Gerard Cotterell

Book review: Regis Debray Praised be Our Lords, Verso: London, 2007; 336 pp.: 9781844671403, £19.99 (pbk)

In the ultimate analysis, the volume reinstates the description of the Third World used by Norwine and Gonzalez (1988: 2) as a ‘mental map region’. On the whole, in confronting the existing and emerging realities and focusing on contending viewing positions, the volume will be a useful read for those who are interested in the current fluidity of the infuriating ideas of Third World and Third Worldism.

BOOK REVIEWS edited by Adam D. Morton: Gerry Mooney and Alex Law (eds.) New Labour/ Hard Labour? Restructuring and Resistance Inside the Welfare Industry

welfare reforms have been well documented. But much less attention, Gerry Mooney and Alex Law note, has been paid to the impact of the reforms on those who actually ‘deliver’ welfare. This book sets out to overcome this neglect by examining the experiences of ‘key groups of workers engaged at the “frontline” in producing and delivering public services’ (p. 2). In the book’s twelve chapters, the experiences of groups of public servants such as social workers, teachers, nurses, childcare workers, staff in the Department of Work and Pensions, and workers in the not-forprofit sector and academics under New Labour are detailed. The book is well structured, beginning with two chapters that set the scene, theoretically and contextually, for the remaining contributions. In these first two chapters, Mooney and Law provide an overview and an analytical framework within which each of the case stories can be located. Bain and Taylor discuss industrial relations under New Labour, and provide a case study of the intensification of work in police emergency call centres in the third chapter. Chapters 4 to 11 then provide case studies of reform experiences in the sectors identified above, with each chapter making a solid contribution to a ‘bottom-up’ understanding of the impact of New Labour’s welfare reform process. In Chapter 4, Ruane examines the impact of private finance initiatives (PFI) in the hospital sector. Drawing on interviews conducted with workers in a number of institutions, Ruane demonstrates how the PFI process has had similar impacts to those of the contracting-out process that occurred under the Conservatives. Thus those at the low end of the pay scale have their working conditions and wages eroded, and the quality of services provided is also eroded as managers seek to find efficiency savings. Maitles details the increased intensification of work in the education sector in Chapter 6, while Law and Work examine the impact of managerial priorities in universities in Chapter 7. The experiences of childcare workers is the subject of Mooney and McCafferty’s Chapter 8. As the authors note, childcare has been at the centre of New Labour’s plans to modernise the welfare state, yet the pay and working conditions of workers in this sector have been neglected while they are expected to take up an everexpanding workload. Developments in the social work sector are the subject of Chapter 9, and Chapter 10 examines life in the where staff have the task of implementing the process of welfare reform. Chapter 11, which examines welfare delivery in the non-profit sector, is an excellent example of how to provide a theoretical context within which to locate subsequent arguments. In this chapter, Poole examines how the managerialist thrust, increasingly prevalent in the public sector, is pushed onto non-profit organisations. In addition, she notes how many non-profit organisations are becoming financially dependent upon providing services for central government, a relationship that impacts upon their ability to be critical of government policy. The final chapter by Law and Mooney sums up the arguments made in the preceding