-end fashion retailing. It considers debates about the required ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ skills for such work. Drawing on Cockburn’s typology – skill residing in the worker; in what is required to perform a job; and as a socially constructed political concept – it seek...

Discussion of the implications of precarious work for individual workers remains hesitant and often confused. A clear conceptualisation would separate out five analytical levels: precariousness in employment, precarious work, precarious workers individually and as an emerging class, and precarity as a general condition of social life. To illustrate...

Food retail is known for its use of flexible labour and for the centralisation of functions at head office, resulting in a reduction of managerial autonomy at store level. This article employs a typology of controls developed from labour process scholarship to explore how retail managers negotiate the control of their predominantly part-time workfo...

Much has been written about varieties of collaboration and the interplay between conflict and collaboration in industrial relations. This paper explores the preconditions, processes and outcomes associated with the collaborative strategies of an Australian retail trade union: the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association. The data were c...

This article explores employers' perspectives on the introduction of child employment legislation in Australia through the lens of the three pillars - regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive - of institutional theory. The study extends the traditional industrial relations (IR) focus on regulation to examine how human resource (HR) practices ar...

This chapter explores the impact of deficit discourses on the developing occupational identity of young workers and how this shapes assessments of their capacity to be a ‘good’ worker. Drawing from studies of young workers’ experiences of paid and unpaid work, we explore the ways that employers characterise the employability and work performance of...

This chapter explores the gender pay gap in public services, comparing the female-dominated librarian workforce to other professions. In the highly regulated public-sector environment, with standardized pay scales and job evaluation processes, and decades of equal employment policies, the gender pay gap should have disappeared. We use Cockburn’s ty...

Serious breaches of the workplace health and safety legislation resulting in a workplace injury can lead to business prosecution. In line with recent shifts in Australian work health and safety prosecutions, alternatively offending businesses may offer an enforceable undertaking. Combining evaluation criteria associated with distributive, procedura...

Public services face several workforce challenges, including impending retirements and austerity programs. Although employing more young people is a likely solution to balancing the demographic profile of public services, the literature and theory suggest that young people would have fared worse during the global financial crisis. This research tes...

Trade union membership, both in aggregate numbers and in density, has declined in the majority of advanced economies globally over recent decades (Blanchflower, 2007). In Australia, the decline in the 1990s was somewhat more precipitate than in most countries (Peetz, 1998). As discussed in Chapter 1, the introductory chapter, reasons for the declin...

While the literature points to significant shifts in young peoples’ labour market participation and the social, economic and political context in which this has occurred, it tells us little about whether and in what sense young people can be considered as industrial citizens. We explored the notion of youth citizenship using data derived from 48 fo...

Scholarship addressing the employment concerns of school age workers has identified a number of areas of vulnerability. Prominent among these is that young workers have insufficient knowledge of their rights in employment, yet the extent of this knowledge has not previously been quantified. This study explores areas of strength and deficit in aware...

This article reports on a project to embed information literacy skills development in a first-year undergraduate business course at an Australian university. In accordance with prior research suggesting that first-year students are over-confident about their skills, the project used an optional online quiz to allow students to pre-test their inform...

Young people are arguably facing more 'complex and contested' transitions to adulthood and an increasing array of 'non-linear' paths. Education and training have been extended, identity is increasingly shaped through leisure and consumerism and youth must navigate their life trajectories in highly individualised ways. The study utilises 819 short e...

Governments undertake extensive planning of many services and functions, but tend to neglect planning of public service workforces. Disruptions to public service delivery, such as shortages of nurses and doctors, have rejuvenated interest in workforce planning, but many organisations struggle to do it effectively. This historical study examines the...

In light of declining trade union density, specifically among young workers, this article explores how trade unions recruit, service and organize young people. Our focus is the way in which trade unions market their services to the young. We use, as a lens of analysis, the services and social marketing literature and the concept of an ‘unsought, ex...

In recent years, a 'cultural turn' in the study of class has resulted in a rich body of work detailing the ways in which class advantage and disadvantage are emotionally inscribed and embodied in educational settings. To date, however, much of this literature has focused on the urban sphere. In order to address this gap in the literature, this pape...

In the case of industrial relations research, particularly that which sets out to examine practices within workplaces, the best way to study this real-life context is to work for the organisation. Studies conducted by researchers working within the organisation comprise some of the (broad) field’s classic research (cf. Roy, 1954; Burawoy, 1979). Pa...

This paper is a comparative exploratory study of the changing nature of employee voice through trade union representation in the retail industry in the UK and Australia. In both countries, the retail industry is a major employer and is one of the few private sector service industries with significant union membership (Griffin et al 2003). The relev...

An ageing workforce is an issue faced by governments and employers in most western countries (OECD 2005). The generally accepted definition of an aged worker is someone aged 45 years and over (Brooke 2003). At the level of the organisation, a range of HR strategies are recommended to deal with an ageing workforce, including attracting younger worke...

Practitioner stories have been recognised as a valuable insight into practice as well as a means by which practice can inform theory. Our practitioner stories about our experiences of being co-supervisors in Higher Degree Research (HDR) supervision have enabled us to further our resonance with HDR literature and at the same time contribute to liter...

This thesis examines the nature of labour usage within a market-leading Australian food retail firm and the employment relations consequences of the labour usage strategies employed by the firm. Retail employment is well established as a research subject in the UK, but has received comparatively little research attention in Australia. Given that re...

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This paper outlines the experience of the tango of temporary casual employment for youth in Australia. A case study of a large Australian supermarket chain is used to examine the costs and benefits of this form of employment for both parties to the employment relationship. The paper argues that the firm’s lack of commitment to their casual labour f...

Retail is a major employing industry across all nations. In the case of Australia, the retail industry employs almost fifteen per cent of the workforce (ABS 6291.0.55.001). Retail is an industry that has been slow to attract research attention. Within the last decade though, a growing body of literature that examines the nature of labour usage with...

This report provides a demographic profile of the Victorian retail and hospitality industries, by employment characteristics and economic profile. It also examines union membership and industrial activity, wages, and methods of wage setting within the industries.

In light of declining trade union density, specifically amongst young workers, this paper explores how trade unions are servicing and organising young people. Our specific focus is the way in which trade unions market their services to the young. We use, as a lens of analysis, the services marketing literature and the concept of an ‘experience good...

Reconfiguration of corporate structures and the retailer-supplier interface in the retail industry have restructured product markets and supply chains, as well as supermarket employment, over the past decade or so (Baret, Lehndorff & Sparks 2000; du Gay 1996). Various studies have examined the consequent changes in labour usage practices within sup...

Many industrialised nations have changing demographic profiles, as increased longevity and decreased birth rates lead to an ageing population. This presents significant challenges for workforces, as older employees retire and there are insufficient numbers of younger employees to take their place. This leads to skills shortages, and strong competit...

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This paper examines the difficulties encountered by researchers while trying to acquire an emic' or insider's view of an organisation. It argues that smokers, because of their social outcast status, and their need to step outside for a cigarette, provide researchers with the opportunity to gain valuable insights into the operations of the firm. It...

An aged and ageing workforce has become a reality for the human resource (HR) professional in developed countries globally. Within the public sector, managing ageing human resources is made more complex by the myriad of legislative and policy guidelines that influence employment-related policies and practices, as well as a tradition of security of...

This paper employs empirical evidence from a survey of Queensland secondary school students to examine their knowledge about their wages and working conditions. It does so within the theoretical lens of the Gagne (or Gagne-Briggs) theory of instruction, which centres on the content of learning and how learning is acquired (Gagne, Briggs & Wager, 19...

The project aimed to understand how young people in different socio-demographic categories (age, gender, rurality) conceptualise and negotiate employment relations and the structural mechanisms (education, industry, legislation) through which youth are socialised in employment citizenship. The study extends previous research on youth employment in...