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Publications (40)
The article investigates the emergence of 'new' forms of working such as 'lean production' and 'learning organisations' in Western Europe, 1995-2015. First, the article identifies the dominant forms of work organisation ('workplace regimes') across Western Europe, including new 'pressure' and 'extreme' varieties of previously identified regimes. Se...
Using the European Working Conditions Survey, we review trends in some of the key aspects of the nature of work itself (opportunities for learning and independent decision-making), in employment (the prevalence of permanency of employment, ‘non-standard’ working time and variable elements of pay such as piece rates and bonuses), and the social rela...
Our analysis makes use of three comparative European datasets to investigate the nature and meaning of working with 'No Contract' across a range of European societies in the mid-2010s) we show that the presence of workers with 'No Contract' is a significant feature of the labour market for a small number of Mediterranean countries, Ireland and the...
How well is Ireland managing to combine the headlong rush into
an uncertain future of new technologies, relationships and activities
with a social contract, of whatever kind? To examine this we focus
on the intersection between the welfare state and the lower-wage
end of the labour market, where the challenges are greatest. We first
provide an over...
Ireland’s deep crisis after 2008 was most immediately produced by the bursting of a real estate and banking bubble combined with collapsing tax revenues. This was made possible by Ireland’s continuing weakness in developing indigenous enterprise and investment, its limited social contract and emergent tensions in its historical external ties with t...
Change: What has happened to European work? An era of network organisations and flexible work; from Toyota to Silicon Valley. Configurations: What are the new ‘contested terrains’ of work? Socialisation of work and individualisation of employment; Varieties of flexible production Consequences: What are the effects of the new workplace regimes? 4 Is...
How can the strengths of different surveys be combined to better answer social science questions? This research examines the possibility of using the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) in tandem with the European Social Survey (ESS) to assess how work regimes shape attitudes towards welfare in the EU-15. The paper makes two major contributio...
We explore the deals that are being made between employers and employees in terms of work organisation (Control mechanisms on the job, Learning, Autonomy, andTime (long hours, unsociable hours, fragmented work)) and ask how are these configurations of work impacting workers? With Europe, globalisation, industrialisation, is there convergence? Do in...
We are seeking to examine attitudes to the role of government in promoting welfare as predicted by work regime. We add in workplace regimes because these regimes represent one kind of institutionalised historical compromise that is largely ignored in the welfare state literature. We would expect that these workplace regimes would generate sets of a...
What workplace regimes generate a high risk of precarious employment? Which workers are more likely to end up in those regimes? Are the risks of experiencing precarious employment less in ‘lower risk’ regimes?
This paper examines the variation in models of manufacturing in Europe from 1995 to 2010 and assesses whether this unitary view of manufacturing is tenable. Do national differences persist? Or are there trends towards a particular dominant model of manufacturing? If they do, to what extent do they reflect comparative typologies of capitalism in oth...
This project collected life histories from 113 respondents who participated in all eight waves of the ‘Living in Ireland Survey’ that formed part of the European Community Household Panel study, conducted in each year between 1994 and 2001. Respondents were drawn from three birth cohorts: those born before 1935, between 1945 and 1954, and between 1...
Although some software engineers and developers work directly with the final users of their product to generate customized software, many do not. However, drawing on an ethnographic study of software developers in a U.S. firm in Ireland, this article argues that both software developers who work closely with customers and those who do not can be th...
In 1992, I took the path followed by many young Irish people at that time and emigrated to the United States. In my case I left Dublin for Berkeley, California to get a Ph.D. in sociology. Within a year or two I found myself beginning to study the Irish software industry from 6,000 miles away in Silicon Valley. Through interviews with managers in S...
This article advances the concept of “time–space intensification” as an alternative to existing notions of time–space distanciation, compression and embedding that attempt to capture the restructuring of time and space in contemporary advanced capitalism. This concept suggests time and space are intensified in the contemporary period – the social e...
This article examines the conditions under which firms in different economies were able to emerge as significant actors in
the global computer industry during different time periods. To achieve this, the article divides into three periods the history
of the industry in terms of the three major policy regimes that have supported the dominant firms a...
Through a case study of the Irish software industry, this article explores how an industry and region that was 'locked in' to a dependent relationship of routine production within the global software production network managed to partially move up the production and technology chain to develop more sophisticated operations among foreign firms and i...
As job losses increased rapidly in 2003 amid calls for increased competitiveness, it becomes all the more crucial to understand the character and causes of such industrial upgrading that did occur in Ireland in the 1990s. This paper argues that despite a continuing reliance on foreign investment, there were significant elements of local industrial...
High-tech workers are creating communities that offer flexibility, creativity and independence at work. But the jury is still out on whether such communities can overcome the problems of insecurity, long work hours, and exclusion created by the fierce individualism of high-tech careers.
Globalization poses a challenge to existing social scientific methods of inquiry and units of analysis by destabilizing the embeddedness of social relations in particular communities and places. Ethnographic sites are globalized by means of various external connections across multiple spatial scales and porous and contested boundaries. Global ethno...
This paper argues that economic globalization has transformed the role of the state in fostering innovation regions and in economic development more generally. A ' Flexible Developmental State' has emerged to assume the mantle of the ' statist' development strategies of the ' Asian Tigers' and the Northern European social democracies. The origins,...
"At last world.com meets ethnography.eudora. This book shows how ethnography can have a global reach and a global relevance, its humanistic and direct methods actually made more not less relevant by recent developments in global culture and economy. Globalisation is not a singular, unilinear process, fatalistically unfolding towards inevitable ends...
The paper considers how states and markets shape one another at the national and world-system levels and how globalization is transforming that relationship. This process is illustrated through a review of research on liberal, social rights, developmental, and socialist states in the postwar capitalist economy. These state models were reconciled wi...
This paper assesses the development potential of local inter-firm networks in Newly Industrializing Countries. This is done through an analysis of the role of such networks in the growth of the software industry in the Republic of Ireland. Transnational software companies located in Ireland developed extensive local supply networks. Local social ne...