Book Review: Institutions, production and working life

This edited volume has an ambitious agenda, as the title implies, in studying the evolution of work, organizations and labour market institutions, over recent decades. A central initial concern of the editors is to integrate a number of the main dichotomies in social science research as applied to the study of employment and society. These concern primarily the relationship between macro versus micro levels of investigation, the interplay between organizations as actors and the institutional context in which they are located and structured, and the formulation of theory about such processes versus the empirical, practical study of them (pp. 3–4). More specifically, to achieve these goals, the contributions to the book have been intended by the editors to combine what they see as two sets of academic strengths. These, they argue, are the detailed workplace analysis of labour process approaches, particularly in investigation of specific employment changes in neoliberal economies and the broader sweep of regulationist analyses of the mechanisms underpinning socio-economic continuity and change. Edited by Geoffrey Wood and Phil James. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006, xii + 361 pp., ISBN 0199291780, £23.99