Richard Scase

Reluctant managers : their work and lifestyles

The changing context of work, careers and lifestyles the costs and benefits of work organizational change and management style personal ambitions and careers women, work and careers homw lives and personal lifestyles man and women managers and their partners.

Business Ownership and Women's Subordination: A Preliminary Study of Female Proprietors

Over recent years some sociological attention has been devoted to the position of women in the labour market and in the domestic sphere. However, the study of women as business proprietors has been almost entirely neglected.1 This is a serious omission because the ownership of small businesses could become an increasingly important area for female economic achievement within ‘no-growth’ industrial economies.2 Further, as trends in the United States would suggest, female proprietorship may have important implications for developments within the womens movement.3 On the basis of interviews with a small number of women business owners, we explore the personal motives for and consequences of proprietorship. We suggest that although women may be compared to many other subordinate groups in their expectations of the gains to be derived from proprietorship they encounter, as women, quite distinct experiences and difficulties. Business ownership, then, does not offer a straightforward solution to womens subordination. Further, claims that female proprietorship merely incorporates a minority of women to the disregard of the majority appears, on the basis of our evidence, to be misleading.

Organizational Change and the Corporate Career: The Restructuring of Managers' Job Aspirations

For managers in large-scale organizations, careers have traditionally provided a set of organizing principles around which they have been able to structure both their private and professional lives. Through them, they have been able to experience a sense of security, stability, and order. Personal feelings of growth and advancement have been achieved through jobs which provide not only the opportunities for the completion of specific tasks but also a mean whereby longer-term personal goals can be achieved. Indeed, the combined promise of job security and advancement within corporate hierarchies-as linked with incremetal increases in authority, status, and pay-have constituted the major rewards of the modern managerial career. It has been largely through these mechanisms that large-scale organizations have been able to obtain the motivation and commitment of their managerial staff. During the 1980s, however, a variety of technological, organizational, and broader social changes have led many observers to suggest that the nature of corporate careers has fundamentally changed. In this paper we explore the attitudes of managers toward their careers in the context of restructuring processes which limit opportunities for hierarchical advancement and which also reduce job security. In particular, we discuss the ways in which those whose career expectations have been frustrated develop coping strategies. These can have important implications for their attitudes and behavior both within and beyond their employing organizations.

Women in management: towards a research agenda

(1990). Women in management: towards a research agenda. The International Journal of Human Resource Management: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 107-125.

Labor relations and political change in eastern Europe : a comparative perspective

Bespreking van: J. Thirkell,Labour Relations and Political Change in Eastern Europe: A Comparative Perspective : ,1997

Class, Entrepreneurship and the Service Sector: Towards a Conceptual Clarification

Opportunities for entrepreneurship within modern economies are concentrated primarily within the service sector. On the basis of recent empirical research this paper develops a conceptual framework which differentiates entrepreneurs according to the relative mix of capital and labour utilised. Four sub-categories within the entrepreneurial middle class are identified and the implications for social mobility on the basis of capital accumulation are explored. In particular, attention is drawn to the significance of employment relationships as a factor which limits the growth of labour-intensive businesses. Despite its neglect within sociological theory the entrepreneurial middle class continues as a significant force within contemporary economies, and several areas for future research are suggested.

Proprietorial Control in Family Firms: Some Functions of “Quasi-Organic” Management System

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategies of managerial control which are used by the proprietors of family-owned business enterprises. Interviews with the proprietors and senior managers of businesses in the building industry illustrate the “quasi-organic” nature of management structures. These grant some autonomy to senior managers without threatening proprietorial decision-making prerogatives. Although the family firm has certain distinctive features, similar control strategies designed to ensure that delegated decisions are “reliable” and “responsible” are evident in various types of business enterprise. There is, then, scope for further comparative research within a conceptual framework which does not entirely divorce the family firm from other business organizations.

Class and Inequality in Pre-Industrial, Capitalist and Communist Countries

noted. The authors examine, in detail, four areas of provision: private health, private education, occupational and private pensions and private housing. The changes in these areas which have taken place under the favourable patronage of the Thatcher government are set in a wider historical context. Recent developments, it is argued, while significant are incremental rather than marking any fundamental shift. Private health care has been enhanced but the NHS remains the major provider. Changes in housing have served to exacerbate preexisting inequali-

Enterprise Strategies and Labour Relations in Central and Eastern Europe

The majority of contemporary discussions of transformation in Eastern Europe are focused around either political changes or macroeconomic developments; enterprise-level labour relations have received considerably less attention. The institutionalization of new patterns of labour relations is highly contingent upon the prevailing economic and political conditions and this may lead some to argue that it is too early to try to study labour relations at the enterprise level. The function of this chapter, however, is to argue that developments at this level are a constituent element in change processes. The discussion draws upon research on processes of change in labour relations in Bulgaria, Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Poland and the Novosibirsk region of Russia. It has been a basic hypothesis of our research that privatization of large state enterprises, and the resulting weakening in centralized control of the economy, would radically alter the context for labour relations in Eastern Europe and in particular, would greatly enhance the opportunities for strategy formulation at enterprise level.

A Nation of Home Owners

How the meek inherit the earth the desire to own a stake in the country a property-owning democracy a home of ones own the marginalized minority. Appendices: the Registrar-General and Goldthorpe social class schema and their use in this study the samples for the three towns survey the questionnaire.